(highlight:: Knowledge Ecology is the Study of How Information Flows Through Organizations
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The first thing I wanted to ask you Christina is what is a knowledge ecologist and what is knowledge ecology?
Speaker 1
Well, people have a general idea of what an ecologist is. Somebody who looks at plants and animals living in their habitat and how they share the different flows of energy and materials that go through the system. So if you think of a wetland ecologist looking at sunlight or nitrogen or any other flow that goes through the wetland system, they can track it through its origin to the plants, to the Fish, to the fish decaying and feeding the trees and all of the cycles that we look at. I think of knowledge ecology as looking at the flows of information and not only tracking the actual information flows, which can be more or less difficult to do depending on how qualitative Or quantitative the information is and how easy it is to see, but also setting up an environment in which information flows easily and readily. And so the people within the organization are able to act with full intelligence and agency. So having a healthy organizational ecology is very, very important to having agile adaptive organizations.)
- Time 0:01:02
- information_flow, information_flows, knowledge_ecology, knowledge_flow, organizational_ecology, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: Organizations Cannot Be Designed, They Can Only Be Disturbed
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The idea that we can choose to design an organization, I think, is up for question. When you look at the sciences that study complex adaptive systems, which cover physics, math, chemistry, biology, there's a whole bunch of sciences that are looking at complex adaptive Systems from all sorts of angles, one thing that becomes very clear is they cannot be designed. They can be disturbed, which is, I don't mean in the sense of the word disturbing, but I mean, like perturbed, like you can add an input and watch and see what happens. But you cannot design them because you can't predict what's going to happen because they are too complex. And if people are interested in going into that, the work on the Canavan framework by Dave Snowden is very interesting looking at probe sense respond, how to investigate complex systems.)
- Time 0:05:46
-
- [note::See: Cynefin Framework by David Snowden]

(highlight:: The Intellectual Gap Between Organizational Designers and Ecologists
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think, for a long time have used the idea of the organization as an organism or as an ecosystem, as a metaphor. But you are a living system. I am a living system. Any conglomeration of people are living systems that are interacting with each other. So at least in some part, and especially around the information flows, which are, however, we mediate through our wonderful technologies, the fundamental thing that changes information Is somebody making a decision, even if it's whoever is designing the algorithm. And so organizations are literally living systems. And it's very interesting to me, as I got interested in organizational design, I discovered there were a lot of people from the tech world. There were a lot of people from human psychology, sort of the social sciences that were very interested in happiness in the workplace, how do we basically health the organizational Ecologies, although they didn't say it that way, how do we make people happy at work and not feel like cogs in a machine. And the lack of people in the organizational design world who have a background in complex adaptive system sciences is really interesting. The lack of awareness that organizational design exists at all, if you talk to living system sciences, scientists, they kind of are like, what business? I don't want to think about business that much. I think about geology or biology or whatever they do.)
- Time 0:06:54
- organizational ecology, complex_systems, organizational design, systems,

(highlight:: Why Shaping the Emergent Behavior of Organizations Is Crucial for Combatting Global Crises
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And this is a gap that I think is very important to bridge if we're going to understand the organization as a literal living system. The reason that that's important, I think it's important on many, many levels, take climate change. If we're going to be able to respond and adapt rapidly to the number of changes coming through, we are seeing increasingly social, ecological, economic crises all over the globe. We need our organizations to be able to act with way more intelligence than we can. The traditional hierarchy that is designed, that is a design system, and before our technology was the only way to coordinate large numbers of people. Because we just didn't have the ability to communicate in a self-organizing way because the technology didn't support that. So hierarchies had their place. They have their place within any living system. There's nested hierarchies within your body, cells, anything. So I'm not saying throw away hierarchy. But that command and control structure, the traditional business as usual, limits any decision to the intelligence of the smartest person in charge of that decision. Whereas when you begin to act in a way that respects the organization as a living system, you begin to free up the intelligence so you actually have the intelligence of how many people Are in the organization as they're expressing their individual agency.)
- Time 0:08:37
- favorite, organizational agility, global_crises, organizational structure,

(highlight:: Organizations as a Lever in Addressing Global Crises
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think that the, well, I should say I feel very strongly that we have a responsibility in this generation, in these generations alive today, we have kind of a do or die moment around climate Change and how the earth is going to go forward in human history. And the organization seems to be an incredibly powerful tool to allow information to be learned and absorbed by many people very rapidly. And one of the people in that organizational design community, Clay Parker-Jones, has said it very well that he looks at the dissemination of massively world changing technologies, Such as the Loom, the printing press, and of course, the personal computer. They've all been driven by large scale organizations, which a lot of the time, both the startup community, the kind of agile company community and the ecological community certainly Make them into the villains. And so I very much like the idea of leveraging these big, powerful organizations to begin to act as self-organizing systems.)
- Time 0:11:16
- favorite, organizations for social good, institutional decision-making, self-organizing systems,

(highlight:: The Shift From Closed Hierarchies to Open Networks & Communities to Achieve Organizational Success
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If you look at the adaptive responsive agile organization communities, there's a paradigm shift looking at not only networks, even over hierarchies, but also open, even over private Or open, even over closed as the default. So right now, this sort of idea that in business as usual, we have the idea that knowledge is power. And so people kind of hold tightly and if they let you in and they know that's a political power play. And in this new paradigm, you want to have your system set up so that anybody can pull information as they need it and have only the very proprietary, very protected whatever absolutely Needs to be protected or your organization will fail. Anything else needs to be opened by default. And that shift requires an incredible amount of trust. It's interesting to look at the difference here, I think, between a network and a community. And if you think of your Twitter network, you would never send a shout out to say, you know, the windstorm blew over my barn. I'm going to rebuild it. Please come help. Like that's your community. The people who are maybe you don't know them, maybe you don't talk to them, but you have some sort of, and maybe it comes out of place. Although there's community as a practice that you would send a shout out like that to. So I think it comes down to a combination of place and trust. Networks are very powerful in moving information rapidly and in supporting people in learning. The more we learn to learn out loud, the quicker we will learn together. Networks are wonderful for that. The weak ties in networks that are linking people with very, very different ideas are extremely important. That's the bridge I want to build that I talked about before between the org design folks and the complex adaptive systems sciences. However, it's really important when you're doing a specific project on the ground to identify the communities that are around that project or the change effort or whatever it is.)
- Time 0:17:18
-

(highlight:: Next System Project: Spurring Public Conversation about Systemic Problems
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Well, I'm going to steal a perspective on this, straight out of a really interesting new initiative called the Next System Project. And what they're trying to do is to engage the mainstream public in a national conversation about what the next system looks like. And basically the first step to that is to admit that this is a systemic problem, whatever a crisis you're talking about, be it ecological, social, economic, whatever. They're all systemic problems. This is, we need to begin to talk about systems in a way that people's eyes don't glaze over and it's not just a geek fest.)
- Time 0:22:13
-

(highlight:: Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution + Joe Brewer
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Well, I am again going to just steal a wonderful project that has been looking at doing that, which is the work of the economics magazine and Joe Brewer and the newly formed, and I think Really won't really launch until next year, officially, but it's a society for the study of culture, cultural evolution. And they were writing and doing a lot of things around the September announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals from the UN about reframing the question on poverty to look at It as a systemic problem.)
- Time 0:40:53
-

(highlight:: Jevin West Citation Graph Indicates the Self-Referential Nature of Economic Thinking
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I do think one thing that I wanted to mention is a wonderful graph by a fellow at University of Washington, Jim and West did a radial graph that actually looks at the citations within academic Journals. So you can actually see which disciplines really draw from other disciplines and which don't. Molecular and cell biology draws from everybody. And you look at the connections that they have on this radial graph and they cover the whole graph. They're drawing from history and astrophysics and mathematics and all of this stuff. And you look at economics and it's this little u that comes right back into economics. The economic journals cite each other and they don't look at anything else. So I think that busting open the discipline of economics to make it truly transdisciplinary will begin, you know, is part of what really needs to happen because so much of this comes Down to money. How we have security and power as people.
Speaker 2
Yeah, which relates again back to ownership.)
- Time 0:43:14
-

(highlight:: Knowledge Ecology is the Study of How Information Flows Through Organizations
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The first thing I wanted to ask you Christina is what is a knowledge ecologist and what is knowledge ecology?
Speaker 1
Well, people have a general idea of what an ecologist is. Somebody who looks at plants and animals living in their habitat and how they share the different flows of energy and materials that go through the system. So if you think of a wetland ecologist looking at sunlight or nitrogen or any other flow that goes through the wetland system, they can track it through its origin to the plants, to the Fish, to the fish decaying and feeding the trees and all of the cycles that we look at. I think of knowledge ecology as looking at the flows of information and not only tracking the actual information flows, which can be more or less difficult to do depending on how qualitative Or quantitative the information is and how easy it is to see, but also setting up an environment in which information flows easily and readily. And so the people within the organization are able to act with full intelligence and agency. So having a healthy organizational ecology is very, very important to having agile adaptive organizations.)
- Time 0:01:02
- information_flow, information_flows, knowledge_ecology, knowledge_flow, organizational_ecology, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: Organizations Cannot Be Designed, They Can Only Be Disturbed
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The idea that we can choose to design an organization, I think, is up for question. When you look at the sciences that study complex adaptive systems, which cover physics, math, chemistry, biology, there's a whole bunch of sciences that are looking at complex adaptive Systems from all sorts of angles, one thing that becomes very clear is they cannot be designed. They can be disturbed, which is, I don't mean in the sense of the word disturbing, but I mean, like perturbed, like you can add an input and watch and see what happens. But you cannot design them because you can't predict what's going to happen because they are too complex. And if people are interested in going into that, the work on the Canavan framework by Dave Snowden is very interesting looking at probe sense respond, how to investigate complex systems.)
- Time 0:05:46
-
- [note::See: Cynefin Framework by David Snowden]

(highlight:: The Intellectual Gap Between Organizational Designers and Ecologists
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think, for a long time have used the idea of the organization as an organism or as an ecosystem, as a metaphor. But you are a living system. I am a living system. Any conglomeration of people are living systems that are interacting with each other. So at least in some part, and especially around the information flows, which are, however, we mediate through our wonderful technologies, the fundamental thing that changes information Is somebody making a decision, even if it's whoever is designing the algorithm. And so organizations are literally living systems. And it's very interesting to me, as I got interested in organizational design, I discovered there were a lot of people from the tech world. There were a lot of people from human psychology, sort of the social sciences that were very interested in happiness in the workplace, how do we basically health the organizational Ecologies, although they didn't say it that way, how do we make people happy at work and not feel like cogs in a machine. And the lack of people in the organizational design world who have a background in complex adaptive system sciences is really interesting. The lack of awareness that organizational design exists at all, if you talk to living system sciences, scientists, they kind of are like, what business? I don't want to think about business that much. I think about geology or biology or whatever they do.)
- Time 0:06:54
- organizational ecology, complex_systems, organizational design, systems,

(highlight:: Why Shaping the Emergent Behavior of Organizations Is Crucial for Combatting Global Crises
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And this is a gap that I think is very important to bridge if we're going to understand the organization as a literal living system. The reason that that's important, I think it's important on many, many levels, take climate change. If we're going to be able to respond and adapt rapidly to the number of changes coming through, we are seeing increasingly social, ecological, economic crises all over the globe. We need our organizations to be able to act with way more intelligence than we can. The traditional hierarchy that is designed, that is a design system, and before our technology was the only way to coordinate large numbers of people. Because we just didn't have the ability to communicate in a self-organizing way because the technology didn't support that. So hierarchies had their place. They have their place within any living system. There's nested hierarchies within your body, cells, anything. So I'm not saying throw away hierarchy. But that command and control structure, the traditional business as usual, limits any decision to the intelligence of the smartest person in charge of that decision. Whereas when you begin to act in a way that respects the organization as a living system, you begin to free up the intelligence so you actually have the intelligence of how many people Are in the organization as they're expressing their individual agency.)
- Time 0:08:37
- favorite, organizational agility, global_crises, organizational structure,

(highlight:: Organizations as a Lever in Addressing Global Crises
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think that the, well, I should say I feel very strongly that we have a responsibility in this generation, in these generations alive today, we have kind of a do or die moment around climate Change and how the earth is going to go forward in human history. And the organization seems to be an incredibly powerful tool to allow information to be learned and absorbed by many people very rapidly. And one of the people in that organizational design community, Clay Parker-Jones, has said it very well that he looks at the dissemination of massively world changing technologies, Such as the Loom, the printing press, and of course, the personal computer. They've all been driven by large scale organizations, which a lot of the time, both the startup community, the kind of agile company community and the ecological community certainly Make them into the villains. And so I very much like the idea of leveraging these big, powerful organizations to begin to act as self-organizing systems.)
- Time 0:11:16
- favorite, organizations for social good, institutional decision-making, self-organizing systems,

(highlight:: The Shift From Closed Hierarchies to Open Networks & Communities to Achieve Organizational Success
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If you look at the adaptive responsive agile organization communities, there's a paradigm shift looking at not only networks, even over hierarchies, but also open, even over private Or open, even over closed as the default. So right now, this sort of idea that in business as usual, we have the idea that knowledge is power. And so people kind of hold tightly and if they let you in and they know that's a political power play. And in this new paradigm, you want to have your system set up so that anybody can pull information as they need it and have only the very proprietary, very protected whatever absolutely Needs to be protected or your organization will fail. Anything else needs to be opened by default. And that shift requires an incredible amount of trust. It's interesting to look at the difference here, I think, between a network and a community. And if you think of your Twitter network, you would never send a shout out to say, you know, the windstorm blew over my barn. I'm going to rebuild it. Please come help. Like that's your community. The people who are maybe you don't know them, maybe you don't talk to them, but you have some sort of, and maybe it comes out of place. Although there's community as a practice that you would send a shout out like that to. So I think it comes down to a combination of place and trust. Networks are very powerful in moving information rapidly and in supporting people in learning. The more we learn to learn out loud, the quicker we will learn together. Networks are wonderful for that. The weak ties in networks that are linking people with very, very different ideas are extremely important. That's the bridge I want to build that I talked about before between the org design folks and the complex adaptive systems sciences. However, it's really important when you're doing a specific project on the ground to identify the communities that are around that project or the change effort or whatever it is.)
- Time 0:17:18
-

(highlight:: Next System Project: Spurring Public Conversation about Systemic Problems
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Well, I'm going to steal a perspective on this, straight out of a really interesting new initiative called the Next System Project. And what they're trying to do is to engage the mainstream public in a national conversation about what the next system looks like. And basically the first step to that is to admit that this is a systemic problem, whatever a crisis you're talking about, be it ecological, social, economic, whatever. They're all systemic problems. This is, we need to begin to talk about systems in a way that people's eyes don't glaze over and it's not just a geek fest.)
- Time 0:22:13
-

(highlight:: Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution + Joe Brewer
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Well, I am again going to just steal a wonderful project that has been looking at doing that, which is the work of the economics magazine and Joe Brewer and the newly formed, and I think Really won't really launch until next year, officially, but it's a society for the study of culture, cultural evolution. And they were writing and doing a lot of things around the September announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals from the UN about reframing the question on poverty to look at It as a systemic problem.)
- Time 0:40:53
-

(highlight:: Jevin West Citation Graph Indicates the Self-Referential Nature of Economic Thinking
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I do think one thing that I wanted to mention is a wonderful graph by a fellow at University of Washington, Jim and West did a radial graph that actually looks at the citations within academic Journals. So you can actually see which disciplines really draw from other disciplines and which don't. Molecular and cell biology draws from everybody. And you look at the connections that they have on this radial graph and they cover the whole graph. They're drawing from history and astrophysics and mathematics and all of this stuff. And you look at economics and it's this little u that comes right back into economics. The economic journals cite each other and they don't look at anything else. So I think that busting open the discipline of economics to make it truly transdisciplinary will begin, you know, is part of what really needs to happen because so much of this comes Down to money. How we have security and power as people.
Speaker 2
Yeah, which relates again back to ownership.)
- Time 0:43:14
-