Comments on: Gradual Unveiling #3: The nature of work http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2006/10/05/gradual-unveiling-3-the-nature-of-work Pontification without all the gritty gravitas Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:45:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Ken Muldrew http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2006/10/05/gradual-unveiling-3-the-nature-of-work#comment-4018 Ken Muldrew Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:10:00 +0000 http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2006/10/05/gradual-unveiling-3-the-nature-of-work#comment-4018 Lots of Kaufmanesque talk of the "edge of chaos" here. Also he seems to use "emergent" to mean magic rather than the more common idea that emergence just refers to a phenomenon or property that is easier to identify through simulation rather than analysis. At least I think that's more common. How do SFI people define emergence? Idenfitication of the customers (the people who actually use what you produce) seems to be pretty important in APM. Surely in an academic research environment that means that the customers are other researchers in your field. That they happen to be your competitors and reviewers, with the power to decide whether you get any funding to continue your research, seems to work pretty effectively against any real innovation. And yet the whole point of APM is to create teamwork that adapts readily to changing conditions to promote innovation. Maybe you're thinking of applying it to big labs like the defence places rather than the small, independent labs that are more common? One hardly needs a formal project management style for such a small group, so you must be thinking on a larger scale. But here you need to reform the whole system: everything, in toto, in enchilada, will have to change. I can't see it happening until the whole system crashes. Looking back up I see your list doesn't include any empirical research, so perhaps with theoretical work it is possible to get larger collaborations without destroying the whole University-Industrial complex. And if you can get experimentalists to be your customers, then for sure great progress could occur. Is this the point? That complex systems theorists are just playing solitaire (i.e. doing simulations) instead of building useful products? Lots of Kaufmanesque talk of the “edge of chaos” here. Also he seems to use “emergent” to mean magic rather than the more common idea that emergence just refers to a phenomenon or property that is easier to identify through simulation rather than analysis. At least I think that’s more common. How do SFI people define emergence?

Idenfitication of the customers (the people who actually use what you produce) seems to be pretty important in APM. Surely in an academic research environment that means that the customers are other researchers in your field. That they happen to be your competitors and reviewers, with the power to decide whether you get any funding to continue your research, seems to work pretty effectively against any real innovation. And yet the whole point of APM is to create teamwork that adapts readily to changing conditions to promote innovation. Maybe you’re thinking of applying it to big labs like the defence places rather than the small, independent labs that are more common? One hardly needs a formal project management style for such a small group, so you must be thinking on a larger scale. But here you need to reform the whole system: everything, in toto, in enchilada, will have to change. I can’t see it happening until the whole system crashes.

Looking back up I see your list doesn’t include any empirical research, so perhaps with theoretical work it is possible to get larger collaborations without destroying the whole University-Industrial complex. And if you can get experimentalists to be your customers, then for sure great progress could occur. Is this the point? That complex systems theorists are just playing solitaire (i.e. doing simulations) instead of building useful products?

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