The sign of our time is the amazing speed with which changes in the business world happen. This requires from the enterprises of today, and even more of the future to become agile, e.g. capable of adjusting themselves to changes in the surrounding world. Continue reading
Here is a slidecast version of the talk I gave at BPM Next in March. In 14 minutes it explains the core ideas of antifragility and how learning organizations are antifragile. Mixed in are some surprising details about adaptive systems. This presentation will help explain why a traditional model-and-automate approach is the wrong thing for an innovative, learning organization. Continue reading
The goal of process management is to improve process. Let’s say you are successful at putting in place a process improvement practice. Can there be too much of a good thing? Experts are saying that it can be. Continue reading
Continuing the pattern from my past few post on Antifragile concepts, today consider Naive Intervention, that idea assuming that simple model actually represents a complex system can lead to disastrously bad decisions. Continue reading
Jared Diamond spoke at the Commonwealth Club last month. I have always been a huge fan of his Pulitzer prize winning book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” as well as “Collapse” and other works. This talk introduced his new book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?” The answer: more than you think. Continue reading
Q: When is it easier to ship a $600 electronic device across the country and back, than it is to change a field in a database?
A: When you are a phone company.
This is a true story, and one that perfectly illustrates how IT systems, when implemented, can actually make a company less flexible and less able to cope with unpredictable things. Information technology can actually make a company more fragile. Continue reading
At the BPMNext conference in March, I am signed up to give a talk titled “Antifragile Systems for Innovation and Learning Organizations.” The term “antifragile” comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.” In this post I review the main concepts of the book. Continue reading
Richie Etwaru makes a post about Human as a Service about the idea that everything / anything can be made available as a cloud. To do so, we need to think about organizations that are stateless as opposed to stateful. There is a parallel between stateless and unpredictable, and how statelessness allows processes to emerge, instead of being defined in advance. Continue reading
There is a continual ongoing debate on how best to express how people plan to work together. Earlier posts make the case that two-dimensional graphical languages are inappropriate for knowledge workers. Many argued against this saying that these languages are still useful for process specialists. However, for unpredictable work, the knowledge worker must directly do the process planning. This post addresses the question of whether we might be able to use two languages in one system: one for the knowledge workers, and one for the business analysts. Continue reading
More products today claim to have Adaptive Case Management (ACM) capabilities. Do they have what it takes? Or are they simply just jumping on a bandwagon? It is a buyer-beware world. Apply the criteria presented in this post to a vendor’s product in order avoid dishonest representations. Continue reading
Thinking Matters 