Everywhere I turn this year, I bump into the meme of complexity . This is disturbing. Why? Because complexity challenges the bedrock of Isaac Newton, rationality, cause and effect, and an ordered universe. Nonetheless, I am buying the conecept because my old worldview no longer maps to reality. This new world defies logic. Anything can happen. Uncertainty abounds.

Letting curiosity take me where it will, I've been studying complex adaptive systems, social networking, contextual collaboration, content aggregation, value networks, realtime enterprise, Web Services, business process modeling, and the economic return from intangible assets. At first glance, this appears to be a dog's breakfast of unrelated subjects.

Last week, driving home from the annual think tank at IBM's Almaden Research Center, the threads began to connect, like a jigsaw puzzle magically assembling itself. MIT's Tom Malone had made a convincing case for new models of business organization: extreme decentralization with bottom-up management.The Workflow Institute has been finding parallels in the evolution of computing and workflow learning.

Organizations without bosses, software without programmers, a web without a weaver, and learning without instructors. Control is migrating from the top to the bottom in commerce, computing, and culture. My focus at Internet Time Group is shifting to helping people, particularly workers, be productive and happy in this new world.

If you share those interests, please get in touch.

Sam Adkins and I are delighted to announce that Gloria Gery has become our first Workflow Institute Fellow. Gloria invented Electronic Performance Support. Her concept of intrinsic EPSS was the forerunner of Workflow Learning. At long last, technology has caught up with Gloria's vision.

Workflow Institute now has a blog. If you want to keep up with real time learning, please check there.

We are busy as beavers doing market studies, developing sales tools, and tracking Web Services. However, since almost all of this is under NDA, don't expect to see the results for months to come.

The eLearning Forum is no more. In late January it morphed into Emergent Learning Forum. Here's why. This is a 17-minute presentation in Macromedia Breeze. Click a slide title to hop around if you like. In short, eLearning has become mainstream. We would rather focus on the future. Expect fireworks.

Membership is still free!

Following the instructions on many Berkeley bumperstickers, sometimes Emergent Learning Forum will "Think Globally, Act Locally." Instead of blowing half a day down in Silicon Valley, this month's meetings will take place informally, in neighborhood pubs. If you're in the East Bay, please join me for a very local gathering of people interested in learning the evening of April Fool's Day. The place: LaVal's on Euclid (Northside), Berkeley. The time: 5:30 - 7:30. The agenda: networking, fun, whatever you bring to the party.