Social Complexity and the Intranet

Richard Hare

Organisational Hierarchy

Organisational Network

“Wirearchy”

“...a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology...” - John Husband

Exercise

“There are profound implications for the design of Intranets once it has been recognized that human systems are

COMPLEX rather than COMPLICATED”

- Dave Snowden

By Snowded (Own creation, own work)

[CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Sensemaking: Cynefin

Managing complexity

1. Distributed cognition- decisions made by diverse networks

2. Finely grained objects- learning from narrative fragments

3. Disintermediation- decision makers see real data

“...partial constraints, co-evolution of constraint with agent behaviour...”

http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/3299/the-necessity-of-partial-constraint/

Intranets and complexity

1. On-line communities

2. Blogs/blogging/blogspheres

3. Enterprise Social Networks

4. Tagging and folksonomy

5. Rating vs. liking

6. “Gamification”

References

“Here Comes Everybody” - Clay Shirky

“The Intranet as a Complex Ecology” - Dave Snowden

“Multi-Ontology Sensemaking - A New Simplicity in Decision Making”- Dave Snowden

www.wirearchy.com - John Husband

www.gapingvoid.com - Hugh MacLeod

Coursera: Gamification – Prof. Kevin Werbach

Thank youRichard Hare: www.richardhare.com

Twitter: @richardhare