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xix Agility is the gold standard for Information Age militaries.
[JLJ - perhaps, but you can't wave a magic wand and make yourself agile. Writing or reading books on agility (or viewing PowerPoint presentations on agility) does not instantly make you agile either. Thinking about agility does not (by itself) make you agile. Doing what you think will make you agile (and doing it correctly) still does not automatically make you agile. You can be agile, yet think you are not agile. You can in fact be agile, and absolutely undo all your agility, in trying to make yourself ever more agile. You can hire people who tell you how to be agile, and who might then give you a certificate of agility when they feel you have become agile (perhaps with gold foil on the edges) but you still are not guaranteed to be agile. And so on. Yet agility is the gold standard for Information Age militaries. Perhaps we run a diagnostic test which simulates warfare to see if we are agile, assess the results, then make changes over and over until we are "agile enough" to be intercepted by other problems.]
xix-xx In Information Age Transformation (2002), agility was defined as a key characteristic of an Information Age organization "of paramount importance in an uncertain world," "a characteristic to be sought even at the sacrifice of seeking to perfect capabilities associated with specific missions or tasks" (page 82).
p.23 We begin our journey with the thought that we tend to think about problems and issues in terms of models and metaphors that are familiar.
p.25 Only by constantly injecting energy into the system can the order be maintained. This new type of order is called a dissipative structure.
p.27 In a complex system, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and thus we need to focus on the global emergent behavior of the system.
p.31 What is the overall emergent behavior of such an ecosystem? ...In fact, what happens is very surprising - a characteristic of the way in which higher level order can emerge from such a complex system. This is due to the large number of degrees of freedom of the system (i.e., the large number of species) and the local nonlinear interactions caused by coevolution... the ecosystem... As we increase the number of species, we transition to a new type of behavior that we call complex. With a large number of species, we have a large number of degrees of freedom and as a result we get emergent ordered behavior.
p.32 Our open system is far from equilibrium. A small nudge to the ecosystem will lead to a network of coevolution interactions that could be almost infinite in extent... Systems that show these kinds of self-organizing, complex, and emergent effects... can... exhibit the full range of behavioral options within system restraints. This means that such systems are in a position of optimal flexibility in some sense.
p.37 Enabling self-organization can often be a source of innovation.
p.42 The term complexity is used to refer to the theories of Complexity as applied to Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). These are dynamic systems able to coevolve and change within, or as part of, a changing environment. It is important however to note that there is no dichotomy between a system and its environment in the sense that a system always adapts to a changing environment. The notion to be explored is rather that of a system closely linked with all other related systems making up an "ecosystem." Within such a context, change needs to be seen in terms of coevolution with all other related systems, rather than as adaptation to a separate and distinct environment.
p.50 In complex systems, as we have seen, one effect... leads to a cascading of effects... Such cascading of effects results in either intended or unintended consequences. The cascading of intended effects can be considered to be an important part of what is now termed Effects Based Operations.
p.87 Two key challenges are posed by Experimentation: first, persuading formal organizations to empower the process (when they may not see the need and, or, threat by doing otherwise) and second, creating a culture that learns from, adapts to, and anneals to failure - the testing of nulls, not just successes - risktaking rather than risk-averse.
p.92 in today’s and tomorrow’s market environment, demand is more likely to include small batches of complex products, each with varied characteristics. In this much more variable and dynamic environment, the response has been to abandon the production line in some cases in favor of a number of very specialized cells that can self-organize in different ways through a process of mutual negotiation.
p.92 By loosely coupled [management style], we mean the tolerance and encouragement of self-organizing Informal Networks of key individuals who share trust and knowledge
p.93 A loosely coupled management process succeeds when conditions are very uncertain and dynamic.
p.102 economist David Ricardo theorized that organizations arrange themselves so as to maximize their competitive advantage
p.124 In Figure 5.1, we have what we call the influence network, forming part of the world outside the enterprise. This represents the complex interplay of entities and their interactions, which allows an intervention to achieve an effect that moves the process in a positive direction. [JLJ - not necessarily true - we can face a situation where all decisions result in movement in a negative direction, in which case we move to the least-negative of the options available.] This influence network will be a Complex Adaptive System in general (as discussed in chapter 2), in which a particular stimulus will have a number of potential nonlinear cascading responses; there will not be just one effect, but an "effects cascade." The central role of management control here is to enable such interventions to achieve their desired consequences in effects space, enabling and influencing rather than directly controlling.
p.125 In order to enable and influence this cascade of effects, management control at the enterprise level has to develop and predict futures. These capture how the world might be in stakeholder perception space under various assumptions. The management process then needs to be able to explore these futures, and from this exploration, select actions corresponding to setting initial conditions, or influencing the evolution of the entities and their interactions in the influence network.
p.126 we cannot predict the likely unfolding of future events. We can only estimate across a range of possible futures (none of which may in fact occur, of course).
p.126 The range of actions available will be a function of the agility of the management system... We assume that the influence network of entities and their interactions have a certain complexity that we denote by the variety of the system. This is a measure of the number of different states or configurations that the system can find itself in, and hence is a measure of its agility. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety from Cybernetics then requires that for this system to be in control, the variety of the controller (i.e., the management system) must match the variety of the system.
p.127 The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate. -An Introduction to Cybernetics, Ashby, 1957
And for variety, read agility. Agile management is required to control a dynamically agile system.
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