A633.3.4.RB_CompexityStrategy_LouBeldotti

A633.3.4.RB

Complexity Science

            The graphic above reminds me of an Etch-A-Sketch gone wrong or a weird string art project by a third grader.  However, it is a depiction of the “butterfly effect”.  Simply put, it reflects how something small can become something big.

            In this reflective blog, I am asked to “reflect on your own organizations strategy and how it has evolved over time. Discussing each stage of development and how feedback and strategy formulation have evolved. Consider the next stages in your company's evolution and describe what it will look like in 10 years and where will you be?.”  Honestly, I cannot do this with my current occupation as a public school teacher.  So, I will use my former “employer”…the US Army.

            I first enlisted into the United States Army in 1982.  Most of the Senior Noncommissioned Officers were Vietnam veterans and there were a few General Officers that were World War II veterans.  These were different times.  The “Air, Land, Sea battle doctrine” was still alive and well.  Essentially this doctrine was to secure and maintain superiority in the air, on the land and on the sea during combat operations.  Like pages on a calendar, pages would be peeled off as each month passed as would change come to how we fought and defeated our enemies.  Our enemies were adapting to our fighting doctrine and gaining a foothold.  Then came asymmetrical combat.  This turned the air, land, sea battle doctrine on its head.  The butterfly effect no longer happened when we fought our enemies.  Now, a small thing could easily become an even smaller thing instead of having a larger effect.

            The military had to evolve its strategy.  According to Obolensky, “There are a variety of ways of looking at strategy. The way it is formulated can be seen as top down, bottom up or a mix of both. The strategy can also be seen in terms of how fixed/fluid it is, how clearly it is understood across the organization, and how much it is owned through the organization:

            • The extent to which the strategy is clear across the organization is often a headache for many top executives. Clarity means that everyone in the organization understands the overall big picture strategy and how they fit within it. This is a perennial problem for top teams. There are, however, stages at which it is natural that the strategy is unclear, normally in a period of transition into matrix or CAS. In many ways the degree of clarity depends not on what the strategy is but how it came about. Similar to the point about ownership below, if there has been no involvement in the formulation of the strategy, do not expect a high degree of understanding – people need to be engaged rather than preached to. The lack of clarity of strategy is also used as an excuse by followers to do nothing to take the initiative. This is looked at in more detail in Chapter 7.

            • Strategies can also been seen in terms of how fixed or fluid they are. In reality this is a continuum, but one can contrast the strategic approach of formulating strategy on, say, a five yearly cycle and having a more fluid approach where strategy is updated on a continual basis. The extent of fluidity and fixed nature will be affected by the market the organization is in, as well as the organizational evolutionary maturity.

            • The level of ownership of the strategy will be dictated by the amount of involvement in formulating and deciding the strategy. The simple rule of ‘No involvement = no ownership’ often applies. Many senior executives worry about ‘buy-in’ when in fact they should be concentrating on ‘sell-out’ – in other words the process used by executives to sell internally is crucial. A key hurdle is the inability to ‘let go’ which, when you come to think about it, is vital when ‘selling’ and developing shared ownership. This is explored more in Chapters 9 and 10.” (Obolensky, 2014)

            This strategy change for the military is a mixture of top down and bottom up.  The war fighters on the ground (bottom) explained to the senior members what was happening and the senior member (top) evoked change that affected the war fighters.  This, in-turn, puts the butterfly effect correctly back into action.

            In ten years, we will have only refined the way we fight unless the enemy makes another game change and we will have to evolve yet again.

Reference

Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty. (2^nd ed). Gower Publishing Company: Burlington, VT

A633.3.3.RB_ComplexAdaptiveSystems_LouBeldotti

A633.3.3.RB

Complex Adaptive Systems

Find a company which reflects Morning Star and St Luke’s image of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and reflect in your blog what the implications are for you and your present organization (or any organization you are familiar with). Identify what you believe are appropriate actions to move your organization forward.

            Wow!  I performed a Google search and found plenty of blogs from past classes at ERAU about Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).

            After spending 27 years in the US Army, limited experience in the public sector, and almost six years in public education, I have very limited exposure to CAS.  In the military, CAS is an acronym for Close Air Support.  Not the same thing.

            However, there has been studies of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) with regards to the military.  One particular study by Keith L. Green in 2011 evokes Tolstoy:

“From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress of the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place of conflict but reported what they had heard from others; and also because while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to Napoleon circumstances changed and the news he brought was already becoming false. Thus an adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings that Borodino had been occupied and the bridge over the Kolocha was in the hands of the French. The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished the troops to cross it?  Napoleon gave orders that the troops should form up on the farther side and wait. But before that order was given—almost as soon in fact as the adjutant had left Borodino—the bridge had been retaken by the Russians and burned...” (Tolstoy, 1869)

            War and Peace is of course a narrative fictional account, but having served in the Russian Army, Tolstoy was conveying in this passage not just hypothetical knowledge gained through his study of history, but to some extent his personal experience in the Crimean. One wonders what Tolstoy might have written had he witnessed the use of technology by the First-World militaries of today. There exists that data allows commanders to know within tolerable error where their units are in near or near-real time; radios permit them to make inquiries of field units and communicate orders in seconds; Unmanned Aerial Systems provide real-time reconnaissance of an area many miles from their headquarters. And yet soldiers still die, and battles may still be won while campaigns are lost. Confusion reigns. Sometimes military analysts cannot answer except with anecdotal evidence or gut feeling what seems a simple question: Are we winning or losing? Moreover, military analysts often cannot answer credibly and convincingly whether a particular action has helped or harmed the cause. War differs from the subjects that traditional technical analysis is well-suited to address; however, in attempting to address the complex problems of war, analysts often attempt to apply traditional techniques by making simplifying assumptions invalid in the real world. In effect, the analysts ignore the complexities of war altogether. War displays archetypical features of complex adaptive systems—systems comprising agents that make decisions based on local, sometimes erroneous or dated information in which interactions produce patterns that could not have been calculated or derived beforehand.

            The mission space for the US military has been dominated in recent years by tasks that were not the focus of the military during much of the twentieth century, when major combat operations against other major powers was the primary concern. These new tasks cut across what has been described as the range of military operations and the problems associated with these tasks cannot be adequately addressed by traditional, fixed responses. Such problems require generalized adaptive strategies and capabilities. Today’s military prevents genocide, delivers humanitarian assistance, counters insurgents, trains foreign militaries, assists reconstruction, and supports civil authorities in a range of missions, from disaster relief to combating drug trafficking. Mission outcomes can be strongly influenced by factors that have nothing directly to do with logistics or kinetic operations. Local economic, political, and social factors exacerbate inherent complexity—as can the economic, political and social factors in the United States and around the world. A US Marine Corps manual states explicitly, War is a complex phenomenon. (Green, 2011)

            War is the same as Tolstoy depicts in his novel, even 147 years later.  The only thing that has changed is technology.  War hasn’t changed but those fighting it have adapted.  Adaptation to technology.  The strategy is the same…the only thing that has changed is how wars are fought.

            As a 27-year veteran of the US Military, it has been adaptation to change and technology that has kept the military relevant.   This is what is necessary to move the military forward. 

References

Tolstoy, L. (1869). War and Peace Project Gutenberg, Book 10, Chapter XXXIII, accessed on 24 Aug 2010 on http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600?msg=welcome_stranger

Green, L. (2011, May). Complex Adaptive Systems in Military Analysis. Retrieved on August 27, 2016 from https://www.ida.org/~/media/Corporate/Files/Publications/IDA_Documents/JAWD/ida-document-d-4313.pdf

A633.2.3.RB_ButterflyEffect_LouBeldotti

A633.2.3.RB

Butterfly Effect

This week’s reflective blog:

            Based on this week's reading, reflect on complexity science and theory in organizations and the butterfly effect (p.66). 

            Identify 2 examples where “small changes yield large results” in your organization.

            What are the implication of complexity theory for you and your organization and how can you use this to drive improvements.

            This week’s reflective blog (RB) immediately made me think of Jurassic Park.  In the original movie, Jeff Goldblum, portrayed a character named Dr. Ian Malcolm.  Dr. Malcolm was a chaos mathematician”.  He was not exactly the voice of reason but he definitely let the other characters in the movie know of his opinion when it came to the cause and effect of cloning ancient creatures for modern man’s amusement.

            According to my research, the “butterfly effect” is an example of an attractor.  According to Obolensky, “These plots have a specific and easily understandable pattern. However, some attractors do not and they are called ‘strange’ attractors. Perhaps the most famous and useful strange attractor is known as the butterfly effect, or Lorenz’s Strange Attractor. Of all the chaos theories this one has special importance for Complex Adaptive Leadership. Much work was done in the 1970s when the new theories of chaos were really beginning to emerge. Strangely enough, most papers in various different fields began to appear independently of each other in 1970. Sadly very few were aware that a lot of work had already been done ten years earlier. It seemed no one thought of looking in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, volume 20, pp. 130–41, published in 1963. Over a decade before the term ‘chaos mathematics’ was first coined an article entitled ‘Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow’ by Edward Lorenz described one of the most famous manifestations of chaos mathematics – the butterfly effect. Its more technical term is ‘Lorenz’s Strange Attractor’.  Edward Lorenz was a keen mathematician but actually worked as a research meteorologist. He built a mini-weather system simulator on a Royal McBee computer in 1960. In the winter of 1961 he wanted to study again a weather simulation he had just spent several days running, and so typed in the starting parameters once more. These consisted of a very lengthy list of numbers each with a long decimal point such as 0.501675. The numbers represented changes in three variables of temperature, pressure and wind speed. To save time, he left the final few numbers off as this in meteorological terms was insignificant – ‘Like a seagull fart in a hurricane’ was the apparent significance he was reported to comment to a colleague. The simulation ran at first exactly as before, but after a couple of days some very small differences occurred to the first run. After a while these differences grew to an outcome that was vastly different – the simulation ended in a weather state poles apart from the first run, despite such a very small change at the start. Lorenz made an accidental but very significant discovery – that a very small change within a complex system (such as weather) can produce a very large difference to what would have otherwise happened. In other words, when a situation has a great sensitivity to initial conditions a small change can have a disproportionate effect. When he worked out why this was, he found that even complex and chaotic systems, which are unpredictable in the long run, have an underlying pattern. This accidental discovery was given the technical name ‘Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions’. When Lorenz presented his paper several years later to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington in 1972, he titled his paper ‘Predictability – Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?’ His answer was, predictably, ambiguous whilst focusing on the instability of the atmosphere. Lorenz’s butterfly effect can be explained by three (temperature, pressure and wind speed) simultaneous non-linear differential equations which have an infinite number of possible solutions. When graphed, these equations give a picture as shown in Figure 5.10, which shows why the term ‘butterfly’ is used. Since that time the butterfly effect is one of the most well-known phenomena of chaos mathematics. It has given rise to many manifestations in films, literature and TV.  It also has historic manifestations, a recent one being Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit seller in the rural town of Sidi Bouzid, who upon having his wares confiscated and being unable to gain an audience with the mayor, immolated himself in front of town hall on 17 December 2010. His desperate action set off a series of events which became known as the Arab Spring. An unforeseen, unprecedented and dramatic political, social, cultural and economical realignment across the Middle-East, has gone on to dramatically change the daily lives of over 200 million people. Although the story of Mohamed Bouazizi is tragic in the extreme, his actions were, in fact, the wing flap of Lorenz’s butterfly. The butterfly effect is very significant as, on the face of it, it seems to break the first law of thermodynamics, sometimes known as the Law of the Conservation of Energy, which can be summarized as: the effort you put in will dictate the result you get out. Yet within complex organizations, small changes can yield large results. A practical example of this is the concept of ‘catalytic mechanisms’ that Collins reports in his research. These are small changes to company policy which yielded large results.” (Obolensky, 2014)

            The “butterfly effect” reminds me of throwing a stone into a body of water.  When the stone pierces the water’s surface a ripple occurs and grows into even larger concentric ripples.  A stone the size of a quarter can turn into a ripple the size of house. 

            As a high school educator, often times small things turn into even larger things when it comes to students.  It can be triggered by a kind word or some type of discipline.  An example of this is offering words of encouragement to a substandard student who ends of being the Valedictorian.  The student could have easily failed out of school but, instead, excelled.  Another example is taking a cell phone from a student.  Parents become involved and they make phone calls and send emails that causes this small act of discipline to escalate into a giant problem.

            Dealing with students and parents is very complex.  There are rules and policies in place but often times, the more irate the parent and student becomes, the more apt the administration is to err on the side of the student and/or parent.

            The only true way to drive improvement is to uphold the policies and standards.  In my position as an Army Instructor, I continuously hold to the standards and this, in itself, causes plenty of ripples.

Reference

Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex adaptive leadership: Embracing paradox and uncertainty (2 ed.). Retrieved from http://reader.chegg.com/book.php?id=ac6967ef3270567b9a1a8af2dc0258ee

A633.1.2.RB

Leadership Gap

A REFLECTIVE EXERCISE TO OPEN UP YOUR MIND AND GET A VIEW OF LEADERSHIP GENERALLY 

We are surrounded by issues of leadership. Leadership books and courses are more numerous now than ever before.  Leaders are under more scrutiny than they ever have been.  We seem fascinated by leaders in all spheres of life – and we also seem to have a different attitude from our forebears.  Here are some questions to ponder:  

•   Has your own attitude to leaders changed in your life, and if so how? 

•   If we take as a starting point the attitude to those in authority/leaders as held by your grandparents, and then look at those attitudes held by your parents, and then by you, and then by the younger generation, is there a changing trend? If so, what is it? 

 

•    Why do you think that this has occurred?  Spend a few minutes reflecting on your answers to these three questions.

            My attitude would change towards my leaders every time I would have a Permanent Change of Station (PCS).  I would have to adapt to my new leader’s style and personality.  It was like getting a new boss every two to four years.  Because of this, I became very adaptive over my twenty seven years of Army service. 

            Trends have changed dramatically over my fifty two years on this planet.  I came of age in the late seventies and early eighties.  When I was a child growing up in the sixties and seventies, I respected my elders or those in authority.  I would use phrases such as “Yes, sir”, “Yes, ma’am” and “please/thank you”.  Over the course of the last three decades, I have noticed a degradation of these respectful comments and pleasantries.  There is definitely a changing trend.

 

            As time changes, so do people.  We now live in the world of email, texts, Twitter (140 characters), Facebook, Instagram, KIK, SnapChat and so many more vehicles for communicating with one another.  The English language has been relegated to “LOL”, “LMS”, “TBT”, “RALMAO”, and so many more acronyms.  Words have also been abbreviated.  Too, to and two have become “2”.  You has become “U”.  I, for one, still use proper English while texting or using social media.  It is just the world that we live in.

            Regardless, leadership is still the same whether we need to speak to our subordinates in this cryptic language or in plain text English.