by Richard Veryard
There are two interesting aspects of the attempted reforms of healthcare in the UK and elsewhere: the muddled notions of power to the edge embodied by some of the proposals, and the repeated attempts to enact similar reforms over the past thirty years.
by Richard Veryard
Masood Mortazavi uses Transaction Cost Economics to explain the difference between Managing to Contract vs. Managing to Relationship. In this post, I want to link this discussion to the key notion of Asymmetric Demand.
by Bernie Cohen
As we move into a technological era in which socially critical systems are built around large and complex, locally universal ontologies, such as openEHR, the Semantic Web, e-government and Network Centric Warfare, we will need increasingly powerful tools and methods to mediate pragmatic and ontological negotiations among embodied individuals. One such set of tools and methods, built around BRL’s PAN (Projective ANalysis), is currently being deployed within the context of its associated methods of asymmetric design.
Our goal is to be able to meet the challenge of managing the dynamic adaptability of large complex systems-of-systems to evolving and disparate contexts-of-use.
by Philip Boxer
A turbulent environment is one that has a life of its own that can no longer be ignored by the organisation, i.e. it becomes asymmetric in a way that cannot be ignored. A vortex is what happens when organisations are not willing or able to adapt to this environment - they continue to ignore it, not because it is not there, but because they have no way of responding to it.
Must we then fall ultimately into this vortex? It depends on whether we can find it within ourselves to take up the double challenge these environments pose to our identities.
by Philip Boxer
East-West dominance requires networked forms of organisation that can hold ‘the edge’ accountable for the way it uses the resources of the supporting organisation, but in relation to the situation in which the demand is arising. This contrasts with the hierarchical forms associated with N-S dominance. What is at stake is the performativity of what is done in relation to the demand at the edge, rather than the performance of what is done against centrally (symmetrically) defined criteria. It is not that hierarchy isn’t still necessary, but rather that it has to be situationally rather than universally defined.
by Richard Veryard
Philip’s post on Managing over the whole governance cycle draws on some important work by Max Boisot, and I wanted to expand on this a little.
by Philip Boxer
It is the personal nature of the response to the customer that distinguishes taking power to the edge of the organisation. It used to be possible to rely on ‘free’ market processes for creating such innovations, but in the 21st Century the whole cycle has to be managed. This presents those leading at the edge with a double challenge, but it also presents business leadership with the need to develop a capacity for asymmetric governance.
