The workshop started with Kurt explaining the motivation behind organising it, after which followed the round of what Mark McKergow called “creeping-death” introductions. Although I also dislike such introduction rounds, it was fascinating to hear what diversity and depth of experience the attendees brought with them, and it was comforting to hear that they understood the same thing that I do for terms such as complexity and self-organisation.

After the introductions, we enjoyed the first part of a talk by George Rzevski, professor emeritus for complexity science at the Open University. I won’t go into the talk in detail; the slides are available on the workshop website. One slide, though, was very thought- and discussion-provoking. There is still no generally agreed-on definition of complexity, and dozens of attempts exist. George presented his 7 criteria for complexity, which we found that (although there were differing points of view that could be discussed) seemed to all of us to be ok, good enough, a good first step towards a common definition.

George Rzevski’s Seven Criteria for Complexity

1. INTERACTION – A complex system consists of a large number of diverse components (Agents) engaged in rich interaction
2. AUTONOMY – Agents are largely autonomous but subject to certain laws, rules or norms; there is no central control but agent behaviour is not random
3. EMERGENCE – Global behaviour of a complex system “emerges” from the interaction of agents and is therefore unpredictable
4. FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM – Complex systems are “far from equilibrium” because frequent occurrences of disruptive events do not allow the system to return to the equilibrium
5. NONLINEARITY – Nonlinearity occasionally causes an insignificant input to be amplified into an extreme event (butterfly effect)
6. SELF-ORGANISATION – Complex systems are capable of self-organisation in response to disruptive events
7. CO-EVOLUTION – Complex systems irreversibly co-evolve with their environments

After lunch, we held an extended poster session. Having never done a poster session before, I simply drew one using visualisation techniques (thanks to Martin Haussmann for teaching me!), and was surpised at the positive responses I got. My topic is the bi-directional insights of using the Cynefin method to understand why Agile works, and using Scrum as a framework for managing work in the complex domain. I’ll be presenting my paper on this later this morning, and am looking forward to the feedback and discussions that will come. During the poster session, I also had interesting talks with Mark McKergow on solution-focused therapy and complexity, and with Ed Olson on his CDE model and the Cynefin ABIDE model, which I use quite heavily in my work on self-organising teams.

When the poster session was done, there was still some time until the evening barbeque, and George Rzevski presented the second part of his talk. He’s done fascinating and world-class work, I highly recommend checking out his slides.

Dinner, drinks and conversation followed, and by the time I got to bed, I was suffering from information overload, and was too tired to write this blog post, which is why I’m doing it now.

More later.

I’ve started using Facebook.

I had kept myself happily free of all the Web 2.0 pseudo-social networking sites up until now, but chose to sign up for Facebook to get in contact with some old friends I couldn’t reach otherwise. Even so, I didn’t want to spend more time and energy there than was absolutely necessary to maintain these important social contacts. I had heard various horror stories about Facebook. My father told me, “what monster have I created? It just keeps sucking me in deeper and deeper.” My dear friend Evelyn told me that she got quite a lot of friendship invitations from unknown men simply because, as some of them wrote: “your profile picture’s so hot”. (n.b. she’s since changed it to one of her dog).

Every time you go to your home page in Facebook, it tells you how many “friends” you have. Are these really friends? Maybe some of them are, but many (if not most) are people who’ve become connected to you simply because of the social network construction mechanism available within Facebook makes it so easy, and because of the competitive aspect: “I’ve got more friends than you”. (Thought: could a lack of virtual friends lead to a virtual depression?)

Having all these contacts as friends, though, is an expensive proposition. The cost of maintaining social ties can be considerable. In one of his blog posts, Christopher Allen (quoting Dunbar) points out the consequences that a social network of 150 would have:

The group size predicted for modern humans by equation (1) would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming.

42% is a lot of time! No wonder many companies block people’s access to such sites at work. In an interesting corollary, Dunbar wrote the following:

My suggestion, then, is that language evolved as a “cheap” form of social grooming, so enabling the ancestral humans to maintain the cohesion of the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time.

Having a large network gives rise to a problem know as the Diplomat’s Dilemma: how do I maximize the usefulness of my network whilst minimizing the time I spend grooming it? I don’t know how others do it, but if I had to spend 42% of my time taking care of my social network, I’d never get any work done! In addition, not only the time involved, but also the type of effort involved, may vary greatly within one and the same network.

Snowden also points this out in his blog:

Now the assumption in Dunbar’s working and subsequent writing is that this level of knowledge requires physical proximity. However we now live in virtual as well as physical worlds so the nature of interactions change. The natural limit is probably in place, but its form, and the nature of its creation will have new variants for a new environment.

The cost of maintaining social ties is also analysed in a recent paper by Petter Holme and Gourab Ghoshal entitled “The Diplomat’s Dilemma: Maximizing Power for Minimal Effort in Social Networks”.

So, how do I solve the Diplomat’s Dilemma? Well, I set up a Facebook rule for myself. If I don’t know you well enough to invite you to my house, possibly contributing funding to help cover your travel costs, and am not comfortable with leaving you alone in my house, I won’t link to you on Facebook. I may exchange emails with you, or chat with you on some IM service, or may link to you on one of the professional social networking sites I’m on, but I’m not going to use Facebook for the 147.8 “friends” or acquaintances I have, but rather for the 15 “deep trust” friends (see Snowden’s blog for an explanation of that number).