Thanks for the list, these are all great resources!

I have not read Tim Browns ‘design thinking’ as I have heard mixed reviews of it, but will give it a read. The other sites I visit regularly as they are mentioned often via the #scrm twitter tag, which is the absolute best resource

Will have to dive into Snowden as well. Have looked at the site before, but will move on to the literature for further information.

Thanks for the feedback

This area – “Enhancing Natural Capacity” – has been researched and explored quite a bit. Look for some articles on innovation, and you’ll see a lot of the same guidelines – fail often, fail fast, assemble dynamic teams, etc – all alluding to the notion that you have to be flexible and adaptable in times of change. One website that has a nice range of articles on this is Blogging Innovation (http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/innovation-blog.html). Also check out Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, or even the Innovation section of Businessweek.

Another website that comes immediately to mind is http://www.cognitive-edge.com/, which was started by Dave Snowden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Snowden), a pioneer in creating methods for Knowledge Management that can be applied to organizational complexity. I think you might really enjoy reading some of the things there.

Another source, coming from the design world, but essentially talking about the same thing, is the idea of ‘design thinking’, a term coined by Tim Brown of IDEO. Here’s a recent article that talks about the process. (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation). There are tons of articles lately though, because he just released a book (which you may also like to take a look at), called Change by Design, and he’s promoting design thinking all over the place.

And here’s a TED talk of him describing it (http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_urges_designers_to_think_big.html)

Also look up some of the papers/case studies by Valdis Krebs, which is focused on Social Network Analysis. Here’s an intro by him. (http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html)

Please let me know if these sources are useful to you.

I agree that we have a long way to go and that more research is needed in order to make this area more tangible.

But before we have this research, are we then stuck?

I mean, look at the argumentation you also refer to.

Enhancing Natural Capacity:

learning to live with change and uncertainty;
nurturing diversity for resilience;
combining different types of knowledge for learning; and
creating opportunity for self-organization towards social-ecological sustainability.

Well, here the self-organization and partially the combining of knowledge are the only tangible and hands on approach that can implemented. I’m not saying that “learning to live with change and uncertainty and
nurturing diversity for resilience” are not valid, but they are simply to vague and have not been researched in depth. (please provide information if I’m mistaken)

My point is, that if companies decides to redesign their organization in order to fit the new ways of interacting, they will want more hard and better researched facts. Simply addressing and encouraging them to enhance Natural Capacity is to vague.

Absorptive capacity, Adaptive capacity and Natural capacity have been referenced by many researchers, but can we be satisfied with this?

Morten, you may find interesting this hobby framework for “intelligence” that I’ve chipped away at over the years: http://socialnode.blogspot.com/2009/10/control-over-perceived-environment-cope.html It takes into account the non-closed nature of systems. I visualize it as globes overlapping globes overlapping globes overlapping globes, in 4d of course. 5d+ if you consider multiple dimensions and the possibility of digitally taggin everything – like I said, no closure baby!