All Life Is Problem Solving

Comparative Evaluation of the Two Theories Let’s compare the two theories of the three worlds, world-by-world, as it were. First, Popper’s W1 has the disadvantage that it blurs the distinction between the living and the non-living, since both are included in W1. This also has the effect of including knowledge in W1 without specifying a […]

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I think your twin posts on knowledge management and its possible relevance to national governments raise some very interesting and creative ideas that warrant a serious pause for thought. I have just been in the United States and revisited the Washington Mall, and the axes of the Mall including the White House, the Congress and […]

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The Organization of Knowledge Management in National Governments (continued) A second possible answer to the question of how to organize KM in National Governments is to organize it in a decentralized way across national governmental agencies and inter-agency teams. Each Governmental unit, or inter-agency group, would have some KM personnel and would be responsible for […]

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National Governmental Knowledge Management The primary focus of Knowledge Management, thus far, has been on organizations, communities, and teams, with some emphasis on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), and “Knowledge Cities.” Knowledge Management in Government has primarily continued the organizational focus of most work in the field. It is agency-based and project-focused, and has had little […]

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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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