pretty good stuff. On the same token, I suggest the reading of Dudley Tower’s primer on Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), which covers similar grounds and comes with an intervention model to let the RIGHT things emerge in organizations that know that they are part of the real world. You will find this paper, titled ‘Creating the Complex Adaptive Organization:
A Primer on Complex Adaptive Systems’ at the following address: http://www.evergreeninstitute.org/pdf/CreatingtheCAO.pdf . Not taking into account an unfortunate reference to Jack Welch on page 4 and a call for planetary love at the end of the paper, I find the model quite interesting and I am using it as a foundation for an paper I am writing right now with a client (a R&D PMO director) that knows there is something going on outside his organization ; this paper will be titled : ‘Planning and fostering the emergence of a R&D Project management culture’.

Regards

In the meantime, let’s remember that projects happen in an uncertain and unknowable future. By organizing and managing projects with the expectation of learning and adapting we have the best chance of succeeding. Lean and agile approaches currently offer the most promise and there’s so much more we can learn.

Actually, it all started for me, this summer,when I found at bargain price a book called ‘CREATION: Life and how to make it’ by Steve Grand, the inventor (as he states it) of the computer game ‘CREATURES’. Grand explains quite well in this book the challenge of creating life (which he claims he did !!) and it is through his explanations about building blocks fitting together to create life from ‘the bottom up’ that I started to understand that my TOP DOWN change management process (à la Kotter) was a complete mistake, particularly with a Research Center PMO. When I told my customer about my doubts, he jumped right in because the top down approach was just generating too much resistance with the scientists (who, after all, are quite smarter than most of their management bosses and just cannot stand being told HOW to do things). Furthermore, those fellows, being scientists, use system dynamics and thinking, and ‘lunch’ with complexity every day. I just know now that the behavior of the head scientist was right on target. He would not strongly sponsor the project, saying that, with the right stimuli, the things would evolve ‘by themselves’in the right direction. I thought he was a weak leader, but he was in fact someone who respected complexity and uncertainty, for coping with them everyday as a scientist, and knew that emergence was the ‘best way’ - no, ‘the only way’ to go.

Finally, the new book by Seth Godin , ‘Survival is not enough’, does quite a good job in vulgarizing all this emergence and ‘complex adaptive systems’ stuff. It makes a good read too and I recommend it to everyone I can.

Thanks again for your fabulous weblog, Hal. I wish a good weekend to everybody who shares these conversations.