CAS & the 'please adjust' culture of India

Image via Wikipedia

I have been interested in Complex Adaptive Systems (the concept, not the details & the mathematics!) ever since I read Sukumar's tweets from a KM meet in Chennai where Dave Snowden talked about it and then I listened to the recordings of Dave's speech at the event. As is my wont, I Googled about it, got a Wikipedia article about it, went deeper thanks to the various hyperlinks and also read some of the PDFs that Google scholar threw up in addition to looking at some of what the Google image searches threw up. Here is a great 101 on CAS: http://www.trojanmice.com/articles/complexadaptivesystems.htm. As Wikipedia puts it:

Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements (and so a part of network science) and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience.

Since then it has given me insights, by drawing analogies with CAS, into many of the mundane stuff I never paid attention to before, like why is the traffic so chaotic in India and yet we survive?

Traffic rules are easy or complicated depending on the local rules & their interpretations and implementations. But navigating a heavy traffic is complex, especially so in India. This is so because nobody follows much of the rules, except for driving on the left side of the road, but theres no guarantee on that either. And so you see chaos like the one depicted in the infamous video below.

But do you see patterns emerging in this video? If you haven't watched it yet or it was long since you watched it for a chuckle, please do so now, I'll wait for you to answer. Did any mishap happen? While most of the western world laughed at it & most of the Indians just shrugged it as yet another day, what struck me interesting when I saw that was the patterns I could see in it.

I have driven in many cities & small towns in India, and recently in the US too. Dreaded road traffic of Kolkata, Bangalore & Chennai, though congested, have an identity of their own. You can even feel the difference in the driving pattern in different parts of the cities. Or the marked difference when you drive on the highway & then enter one of these cities, or vice versa. I could see that in the US too. Though I did not drive myself on the highways, Mitch Lieberman, a very good friend and great thought leader in Social CRM, recently took me on a road drive from Boston to NYC, via the quaint Mystic where we stopped for lunch. And we passed through various states and I could feel the difference in the driving patterns.

There may be some other reason to all this that I am unaware of but it did strike me that may be this is all because we drivers learn & adapt on the fly and though some generic rules are followed, thus constrained into a system, patterns emerge.

In India we call this the "please adjust" culture. That is, adapt to the environment and the other actors in the system. There is a funny ad that captures the culture perfectly, no adjustment needed (pun intended).

And another key aspect is that the actors in the system 'learn'. Sure, some like to call this a Complex Evolving System, but thats getting too academic I guess. For simplicity lets just stick with CAS as the common term.

Business processes needs to be considered as CAS, as Max brings to our attention in his latest post on why BPMN & Flowcharts are insufficient. Or as mentioned here, not a CAS rather an analogy of CAS.

Whichever it is, I am decided that I will need to look at emerging patterns thanks to the use of 'social' platforms in the business ecosystem (both inside & outside the organization) as John Hagel put it at the #e20conf:

"Social softtware adoption starts with tasks (problem solving) and moves to social learning & innovation."

So expect more from me in terms of BPM, Learning (training) & Innovation that are modeled taking into consideration the fact that business is a CAS and not merely a complicated system that can be explained/modeled with reductionist methods. Top-down modeling though good for strategy & business goal setting, bottom-up emergence needs to be leveraged for implementing them.

If it gains attention if I call them Social BPM, Social Learning (which is an old pedagogical term and not yet another new term) or Open Innovation then so be it. I am not one to fight over nomenclature beyond a certain point. Granted names & definitions are important, but I do not want to spend my time & effort in their nuances.

I strictly believe we need to look at an integrated approach to these three things for maximum leverage. When I say we might be able to use a social software, like say Jive or SocialText or Drupal Commons, to perform certain business activities, like say processing claims, I do not think it is unattainable. We can give a general construct and then allow the users to tweak their business processes by using folksonomies, activity streams, etc. and even learn from each other while doing their work. KM & Learning objectives too met on the job. And when they are tweaking their own processes, of course they are innovating, but we could also consider open innovation as a dedicated process in itself.

What do you think? Am I daft? Think this won't work? Is it Sci-fi? Pipe dream? Might be achievable? Someone needs to show it in action? Need case studies to prove they are worth looking into?

Please do let me know.