Complexity, Innovation, Knowledge and Learning: A quantum interpretation of management

The power of networks

Last Sunday, August 29, a crowd of 200.000 "welcomed" W. Bush in New York, voicing their discontent with his policy. An interesting question is: how do these kind of (protest) movements have their influence ? Are they able to make a difference ? Certainly on this side of the Ocean, we hope for another US international policy, and let us face it, probably also for another person as President. But is a movement like the one of Sunday able to create the necessary power to realize that ?

The phenomenon is not new. We just have to recall the Thursday evening demonstrations in Dresden, that certainly contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Much older we have the Ghandi policy on non-violent opposition. On the more "violent" side we have had the power of the Vietcong in the Vietnam war, that for most classical thinkers was ununderstandable. We have known the same kind of (indeed network) structures in the resistance movement during the Second World War.

The power of networks is what we do not really seem to understand, as long as we do not understand how e.g. terrorist networks operate. Never any straight forward (static and non-linear) attack will be able to stop a network operation. We have had some sad examples in the past, but unfortunately we respond to it with the wrong arms. The logic of a network is one that cannot be broken with the logic of a (military) chain operation.

As much as this is true for military (geo-political) matters, this is true for business networks. Networks of national (the construction industry fraude in the Netherlands) and international (drug money laundry) fraude are just some examples of the negative power of networks.

The same power networks can of course also be used in a positive sense, like for creating momentum to force a necessary political change, or momentum to start doing something for fostering sustainable development in the world.

Anyway, a better understanding of the power of networks would allow us to get a more realistic view of the world of today, and how we could probably manage it for the better. Axelrod has written a few interesting books on the underlying theories of networks.

The promise of wisdom

In the FT Summer School section of August 26, Michael Earl that I appreciate a lot for his, in general, insightfull research contributes an article titled "Tantalised by the promise of wisdom". Leaving apart the fact that talking with executives and then, a number of years later, observe that they are not in their functions anymore is not really what one could expect from research, an interesting point is made.

Indeed I think that most of the knowledge management projects that we have seen over the last decade were nothing more than hidden IT projects. But we all knew that. Indeed, the role of many Knowledge Managers (or whatever they were titled) was nothing more than a way to assembling quickly and flexibly resources throughout an entirely too fixed structure. But we also knew that.

Though what Michael suggests is no doubt correct (identify business needs; don't relabel IT projects; knowledge management should dissolve in the entire organisation), what a difference does that make with the past ? It are open doors that do not touch the real question about knowledge management: what is the nature of knowledge and consequently, what can we expect from knowledge ? As long as we continue to consider knowledge as a static (and linear) representation of experiences (in best cases), that can be transfered, we implicitly define it as information.

We should explore more dynamic definitions of knowledge, in line with what e.g. neurobiology knows as enacted cognition, knowledge in context (as the story tellers create) in order to understand how knowledge can make the difference. Knowledge is not necessarily a hype, but as we often do, we have made it one, since we ignore its true nature.

For those interested in some of these ideas, I refer to a chapter on complexity theory (under construction) that I contribute to a book these days.