Knowing Earlier With Metaphors: Interview and Video

The April 14, 2008 News entry recommended Metaphoria, a book about an innovation in knowing earlier what individuals think, but can’t articulate, about companies, products, services, values and experiences.  Harvard Business School Publishing has now provided an on-line interview of author Gerald Zaltman giving an excellent overview of his metaphor elicitation method, and a link to a video about the surprising results of its application at Coca Cola.

Extending Sense & Respond Logistics (S&RL) to Sense & Respond Combat Support

S&RL was a response by the DOD to the realization that “event-driven demand-pull” provisioning is inherently more effective (and ultimately more efficient) than “predict-plan-push” supply chains.  A 2007 Rand Corporation Monograph by Robert S. Tripp proposed extending S&RL to incorporate additional Combat Support capabilities…..but still within the framework of a traditional (albeit technologically enhanced) Command and Control system.

The logical conclusion of this evolution is the incorporation of Logistics, Intelligence and Operations capabilities into a coherent and highly adaptable Sense & Respond Combat System. But the more inclusive the response capabilities, the more silos and sub-optimizing performance metrics are dragged in. As it stands, extraordinarily adaptive and effect-driven war fighters must still rely on efficiency-driven “back-office” systems.

An interesting question, therefore, is how far down the technology path a sub-optimizing military can go before the lack of a corresponding managerial transition from Command and Control to Context and Coordination becomes an insurmountable hurdle.  

CEOs Focus on Coping with Change…….Again

Struggling with the information age challenges of unpredictable change has occupied senior managers for at least three decades. According to a new study by IBM this continues to be the case – only more so.

In its third global survey of over 1000 CEOs and public sector leaders, IBM discovered that the number of executives expecting substantial change has increased by 18 percent in the past two years (from 65% to 83% of those interviewed). Sixty-one percent stated that they had changed successfully in the past --- which may sound high, but many executives (and companies) who have not successfully adapted were presumably no longer around to be interviewed.  Market factors and access to competent people were said to be the two most significant factors affecting an organization’s ability to cope with the changes confronting it.

“Virtually all CEOs are changing their business models,” is a particularly interesting finding of this survey. It indicates that the battle ground of change management is itself changing. What was early on considered an imperative to produce adaptive product and services, and then adaptive strategies, is now becoming an issue of rapidly adapting the business model. (See Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer’s assessment of how difficult this is in the Essay on Managerial Models ). 

Knowing Earlier with Metaphors

Marketing Metaphoria by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman has just been published by Harvard Business School Press. Jerry Zaltman is an Emeritus Professor of Marketing at Harvard, and creator of a patented methodology for eliciting the deep metaphors that are common among people who encounter a particular company, product, service, experience or issue.

As the authors say in the Introduction, the method was developed, “because most of what people know, they do not know that they know – and what they say may not be what they mean—since most thoughts and other important cognitive processes occur unconsciously.” The Zaltmans provide dozens of examples of first-tier companies who have successfully leveraged this insight.

Though positioned as a marketing research innovation (and it is), their metaphor elicitation method has important implications and applications for customer-back business strategies and organizational designs. It is a tool for knowing earlier than customers what they think and feel…..a diagnostic for developing and validating differentiated value propositions, and for delivering preference-creating experiences.

Marketing Metaphoria belongs on everyone’s Sense & Respond reading list.

Managing by Wire: The Original Article

“When pilots fly by wire, they’re flying informational representations of airplanes. In a similar way, managing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informational representation. Manage-by-wire capability augments, instead of automating, a manager’s function. Fly-by-wire technology—and by extension managing by wire—integrate pilot and plane into a single coherent system. The role and accountabilities of the pilot become an essential part of the design. Autopilot, or complete automation, is used only in calm, stable flying conditions. The system design allows for considerable flexibility in pilot behavior, including the ability to override the technology if, for instance, a sudden storm arises.”

Almost fifteen years after it’s publication, the seminal “Managing by Wire” article is featured in a current Harvard Business Review advertisement. The excerpted passages in this ad provide an excellent summary of the article.

Although it preceded the publication of Adaptive Enterprise by six years, the concepts of sense-and-respond, adaptive Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act loops, roles and accountabilities, and coherence as an organizational imperative were already emerging. But if the article were written today, three modifications would be appropriate:

• A distinction would be drawn between “enterprise models” as informational representations of a business, and “role and accountability” (R&A) designs as expressions of policy-level executive intent.  In 1993, enterprise models were the creations of IT professionals, who did their best to elicit executive intent through interviews and interpretations of policy and strategy documents and executive memos and speeches. In a very real sense, “enterprise models’” were largely figments of the IT imagination – used as a basis for formulating, designing and implementing IT strategies, infrastructures and systems.
  
  Because both enterprise models and R&A designs are system designs, an R&A design is the ideal starting point for an enterprise model design. Both are architectures, but while there are many IT architects, there are still very few business architects. Why? Because designing organizations as systems is a new managerial competence….one not yet covered in MBA curricula.
• The analog of an executive managing a business by wire like a pilot flies a plane by wire suggests 1) that human social systems are amenable to the same kind of direction and “management” as a mechanical system….this is manifestly not the case (though it was in fact a premise of early industrial age managers); and 2) that an individual at the top of a large organization could know enough to make key operational decisions in a rapidly changing environment. The need for adaptability dictates moving general management decisions ever closer to the customer. These points would be made in an updated verson.
• The featured example would be the MBW implementation by Glen Salow at the Aetna Portfolio Management Group. This was inspired by the HBR article, and is described in Chapter 9 of Adaptive Enterprise. 

Attacking Bureaucracy with S&R Weapons

Vice Admiral Robert Conway is Commander, Naval installation Command (CNIC). Established in 2003 to align support of the fleet, its warfighters, and their families at 79 disparate Navy shore installations around the world, CNIC is a $9 billion enterprise of more than 50,000 military and civilian personnel.

Like John Ramsdell (see February 1, 2008 entry), but at the other end of the size spectrum, VADM Conway focused on the Adaptive Loop as a way of shortening decision cycles and introducing the concepts in Adaptive Enterprise. By pushing authority down to the base commanding officers, a better and faster matching of CNIC resources with customer needs was achieved. The roles at CNIC HQ Staff level now consider the base commanders and officers to be their customers, rather than the targets of top-down directives.

An interview in which VADM Conway describes the mission and direction of CNIC appears on page 34 of the February 2008 issue of Seapower. (Click on "Contents" and scroll down to Interview)

At a December 2007 year end session with CNIC regional flag officers and base commanders, Conway announced,

“We are adopting Sense & Respond because it destroys bureaucracy.”

Dr.John Ramsdell is an expert toxicologist, and chief of the Coastal Research Branch of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He heads a staff of scientists, organized in five or six teams, one of which is an Analytical Response Team. This is a  multidisciplinary group of scientists whose responsibility is to determine the cause of “mortality events” -- the strange and often devastating destructions of marine life that occur unpredictably in US coastal waters. Fish kills from Red Tides are one example of these phenomena. The mysterious and often fatal beaching of whales and dolphins is another.

The Analytic Response Team (ART) was chartered to enable more effective responses to these events by the managers in state and federal agencies accountable for marine resources, ecology and public health -- for example, Fishery and Wildlife departments. To carry this out, the team conducts fundamental research, devising innovative technologies (such as chemical detection methods having a resolution of one-tenth the mass of elemental hydrogen), and sifting through massive amounts of input supplied by a vast global network of scientific colleagues. The challenge Ramsdell took on was to transform their value proposition from post-mortem assessments to one of giving decision-makers much more precise information, and to make it available in time to be useful in managing the event.

Soon after his appointment to this, his first managerial position, Ramsdell began looking through business books. He found Adaptive Enterprise on amazon.com in 1999, and was intrigued by the idea of designing an organization explicitly to deal with unpredictability. Recognizing that the ART was, in effect, the Sense and Interpret support for state and local event managers, he decided to design the team itself as an interactive set of roles that corresponded to the four phases of the Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act (SIDA) adaptive loop.

In 2000, there were multiple significant events on the California coast involving sea lions, whales and sea otters. The team detected demoic acid in each of these species and informed their customers of the cause in each event and how the events were related, while they were occurring. They credited their adaptive loop organizational structure with improving their response to “near real time.”

As a result of these accomplishments the Marine Biotoxins Analytical Response Team was recognized at the Federal Employee of the Year Awards in 2000. Their citation reads, in part:

“The organization of the team [is] based on the premise that unusual mortality events [are] largely unpredictable. This team was designed on the principles of a sense and respond unit. It is comprised of early event listeners, a multidisciplinary team of event assessors and a team leader responsible [for] designing an event-specific solution. Key to the success of the team [is] that the response was based upon the unique expertise of the people rather than a pre-designed response and that all the people worked together on a daily basis in a mission-based Program. This approach represents a revolutionary design in business in which 'business is an adaptive system for responding to unanticipated requests in unpredictable environments' (Haeckel, Adaptive Enterprise, Harvard Business School Press, 1999.)”

In October of 2003, John Ramsdell received the prestigious Department of Commerce Silver Medal “for his efforts in designing a method that rapidly responds to the needs of coastal managers….. Ramsdell is being honored for his design of an organizational structure that quickly responds to coastal managers needs during marine mortality events. The adoption of this model created a highly successful method of readiness and capability.”

Sense & Respond at a Glance

Two months before the publication of Adaptive Enterprise, The Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation--a creation of Chris Meyer’s exceptionally fertile mind-- held a Conference called “Embracing Complexity.” It attracted and featured innovators in a wide range of disciplines and was focused on how these disciplines could help organizations cope with the reality of unpredictable change -- how an organization might itself become more like a complex adaptive system.

Each speaker’s presentation was captured “on the fly” by cartoonists Joe Sterling and Andy Park of Sterling Insights. These men, with no background in the concepts or terminology of the topics being presented, were consistently on the mark in their summary representations of the stories and major messages delivered by the presenters.

Here is their rendering of Sense & Respond.

The Difference Between Knowing Earlier and Predicting Better

A senior IT manager involved in developing “Advanced Sense and Respond” capabilities recently contacted us looking for papers and articles on “new and better techniques for predicting demand.”

We offered some suggestions, but this seemed a curious request to direct to this Website. Not, as Seinfeld might say, because there’s anything wrong with getting better and better at predicting the predictable. It’s just that this doesn’t have much to do with the problem that S&R was created to address: the lack of a systematic and scaleable way to rapidly reconfigure organizational capabilities into effective responses to inherently unpredictable demands.

In his Foreword to Adaptive Enterprise, Adrian Slywotsky introduced the term “anticipate and preempt” to capture the idea behind proactive sense-and-respond strategies (as opposed to the reactive “build to order” end of the S&R strategy spectrum). But what does the word anticipate mean when prediction is not possible?

In Sense & Respond Organizations, anticipate means “knowing earlier than others the meaning of what is happening now.” It involves diagnosis and systems knowledge, not extrapolation and prediction. Operationally, it is achieved through Manage by Wire implementations that speed up the Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act adaptive cycle of decision-making roles, enabling them to translate signals into early knowledge, and early knowledge into preemptive action.

The iSpheres Event Server (see September 23, 2006 News Item below) has been acquired by Avaya, and is now marketed as the Avaya Event Processor . It "enables the enterprise to be more competitive through the deployment of sophisticated "sense and respond" applications that drive down latency or delays as well as reduce operational cost."

Mani Chandy, (see his entry on the Expertise Page ) is the Cal Tech professor that led the development of Event Driven processing as a thin layer on top of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).  Like Stream Computing, Event Driven processing enables near-real time association of incoming "live" data with the applications that process it. According to Chandy, an event condition may apply to data in multiple streams---something like:  the threat level is orange, and five customers booked first class tickets at the last minute, and asked not to be seated together, and their photographs are similar to some on the no-fly list. The events here aren't part of an ongoing stream, and the application that is invoked depends on the condition that is detected.

These new "knowing earlier" technologies are important enhancements of the  IT infrastructures that provide role-specific Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act support in Sense & Respond organizations.

Update on DOD Sense & Respond Logistics

“Managing Change,” an article by Peter Buxbaum on the status of the Department of Defense’s Sense–and-Respond Logistics (S&RL) initiative, was published in the August 2007 Issue of Military Logistics Forum  (http://www.military-logistics-forum.com/article.cfm?DocID=2153) . One of it’s messages is that the meaning of S&R in the DoD has morphed into a series of technology and information sharing projects. Here are some excerpts:

The military sees sense and respond logistics as part and parcel of its transformation to information-intensive network centric operations. But network centricity, by its nature, has emphasized technology implementations and data sharing rather than organizational changes. Last year’s Quadrennial Defense Report, for example, advocated “extending the communications backbone down to the smallest tactical unit in the field.”

Sense and respond logistics, as it is being implemented, has also revolved around technology. But this emphasis has missed the mark when it comes to the important organizational aspects of the concept. Technology may have improved the military’s ability to “sense” logistics needs but not necessarily to more effectively “respond.”

Sense and respond logistics is based on management theories developed by Stephan Haeckel at the IBM Advanced Business Institute. Haeckel’s original work was directed toward creating greater adaptability in large commercial enterprises. His theory posited that companies must become sense-and-respond organizations when their customers’ needs changed faster than the company's ability to respond to them.

In Haeckel's view, sense and respond revolves less around technology and more around new concepts of management and organization. In a sense and respond organization, hierarchy is replaced by a dynamic network of accountable roles.

All but the most casual visitors to this site will be aware that Sense & Respond is originally and fundamentally a managerial, not a technology or information infrastructure innovation (though it relies upon and leverages them). But that distinction is frequently lost. Technologies that support S&R competences (such as Knowing Earlier, Managing by Wire, dynamic inter-role Commitment Management, and Customer-back configuration of responses)—these technologies are necessary, but insufficient to achieve and sustain organizational-level adaptability. An adaptable, effect-back organizational design is required that coherently incorporates and exploits their use.

S&RL originated in 2002 as the flagship project of the DoD’s Office of Force Transformation (OFT). The project objective was to conceptualize and validate an adaptive logistical capability to support Network Centric Warfare -- a military transformation predicated on the increasing unpredictability inherent in information age warfighting. The project leader (see Linda Lewandowski’s entry on the S&R Expertise page http://senseandrespond.com/experts.html ) recognized that organizational fragmentation and suboptimization in the DoD and the uniformed services were major impediments to adaptive logistics responses---and that these could not be resolved by technologies. The managerial transformations and adaptive competences described in Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations were adopted to address this issue, and the term “Sense and Respond” was included in the project title. Haeckel was asked to serve as a project advisor in its initial phase.

Haeckel was interviewed by Buxbaum for the article. He thinks the lack of managerial and organizational reforms makes it inappropriate to use the label “Sense and Respond” to describe technological and process innovations. He agrees that adaptive technologies and data-sharing improvements must contribute to making military logistics more adaptable – but asserts that the existing organizational structure and management system continue to conspire against realizing that promise.

For an example of how embedded technologies and information sharing might enhance the US Marine Corp’s logistics “Knowing Earlier” capability, see the 6 minute “Sense and Respond” video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4RXSYSXOg . Benefits cited include “comprehensive view of how much life is left” in a platform; “improve[d] quality of repairs”; and earlier triggering of “work package” development. Toward the end of the clip is an appeal to the office of the Secretary of Defense to “standardize technical data” and to “work in concert” from the “effect back.”

S&R Applications in the US Department of Defense

Two recent documents relating to the application of S&R in the military have been published.

Russell A. Vacante, Program Director at the Defense Acquisition University, is the author of “Sense and Respond: An Emerging DoD Concept for National Defense,” in the latest issue of the Defense Acquisition Review Journal. http://www.dau.mil/pubs/arq/2007arq/2007arq44/ARJ44_Vacante.pdf

Linda Lewandowski, whose S&R credentials can be found on the Expertise Page, posted an article on the Center for Co-Evolutionary Development site, “ DoD Transformation: Harnessing Knowledge and Achieving Growth Through Value Innovation.” http://www.cced-blog.com/archive/2007_08_23_icfconsulting_archive.html 

Vacante focuses on the S&R competence of better sense-making (knowing earlier), but not on the S&R managerial framework necessary to leverage this capability within networks of people. (An adaptive organizational design of modular roles and accountabilities is necessary to make coherent the decisions and actions of networks of adaptive people….who in turn require adaptive technologies to augment the speed and quality of their sense-interpret-decide-act cycles. A true Sense & Respond implementation encompasses all three of these elements.)

In her piece, Lewandowski underlines the need to replace traditional C2 (Command and Control) with an adaptive management system in order to transform the DoD into an adaptive enterprise: “The center of [this] transformation, which also is the distinction between success and failure, is an organization’s ability to create an enterprise design that enables greater performance.”

The August 27, 2007 News Item comments on the publication of an article published this week that assesses the current status of the DoD’s Sense and Respond Logistics initiative.

How Stream Computing Can Enhance Adaptability in S&R Organizations

As reported in a June 19, 2007 NY Times article about IBM’s introduction of System S, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/technology/19compute.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin , stream computing is an emerging technology that processes incoming information on the fly to determine its relevance to existing applications, and send it on to the computer programs that would benefit most from it.  Nagui Halim, director of high performance stream computing at IBM, describes System S as “a computing system that can morph and adapt to the problems it sees.”

In other words, stream computing is an adaptive application with the potential to enable dynamic change the Interpretive frameworks of an adaptive decisionmaker. Realizing this potential requires that some of the “benefiting programs” be those that modify the models used in the interpret phase of role-specific sense-interpret-decide-act support systems.

A crisp discussion of authority, responsibility and accountability appears on the AllBusiness website at http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/employee-development-team-building/10362-1.html  

Although responsibility and accountability are too often used interchangeably and imprecisely, these words have distinct meanings in the Sense & Respond lexicon:

Authority is a bounded license to make decisions in a defined domain of accountability.

Responsibility is an individual commitment to do or produce something for another individual.

Accountability is the acceptance of the consequences of an individual’s performance in carrying out a responsibility.

As the AllBusiness piece points out, authority and responsibility precede performance, while accountability follows it.

In S&R organizations, authority and responsibility are agreed to as part of the negotiation that takes place when populating organizational Roles. Some performance consequences may also be agreed to in this negotiation. Other performance consequences will be negotiated between individuals as they take operational decisions and actions in the roles they have agreed to occupy.

Accountability is realized when the operational performance of a commitment is assessed, and the consequences previously negotiated are effected.

Heroism as a Managerial Framework

A good definition of “Customer-Back” is captured in Ron Shevlin’s recent posting on his “Marketing ROI" blog: http://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/the-unseen-barrier-to-marketing-innovation/.

What is a business model?

The term is in everyone’s vocabulary, but we all seem to use different dictionaries. To some it is a financial model, while to others it’s a set of decisions that characterize unique aspects of a firm’s strategy and operations. For example, many people might describe Dell’s business model as “direct sales, no middle-men, low cost assembly, low investment in R&D, high quality service……”  But what would Dell’s business model look like if rendered on a single page? Would it be a list of these decisions?

If the purpose of a business model is to capture the essence of a strategy for profitably creating customer value, it can be depicted elegantly and unambiguously as an architecture of roles and accountabilities. And if this architecture is created using the principles of adaptive system design, it has the added attributes of being scaleable, of ensuring alignment of all roles—external and internal-- around a common purpose, and of significantly reducing the substantial costs of bureaucratic sub-optimization associated with silos and matrix management.

Managers who apply S&R principles discover that their organizational design is at once a strategy document and a business model. One executive says he now never uses more than three slides to talk about his business – whether to employees or investors or his mother-in-law. The first slide is the Reason for Being statement that defines organizational purpose; the second is a list of 7-10 Governing Principles establishing the global constraints that govern, but do not dictate, the actions of people in the enterprise; and the third slide is the high-level Role and Accountability Design that shows the key strategic investments (Roles), and how they interact (Accountabilities) to realize organizational purpose (Reason for Being). Recently, another executive suggested that Venture Capitalists would benefit if they saw a proposed business model rendered as an R&A design, because it would demonstrate if management has a crisp and convincing grasp of how they intend to create value.

M.E. Sharpe has published the content of a Marketing Academic Conference on the subject Does Marketing Need Reform? Chapter 39 of this book, "Designing a Business from the Customer Back," is now available as a download in the Library , thanks to permission granted by the publisher. This chapter presents the case for using the S&R customer-back managerial framework as the basis for a post-industrial update of business school curricula. Although Marketing would seem to be the obvious choice to lead such a reformation, it’s not clear it will be. This would not be the first time that the marketing discipline has side-stepped an emerging business area (such as services) that logically extends the marketing concept articulated in the 1950s by academics Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt, among others.

CIO, an Australian magazine for information executives, recently interviewed Caltech Professor Mani Chandy (see his Expertise page entry ) on the relationship between S&R and IT architectures. In it, Chandy argues that Event Driven Architectures (EDAs) are better suited to support Sense & Respond organizations than are Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Here are some excerpts:

….. Chandy is working on development of an EDA to sit as a thin layer on top of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to take advantage of S&R, as well as on applying S&R systems to crisis management. He says an event-directed architecture can help organizations to capitalize on the event Web (EW), a thin layer on top of the World Wide Web developed by Caltech's Infospheres Group. Continuously active, the EW monitors information sources and responds fittingly as conditions change. Organizations can build new S&R applications to respond continuously to critical conditions on top of the EW.

 …..[Chandy] "The event Web is an S&R utility that helps people respond to critical conditions in their environments. EDA is the architecture that allows for the systematic structuring of S&R applications. Event-directed architecture components monitor the environment, process events and respond to changing conditions continuously,"

Chandy positions S&R applications and systems as support for decisionmaking roles in the S&R managerial framework. This important distinction is missed by those who view organizational adaptability as a technology issue. The article describes the nature of Sense & Respond using several passages from this web site.

A short paper on accountability and commitment management by Lee Dyer, Chair of the Department of Human Resource Studies at Cornell University, can be viewed at http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ilrhr662/archive/s2006/negotiatingcommitmentspaper.htm 

Professor Dyer has created an innovative course that he calls “Agilon.” According to the course description, its “basic premise [is] that bureaucracy, the dominant organizational paradigm of the 20th century, is increasingly inappropriate as more and more organizations find themselves operating, or indeed even trying to create, dynamic or what some call hyper-competitive environments. The problem is that bureaucracy is predicated on predictability and stability, whereas organizations in evolving circumstances thrive on spontaneity and change. So, the search is on for a more appropriate organizational paradigm.”

The course itself is designed to embody the principles it preaches. Here are more excerpts from the course description:

Mutual ongoing design: Rather than the instructor designing the entire course - content, procedures, rules, performance measures, and the like - up front, all participants collaborate on the design of these features as the semester proceeds.

Self-organizing: During the first few weeks of the course, the instructors decide what happens when and how. After that, the course becomes self-organizing; participants (instructors and students) collectively assume responsibility for deciding what happens when and how.

Disruption: During the course of the semester there will be periodic unanticipated occurrences that totally disrupt any routine that seems to be emerging. This is to simulate the experience of being in a dynamic environment and, of course, to see how quickly and easily the class can adapt and learn from the experience.

From its description, this course would seem to be a harbinger of the kind of education MBA programs should incorporate to prepare the next generation of business leaders for the environment they will have to cope with.

An excellent article by Len Berry, Eileen Wall and Lou Carbone on the application of Customer Experience Management principles to enhance the value delivered by service providers is now available as a download in the Experience Management Section of the Library .

Customer Experience Management in Adaptive Enterprises

This article  by Scott Shane published in the New York Times on February 28, 2006 makes an excellent companion piece to the essay described below in the January 23. 2006 entry. You will have to register with the NY Times to see the entire article, but the first few paragraphs capture the gist of the story:

Economist Arnold Kling has written an insightful article that captures the intrinsic inadequacy of traditional planning to cope with highly non-linear events such as Hurricane Katrina. Kling points out that this type of event requires better improvisation, not better planning.

In this particular case, there was more than the usual amount of difficulty in synchronizing multiple federal, state and local response capabilities. Among other things, the fact that FEMA had been moved under DHS was cited as one reason it took so long to get the requisite approvals to act. A contributing factor to sluggish Federal response is certainly the fact that in the past two years both the 9-11 Commission and the Department of Homeland Security resorted to legacy-think structural recommendations to address severe accountability, governance and coordination issues in US Intelligence and Security agencies. Specifically, these were: adding another layer of authority at the top; re-arranging the deck chairs into a new set of silos that show precisely where the new turf and budget wars will be waged; and creating plans of action when designing structures FOR action is what’s required of strategies these days.

Kling understands well that although state of the art forecasting can provide several-day advanced warning of a hurricane threat, there is no way to predict -- much less coordinate in advance -- the thousands of front-line actions necessary to carry off an effective large scale response once the storm hits. Effective improvisation -- near real-time, coherently and at scale --  is what's needed. And that, of course, implies the "late-binding" of capabilities featured in Sense & Respond organizational designs.

The Center for Co-Evolutionary Development™ (CCED) has been established to accelerate the sharing and creation of new knowledge and applications necessary to realize adaptive organizations and significantly enhanced performance. Linda Lewandowski, who led the Sense and Respond Logistics project for the DoD office of Force Transformation, created CCED,  which will incorporate Sense and Respond organizational design and management principles to develop an architecture for an "Adaptive National Security Enterprise." According to its website :

CCED provides knowledge, methods, and tools to senior leaders and managers facing unpredictable change who:

• recognize adaptability as an imperative
• are willing to invest in assessing alternatives and their implications
• are ready to lead transformation to an adaptive organization

The CCED is an active network of people who represent modular and re-configurable capabilities designed to accelerate understanding and development of Adaptive Enterprise methods and applications. Our expert network membership comprises distinguished professionals across many different educational disciplines, experiences, and sectors. These members are united by a common intellectual framework dedicated to advancing Adaptive Enterprise applications and techniques for achieving long term viability and growth through improved organizational adaptiveness.

Origins and Axioms of the Industrial Age Managerial Framework

If any one person deserves credit for the creation and codification of Industrial Age  management principles, a compelling case can be made for Frederick Taylor, creator of the Taylor System of Management. For Taylor, scientific management was task management, and represented a transformational change from what he termed “rule of thumb” management.  Taylor was a brilliant thinker and many of his contributions remain, tacitly or explicitly, cornerstones of managerial practice a century later. His own axiomatic foundation was the cause-and-effect logic of the Enlightenment – what Russell Ackoff calls the Machine Age. Time and Motion Study, Efficiency Experts, Functional Hierarchies of Authority, Best Practice and Root Cause Analyses, Process Design / Optimization / Automation, and Six Sigma Projects are but some of the familiar 20th century managerial innovations and concepts that flowed directly from the logic of Taylor's model. But many other innovations -- such as cross functional teams, mass customization, empowerment, rapid prototyping, real options, and outsourcing -- make no sense in Taylor’s framework, and are therefore fiendishly difficult to implement and sustain in organizations where his framework remains the institutionalized logic of how to run a business. That is to say, in virtually every large 21^st Century corporation. 

While Taylor