Chaos as Strategy Part III

Comment: In the earlier post we looked at the military's approach to chaos and cultural paradigm shifts in thought necessary in order manage and leverage chaos as a strategy. We also looked at chaos as both a science and an art then connected the art to emotional design. I will expand on emotional design as coupled to organizational design and chaos. The objective to illustrate that chaos is manageable then provide some project management tactics, techniques, and practices that help during chaotic situations. This will be the last post on this topic for now. 

Emotional Design and Chaos

Leveraging chaos involves an organization that can support and be accurately responsive to surprise, perceptions, and intuition with a low latency. Similar to a warfare commander who organizes war fighting elements such as ships, planes, tanks, and forces for battle, companies must be structured for battle leveraging their organization and staff for profitability and survivability. The idea of applying warfare methods to business is not new and has been popularized by books such as The Art of War by Sun Tsu or Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun by Wess Roberts. Both of these books explore war fighting tradecraft but fall short of structuring systems and organizations. In this series, we are leveraging emotional design which involves three elements; the visceral, behavioral, and reflective.

These three elements interplay in differing ways that result in judgements and rapid decision making during a dialectic conversation about what is good or bad, safe or dangerous, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, etc... Humans then act on these perceptions. (Norman, 2004, p. 22 ). The conversation is both overt and internalized as well as in ongoing with or without all the participant's contributing. Business leaders must not only participate in the conversation but somehow contribute in a way that favorably sways the conversation. Principle based character ethics is one approach that should be leveraged. Business leaders and project managers should appeal to well established and acceptable principles in order to be seen as forthright and upstanding. The quickest way to loose respect in business, the workplace, or marketplace is to use personality or situational character ethics. However, the marketplace is often unfair and business can be thought of as warfare as pointed to earlier. Therefore, surprise, perceptions, and intuition must be leveraged to the advantage of a company and operation. Information warfare methods shape the conversation. I will save this for another post. I do want to couple organizational design to emotional design in order for the business to be responsive to surprise and the business leaders intuition.

The primary objective is to have an adaptable organizational architecture that leadership can array in different ways to meet marketplace challenges without disruption to the organization.  A closely coupled objective is to have a self-organizing architecture that adapts or adjusts to emergent conditions simultaneous to leadership's efforts to array the organizational elements if different ways. This is possible by virtualizing the organization using complex adaptive systems approach. But first let's link emotional and organizational design. 

Emotional Design and Organizational Design

In emotion design of an organization, the visceral relates to beauty which has the traits of harmony and unity within a system. The organization that results in smooth and responsive operations during stressor conditions as well as adapt or self-organize to changing conditions without becoming confused or disjunctive is said to exhibit beauty.  A measure of beauty is the Golden Ratio which can be applied to physical and virtual relationships of design. ie timing sequences, resonance, and various ratios throughout the organizational design. 

The behavioral component of design promotes usability or functionality which must answer the question does the organization perform under the intended or contingent stressors and deliver quality results. Accuracy and latency are perhaps the most important measure of usability. Latency is the time interval from discovery to result or outcome the organization takes to identify, evaluate, and implement a solution to a challenge or emergent condition. 

Reflective design element provokes thought or intellectualization. Like warfare commanders, business leaders leverage intuition to their advantage while assessing perceptions for accuracy and value. Often optics, what does situation look like, can be deceptive. For example, General Schwarzkopf created an optic for Saddam Hussein that a 10,000 troop Marine force was his worse nightmare. Hussein focused on this optic as Schwarzkopf moved them around, split them up, and would hide part of them such that Hussein consumed his time looking for them. In the meantime, Schwarzkopf swept around with a large mechanized ground force and marched on Baghdad approaching from several directions at once. Hussein was stunned to learn of this force as a giant dust cloud stirred on the horizon and the earth quaked under the thunderous approach of the advancing mechanized force. He surrendered. 

Likewise, it is not uncommon for companies to create optics that are distractive. For example, a power company was installing micro power generation plants throughout the South Florida metropolitan region but ecological groups resisted the construction of the units. The CEO announced construction of a unit near the neighborhoods of the protestor leaders who immediately dropped all other protest and focused on the N.I.M.B.Y. optic. Construction of the other units went smoothly but the unit near the protestors neighborhoods was experiencing significant delays. Whenever the protestor's attention waned from the optic, the company would try something outrageous with the unit near their neighborhoods. In the end the CEO acquiesced to the protestors and withdrew the bid to build a unit near their neighborhood. The protestors celebrated popping Champaign bottles and lauding their victory over the evil capitalist power company that accomplished the objective of building the other units. The company sold the property near the protestor's neighborhood at profit.

Like the previous book's these are mostly tactics and techniques. Let's combine these with the ideal organizational architecture.

A Better Solution to Managing Complexity and Chaos

The organizational design promoted in many of my posts is the Complex Adaptive Systems, CAS, architecture. I like this approach because of the adaptability and manageability without causing disruptive conditions. CAS is an ideal approach to leveraging chaos both to withstand natural events and deliberate efforts that disrupt the organization as well as to leverage chaos as a business strategy both internally and externally. The challenge is to understand how to apply complex adaptive theory in combination with other methods to organizational design.  

CAS is an architecture of communication pathways and interconnected nodes like natural systems such as crystalline structures, molecular chains, and to a greater extent neural networks of the brain when animated. For this post, CAS is a network of nodes that self-organize by identifying and connecting to other nodes based on demand for a node's output. The nodes can also be arrayed to form new processes   or ways of thinking for the organization. 

For clarification, the network of nodes and communication pathways can be viewed as a neural net having firing signals and information transfers along the connecting pathways.  These connecting pathways are viewed as forming line of logic or knowledge. Hence, the nodal network is a knowledge manufacturing instrument as well as producing physical goods. The lines of logic are virtual and can be layered. All nodes are stable and process their workload based on queued work seeing the first order connection only. Although, notice of incoming work is possible if the line of logic is already known and established. Logistical networks move any physical goods being processed while informational networks move virtual activity. 

Nodes are fully encapsulated processes that can be associated to U-shaped cells commonly found in lean manufacturing having the inputs and outputs. The communication pathways duct information exchange requirements between nodes or the U-Shaped cells.  The network is self-organizing based on processing needs. Cells advertise their physical and informational products. Computer networks and logistical network animate the nodal network exchanges. Cells can be internalized or outsourced based on financial and strategic considerations. Cells can be called into action on an as needed basis.  Software can manage the entire nodal system as supervised intelligence. Latencies can be leaned out and the network response times can be dramatically shortened as the cells are self-directed establishing relationships with other nodes as required. Applying complex adaptive system concepts to organizational design can lean out the organization and leverage chaos to its favor given the rapid self-organizing nature of the design.

Cell or node design is not complicated. A cell is simply a set of fully encapsulated processes, activities, or steps that are performed by the cells systems and staff. The cell is buffered and receives inputs from the network, performing work, then outputting the work in progress for other cells to act on or as a finished good.

Leveraging Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

Common to operations management on a practical level is the need to manage the operations or in this case the nodal or cellular network. Operations managers (OMs) and project managers (PMs) can see the network laid down at any point in time (with the proper management tools) and node queues or backlogs.  Cell workloads would become evident as queues buffer the cells taskings. Work flows would become self-evident as cells make connections to other cells which schedule the arrival of the taskings, work packages, or job followers.  PMs then can monitor project activity for conflicting taskings more readily. Project management transitions from the cowboy PM who wrangled the staff and constantly searched out conflicts to having the company self-organize dynamically to reflect the workflow priorities and schedule.

As a rapid paced and dynamic marketplace changes, the organizational nodes respond by adapting, and self-organizing without the overhead of business and system analyst creating latency in the organization as they assess what to do. Leadership may also review the standing exchanges between nodes then adjust processes to optimize performance.

In a war fighting scenario, the cells can be arrayed to deliver desired outcomes the leadership seeks. For example, a new technology disrupts the marketplace obsoleting conventional practices due to lower operating costs.  In the case of the cellular network, a cell can be stood up that leverages that technological process then added into the network or leadership may resource this cell by outsourcing. The other cells simply repoint to the new cell added. In another scenario, leadership may have a hunch about a new product or service then decide to build a new process. After mapping the process out and creating a work breakdown structure, cells are identified that would support the new process. The cell's queues load with the work packages as the process moves through the network. Capacities and capabilities are assessed quickly.  A cell's staffing can be increased or identical cell's can be stood up in parallel to handle the additional throughput. Costs are well known. Leadership can assess all the processes layers throughout the organization quickly compressing decision making. In an ultimate circumstance, cells can be arrayed to process then deliver information and knowledge much like the human brain. Truth reports assess the accuracy and validity of the arrayed path through the network. With proper tooling and design, this can be accomplished from a desk in a matter of a brief moment.

Overall, the CAS network is a pliable and adaptable approach to managing an operation that can lean out inefficiencies and be leveraged in ways that result in increased knowledge about the organization, marketplace, or some other phenomenon. Hence, chaos has been wrangled and is now leveraged to the advantage of the leadership. 

Reference:

Norman, D. (2004). Emotional design: why we love or hate everyday things. Basic Books; New York. 

Pierce, T. (1998). Proceedings Magazine: teaching elephants to swim. (vol. 124, 3, 1, 143). U.S. Naval Institute.