Norman Johnson
From InterSciWiki
Norm Johnson (from Santa Fe, Los Alamos Labs and Referentia Systems) will be visiting UCLA on Friday, April 18th, and giving the bi-weekly 4UC HCS Video Conference from here from 1:30pm to 3pm in Powell 285.
A Landscape for Navigating Leadership in Human Complex Systems
Norman L. Johnson
Referentia Systems, Inc
norman [at] santafe.edu
and
Jennifer H. Watkins
Los Alamos National Laboratory
jhw [at] lanl.gov
One of the major achievements of complexity studies is the greater understanding of how global performance arises from interactions between individuals in a collective, revealed in many systems: social insects to financial markets to Internet recommender systems. In these times of faster change and greater interdependency, the understanding of collective performance and robustness is essential to not only know where we’ve been, but also how to address the future challenges, as expressed in groups, organizations, nations, or simply humanity. In this talk, we’ll confront what many consider to the most frequent failure point of modern humans complex systems, Leadership – certainly one of the most messy and unsatisfying areas, either in academics or applications. To motivate this undertaking, reflect on how much leadership is adapting to the dynamic and complex systems in which they must function. Modern leadership is now required to address a diversity of contributions, even to the extreme of having no “leadership” and simply facilitating and implementing emergent solutions from the diverse collective.
We propose a two-dimensional leadership landscape that identifies new frontiers of leadership and is consistent with past leadership models. One dimension is for where leadership occurs – ranging from a single individual to the entire collective – and the other is for how leadership arises – the degree to which leadership is predictable by the structure of the system or unpredictable, opportunistic and/or emergent. For simplicity this landscape is divided into four quadrants; two of quadrants are identified with traditional centralized leadership models: 1) power-based, hierarchical and/or predictable leadership resources and 2) the opportunistic, unpredictable, and/or emergent hero or leader. We argue that the two quadrants identified with distributed leadership are the frontiers of leadership. The distributed quadrant for high structure is identified with collective leadership systems – such as traditional systems (e.g., direct democracies) and newly developing information technologies that are being adopted as more reliable and accurate leadership resources (e.g., prediction markets). The final quadrant, associated with emergent leadership from diverse collectives, is identified as the newest frontier for leadership resources, particularly for the most challenging of human complex systems. Many familiar examples of academic studies and real applications will be used to populate the landscape.
Biography – March 2008
Dr. Norman L. Johnson
Chief Scientist
Referentia Systems, Inc
norman [at] referntia.com
Norman L. Johnson is currently Chief Scientist at Referentia Systems, a minority-owned business that develops advanced technology solutions to complex problems in the areas of defense and homeland security. He received his B.S. from the University of California, Davis and his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Johnson is on leave of absence from Los Alamos National Laboratory where he served for 25 years, most recently as Deputy Group Leader of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group in the Theoretical Division. Before this, he was Deputy Program Manager for three years for the Biological Threat Reduction Program Office, under Dr. I. Gary Resnick, and guided the development and execution of a $40 million program in the all areas of biothreats, from genomics to sensor systems to system modelling to operations. As a project manger, he oversaw projects that were challenging and often considered to be in the “too hard to do” box. The key to success was enabling diverse teams to break limiting barriers and discover synergistic advantages of diverse contributions. His published research covers multiphase flows, inertially confined fusion, combustion modelling, self-organizing knowledge creation, diversity in collective systems, and developmental theories of evolution. His current areas of interest are biodefense, epidemiology – particularly pandemic influenza, and modeling the dynamics of social collectives and social identity. He recently co-chaired a study on biothreats for the National Academy of Science. He is the recipient of a variety of honors, including a Department of Defense Programs Award of Excellence, a Department of Energy Award of Excellence for one of the top 23 DOE scientific projects from 1977 to 2000, and multiple awards from industry.
