Tacit knowing for organisational resilience ... or, if you don't understand why you can never

1. T knowing for organisational resilience
acit
... or, if you don't understand why you can never
1.4kg of jelly like fats & tissues
• We always know more than we can say and we will
always say more than we can write down
• Humans have evolved to sense patterns based on (very)
partial data scans (but it's not mental models)
• Autonomic and novelty receptive (system 1 and system 2
in Thinking, fast and slow)
• 98% of our genetic history is as Pliocene hunter gathers;
social computing works because it in part mimics that
ecology
• It's not it's just about the brain, so forget "The
Singularity" and think embodied and extended
• Human knowledge requires mediation through trusted
networks or institutions - think apps not Web 3.0
All cartoons courtesy of gaping void

2. Intrinsic and extrinsic reward
“Economists and workplace consultants regard it
as almost unquestioned dogma that people are
motivated by rewards, so they don’t feel the need
to test this. It has the status more of religious
truth than scientific hypothesis.”
“The facts are absolutely clear.
There is no question that in virtually all
circumstances in which people are doing things in
order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards
undermine intrinsic motivation”
New Scientist 9th April 2011 pp 40-43
Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.
A new context: from robustness to resilience
Gaussian Pareto
10⁵
10⁴
N(M=m(earthquakes/year)
Probability of outcome
10⇤
10⇥
10
10⁰
10-
Low Probability 10-⇥
High impact events
Range of possible outcomes 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
early detection Magnitude m=log₁₀(S)
fast recovery
early exploitation Derived from material created by Max Boisot
Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved. Academy of Management Montreal 2010

3. Research & monitoring
From prediction ... Pareto world
Hypothesis/
inductive
Non-hypothesis/
Log of event frequency
abductive
Gaussian
world
Probable
Possible
... to triggering
Plausible anticipatory
Log of event size awareness
Derived from material created by Max Boisot
Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved. Academy of Management Montreal 2010
...think anew, act anew
• In a complex adaptive system, constraints and agents co-evolve
so we are dealing with systems that are dispositional but not
causal
• Shift from closing the gap to an idealised future to managing. The
evolutionary potentially the present
• Valuable knowledge is social in nature, collective use can be
ritualised in crews (replace teams) and other organisational
forms (but you need hierarchies)
• Exaptation is more important than adaptation and design;
managing for exaption requires messy coherence
• Proactive: stimulator create networks with purpose, it's not
about anarchy
• Human sensor networks, distributed cognition not crowd
sourcing) within constraints ...
Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

5. Homo narrans
• Using the micro-narratives of day to day conversation
that provide the patterns of meaning and culture
• Self-signification for volume, objectivity, empowerment
and contiuous monitoring
• Distributed enthnography, not field anthropology or
story telling
• Peer to peer knowledge flow and learning
• Research capture creates a knowledge database and
enables monitoring, weak signal detection and fast
response.
• .. And it also enables exaptative innovation,market
discovery etc.
Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.
www.cogntiive-edge.com