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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
OrgViz™
Complexity Modeling Service Announced
Santa Fe, New Mexico, September
18, 2002 - RedfishGroup (http://www.redfish.com)
is pleased to announce its collaboration with prominent
ethnographer, Dr. Michael Agar,
author of Professional
Stranger and Language
Shock. The collaboration will take the form of
a joint service offering called OrgViz™.
The OrgViz™ Approach Good models, agent-based or any other
kind, have to be anchored in reality. The more anchored
they are, the more “natural” they feel,
and the more easily they let you talk about both
the model and the real situation at the same time.
OrgViz features an important first
step in the modeling process to achieve this natural
fit. That step involves looking at real situations
before the modeling
begins. We learn from those who know the situations best--the people who are
actually involved in them. This step, fieldwork, draws on approaches based
on a hundred years of experience in anthropology
and sociology. Such approaches
were designed to investigate how a particular corner of the world works by
learning the perspectives and practices of those
who occupy it.
Fieldwork yields folk-models, a term
of art in cognitive science and anthropology. Folk-models
are agent-based models in living color. They show
us how people
construct their situations out of a limited set of rules, applied in part
by rote, in part
through improvisation in a particular context. They show how they improvise
and change when their environments change, and how the system-wide “indicators” emerge
as a result.
Fieldwork builds on intensive work
with a few cases. Based on that first step, an agent-based
model is created, a model that incorporates the folk-models
and their parameters. The agent-based model allows experimentation and
exploration.
How would the indicators emerge if the rules changed, or if changes in
the parameters
occurred? What would the agents do, and what would the system indicators
look
like as a result, if an unexpected event occurred?
Finally, the agent-based model is
translated into an accessible visual form, a process
we call visualization. The visual model is then validated
together
with those who provided the original folk model. Alternative rules and
parameters are explored to determine what is feasible. The emergent indicators
are seen
to change with those alternative ways of acting. Based on this validation
work, additional fieldwork is conducted to fine-tune the agent-based
model
so that
it better corresponds with the situations that it represents.
The Process
This process—fieldwork,
agent-based model, visualization, validation—is
repeated until the visual model explains the working of the folk models
and fits the organizational context. The iterative nature of the OrgViz
approach in fact
corresponds to a basic characteristic of the fieldwork tradition in
anthropology and sociology.
The visual model can then be incorporated
into organizational activities, with an emphasis
on how the agent-based model, and the folk model
that
it represents,
can learn and adapt to a variety of circumstances. Among many other
potential applications, the model can show effects of different strategies
for
coordinating work and resource flow, or it can allow exploration
of alternative futures
to assist in decision-making, or it can help train new and old organizational
participants
in a simulated environment.
To request a demonstration of OrgViz™,
contact us:
contact: Stephen Guerin
voice: (505)577-5828
email: OrgViz@redfish.com
RedfishGroup
624 Agua Fria Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501
About Dr. Michael Agar
Michael Agar
currently works out of Ethknoworks in Takoma Park,
MD. He has faculty appointments at the University
of Maryland, College Park and the International Institute
for Qualitative Methodology at the University of Alberta,
as well as an appointment as Senior Research Scientist
at Friends Research International in Baltimore. He
is the author of over 100 books, chapters and articles
that describe or apply ethnography, including his
recent chapter on the topic in the International Encyclopedia
of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. His work spans
areas as diverse as intercultural communication, language
and society, public health, transportation, and organization
theory, and he has conducted organizational development
work for businesses, for educational institutions,
and for public health. His two most recent books are
The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction
to Ethnography (second edition) and Language Shock:
Understanding the Culture of Conversation.
About RedfishGroup
RedfishGroup is a loosely-coupled organization
of complexity researchers, software developers and
business professionals applying the emerging science
of Complex Adaptive Systems to difficult problems
in business and government. RedfishGroup's core value
is in the design, modeling and visualization of self-organizing
systems. RedfishGroup was founded in 1991 by Stephen
Guerin and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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