Further Reflections on Dave Snowden’s Resilient Organization

Last November I attended the KM World 2010 the keynote session, The Resilient Organization led by Dave Snowden, Founder & CTO - Cognitive Edge. Here are my session notes. There were a number of things that Dave said that strike at some of the principles behind the Darwin Awareness Engine™. I wanted to reflect on those touch points in this post as we enter the new year.

First - Dave noted that most people can produce a decent meal through recipes and the right ingredients. A master chef can produce a great meal with whatever is your kitchen.  We need theory and not just recipes to blindly follow.

We developed the Darwin interface to be very simple to use. It only takes a few minutes to understand how to make use of the data visualizations. However, it works best under the hands of a master who really knows the content, can select the right feeds and make hypotheses to test through following feeds, Rob Paterson’s work with KETC is a great example (see KETC TV Social Media Experience Part Four: How Does Darwin Help Clarify Complex Issues?)

Second – Dave noted that the human brain scans a small percentage of the available data and makes quick decisions. The only people who look at all the data are autistic and they are overwhelmed but management theory adopts this autistic approach.  To react to the charging lion you cannot examine all the data before you react.

We designed both the Scan Cloud™ and the Buzz Tape™ for quick scanning (see below) only you to check out a vast amount of data quickly and rill down where you find interesting things. Anomalies show up.

Third - Dave said that despite what Chomsky said, there are no deep structures in language and so taxonomies are useful but limited.  We would certainly agree at Darwin since we let the content self-organize dynamically rather than impose an external structure. We are the opposite of semantic technology. If you let the content self organize there is no external framework like Google Page Rank to game or approach through legitimate methods. There is no SEO or even spam as it would serve no value. We allow the visualization of connections between content related to a particular theme to reveal new relationships and help with the discovery and awareness of trends, both anticipated and unanticipated.

Rather than taking a linear, deterministic approach to finding content through seeking repeatable patterns on the Web with an external framework like page rank as done by Google, we use Correlation Rank™ to find non-repeatable patterns in Web content that come and go in real time. Rather than using an external framework, we look for self-organizing patterns within the content itself.

Fourth - Dave noted that technology needs to be seen as cognitive augmentation.  Larry Prusack said intuition is just compressed experience. The human brain blends fragments in the face of challenge. He noted how General Patton did this in World War Two. We use provide the bits of content so the human mind can decide on how to put them together. Darwin Correlation Rank™ does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs

Fifth - Dave stated that we need to move from aggregation for people to allowing people to synthesize fragments. We need to allow for contextual blending of fragments. We need to put decision makers in direct contact with the raw data. This is our goal at Darwin. 

You can download a podcast and slides of Dave's KM World talk at the Cognitive Edge site.  

 

Comments

[Lawyer Social Marketing]

Darwin had really a unique theory of mind. All the data that has been stated above are true. This will help us, know how important life is; that everything undergoes a process. You don't have to hurry things, be sure that every process, article, methods are in proper way. Hope to read more on this article, thank you for sharing your ideas.