All Life Is Problem Solving

Last week, during a talk I gave on National Governmental Knowledge Management to George Washington University’s University Seminar on Complex Systems, one of the members of the Seminar, asked a question about the Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base (DOKB), an important aspect of the Knowledge Life Cycle Framework. Specifically, she asked how the KLC and the […]

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Introduction In my two previous posts I’ve talked about the OODA loop framework and its relationships to the Decision Execution Cycle (DEC), Single- and Double-loop learning, and the Knowledge Life Cycle (KLC) frameworks. Here I want to discuss the relationship of Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPD), a primary type of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) to […]

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Introduction In my last post, I examined John Boyd’s OODA Loop framework and discussed its relationship to double-loop learning. I mentioned there that OODA was one of a number of similar Decision Learning Cycle (DLC) frameworks developed by various writers over the years, including my own Decision Execution Cycle (DEC) framework. In this post, I’ll […]

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Decision and Learning Cycles There are a number of examples in the organizational learning field of frameworks that conjecture a cyclic agent behavioral process of decision, action, experiential feedback, and then adjustment followed by new action. Such frameworks are not new. Russell Ackoff and Kolb and Fry in the 1970s, Kolb in the 1980s, and […]

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  This post is about “safe-fail experiments.” The essential idea in safe-fail experiments was expressed well by Dave Snowden in this way: “I can afford them to fail and critically, I plan them so that through that failure I learn more about the terrain through which I wish to travel.” And again, in another place, […]

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  There are three interesting questions we’d like to take up in this part. — First, assuming that the approach taken by Cynefin, requiring sensemaking through first selecting the context type one is dealing with is appropriate, is the Cynefin framework complete enough as it stands or does it fail to identify important types of […]

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  It’s now time to review Dave’s characterizations of the three remaining contexts and to comment on them. Again using the HBR article as the primary source for my discussion, the “complicated” domain is characterized as follows. Complicated — Expert diagnosis required — Cause-and-effect relationships discoverable but not immediately apparent to everyone; — More than […]

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  In earlier posts, I discussed Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework from the viewpoint of systems classification, offered an alternative to it, and then offered some critical comments. I did this because (a) Dave sometimes used the term “system” in describing one or another Cynefin “domain” and (b) a lot of the recent discussion on Cynefin […]

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In the opening blog of “All Life is Problem Solving,” I gave a general account of how problem solving occurs in living things including humans. But are organizations living systems, or, at least, are they like living systems in their problem solving patterns? How does organizational problem solving happen? In seeking an answer to that […]

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