Existential blogging from Ray Ozzie:

Clay Shirky on online community.  Clay's contrasting of "audiences" versus "communities" is also relevant in the enterprise environment.  "Employees", like "audiences", are intentionally gathered sets of individuals, linked by organizational affiliation and by the business processes within which they need to participate.  The bonds that hold communities together, however, are edge-based forces - the same forces that bring people together to solve problems, to innovate.

Center vs. edge.  Orchestrated organization vs. self-organization.  Business process vs. business practice.  Fragility vs. resiliency.  Complexity vs. chaos.  Control vs. empowerment.

Clay and Ray are right.

Complexity science bleeds all over the social sciences. It is slow going and the math and empirical work are just getting started. But the thought, the approach is there. We're not decomposing organizations. We're going to their atomic components, people, and studying their interactions.

Take a look:

• Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications 
• Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences
• Weaving Complexity and Business: Engaging the Soul at Work by Lewin and Regine  
• The Edge of Organization: Chaos and Complexity Theories of Formal Social Systems by Russ Marion
• Facilitating Organization Change: Lessons From Complexity Science by Edwin E. Olson, et al
• Cities and Regions as Self-organizing Systems: Models of Complexity (Environmental Problems and Social Dynamics) by Allen

And then there's the attempt to inform the management classes:

• Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge?
• The Paradox of Control in Organizations
• Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation  by Ralph D. Stacey
• Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change by Patricia Shaw
• The Emergence of Leadership: Linking Self-organization and Ethics by Douglas Griffin

I can't wait for emergent project management: it's coming.

A lot of it is balderdash, slogging through the bog in the dark.

But then you come across advice to the atom. If you are a cell in a cellular automata, what are your rules? What works best for you?

Bill Jensen's Simplicity and Work 2.0, and Cultivating Communities of Practice by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder are like this. Hell, I'll go so far as to say that the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined belong in this cluster.

This is part of why I like cyberspace. Our scribbling, pinging, messy stuff of human interaction, leaves spoor for academe. 

I blog therefore I am.

We link therefore we are.

Our klognet melds with your klognet.  

 [aka books]

I often receive emails from people new to web and application development asking me how to begin. What direction to take. What things are important to know. How to get started!