The UK Systems Society have the annual conference at this time of year, and being interested in systems thinking and its application to business, I took the opportunity to go this year - my funded studentship finishes this month, :( so if I want to do something that costs, this is the last month to claim it. It was worth it because I met and talked with lots of interesting and knowledgeable people about systems, got to know of aspects of systems I'd not heard of before (like Connant-Ashby) and used systems thinking that I'm familiar with.
Systems thinking is a niche with few practitioners, a few small journals with low Research Asssesment ratings and little academic recognition. John Martin from the systems department of the Open University suggested that systems thinking is used in other non-specifically systems and published in other journals, but we don't have the evidence. So systems thinking isn't obvious in the academic literature, but may be applied in practice because we had a number of practitioners at the conference, and a couple of practitioner speakers: John Seddon of Vanguard consulting, and Hoverstadt.
Hoverstadt works in the sort of public sector areas that are relevant to my research, so we had an interesting conversation. His book, The Fractal Organisation, is one that I've been recently reading. He writes clearly, and explains the viable systems model much better than Stafford Beer does. He tutors one of the OU systems courses, and is running a systems workshop on VSM at the OU this month. I'm going to squeeze that in to my last month's funding too.
Showing posts with label trust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trust. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
What’s the difference between social capital and trust?
Trust is “a key facet of social capital” {Nahapiet, 1998} that you can use to build up social capital. So is there any difference?
Assuming trust promotes useful knowledge {Levin, 2004 } - hence the value added bit - then you'd share knowledge with people you trust, but it's something that feeds into social capital, an aspect of social capital.
Pinto et al {2008} say trust facilitates positive relationships on projects. That's adding value too, but it's facilitating an aspect of social capital - it isn't social capital. But you couldn't have social capital without trust. Trust provides a competitive advantage to the consultant (Block, 2000) so would help a consultant to build social capital in a new project.
Trust cements critical stakeholder relationships {Pinto, 2008}, which is what a consultant must be looking at - the various stakeholders. Pinto et al's study views it as valuable to manage interorganisational relationships to improve trust, so it's a kind of lubricant {Costa, 2009} - an oil (which is what some of my interviewees suggested).
Fukuyama relates trust to culture, 1996}; networks are a means of trust generation and networks can save on transaction costs. That's really interesting because it suggests that the networks of social capital generate trust, but trust also generates social capital - there's a positive feedback loop.
Wenger's new book 2009 Digital Habitats "learning together depends on the qualities of trust and mutual engagement that member develop with each other" (p8) so he doesn't say trust is a facet of engagement but trust and engagement together lead to learning. And how does that differ from social capital?
Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust : the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. London, Penguin.
Levin, D. Z. & Cross, R. 2004. The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer. Management Science, 50(11): 1477-1490.
McCormick, T. i. r. i. c. o. M. 1999. The impact of large-scale participative interventions on participants.
Nahapiet, J. & Ghoshal, S. 1998. Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242-266.
Pinto, J. K., Slevin, D. P., & English, B. 2008. Trust in projects: An empirical assessment of owner/contractor relationships. International Journal of Project Management, In Press, Corrected Proof.
Assuming trust promotes useful knowledge {Levin, 2004 } - hence the value added bit - then you'd share knowledge with people you trust, but it's something that feeds into social capital, an aspect of social capital.
Pinto et al {2008} say trust facilitates positive relationships on projects. That's adding value too, but it's facilitating an aspect of social capital - it isn't social capital. But you couldn't have social capital without trust. Trust provides a competitive advantage to the consultant (Block, 2000) so would help a consultant to build social capital in a new project.
Trust cements critical stakeholder relationships {Pinto, 2008}, which is what a consultant must be looking at - the various stakeholders. Pinto et al's study views it as valuable to manage interorganisational relationships to improve trust, so it's a kind of lubricant {Costa, 2009} - an oil (which is what some of my interviewees suggested).
Fukuyama relates trust to culture, 1996}; networks are a means of trust generation and networks can save on transaction costs. That's really interesting because it suggests that the networks of social capital generate trust, but trust also generates social capital - there's a positive feedback loop.
Wenger's new book 2009 Digital Habitats "learning together depends on the qualities of trust and mutual engagement that member develop with each other" (p8) so he doesn't say trust is a facet of engagement but trust and engagement together lead to learning. And how does that differ from social capital?
Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust : the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. London, Penguin.
Levin, D. Z. & Cross, R. 2004. The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer. Management Science, 50(11): 1477-1490.
McCormick, T. i. r. i. c. o. M. 1999. The impact of large-scale participative interventions on participants.
Nahapiet, J. & Ghoshal, S. 1998. Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242-266.
Pinto, J. K., Slevin, D. P., & English, B. 2008. Trust in projects: An empirical assessment of owner/contractor relationships. International Journal of Project Management, In Press, Corrected Proof.
Thursday, 23 April 2009
RAF High Wycombe
I went to an exhilarating meeting of the Institute of Chartered Managers at RAF High Wycombe, for a behind the scenes view of Air command. The fascinating talk was on leadership and was an MBA useful?
The charismatic speaker - a squadron leader with 2500+ hours of Tornado flying, after a tour of duty, leaving Basra, viewing the Euphrates and the Tigris and thinking he might want to come back and visit later, meaning in five or six years, finds himself back in weeks but this time in charge of the airport and airfield. This squadron leader becomes Group Captain Dean Andrew.
The brief is to get the airfield ready to hand over to the Americans at an unknown date, and the airport ready to hand back to the Iraqis at some unknown date, and not to let each party know when about each other. In the meantime, the insurgents are launching 125+ rocket attacks a week at the airfield, an area one and a half times as big as Heathrow airport.
The airport had been built in 1983, but never had air traffic through because the Iran-Iraq war happened soon after, and there were the two gulf wars. Group Capt Andrew used a variety of resources - the ground force (I didn't realise the RAF had one) to defined the no man's land by the airfields and make sure no rockets got launched there. Every day these men worked in 66F in the heat of the midday sun - "mad dogs and English men ..."
He mapped out the stakeholders with high/low power against ability to influence, so he could identify people he really needed to work with. He recognised the cultural challenges of difference between English, American and Iraqi. The cultural difference probably saved his life. The RAF was not exactly very welcome; the insurgents bombed their offices two weeks after he arrived. The insurgents chose a Sunday morning, which is an ordinary working day for Iraqis, but a day for church (or whatever) for the British, so the office was empty.
He prioritised his day by working hard from 7am to 11 pm, but spent the first couple of hours doing the most important things - allocating jobs and trusting people to do what they had to do.
He handed over the airport to the Iraqis in January 2009. And did the MBA help?
This was about leadership, not management, so depends on personality. The RAF didn't know he had an MBA when he put in there - he was put in because they'd already seen his leadership qualities, and whilst he used knowledge from his MBA studies (e.g. case studies of other airports), it was the leadership that mattered.
The charismatic speaker - a squadron leader with 2500+ hours of Tornado flying, after a tour of duty, leaving Basra, viewing the Euphrates and the Tigris and thinking he might want to come back and visit later, meaning in five or six years, finds himself back in weeks but this time in charge of the airport and airfield. This squadron leader becomes Group Captain Dean Andrew.
The brief is to get the airfield ready to hand over to the Americans at an unknown date, and the airport ready to hand back to the Iraqis at some unknown date, and not to let each party know when about each other. In the meantime, the insurgents are launching 125+ rocket attacks a week at the airfield, an area one and a half times as big as Heathrow airport.
The airport had been built in 1983, but never had air traffic through because the Iran-Iraq war happened soon after, and there were the two gulf wars. Group Capt Andrew used a variety of resources - the ground force (I didn't realise the RAF had one) to defined the no man's land by the airfields and make sure no rockets got launched there. Every day these men worked in 66F in the heat of the midday sun - "mad dogs and English men ..."
He mapped out the stakeholders with high/low power against ability to influence, so he could identify people he really needed to work with. He recognised the cultural challenges of difference between English, American and Iraqi. The cultural difference probably saved his life. The RAF was not exactly very welcome; the insurgents bombed their offices two weeks after he arrived. The insurgents chose a Sunday morning, which is an ordinary working day for Iraqis, but a day for church (or whatever) for the British, so the office was empty.
He prioritised his day by working hard from 7am to 11 pm, but spent the first couple of hours doing the most important things - allocating jobs and trusting people to do what they had to do.
"Understanding culture builds trust"He built trust. Having some spare money he could have spent it on something important to Westerners, like fixing the luggage carousels, but he asked the Iraqi airport manager, who wanted pot plants, because that what made an impression in Iraqis eyes. Dean Andrew got someone in the UK to fly out such pot plants within 48 hours - thus earning the trust of the Iraqi manager, who was so grateful that he invited Dean Andrew to break the end of the Ramadan fast with him and has invited him to return with his wife.
He handed over the airport to the Iraqis in January 2009. And did the MBA help?
This was about leadership, not management, so depends on personality. The RAF didn't know he had an MBA when he put in there - he was put in because they'd already seen his leadership qualities, and whilst he used knowledge from his MBA studies (e.g. case studies of other airports), it was the leadership that mattered.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Analysis
I could get someone else to do the transcription for me, but doing it myself brings some of the themes to mind. I'm finding trust and commitment and team work keep coming up. And if people have worked together they trust each other quicker and teams gel.
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