Institutional abuses:: “cut the crap” – from edifice to artifice

So what if, Barclays and others* have been caught screwing the system…AGAIN!

*”Other big names believed to be under investigation include Citigroup, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland”

Cue outcry, righteous indignation, questions in the House and sound bites from every direction. This passes as information but isn’t it just a smokescreen!? Never mind “white collar” crime this is YET ANOTHER case of bare-faced THEFT. £290m is a helluva lot of money to you and me but it will not amount to the collective remunerations to Directors of Barclays (or any other bank) over the last 10 years!!!

What happened to Corporate Governance? Too big to fail was just code for “way too close and too complex to prosecute” without being recognised as accomplices and suffering the, unthinkable but inevitable, loss of office…the jails are too overcrowded anyway!

What is “the system” that they have been abusing?

According to Wikipedia “The phrase in this usage can carry negative connotations”. Damn right it does…PLEASE think about the question. What is it? Why is it? Who pays for it? How can it be changed? But don’t just think about “it” in terms of the banking or financial system, because the culture has contaminated and corrupted Institutions that were once pillars for all that was good in our society.

American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it

Upton Sinclair (1918)

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A Bubble Promoted with Anti-values

The impact of “ambiguity of purpose”, necessitated to mask the loss of values, led to conflicting strategies, misaligned objectives and, therefore, convoluted and complex processes. These impact the manageability, effectiveness and profitability of the system.

This is manifest in the corruption(!) of the structured information-flow across systems, as increased risk/excessive complexity and impaired resilience.

via A Bubble Promoted with Anti-values.

Bob Dylan and the evolving role of Social Business in the redistribution of “absolute power”

You can’t fail to have noticed the sorry demise of some major High Street brands in recent years. It’s true that a lot of the “tales of woe” are as a result of the, immediate impact, of the global financial crisis but that is only part of the story. Because, there have probably been more casualties, large and small, as a result of the far-reaching “aftershocks” and resultant recession.

Stakeholders and Complexity in the project management environment

Project management writings of the last few years suggest that ‘people skills’ and leadership are important attributes of a successful Project Manager and effective stakeholder management is definitely seen as a major item in delivering project success[2]. Within this emerging people centric paradigm, complexity theory helps us to understand the social behaviours of teams and the networks of people involved in and around a project. The idea of complexity applies equally to small in-house projects and large complicated programs; in this regard, ‘complexity’ is not a synonym for ‘complicated’ or ‘large’.

Link

Complexity:: understanding living systems

Reading the attached may, in many respects, do no more than confirm what you already knew…even if aspects are so familiar that they are taken for granted.

“Living Systems” with too much order can become as fragile as those with too much chaos and one of the most significant sentences is, perhaps, the last:

You must not become complacent with a pattern that works today because new patterns will be needed in the very near future

…do we continue to wait for uncertainty like we can do nothing or do we use advanced tools [from Ontonix] to identify the “patterns” than can help us maintain “balance”?

If we don’t prepare how can we be resilient?

Animated gif showing the setting up of a gradient which can then be used by cells to gather information about their position early on in morphogenesis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All systems have certain characteristics in common. Non-living systems include heating and air conditioning systems, electrical systems, computer systems, radar systems, weather, the solar system and so on. Living systems include animals, people, organizations, communities, nations and the world. The following key characteristics of systems are based on General System Theory, the landmark work by Viennese biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and other insights from the life sciences.

via Understanding Living Systems.

If you are “hungry” for more Complexity Facts, from the work undertaken by Ontonix, follow the links.

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