Simplexity Thinking Canvas

Our Mission:

• To shape the evolution of the digital ecosystem we are living in today
• By learning from the natural ecosystem inside and outside us
• Through mankind collective intelligence
• While maintaining a delicate balance at the sweet spot between order and chaos, efficiency and agility, exploitation and exploration, cooperation and competition, patterns optimising vs patterns breaking
• In search of the evolving answer to the question of "What does it mean to be human?"

Objectives

The objectives:

• As a complexity systems thinker, I want to be able to make decision by seeking clarity and simplicity on the other side of complexity
• Frame the question so that more than 1 solution is possible (better still let the question surfaces through narrative inquiry)
• Use context-free canvases for thinking and decision-making

Insights

1. Two is company, Three is complexity
2. Increase both structural and behavioral complexities and diversity to be creative, agile and adaptable
3. Enable genuine local ownership through locally driven interventions, including diverse stakeholders across systems
4. Continuously monitor for unintended consequences
5. Take an iterative approach to program management
6. Adopt a leadership style that makes modest and contingent claims
7. Strategy is changing our fit with the environment to our advantage by concentrating power in time
8. Questions are more important than answers because the former is divergent while the latter is convergent

Overview

Context

information flow, interconnectedness, interdependencies, relationality, interactions -> enabling context-sensitive/dependent constraints

cadence, rhythm, gait -> enabling temporal constraints

Also see definition in Complexity Space Framework

3 Universal Entities:

• actors
• capabilities
• relationships

3 Universal Conditions:

• Containers
• Differences
• Exchanges

Principles:

• Communicate your logic
• Make change your default
• Top-down interventions, bottom-up emergence
• The permeating centrality of relationships between people and systems

Pattern Elements:

• 3 critical dimensions of Fit (Drive,Differentiation,Stretch), Power (Concentration, Strength) and Time (Speed)
• Drive,Differentiation,Stretch, Concentration, Strength and Speed are elements of structural coupling
• Differentiation - 3 degrees of similarity or difference with others - herd, edge, individual
• Drive - 3 differential between leading or following others, through time - an actor shape, react and co-evolve with others
• Stretch - 5 types of change as a result of coupling - incremental, radical, disruptive, paradigm shift, confound
• Time - 3 differential in the rate of change relative to others - fast, slow, synchronised
  • Time Enablers - Foresight, Change Rate, Cycle Time
• Strength - 3 differential in relevant resource and capability - stronger, weaker, balanced
• Concentration - 3 degree of focus of capabilities and resources - single, multiple, diffuse
  • Power Enablers - Critical Mass, Agility

Patterns:

• Differentials drive Dynamics
• Authority
• Crusader - value-driven

Approach - what do a framework looks like that listens and adapts to stakeholders stories?

• Ongoing meaningful inquiry.
• Iterative evaluative questions that matter: What’s being developed? What’s emerging? How is it being judged? How should it be judged? Who is the judge? Based on what’s happening so far, what’s next? This means asking stakeholders, or complex adaptive agents, from all their different perspectives: what’s going on? How can we make it better? And importantly using language and a framework that engages and includes stakeholders, using their everyday language.
• Context: What are the objectives? What is the operating environment?
• Stakeholders: Identify them using using participatory stakeholder mapping techniques. what does success looks like to them? What objectives do they want to achieve?
• Situational analysis: Drawing on all the data available to us, including the stakeholders, ask: what is happening now? What needs to change? And how can we make that change? What’s going on that might prevent that change? How would we know if we’ve achieved our objectives? How will we monitor change and find out about barriers and unintended consequences?
• Interventions: How can we unlock the system forces to allow co-evolution to take effects resulting in desirable changes?
• Monitoring Loops: Who to assign monitoring responsibilities to capture data about change? How do we develop a series of ongoing evaluative questions to measure progress, to keep asking periodically and feed back into our monitoring loops? This monitoring data keeps feeding back into our program adaptation.
• Communication: We keep communicating with our broader stakeholders about what we’re doing and how it’s all going. Through that we identify more stakeholders that we can now include. We get their feedback, and that informs our ongoing adaptation.
• Unintended consequences: As the broader stakeholders tell us about unintended consequences, and we learn and we adapt. And we can capture all this data and provide an evidence based argument to why the program has changed.
• Evaluation: On the basis of realistic, contextually evolved objectives, we ask our evaluative questions

6 Structural Barriers to effective Collaboration and Co-Creation:

1. Organizational Structure
2. Competition Over Resources
3. Task Interdependence
4. Inherent Culture/Style/Socio-Economic Differences
5. Poor Communication Procedures, Practices and Systems
6. Interpersonal differences
   1. Colliding Differences in Perceptions
   2. Inaccurate Assumptions About Intent
   3. Hidden and Unexpressed Feelings
   4. Blame

Execution

References :

• http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/p/confluence-sensemaking-framework.html
• https://storyconnect.nl/hexagon-sensemaking-canvas-introduction/?lang=en

For like-minded thinkers: about.me/simplexity

For everyone else: about.me/simplexitythinking