I’ve written before on the cross-over from science into business and cited with gushing enthusiasm the insights of Edward O. Wilson. I’ve just finished reading Veran Allee’s book the Future of Knowledge. Her book is a pretty good overview of where we’re at and the challenges we face when managing this new organic world of information.
Because Verna’s book is an overview, she relies on many other thinkers to do the heavy lifting. One of those people is John Hagel who’s called for (what he calls) the molecular organisation. The problem with molecular organisations is that we don’t know how to work one – or even build them intentionally. Verna says we’re in trouble because we while we think in terms of processes (instead of functional units), we need to think about webs and networks which don’t work well with our current resource management systems. And while we’re busy trying to stretch our processes to meet the challenge – the challenge keeps getting bigger.
The problem is bigger than we think. Or perhaps more Mutant X than we imagine. Knowledge theorist Max Boisot says we don’t have the software systems or even the language to handle the task. But we do have the brains – or some of us do. And he posits that the information-based economy is driving a species-level evolution. There’s a few that can handle the shift. And many that can’t.
While some of us are busy mutating, Verna points out that the rest of us face a most complex and difficult challenge: the temptation to simply incorporate networks into existing frameworks and tools – and then convince ourselves we are introducing something dramatically new and different. We use new language but not new concepts. And we get this strange mix of new words and old concepts. But bad analogies and inappropriate tools threaten to mislead or subvert the very principles that are being introduced by the mutating few.
Verna points out that we need a shift in consciousness; we are experiencing a meta-level dilemma. On one hand, old logic is insufficient to reason our way through current challenges. On the other hand, our only tools are the linear business principles, processes and systems we currently work with. So, for the time being, we must be very clear on the worldview we are operating from. And we need to approach learning with a much higher level of self-reflection than has ever before been required.
The problem then is that we are faced with complex issues and we don’t have the mutants we need to get the job done. In the meantime, we can’t solve complex issues with the same tools we use to solve complicated ones. David Snowden (Institute of Knowledge Management) makes a clear distinction between complicated and complex. He says an airplane is complicated, but all its parts may be known, understood, engineered, and managed. The truly complex includes too many variables to ever be known, fully understood, or managed. Humans are complex. Organisations are complex. Life is complex.
As a result, Complexity Theory concepts are increasingly used, both metaphorically and literally, in a business context. Complexity theory is an umbrella of interdisciplinary exploration of a set of theories from physics, biology, chemistry, sociology, cybernetics, nonlinear dynamics, nonlinear mathematics, and chaos theory. Also included are psychology, anthropology, and organisational behaviour.
Once Complexity Theory is embraced we can move from the mirage of a predictable world to the reality of a world of probabilities. We leave behind the deterministic economy of physical goods, production lines and dive into a knowledge-based economy. The human skills of pattern recognition, heuristic approaches, and experimental inquiry are suddenly valued. We get to explore. We get to taste, touch and experience. Our talents for metaphor, poetry, and music are suddenly business propositions instead of past-times.
Now can you see why Maslow’s challenge was so important to recognize? Is it suddenly clear why education is such a critical enterprise? Does it jump out at you that innovation, insight, and vision share a measure of magnitude that renders skills like time management and memo writing laughably overrated and utterly irrelevant?
We aren’t facing a world air-travel vs. space travel or dvd’s vs. hard-disk storage. There’s money in those things but the solutions are out there. We are facing melting ice caps, extinguished biodiversity, mounting municipal waste, decaying social systems and an alarming absence of movement toward anything that promises solutions. I’m not all in on the species-level shift stuff but geez, it’s a million miles closer to where we need to be than most of us are. We aren’t overhauling education. We aren’t tearing down hierarchies. We aren’t abandoning home pages. Why?
A few days ago I met one of life’s undeclared mentors. One of those people that have seen so much, done so much, and achieved so much that nearly every idea is weighted with a multitude of applications.
I think I missed my own point 
