ActionMap Waves

The bottleneck:  long cycles of meetings and communications for business/technology process development, used to bridge the gap between:

Why don’t existing categories of solutions provide a breakthrough?

Briefly, free-form collaboration does not have sufficient analytic power or direction, decision support produces too narrow a perspective, process modeling is too rigid and analytic, and project planning requires too many un-affirmed assumptions and pre-buy-in commitments.

A hypothetical option is to combine pre-existing tools from among these different categories. However, in terms of net impact on the bottleneck in the market today, this is largely a consultant’s dream and a customer’s nightmare.

At the center of the problem is the fact that the activity of bridging the above gap is effectively the same activity as “people communicating to agree on what to do together”. In everyday situations of relatively low complexity, this activity uses a natural fusion of natural human abilities for “collaboration”, “decision support”, “process modeling” and “project planning”. That’s where this work is done.

Simply put, the work is -knowledge- processing, not information processing. Knowledge is the result of that fusion of collaboration (peer confirmation and interest gauging), decision support (analytic review of the facts), process modeling (context and flow logic), and project planning (understanding what actions can be taken).

What a person “knows” about the external world, they know through a fusion of all of these cognitive modes at the same time.

To test this assertion, find something not entirely personal that you feel that you strongly “know” that does not include one of these modes.

In the current business environment, when a situation becomes more complicated, this natural human activity is sub-divided into the separate activities of “collaboration”, “decision support”, “process modeling” and “project planning”, and supported with predominantly non-overlapping “information” tools.

These tools work effectively in their own domains. However, by virtue of specialization, they have lost the ability to fully support the natural ability of people to “communicate to agree on what to do together”.

As a result, when people use these tools in group meetings, they don’t end up “knowing”. And when they don’t “know” they don’t produce alignment on detailed processes and plans. Instead, they produce the conclusion: “Let’s look at it again a next week”. Or for better or worse, “Let’s go ahead with what we’ve got”.

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