Why Systems Fail & Redesigning for the Better?

I am excited. My months of struggle is almost nearing its end to give birth to something new. I am almost on the verge of completing a book on 'Why Systems Fail & Redesigning for the Better? - A Nemetic Approach'.

Well, writing a book is something like birthing a baby. I can well feel the joy, worry, agony and ecstasy of women creating life on earth. Unfortunately, being a man I would never feel it exactly as they feel but writing is something similar - a process of creative enfolding and unfolding where intense pure emotions and clear cognition come together to create new flows.  

In this post I would like to share a part of that agony filled excitement with you by presenting the Preface (still in draft till publication):

 

Preface

 

For the last thirty three years I have tried to be attentive in finding an answer to an interesting and important question that occupied my mind for so long: ‘Why systems fail?’ This is just the opposite of asking: ‘How systems work?’

Though these two questions apparently oppose each other the answer is paradoxically the same. That is for anything to work or function smoothly it must not fail. Or stated more explicitly, smooth functioning or failure of any system is the outcome of the same interactions taking place within a system. I also believe that our human mind is designed for noticing failures much faster than noticing successes. Hence my professional journey began with that question, ‘Why Systems Fail?’ and the question has remained with me till date.

 

To my mind this is an important and relevant question in these times since as of now our world as a system has grown more complex and chaotic that shows erratic behavior, which at times, is not very pleasing. We feel it every day in our lives. Uncertainty of jobs or means of livelihood is no longer questionable but a fact of life. We are completely governed by various systems that we have created. Thus failures like famine, poverty, illiteracy, spread of diseases; infant mortality and unemployment that we see around us are outcomes of the systems that we engineered. So my hope is if only we clearly understand as to why systems fail we would also be able to re-design our systems with changing times to benefit many.  

 

This gives us the hope that you and I may do something about making our systems fail less often that they do now. Never before, mankind has been so dependent on the success of man made engineering systems (social systems are also engineered systems) to function smoothly in an uninterrupted manner. If this can be done, as the numerous examples in the book would show, it saves us time, money, resources (mainly energy) and effort. Isn’t it a sane thing to do? The approach is neither evolutionary nor revolutionary. It lies “in between” the two. Hence I call it ‘evorevolution’ – an interesting in between where big systemic changes may be brought about by small onetime efforts. Achieving the interesting ‘in between’ is the focus of the book.

 

A failure of our man made systems often proves too costly. It endangers human lives. It endangers the environment. It affects national economies. It affects productivity. It wastes material and resources that affects our own sustainability as a ‘species’. It affects costs and thereby profitability of our productive organizations. If we cannot put our human feelings and intelligence to work to eradicate such ‘failures’ then what is the use?

 

It is obvious that poorly engineered systems force an economy to spend more and thereby impoverish the economy and lower the standard of living of its citizens. Thus I can say that in today’s world, the success of engineered systems has created the fundamental divide between richer and developing (read poor) nations. Then the question of improvement of economy squarely rests on the how do we eliminate or contain failures of our engineered systems and make them work to meet the best performance standards. That is the essence of the subject of System Reliability through the discipline of Nemetics on which I would love to have a dialogue through this book.  

 

In this regard I must say that I was extremely lucky to have been associated with failures within manufacturing organizations. It could not have been any better. It proved to be a perfect field of study that is totally concerned with ‘surprises’, ‘failures that prove to be costly’, ‘randomness’, ‘complexity’ and ‘chaos’.  I have been lucky to engage with thousands of failures that take place in strange combinations. I have seen innumerable machinery problems. And each of those told me stories, which I internalized. I have seen countless problems and issues with the human part of manufacturing organizations and have learned from those stories too. I have seen problems with management and problems with workers and employees and those stories have been kind enough to teach me through silence, the lessons worth learning for life. Over time, I slowly got to see the underlying essence of the problems through the patterns that evolved on their own. And then I was in for some great surprise.

 

One day, it suddenly dawned on me that the lessons I learned from the dark and dim world of manufacturing organizations could be easily applied to any system whether local or global’ whether small businesses or big businesses; whether economies or nations; in short to every conceivable system even to social systems like healthcare, education, transportation etc. That makes life grand. It gives us tremendous hope for creating a better future.   

 

That does not mean that I have learned all the lessons life has to offer me. Far from it! I am still on that exciting journey learning everyday something new and exciting. But all I want to do is to share a simple enough framework with its methods, called Nemetics, that helps just about anyone find answers to how and why systems fail and what we might do about such failures to improve systems as time and need change.  

 

I must say that the framework of Nemetics, so to say, was quite accidentally invented and co-evolved through several conversations and dialogues on Twitter with my Twitter pals, coming from various fields. We soon discovered that this framework could be effortlessly applied to any field or context of human activity involved in a process or a system. The context changes but the metaphor remains the same.

 

So, with great enthusiasm and excitement I want to share with you the stories with the hope that the framework and the methods of Nemetics, i.e. to notice reality through failures & movements, engage with the interrelationships that play out, mull over the rules that create them, create and exchange value with new or re-engineered designs might help others to improve productivity, performance and profitability of the systems they are presently engaged with.

 

And there are two big advantages of using the Nemetics framework and its methods, which are:

 

1. A group of multiple problems can be addressed by “one time effort”. There is little need to address problems one by one. That saves money, resources, time and the pain of suffering failures.

 

2. Such ‘one time efforts’ to solve groups of multiple problems & paradoxes simultaneously also help individuals and organizations to reap on-going benefits for years to come before new needs accost us to disturb our peace of mind.

 

Acknowledgements:

 

One must know a rather strange fact regarding the development of Nemetics. The discussion on Nemetics started out more as fun conversation on Twitter amongst Twitter friends. Since then it has come a long way to its present state of development through constant practice and theory. Therefore I acknowledge with thanks Michael Josefowicz (@toughloveforx) with whom the initial conversation on Nemetics started. He introduced to me his language of Nemetics waiting for real life applications. And I in turn slowly introduced to him my methods of solving ‘complex’ and ‘wicked problems’ waiting for a language to express the essence. There could not have been a better relationship that resonated at once fulfilling each others mutual needs.

 

Subsequently, such conversations on Twitter turned into a sort of an exciting game that we played along with other Twitter pals  Dan R.D (@ddrrnt)  Sean Grainger (@graingered) D. C. Padhi (@humanatom) and having Paula Thornton (@rotkapchen), Neus Lorenzo (@newsneus) @counterpane, @assesswell, Paul (reomahi), Steven Putter (@stevenputter), Mpule K. Kwelagobe (@mpulekwelagobe) as interested, engaged & curious observers and participants to our frequent but intense and passionate plays. And soon many others joined. I am grateful to them too.   

I am also greatly indebted to organizations like Tata Metaliks Kobutu Pipes Limited, Tata Metaliks Limited, UltraTech, Vikram Cement, Grasim Cement, Tega Industries Limited, and Hindustan Unilever for providing opportunities and the playgrounds where the action research of Nemetics (from 1990 till date) played out to resolve their complex issues and ‘wicked problems’ in manufacturing systems, design, incentive and learning systems.

 

Till date, the discipline and practice of Nemetics are being developed through active participation of many through numerous conversations, applications to live problems, training and education programs all of which form the significant part of the ongoing Action Oriented Research in the development of Nemetics. Such practical self organizing way of development of the discipline is what we call ‘praxis’ that informs our theory, which then goes on to develop the practice in an iterative manner.

 

However, I am immensely grateful to Prof Tim Henry, of the University of Manchester, whose gentle voice coaxed me along on the roads of Reliability, Design Improvements, Complexity and Chaos and to stay with that exciting journey, whenever tiredness overcame me. With his light I saw how all these seemingly diverse subjects are really entangled into one. He is my Guru.

 

I am indebted to my Dad, who spent countless hours at my study table from my young school days teaching me how to look at social systems, their birth, development, death and re-formation. It was and still is a pleasure listening to him explaining social movements and development. It not only shaped my young mind but also gave me the much needed understanding that we as a ‘human species’ simply do too much and unnecessarily waste too much. There are easier ways. This book is dedicated to him.

 

But without the immense patience and tolerance exhibited by my wife, Madhumita, for putting up with my crazy emergent ways of passionately engaging with this exciting work, this exciting book that reveals the magic of big changes through Nemetics would not have seen the day. I am grateful to her.

 

A sense of gratitude fills me for the immense support and constant encouragement provided by Core Common Press in taking the initiative to publish the book and exchanging the value it contains with many.  

In a way, like all complex systems, each and every one of them left their entangled and hard to segregate, imprints on the development of this important subject, which only enriched the discipline through spontaneous co-evolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leadership in Complexity

"Leadership in Complexity" maintains a position and a viewpoint that each one of us is a leader of his/her own life not only to change oneself but also to act as agents of change for others through their actions and ideas. For this, one needs the courage to look at his/her own thought process to discover the underlying assumptions, beliefs, perceptions that create the apparent complexity and paradoxes one is engaged with in life.

That in short is the essence of social and cultural innovation and entrepreneurship. However, the important thing to be kept in mind is that we are not going to create any purely imagined 'desired future' in our minds rooted in idealism and run after that. For example, we are not going to say that 'let us build a more resilient community' or let us aim for more 'structure and order' realizing that resilience, structure, order are products of self organization.

Why is that? This is because 'complex systems' would not listen to what we 'desire'. They produce their own emergence, which take on various forms. For instance 'failures', 'insight' 'learning', 'wisdom', 'strange behavior', 'shortfall in attendance' , 'bad quality', 'low productivity', 'obesity', 'disease', 'epidemics' and 'love' are all cases of 'emergence'. And these are never fixed or static. They keep changing over time.

So, it is indeed stupid to have any fixed plan in the mind and exert our will to achieve the 'desired mental model' we have in mind. That of course does not tell us not to have any 'intention' whatsoever. Nor does it ask us to submit to 'fatality' of reality. Our path clearly lies in balancing between the two wheels of 'reality' and 'desire' forged by our will emanating from intention. Such balancing act is fueled by the heady mix of courage to pay attention to our thought process and the deeply felt intention to balance.

Our intention in most cases would be to adapt to the ongoing emergent phenomenon by exploring the rules that generate the emergence and then examine the underlying 'paradoxes' that shape and sustain such emergence enabling us to adapt through balancing (the Indian concept of jugaard) to give shape to a better collective future. Our aim is not to achieve this or that. Our aim is to simply adapt based on the emergence. It is a delicate balancing act like walking on the sword's edge and being in the fire at the same time.

I believe it makes life simpler, fun to live, helps us 'survive' better and also 'collectively thrive'.

The philosophical base that we are going to use is 'Complex Adaptive Systems'

The process that we would use to do so would be #Nemetics

And the tools that we would use would be many but mostly Dialogs, Learning by Doing, Iterations, Improvisations and even employ mathematical tools, if needed, like Time Waveforms, Fourier Transform without losing sight of highly explosive techniques like Meditation and the use of Principles of #nemetics

While knowledge lies in selecting the right technique for a given context or situation wisdom lies in balancing and adapting, where both knowledge and wisdom are contextual emergence.

Rapidinnovation - Understanding Complexity

As Problem Solvers we sometimes misunderstand complexity and the play of complex adaptive systems. We can become so obsessed with the solutions we come up with that we forget to take notice of the interactions and interdependence between things and how our proposed solutions might affect the existing web of interactions and interdependence, creating more difficult problems for us to tackle in the future.

For instance, in the late 1800s rangers at Yellowstone National Park saw that the population of elks was dwindling. They reasoned that the elks were not getting enough food to sustain and grow. Hence they came up with the bright solution that the elks must be 'forced feed' by human beings so that their population would substantially increase avoiding a possible 'risk' of extinction.

The solution seemed viable and nothing seemed to be missing. So the rangers of Yellowstone park brought in the U.S. cavalry to implement their solution to hand-feed the elks. And as expected the solution worked wonders. The elk population swelled. 

But that is not the end of the story. As the elk population swelled the elk started eating aspen trees. But aspen trees were what the beavers were using to build their dams that caught the runoff in the spring, which allowed trout to spawn.

Now with less and less aspen trees there were less and less dams and with less and less dams there were less and less trout to spawn. So more elks equaled less trout.

Why did this happen? It happened since we did not recognize that we were dealing with an 'adaptive system' which by nature, exhibit complex and often unexplained emergent behavior.

The seemingly 'good' solution of 'force feeding' elks led to a series of cascading events that were completely unanticipated.

We most often seek to improve complex adaptive systems, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

It doesn’t take a lot of stretching of our mental awareness to make comparative understanding of complex adaptive systems of the elk ecology to the ecology of organizations and economy. Even with our best intentions in place, there seems to be really no way we can anticipate the ultimate results with 'tinkering' with complex adaptive systems. .

The important question that we must ask ourselves is, "What conditions have to be in place to actually solve these kinds of challenging problems? It does not matter whether we are attempting to solve organizational problems, or machinery problems, ecological problems, economic problems or grappling with design problems.

For some strange reason they are all complex adaptive systems exhibiting their strange behavior through 'emergence'.

CL - Self Organising Movement in Complexity

Electrons, Corrosion, Particles, Water, Smoke, Population, Bacteria, Organizations, Societies, Nations, Human minds have one thing in common. They all move. All such movements grow and evolve, not through top-down direction and control, but through balancing of opposite forces or diverse ideas, changes in quantities that change the quality of movement and change of phase transformation of becoming through the elimination of previous states of being. But what changes situations are changes in relationships that, so to say, hold the 'organism' together.

We may say that social relationships are built around opposing or diverse ideas, apparently paradoxical, that mutually support relationships that are mostly non-linear lending the inherent 'complexity' in its movement and behavior that defies individual control of human beings. New ideas gain traction or lose it depending on their inherent appeal and utility and desire of people. Leaders in such movements give shape and flow to such collective desires. Individuals coalease spontaneously as do individual groups. Such spontaneous self organization helps new alliances to emerge rooted in the situation and the mutual needs of the groups (which I call as 'situatedness') depending on what works for those involved in the moment. What exactly would emerge is both difficult to assess and predict with great degree of certainty. While some alliances are fleeting; others endure; and some serve their purpose before they dissolve. Whatever, it might be, the states always transforming and changing. Such becoming is the nature of complex systems.

Therefore, in short, social systems self-organize around ideas and non-linear relationships. They are living, complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving as they and their members learn from shared experience generated by various leaders who emerge at different points of time and space.

This is because as social movements develop, multiple sources of leadership are essential since improvements and movements of complex systems affect the whole and never in parts. Any individual or group, however that presumes to be the leader of the whole or aspires to organize a central coordinating body to impose order on the chaos does not understand the process of self generated chaos itself which is nothing but directional order. Hence self-organizing chaos is integral to the movement building process and essential to its success of the whole of complex systems.

Those who understand the complexity of the self organizing, self sustaining process are creative leaders.

 

CL - stands for Creative Leadership.

IUO - Creative Leaders Usually Suffer!

“When so many scholars in the world are calculating, is it not right that some, who can, dream?” – René Thom

Rene Thom was a creative leader because he was the first to bring out a mathematical treatment for 'complexity' a 'wicked problem' that evaded us for long.

Thom was the spiritual leader in the development of catastrophe theory, used to study and classify phenomena characterized by sudden shifts in behavior arising from small perturbations, that is, a mathematical treatment of continuous action producing a discontinuous result.

It was extremely useful and is now the basis of further development in this new and interesting study of the phenomenon of complexity.

Although Thom introduced the theory in the late 1960’s it didn’t appear in book form until 1972 with the publication of Christopher Zeeman, who named the theory, brought it to the attention of the general public and pioneered its application to the biological and behavioral sciences.

The motivation for its development was laudable since the need to develop appropriate mathematical tools for use in the biological, behavioral and social sciences is not disputed. 

Ian Stewart in Life’s Other Secret (1998) wrote: “…it completely revolutionized bifurcation theory. It was a bloodless revolution, accomplished under an assumed name (singularity theory), and it took place largely within mathematics, so hardly anybody noticed.” Catastrophe theory paved the way for the more influential chaos theory.

But some critics claimed catastrophe theory was little more than an intellectual fad. Thom reluctantly announced its demise in 1990: “Catastrophe theory is dead. For as soon as it became clear that the theory did not permit quantitative prediction, all good minds … decided in was of no value.”

Does that not remind us of Galileo Galilei who was forced to retract his support for the 'heliocentric' view under the pressure of the church and of Giordano Bruno, the fine mathematician and philosopher, who became a martyr at the stakes for propagating free thought and modern scientific ideas?

Creative leaders who lead the path less taken usually suffer when their ideas are far ahead of their times and the ignorant society rejects them. 

Complexity, Shall We Dance?

There is an old saying in Bengal, which runs something like this: One person is insignificant; Two together make something creative/worthwhile: Three persons collaborating make things complicated: When four get together things turn chaotic.

Needless to say governments, parties, organizations, teams, communities, online communities are complicated and chaotic. So, what do we do? Naturally, organizations are always wary of chaos and therefore want to bring in order through rules, regulations, regimentation, hierarchies etc. This is the common way.

But even with all that in place, leaders still want to feel the pulse of their people, want to keep a tab on what is going on around them, listen to stories, build culture and many other things. How do they do that? 

They dance with Complexity as a partner. They keenly listen to its music. They follow its steps. They feel the passion and sense its self organizing movement. Then they either copy the steps of complexity. Or they take charge to lead complexity. Or improvize and innovate on the way. But in no case they try to overpower complexity or play rough or be sly about it or ignore it. They dance cheek to cheek with complexity.

Let us see how great and good leaders go about befriending complexity,  

Deep immersion to learn

Here Mr. Bill Gates and his wife are seen in one of the remote villages of Bihar, India. Both of them are now highly involved in philanthropic work in India. However, as expected, they know very little about the country and its culture, which they must learn so as to bring meaning to what they are doing. Hence, they immerse themselves in that learning environment.

In Bill Gates own words, "learning from partners and community members in Patna, Bihar. Incredible start to the day…"

And why in the world is he doing that? Could he not have asked his well paid people to do that for him? They would have loved to send him a detailed report complete with facts and figures supported by photos, videos and what not. Obviously that would not work for him. Human interactions are very complex in nature and that complexity can't be fathomed to any degree of reality without deep observation and learning through direct experience such as this.

Is Mr. Gates alone in such Observation Based Learning through deep immersion?

No, it seems that other great business leaders keep doing this on a regular basis trying to learn within a given context.

Here is another photo that shows Sir Richard Branson practically doing the same thing with his staff located at various offices.

Deep immersion to build culture

The idea is not to straighten out complexity. The idea is not to find order in the complexity or avoid complexity or formulate rules to bring about simplicity. The idea is to befriend complexity to grow and develop by learning from it through direct experience gained through deep immersion and observations.

This brings us to another idea: How do organizations build upon such direct experiences of learning? They can do so through sharing such experiences on a common platform for others to learn and develop on the ideas gained. We call this social learning which uses Enterprise 2.0 platforms to harness the power of complexity and chaos to drive the organization in a self organizing and may I add creative manner.

Best platforms are those which are run on this idea of building on observations, ideas, deep immersions and learning not those who focus narrowly on retaining the heirarchical structure of work as the meaning of work is now undergoing a serious redefinition, the most useful I find is 'observable work'. Such platforms enable Culture Based Design for long term sustainability of an organization.

We now have another name for it. Seth Godin calls it Idea Tourism.

And why would this be so important?

Because money hardly brings in good ideas to sustain but good ideas rake in a lot of money to progress and sustain.

So, we need not be afraid of complexity anymore. Complexity is our partner in our progress not an impediment. So,....

Complexity, Shall We Dance.... since the 21st century belong to the tacit. Or is it?

 

References

1. Culture Based Design

2. Evaluating E2.0 Platforms

3. Management Upside Down

4. Coconut Uncertainty

 

 

The Power of 3 - Changes in Management Thinking.

This great story demonstrates a fundamental emergence in our lives. The old ways of thinking and managing simply wouldn't work any longer.

The 'science' and practice' of management as we know of it today were originally invented to solve two very important problems, which were:

a) How do we get ordinary folks do complicated and repetitive tasks to achieve a standard of efficiency and standardization to optimize profits?

b) How do we make our way through a complex web of processes to deliver goods and services to our clients? The complexity arose from scaling up of operations meant to generate ever increasing volume of goods and services that could provide more profits and subdue competitors.

In order to do that we created lot many logical rules and regulations. The number of rules increased with the degree of operational complexity. Then we trained and made people follow those rules to achieve the magic numbers that could produce more profits that are constantly under squeeze. 

With our present thinking we understand that such management thinking does not work well beyond a certain degree of complexity. Why is that?

So far we focused on objects that played any role within business cycles of production and consumption. Sometimes we focused on machines while at other times we focused on people or customers. And yet on some other occasion we forced our attention onto suppliers and quality or we looked at increasing inventory levels. We never quite saw the whole in one breath. What we clearly missed out was to observe the relationships between objects in a given context. What we chose to do instead was to focus wholeheartedly on objects and their functions and properties without taking into consideration the context in which they operated. We failed to realize the importance of interdependent relationships between all things that simultanteously arise and abate in the system in a "wholistic" manner.

What happens when we fail to see relationships?

Let us take two objects that are related to each other. Then the possible relationships that can exist between them are four [2 to the power 2 gives us 4]. As we keep increasing the number of related objects it keeps following the same power law [2 to the power of n, where n = the number of related objects].

It is then easy to imagine the exponential rise in the number of possible relationships as the system becomes more and more complex. How can such exponential behavior be controlled and regulated by a set of linear rules and regulations? Since that is clearly not possible to do so it exposes the unscientific nature of our so called 'scientific' management thinking.  

This flaw is clearly depicted in the video. As the number of cars increased along with the rise in the number of pedestrians and cyclists the system soon reached a critical point of complexity beyond which it was not possible to regulate the traffic flow, reduce the number of traffic jams and keep accidents in check. Even the logic of operating traffic lights represents a part of the growing rules and regulations to contain the menace of slowing traffic, snarling jams and terrible accidents without much success ofcourse.

So, what did the new management thinking do? They drastically reduced the number of rules and regulations to one simple rule - "give way to pedestrians and cyclists first". The result of such a brilliant move is amply demonstrated in the video.

What lessons management can learn from this? Probably these:

1. As the system becomes more and more complex reduce the complexity of the jobs ordinary folks are called on to do in all possible ways. One of the simplest way to do that is to reduce the number of irrelevant rules and regulations that bind and blind people from performing better. Forcing people to keep their eyes on so many rules is enough to make anyone crazy and make mistakes. For example, by simply enabling drivers not to pay any attention to the traffic signals and policemen but to keep in mind one simple rule greatly simplified their job of driving safely. This then left the drivers free to focus on their goals without getting distracted by a host of unrelated issues. Ease of traffic flow, reduction of jams and elimination of accidents are few of the by-products of making jobs easier and free of unnecessary clutter. 

2. Redesign the system so as to reduce the number of relationships one has to negotiate in order to achieve the desired results. This was done by redesigning the roads at critical traffic intersections.  By reducing the total number of relationships within a system we can easily convert complex processes to much simpler ones. 

3. Managers are then left to keep healthy communications going within the system and focus their attention to fine tune the existing relationships and also think of simplifying the processes further through redesign.

Aren't these three universal management lessons simple enough?

Let me know what you think.

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