Eve Mitleton-Kelly

A Complexity Approach To Co-Creating An Innovative Environment

Abstract The distinguishing characteristic of complex co-evolving systems is their ability to create new order. In human systems this may take the form of new ways of working or relating, new ideas for products, procedures, artefacts, or even the creation of a different culture or a new organizational form. This article will explore the creation of new order using the principles of complexity and the concepts of creativity and innovation. It will argue that innovation can be facilitated by an enabling environment based on the logic of complexity and describe how one organization (the Humberside Training and Enterprise Council) co-created an innovative environment and changed its culture, ways of working, thinking, and relating.

A Complexity Theory Approach to Sustainability: A Longitudinal Study in Two London NHS Hospitals.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that organisational sustainability is not a continuation of the status quo but, seen from a complexity theory perspective, is a continuous dynamic process of co‐evolution with a changing environment. It is underpinned by learning, and it creates new structures and ways of working to adjust and to continue adjusting to a changing set of conditions.Design/methodology/approach – This longitudinal study concerns two London‐based NHS hospitals: a teaching hospital and a District General Hospital. The analysis is based on several sets of semi‐structured interviews, group interviews and workshops, conducted in June and July 2005 and again in October 2006 and finally in January 2007. The argument used to analyse narrative data is underpinned by complexity theory and based on two hypotheses and two assumptions defined in the paper.Findings – Both hospitals faced a significant deficit and in addressing it they had to change fundamentally ways of working and rela...

Co-evolution of diverse elements interacting within a social ecosystem

The aim of this paper is to discuss the evolution of diverse elements within a social ecosystem and its underlying feedback processes, with special emphasis on the notion of co-evolution of the principal elements - human and artefacts - participating in the ecosystem. It is based on a research project looking at the co-evolution of the business process and information systems (IS) development. The project is part of the SEBPC IT Legacy Systems Programme, funded by the EPSRC. The project tests the hypothesis that if co-evolution between the business process and IS development is enabled, then the problems associated with legacy systems will be reduced. The study went beyond the interaction between software and business evolution. First, it looked at IT systems (i.e. at both hardware and software) and at the IS domain, which includes the individuals involved with the IT systems (i.e. both developers and users). Second, it looked at the multiple elements, which make up the complex environment (or social ecosystem) interacting with the two areas under study. Finally, the research identified some of the conditions that facilitated co-evolution between the business and IS development in two case studies. This chapter will focus on the complex interactions between the multiple elements within a social ecosystem, which contribute to the creation of IT legacy systems; on some of the underlying feedback processes; and on the conditions that facilitate co-evolution.

Complexity: Partial Support for BPR?

If organisations can be said to thrive and become more innovative when pushed far from equilibrium [5, 7], then business process re-engineering (BPR) may be seen as a means of creating these conditions. However, BPR often disregards the consequences of massive disruption in connectivity and tends to restrict emergence and self-organisation. The new engineered or designed structure may provide a new framework, but it does not encourage exploration, learning and evolution. Neither does it support divergence and variety, which are essential elements in enabling the emergence of new behaviours and ways of working. BPR, by relying on designing and controlling both the process and the outcome, blocks emergence and thus disables one of its key objectives: the creation of a new way of working.

The information systems professional as a hermit: of plural rationalities, information rejection and complexity

In this article, the contributions that Michael Thompson has made to the development of cultural theory are laid out. This is done by highlighting the ways in which Thompson has built upon the grid–group analysis of Mary Douglas. Thereafter, it is shown how cultural theory is compatible with, and can be strengthened by, the complexity theories that have been formulated within the natural sciences. The resulting theoretical framework is then applied to explain the persistent cultural gap between the business planning and the information systems (IS) departments within companies. It will be argued and demonstrated that the IS professional can usefully be understood as following the views and practices characteristic of the hermit, as defined in cultural theory.

Co-evolution and an enabling infrastructure: a solution to legacy?

A major international financial institution has a substantial IT legacy systems problem. Its European operation based in the UK has resolved many of the issues and this chapter will explore the conditions which have enabled this development to take place. It will argue that ‘legacy’ is not solely a technical issue, and the ‘solution’ in this case would not have been possible if many other organisational and cultural conditions were not in place. It will argue that the enabling organisational infrastructure was such that it enabled the emergence of new ways of working, not typical between the business and IS domains and that it encouraged co-evolution between the two domains. By providing support and direction it was able to allow self-organisation in the development of new relationships. By exploring its space of possibilities the project also brought together the necessary technical skills, tools and approaches which facilitated the technical solutions. The exogenous pressure of the Euro created the need for internal unification, but that pressure alone would not have been sufficient to address the multiple problem space and to overcome deep cultural differences. Despite its success, the existing management approach of moving managers every two to three years is threatening the stability and sustainability of the project in the future. Furthermore, the head office in the USA was unaware of the European development. The case will be used by the US office to learn about a natural experiment and the special conditions it created to enable co-evolution and to resolve the multifaceted problem of legacy.

CoenoSense: A Framework for Real-Time Detection and Visualization of Collective Behaviors in Human Crowds by Tracking Mobile Devices

There is a need for event organizers and emergency response personnel to detect emerging, potentially critical crowd situations at an early stage during city-wide mass gatherings. In this work, we present a framework to infer and visualize crowd behavior patterns in real-time from pedestrians’ GPS location traces. We deployed and tested our framework during the 2011 Lord Mayor’s Show in London. To collection location updates from festival visitors, a mobile phone app that supplies the user with event-related information and periodically logs the device’s location was distributed. We collected around four million location updates from over 800 visitors. The City of London Police consulted the crowd condition visualization to monitor the event. We learned from the police officers that our framework helps to assess occurring crowd conditions and to spot critical situations faster compared to the traditional video-based methods. With that, appropriate measure can be deployed quickly helping to resolve a critical situation at an early stage.

Participatory sensing and crowd management in public spaces

We present a smartphone app based system for crowd monitoring and management during large public events. The app has been deployed during a number of large scale public events including a large parade in London (Lord Mayors Show), the Vienna marathon, the new Years Eve celebrations in Zurich and the crowning ceremony of King Willem Alexander in Amsterdam.

Using Mobile Technology and a Participatory Sensing Approach for Crowd Monitoring and Management During Large-Scale Mass Gatherings

A real-time understanding of the behavior of pedestrian crowds in physical spaces is important for crowd monitoring and management during large-scale mass gatherings. Thanks to the proliferation of location-aware smartphones in our society, we see a big potential in inferring crowd behavior patterns by tracking the location of attendees via their mobile phones. This chapter describes a framework to infer and visualize crowd behavior patterns in real-time, using a specially developed smartphone app. Attendees at an event voluntarily provide their location updates and in return may receive timely, targeted and personalized notifications directly from the security personnel which can be of help during an emergency situation. Users also have access to event-related information including travel advice to the location. We conducted a systems trial during the Lord Mayor’s Show 2011 in London, UK and the Notte Bianca festival 2011 in Valletta, Malta. In this chapter, besides verifying the technological feasibility, we report on interviews conducted with app users and police forces that were accessing the monitoring tools during the event. We learned from both sides that the created feedback loop between the attendees of the event running the app and the security personnel is seen as a strong incentive to follow such a participatory sensing approach. The researchers worked closely with policy makers, the emergency services and event organisers and policy implications of using the Socionical App will be discussed; as well as the response of users to being guided by an AmI device during a possible emergency.

The Concept of ‘Co-evolution’ and Its Application in the Social Sciences: A Review of the Literature

The Oxford Dictionary online defines co-evolution as a term originating in biology, meaning “the influence of closely associated species on each other in their evolution”. Ehrlich and Raven [10] first used the term co-evolution in reference to biological evolution when looking at the relationship between the patterns of evolution of plants and butterflies, stating that it describes the simultaneous, reciprocal evolution of interacting populations. Reciprocity is an element of co-evolutionary relationships stressed by all definitions in the literature. In biology, co-evolution refers to the change of a biological entity triggered by the change of a related entity [42]. Each entity exerts certain pressures and influences over the other, affecting the evolutionary trajectory of each.