your new job
March 9th, 2010 • posts i've written
Your new job is to commandeer either one or all of these circles. Your company needs you to.
The world is a game of chess … in that the space of possible decisions and actions is almost endless, beyond your imagination.* Chess, and the market that your company belongs to, are complex adaptive systems. The market itself is a complex adaptive system, your organization is one as well, along with your brain, your ecosystem, and the world – we inhabit ever larger spheres of complexity.
Consistent elements of complex adaptive systems:
- a multi-level network of agents constantly acting and interacting, thus a system always in motion
- highly dispersed control, behavior is set by cooperation and competition between agents
- an ability to restructure and arrange – to adapt as experience is gained or conditions change
- an anticipation of the future – a system of agents predicting potential outcomes and planning for those outcomes
- many niches, and the act of filling one niche opens up more niches – for cooperation and competition w/in that niche
- complex adaptive systems are characterized by perpetual novelty – talking of equilibrium is pointless, equilibrium in a complex adaptive system is essentially a dead system
Just as in chess, there’s no optimal strategy for navigating a market – your best course of action is to make predictions, collect insights, and explore successful strategies outside of your company and bring them in.
Knowing this, it’s shocking just how little of all three activities most organizations engage in and how little credence each is given. Why not a Chief Prediction Officer, a Chief Insight Officer, and a Chief Explorer? And why aren’t there more technological solutions that will capture an organization’s predictions, their outcomes, and rate their effectiveness? Everyone’s job should require them to perform duties inside these three circles; that is, if everyone wants to keep their job.
*Claude Shannon, of Bell Labs, once estimated the total possible number of chess moves to 10^120 – a gigantically unfathomable figure, there hasn’t been that many microseconds since the Big Bang.
Related posts:
- responding to the social media bubble
- marketing to developing online communities
- we need new organizational forms
7 Responses (add your comment)
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Nice post Bud. IMO Marketers should be leading the front on this type of role.
This is what I find most challenging about running my own business. The desire to excel in these 3 categories, network, learn AND execute, all while being remarkable.
If I were to join a company once more, they would have to show me that they are an “intelligent organization”. Unfortunately, most of them are not….
ohh…and you just made my post today…
cheers
tony -
Bud, I really hope the good companies understand it. it seems slap-in-the-face logical to me. its what I think good companies should do internally, and I think our best clients prolly do it. its the behind the curtain type stuff that makes a difference.
Plus, I like it cuz i know im all about that grey bubble and try hard to get better at the burgundy bubble. Whereas this blog is consistent proof of your proficiency in the peach bubble. So for our sake i damn well hope the good companies believe in this methodology.
So a vote of confidence in your suggestion to formalise functions in these areas for the 21st century marketplace. #letsgo
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I like the post. In 2006 we formalized the concept of Probability Management, which makes use of a Chief Probability Officer or CPO. See http://www.ProbabilityManagement.org
I love the chess analogy. A friend once remarked that life is like chess: you have complete control over half of the moves in a game, yet absolutely no control of the other half.
I imagine that most companies would gnash their teeth at trying to figure out how those positions would pay for themselves. A more interesting question is how much money are the companies leaving on the table by NOT having people like this?
How would you calculate something like that?