Events

Managing in Complexity Series

This series features speakers well-versed on the ideas of complexity theory and organisational management. They will share how organisations and leaders can better make sense and react in a world of great complexity and uncertainty, as well as how best to organise themselves and their organisations to be ready for future challenges.

Lecture on "Recent Developments in Futures Thinking: An Overview for Policymakers"
17 March 2010
Dr Riel Miller
Founder of Xperidox: Futures Consulting

This lecture seeks to introduce emerging developments and changes in the theory and practice of anticipatory thinking, and is relevant to decision-makers because their choices are influenced by the nature and content of the anticipatory systems they use. The lecture will begin with a historical overview of the development of foresight as a decision making tool, including recent uses of strategic foresight for policy formation in Europe and North America. This serves as background for an introduction to the “anticipatory systems” approach to foresight and the concept of Futures Literacy.

In connecting foresight to decision making, the lecture will also include a case study of the Learning Intensive Society that will illustrate how an extended Futures Literacy process, can challenge the anticipatory assumptions that shape conventional policy. Thereby providing an example of how to link foresight to decision making. The lecture will close with a discussion of FuturesIreland, a recent three-year Futures Literacy process conducted on behalf of the Prime Minister by the National Economic and Social Development Office of Ireland.

About Dr Riel Miller
Riel Miller is a specialist in long-run strategic thinking and the design of advanced foresight processes. For over twenty-five years he has assisted senior decision makers to assess and direct the potential for socio-economic transformation in both the private and public sectors. His extensive publications address a range of issues, from futures methodology and the design of scenario processes for strategic decision making to the future of money, education, the internet, the knowledge society, the public sector, etc.. He is one of the world’s leading practitioners of scenario methods and now designs cutting-edge “hybrid strategic scenarios” processes for a wide range of international clients. He works closely with his customers to design and implement state-of-the-art scenario processes that reveal the assumptions underlying current choices and the potential, often hidden, in the world around us today. His “rigorous imagining” techniques build the “Futures Literacy” required for both new decision making capabilities and the capacity to innovate.

His current and recent client list includes public and private sector organizations in more than twenty-five countries: the National Economic and Social Development Office, Ireland; the Autonomous University of Mexico; the Office of Harmonization of the Internal Market, Alicante; the Korean Development Institute, Seoul; Europ Assistance; Cartes Bancaire; Ateliers de la Terre; Gemalto; Philips Design; The Renault Foundation; various DGs of the EC: Employment, Research, Administration, Brussels; Scottish Enterprise; Consortium for the Commercial Promotion of Catalonia; Cisco Systems; SecondaryFutures, New Zealand; Office of the National Science Advisor, Canada; Policy Research Initiative, Canada; La Poste, France; The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Seville, Spain; Ministry of Labour, Finland; Research Council of Norway; etc.

Riel also devotes considerable time to teaching and speaking. He has taught courses at undergraduate, graduate and professional continuing education levels at institutions around the world, including: the College of Europe, Bruges; Sciences-Po, Paris; IESE, Barcelona; CNAM, Paris; Carleton University, Ottawa; etc.. Riel is a dynamic speaker and on average gives 15 to 20 keynote speeches a year on a wide variety of topics. He is currently a member of the Board of the Association of Professional Futurists; a faculty member at the Masters in Public Affairs, Institut de Sciences Politique (Sciences-Po), Paris, France; and a Fellow of the World Future Studies Federation.

Lecture on "Addressing Complex Social Challenges"
12 March 2010
Mr Adam Kahane
Partner in Reos Partners; and Visiting Practitioner, University of Oxford and University of Waterloo

The two methods most frequently employed to address our most complex social challenges—either relying on violence and aggression, or submitting to endless negotiation and compromise—are fundamentally flawed. This is because the seemingly contradictory drives behind these approaches—power, the desire to achieve one’s purpose, and love, the urge to unite with others—are actually complementary. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” But how do you combine them?

For the last twenty years Adam Kahane has worked around the world on many tough and vital challenges: food security, health care, economic development, judicial reform, peace making, climate change. In this lecture he will draw on this experience to delve deeply in the dual natures of both power and love, exploring their subtle and intricate interplay. He will relate how, through trial and error, he has learned to balance them, and offer practical guidance for how others can learn that balance as well.

About Mr Adam Kahane
Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partner, an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems, and a Visiting Practitioner at both the University of Oxford and the University of Waterloo.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address their most complex challenges. He is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities and Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change.

During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell in London. Previously he held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.

Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honours) from McGill University, an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California, and an M.A. in Applied Behavioural Science from Bastyr University.

Lecture on Complexity in Biology - Lessons for Today's Organisations
18 November 2009
Professor Edison Liu
Executive Director, Genome Institute of Singapore

Dr. Edison Liu was educated at Stanford University receiving a Bachelors of Science in Chemistry and Psychology (1973) and an M.D. in 1978. He received his residency training in internal medicine at Washington University, St. Louis, and clinical cancer fellowships at Stanford University (Oncology), and at the University of California at San Francisco (Hematology). He then pursued post-doctoral studies as a Damon-Runyan Cancer Research Fellow at the University of California at San Francisco in the laboratory of Dr. J. Michael Bishop. In 1987, he joined the faculty of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was director of UNC's Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Breast Cancer. In 1996, he joined the NCI as the Director of the Division of Clinical Sciences responsible for the intramural clinical and translational programmes at the NCI that comprised 1200 employees and over 100 principal investigators. In 2001, Dr. Liu assumed the position of Executive Director, Genome Institute of Singapore. He founded the institute which now houses 280 scientists within Singapore’s Biopolis.

His current scientific research investigates the dynamics of gene regulation on a genome scale that can explain biological states in cancer. Dr. Liu has contributed over 250 articles, reviews, books, and book chapters to the scientific literature. Dr. Liu was also the executive director of the Singapore Cancer Syndicate, a governmental funding agency supporting clinical translational cancer research (2003-2008), and is currently the Executive Director of the Singapore Tissue Network, the national tissue repository in Singapore. He is the Chairman of the Governing Board for Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority which is the key health regulatory agency for the nation that includes the FDA and national blood banking equivalents. In 2007, Dr. Liu was elected as President of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO).

Dr. Liu’s awards include the Leukemia Society Scholar (1991-1996), the Brinker International Award for basic science research in Breast Cancer (1996), the Rosenthal Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (2000), the President’s Public Service Medal for his work in helping Singapore resolve the SARS crisis, and a Doctor of Medicine Sciences honoris causa (Queen’s University, Belfast. 2007). Dr. Liu’s current scientific interests are the functional genomics of breast cancer that spans from basic to epidemiologic studies. He writes general commentaries for the Singapore’s national newspaper, The Straits Times and for the biotechnology magazine, BioSpectrum.

Lecture Notes

Workshop on Management by Discovery
10 September 2009
Dr Gary Klein
Chief Scientist, Klein Associates and CSC Senior Visiting Fellows

Traditional planning methods depend on clear goals, but in many cases managers and executives have to wrestle with wicked problems. Programme leaders cannot wait for these goals to get clarified because the goals are inherently vague, and will only become clear in the process of pursuing them. The Management by Discovery (MBD) process is designed for these conditions, to help leaders clarify goals as quickly as possible while their programmes and projects are underway.

Targeted at policy analysts, Division 1 public officers and above, this workshop presents the concepts behind MBD and provides a set of tools for rapid goal clarification. An experiential approach will be adopted, building on key programmes or projects that participants are managing, to equip participants with skills to better manage projects that have vague goals. In this interactive workshop, Dr Klein will employ real-life incidents to demonstrate the usefulness of MBD, and to relate its MBD tools and techniques to our public policy process. To enrich learning, and to situate the discussion in our public policy context, participants will be asked to think of real-life policy examples/ challenges ahead of the workshop, and to share them as case examples for discussion in class.

Thinking About Thinking
28 July and 3 August 2009
Lam Chuan Leong
Ambassador-At-Large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and CSC Senior Fellow

Humans are less rational than is commonly presumed. The standard economics assumption of rational agency is often an unrealistic basis for describing how people think and make decisions. For example, we are poor at assessing probabilities. We dislike uncertainties. We are inclined to pay more for something if we have been shown a higher number just before the purchase. We seek facts to confirm prior beliefs rather than detect new or emerging trends. Why do we behave like this? Can we put these behavioural insights and turn them into better and more effective use of our thinking? The answer is “YES”. Our thinking processes have evolved to cope with the problems commonly faced by humans. It turns out that it is more useful to conceive of different modes of thinking. Each of these modes is optimal for a specific class of problems.

The two sessions conducted by Mr Lam explored these issues using the findings of the cognitive sciences, psychology and the behaviour of complex system and demonstrated how using the right mode of thinking and framing the environment correctly can bring about very significant improvement in our ability to handle cognitive tasks, whether they are simple day-to-day decisions or important policy or strategic management decisions.

Lecture Notes

22 & 23 April 2008
Dr Pierpaolo Andriani

Dr Andriani is Senior Lecturer in Technology Management from the Durham Business School UK. His current research focuses on the theory of Complexity as an interpretative framework and on its application to industrial clusters and New Product Development in distributed environments. Dr Andriani will be in Singapore to deliver a series of focused seminars for selected public sector agencies.

Why the Future Happens: Socionomics and the Science of Surprise
13 September 2007
Dr John L. Casti
Co-Founder of The Kenos Circle and Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Wien

Collective human social events, such as the outcome of political elections, trends in film and fashion, the outbreak of war and the rise and fall of civilisations, are generated by a population’s changing social mood, and these changes in mood follow patterns that are predictable. This fact has led to the emerging field of socionomics, which is nothing less than a “science of surprise”.

In this lecture, popular author and mathematician Dr. Casti presented the story behind the development of socionomics and how it seeks The lecture examined the relationship between thoughts, actions and events, the phenomenon of herding instincts, and how bets people place about the future self-organise into an overall collective social mood.to forecast social trends, through the use of numerous examples and stories. See Lecture Notes.

Dr Casti has had a wide-ranging career experience, having served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, New York University and Princeton, and at the RAND Corporation.

Complexity and Network Theory: Basic Key Concepts and Their Applications
26 July 2007
Lam Chuan Leong
Senior Fellow, CGL and Ambassador-At-Large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

This 101-style workshop is an introduction to the world of cognition and complexity and the developments and current thinking in this field. It will be followed with other events and speakers, which will go more in-depth into specific aspects of complexity. Mr Lam’s workshop will serve as an excellent foundation for those with an interest in complexity and management. Some of the topics include:

• the role of cognition -- pattern recognition and selective perception;
• the functioning of complex organisations, and how organisations can best function in a complex environment;
• how to influence and change behaviour in a complex environment; and
• the network effect and its impact on the Singapore Economy

Exploration and Experimentation: The Organisational Imperative
21 March 2007
Max Boisot
Professor of Strategic Management at the Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham

Governments and businesses face massive uncertainty about the effects of their actions. Outcome is seldom the same as intent. Conventional strategic planning and economic forecasting models-based on the assumptions of causality, control and prediction-are often too mechanistic and fail to capture the complexities of the economy and society. Successful innovations or good policies are rarely the result of superior foresight or accurate prediction. Instead, they are often the result of learning-by-doing, constant experimentation, and flexible adaptation.

This roundtable explored the limits of traditional planning approaches in an uncertain, inherently unpredictable world. It will also propose frameworks to guide our organisational learning and knowledge management practices in a way that builds organisational resilience and adaptability.

Session Summary of Roundtable
Slides from Prof Boisot