 I‘ll be out of town and offline for a couple of days, so I thought I’d take a day to think about where to go next with How to Save the World. Therefore please consider this as a kind of ‘open thread’ and tell me what you’d like to see here next. And to provoke your thinking here are four more questions to ponder:
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March 31, 2005
Five Questions
March 30, 2005
How Corporations Became Culturally Dysfunctional and Why Simple Solutions Won’t Fix Them
 The Idea: We’ve already been told that corporations are psychopathic. There’s evidence they are also culturally dysfunctional, an inappropriate construct to do what they were designed to do, or could do. But because they’re part of a complex system, there are no easy or imminent fixes.
Joel Bakan’s book (and film, which will be shown on the CBC next week BTW) The Corporation, argues that corporations have evolved into psychopathic entities. But their reputation is not just one of anti-social behaviour. Corporations are also seen by many as lumbering, inflexible, un-innovative creatures. I thought it might be worth exploring why this is so. Recently I’ve been studying and writing about the difference between complicated systems (those that lend themselves to cause-and-effect analysis) and complex systems (where there are so many variables the best you can do is look for meaningful patterns and correlations). Corporations were initially designed as a ’shell’ that would allow a group of workers to collectively raise capital, add and delete members easily, and, later, to protect workers who were associated with partners who engaged in criminal, negligent or fraudulent activities from liability for those partners’ actions. The concept of ’shareholding’ met these requirements. The interests of shareholders, initially the workers in the organization, were subordinated to the interests of creditors — the worker-shareholders ’shared’ what was left after the corporation’s debts were paid. Several consequences of ’shareholdings’ were probably unanticipated. Some worker-shareholders could easily be given more shares than others, to reflect a greater time or financial commitment to the enterprise. And some workers, and even managers, could simply be treated as another class of creditor — paid a fixed return on their ‘investment’ of time in the organization, but given no ’shares’ in the profits at all. And if some investors were willing to take the risks, they could be given shares in return for a cash infusion in the company, even if they played no active role in the corporation at all. And since they were inessential to the operations of the company, why not allow these passive shareholders to use these shares as collateral for loans, or even trade their shares with others, creating a kind of ’stock market’ that would allow the rich gentry with lots of money they could afford to lose, to gamble with each other on which of these passive shareholdings would pay ‘dividends’ and which would be useful only as wallpaper? The rest, as they say, is history. Corporations are no longer run for the well-being of their workers, but to maximize the profits paid to their mostly-absentee shareholders. Many corporations have no workers at all — they are merely ‘holding companies’ that own shares of other corporations. Shareholders feel no responsibility to the workers, the people who generate the value of the shares, and whose wages are increasingly unconnected to the value they produce, as the value is all paid out to the shareholders. What has emerged as a result is hierarchy. Managers are hired by the shareholders to employ as few workers as possible and pay those workers as little as possible, and to provide the fewest and most inexpensive benefits and facilities possible, so that more of the profits are left for the shareholders. Managers are therefore remunerated in inverse proportion to the well-being of the workers and the communities in which they live. Disparity between the well-being of workers and that of shareholders grows without limit, with managers as the ‘middle-men’ to ensure that this happens and to keep workers in line. The physical slavery of early civilization, enforced by warlords and feudal fiefs, is hence replaced by economic wage-slavery, enforced by management. Not surprisingly, workers who might have otherwise been motivated to work hard out of self-interest now seek ways to do the least work possible for their wages, and counter the force of shareholders with their own self-organized bodies, unions. The education system is enlisted to convince workers not born into the privileged elite that if they work hard they too can become managers, and the hierarchy is made more multi-leveled to provide the illusion of ‘progress’ towards that goal. If the corporation is large enough this fraud can be perpetrated almost indefinitely, as workers spend a lifetime chasing the carrots up increasingly steep (and increasingly handsomely rewarded) steps of the ladder towards management. And some workers can even be given a token number of shares in the company, to bamboozle them into believeing that they are also real shareholders in the organization. In each industry, the largest corporations, while still feigning competitiveness, merge, acquire and otherwise band together in oligopolies, acting in the best interests of shareholders to eliminate real competition so that upstarts who share the rewards of their labour more equitably with workers and with customers can gain no foothold in the market. Advertising is introduced to provide the illusion of real choice and competition. As we all know, however, pyramid schemes are unsustainable, and this one is no exception. Given enough time, workers begin to realize that the cost of living is rising faster than their wages and that their standard of living is actually falling while that of shareholders is rising astronomically. Financial corporations, seeing an opportunity to push the crumbling pyramid a bit further, start offering huge amounts of credit to workers (using deceptive advertising to understate the cost of this credit), so that workers can ‘afford’ to buy ever more of the overpriced crap the corporations are producing. Corporations turn to outsourcing and offshoring in the endless quest to reduce costs so that shareholders’ wealth can keep rising even though the market is saturated and debt levels are sky-high. Governments and media are bought by the now obscenely-wealthy shareholders and paid to parrot the fraud and hype of ‘free’ trade, ‘free’ markets and globalization, to even further deregulate, subsidize and undertax corporations, and to pass laws so that that corporations cannot be sued by workers but workers can be sued by corporations. If the growth stumbles, the stock market, which is now a Ponzi scheme that demands endless double-digit annual profit increases, will collapse, taking the whole economic house of cards built up around it with it. The result is that today corporations are huge, anti-democratic, unconcerned about (or even averse to) the well-being of employees and the health of the environment, market-distorting and addicted to growth. In short, they are culturally dysfunctional – working at odds with the best interests of people. Note that there was no conspiracy here, no master plan to make the lowly medieval corporation designed to allow workers to raise capital funds collectively into today’s Frankenstein monster. It has been an evolution, an emergence set in motion by unexpected consequences of the creation of the useful concept of shareholdings, and then affected over centuries by thousands of social, political, economic and cultural events and behaviours, from divine right to the New Deal, from the 19th-century error in US law that gave American and then all corporations the rights of personhood, to the end of physical slavery, the dislocation of labour in the world wars, the emancipation of women and the beginnings of the Two-Income Trap.
There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that, while we are responsible for the emergence of the modern dysfunctional corporation (and all the other endemic social, political, environmental and economic ills of our time and culture), we should not feel guilty about it. Organization and activism are extremely unlikely to change these things, because they are evolutions of complex systems, not simple cause-and-effect ‘problems’. Just becoming aware of these things and understanding the need for change and acting individually with modest changes in our behaviour (mostly things readers of this blog have probably already done) is really all you can do, and the effect of us individually changing our behaviours could, in time, precipitate positive change to the whole system. The whole of a complex system is nothing more, or less, than the sum of the parts. You just have to let go of the illusion that anyone is (or even could be) in control and enjoy the ride. If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, when we reach the tipping point, the earth will move. The bad news is that it’s futile to try to speed up the process. There’s a reason your instincts probably told you that getting out the vote for Kerry was a worthwhile effort (it almost worked — the tipping point was close), but protesting against globalization was not. There’s a reason your instincts might have told you not to even bother voting for Kerry — when it’s time, it’s time. People change slowly. That’s our nature. Unfortunately, that means that with our impact on this planet being so massive and accelerating at such a phenomenal rate, it is increasingly unlikely that we can change direction quickly enough to avert catastrophe. So my new paradox is this: The more I learn about ‘complex thinking’ the happier I am about just blogging and talking and spreading ideas and information as my part to make the world a better place, and the less guilt-ridden I am about not doing more to ’save the world’ — and the less hopeful I am that it will save itself in time. |
March 29, 2005
Domestic Security: Some Complex Thinking
| The Idea: Maybe the reason we can’t agree on how to deal with terrorism is that we’re all using illogical, inappropriate and overly simplistic thinking. If we used ‘complex thinking’ would we stop arguing and start getting somewhere? It is likely that the Department of Homeland Security (which is now the largest state-run organization on the planet) will go down in history as the poorest investment in human history — an operation that has churned through trillions of dollars (possibly enough to eradicate world poverty and a dozen of the biggest killer diseases on the planet at the same time), and accomplished absolutely nothing. The insidious nature of such ’security’ programs is that no one can ever say for sure they haven’t or might not yet prevent a catastrophe — US government intelligence is now a black hole that sucks up money and from which nothing ever escapes. A recent article by John Tirman argues that progressives have missed a great opportunity to stake out an alternative strategy for security that would be modestly less expensive than the conservative strategy that has been used since Bush took office, more effective, and provide a host of other social and environmental benefits in the process. The gist of his argument is shown in the first three columns below. I’ve added as a fourth column the preventative strategy that I have argued for on these pages, which has also been advocated in a number of European newspapers.
My recent study of complex systems (and the politics of international terrorism are nothing if not complex) and the approaches to dealing with them have given me pause. All of the agendas above are designed for complicated systems, not complex ones. They all presume to have a monopoly on understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships behind acts of terror. The very terms ‘deterrence’, ‘preemption’ and ‘prevention’ are rooted in complicated systems theory, and are meaningless and perhaps even dangerous when applied to complex systems. They are all about trying to understand and exercise control over a system that is simply unknowable and uncontrollable. Perhaps this is why neocons and all previous imperialists have striven to impose homogeneity over global culture, with the unattainable objective of making us all so much alike that civilization becomes a predictable, merely complicated system. Diversity is a dirty word to conservatives. Progressives support diversity as a matter of principle, but have been notoriously poor at understanding its implications — resulting in bizarre behaviours like ‘political correctness’, which no one seems to like. Here’s a quote from Dave Snowden talking over on AOK about another social issue where conservatives and progressives disagree completely and have tried to impose policies based on different cause-and-effect oversimplifications. The issue is capital punishment: Order in complex systems emerges from the interaction of multiple identities over time, within boundaries around attractors. If we want to see change then it will arise from multiple bottom-up initiatives which change the context and make certain types of negative pattern unsustainable. To take a political example, capital punishment has become largely an unsustainable approach for European governments over the last fifty years, but the same phenomenon has not yet impacted on the bulk of the US (or several regimes who the US regard as uncivilized). In Europe this is a pattern that has emerged from multiple interactions: cases of the wrong people being convicted, a gradual change to liberalization in multiple fields of human thinking which create a framework within which leaders and politicians are able to operate. For some reason this has not happened in the US despite similar evidence plus the general data on racial/social bias on who actually gets killed (lets not use the word execute: it hides the reality). With the notable exception of the film Dead Man Walking most interactions in US society create a different type of entrainment which is the opposite of the European position. From a personal perspective I feel a physical sense of horror at the whole idea that you can take a human being and kill them in some public ritual, but that is partly because of the society in which I grew up, the political influences of a family deeply committed to politics and an historical age which allowed that thinking to take place.
Now this is not an argument that Europe is more enlightened that the US because it isnít (although it is more liberal), it’s an argument that many different things are connected and social systems arise from multiple interactions which cannot be directed top down, and it would not make a scrap of difference if you changed the mind set of senior leaders because their patterns personal and collective will respond to the emergent patterns of the societies in which they operate. The Grameen bank case that I quote in the article is a great example of complex thinking ñ its bottom up, no one changed leaders to some model of thinking, someone just went out and did something simple which created change ñ the more people do that the more chance the world has. Apply this thinking to the Schiavo case and it will make your head spin. The article cited above explains the Grameen bank case as follows: The Grameen Bank was created in Bangladesh to provide small loans to poor people. The name Grameen comes from the Bangla word for village. This is a market which the conventional banking system finds unattractive. Most commercial and private loans are based on credit scoring, an ordered concept in which the characteristics of good and bad debtors are identified and used as predictors and therefore controls for future lending. This increases the cost of lending as the various processes have to be administered, and small loans this become uneconomic. In the Grameen Bank everyone who took out a loan was required to be a part of a self regulating borrowersí group in which each member of the group had to take responsibility for the debts of the others. This simple rule which costs little to administer produced a 97% repayment rate comparable with best achievements of the large banks; there are now over two million clients of the Grameen bank and the approach has proved both scalable and portable. I find the Grameen Bank an inspiring case, and an illustration of the great benefits that complex or unordered thinking can bring. Managing the starting conditions not an idealized end state can produce lower cost more effective solutions. Complex thinking is not a nice to have in modern management, it is a fundamental necessity. It is a new and exciting way of thinking about the world
Some of the techniques for ‘complex thinking’ he suggests:
So how might we apply ‘complex thinking’ to domestic security? Rather than trying to solve causality, or rank and address all of the potential security risks, how could we discover and ‘disrupt the patterns’ of acts of terror? Does this imply that until/unless we can discover the patterns, it’s a waste of time and money doing anything? Decentralizing targets and diversifying sources of supply would seem to be a good way to build resilience into critical systems. What else could we do? If we acknowledge that the barriers we have erected at borders are unstable (and next to useless for combating terrorism, while particularly effective at disrupting commerce and tourism), are there other barriers we could use instead? Are there ‘attractors’ we could put in place that would draw those with an axe to grind against the West elsewhere (Iraq seems to be an unexpectedly good attractor these days)? What kinds of simulation could we run that might help us see what the impact on terrorist activity might be of various interventions — would building good schools in the Mideast help or hurt for example? And what kind of stories can we surface and tell that would inform the decisions of those inclined to loathe us and act on that loathing? |
March 28, 2005
A Proposal to Make Blogs More Conversational
 The Idea: A proposal to have hosted ‘conversations’ on blogs to allow more cross-pollination of ideas and more interactivity between bloggers, in order to bring good ideas to fruition. Ottawa economist Jeremy Heigh has been exchanging thoughts with me about how to make blogs more conversational. There seems to be a growing consensus in all eight communities that I’m part of — natural philosophers/environmentalists, business advisers/theorists/entrepreneurs, technophiles/social networkers, progressives, artists/storytellers, Salon bloggers, Canadian bloggers, and physical neighbours — that context-rich conversations are the key to learning, to understanding, to persuading, to knowledge transfer, and to achieving grassroots change, but that weblogs are not, currently, very conversational. Jeremy’s idea, which he originally conceived as a mechanism to get bloggers some income for writing, was to ask a specific group of bloggers to post their articles or thoughts on a specific series of topics or questions, to a hosted site. I think it’s a great idea, but I’d be tempted to push it in a particular direction, and abandon the idea of using it to generate revenue (at least directly — if the conversation generated enough ‘wow’ it might lead to revenue opportunities for the participants). I’m not a big fan of debates, which seem more focused on scoring points than surfacing insights, and which are inherently adversarial and non-collaborative. They may be entertaining, but they’re too competitive to be really productive. I also think James Surowiecki has staked out quite clearly the things that crowds, not small groups of ‘experts’ can do best — making decisions from a discrete set of alternatives, making predictions, and solving coordination problems. So I would want the thrust of the ‘conversations’ to be highly creative and collaborative activities — brainstorming, model-building, teaching, designing, organizing — the types of activities that small, informed, diverse groups do well. Here’s a first cut at how I would envision it working:
And here are the inevitable questions:
Painting “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell |
March 27, 2005
The Geese of Beaver Bog
 The Idea: Bernd Heinrich’s new book will change the way you look at nature. I‘ve written about several of biologist Bernd Heinrich’s books before, notably Mind of the Raven, Winter World and Why We Run. His latest book The Geese of Beaver Bog is less scientific than these previous works, more of a personal memoir, or even a love story. It is the anecdotal record of four years observing the Canada Geese in the bog system near his Vermont home. With painstaking effort, Heinrich learned to recognize goose individuals by their facial markings, and then by their behaviours. This began inadvertently when he suddenly became the step-parent of Peep, a gosling that had been hatched by the penned geese of Heinrich’s neighbour. It continued for four years as each year Peep returned ‘home’ to Beaver Bog, and introduced and acclimatized Heinrich to more of the geese in her ‘flock’. I won’t spoil the heart-warming and astonishing end of the story. What I want to do in this article is tell you some of the remarkable learnings and discoveries that Heinrich made by observing Peep and her ‘family’.
All of these behaviours, encoded in goose DNA, are selected for in evolutionary terms to ensure the safety, survival, and success of the species as a whole, and sustain the balance and integrity of the multiple ecosystems of which they are a part. We have much to learn from them. The community in which I live has three regular ’superfamily’ sites where a few weeks from now we will again see these noisy and adorable communities, who are so accustomed to our community that they know we will stop our cars and wait for the long waddling rows to cross the road in front of us, and who have no fear of us or our dogs. I’m on my way outside now to check out a prime nesting site (an island on ‘our’ pond). |
March 26, 2005
Protesters Call for End to Canada’s Annual Slaughter of Conservatives
| The Idea: I couldn’t resist after reading this. I’m kidding. Really.
The snow and ice of Canada is set to turn red with blood once again as hunters prepare to embark on an operation to club or shoot up to 320,000 conservatives. The government quota has been increased tenfold for the next three years as populations of conservatives in some of Canada’s most isolated areas have spiked, following the demise of their natural predators, and as unemployment of hunters and fishermen has soared due to overexploitation of Canada’s natural resources. Pointing to the appointment of disgraced Canadian conservative businessman Conrad Black to the British House of Lords, British and European trade critics have accused Canada of “dumping” their excess unwanted conservatives there. “We have enough of our own to deal with”, said Germany’s trade minister, “We don’t need Canada sending us their bloated conservative carcasses. There is absolutely no use for them.” Political rights campaigners have begun a boycott of Canadian bacon, maple sugar and other products and this year’s hunt is set to be as controversial as before. The controversy is inextricably linked to the visceral images of hapless, slow-moving conservatives being clubbed to death and the ice floes turning red with their blood and brains. Hunters say that using a spiked club or hakapik is a humane method but opponents say the conservatives are often skinned alive and left to die, pointing out as an example the treatment of former conservative leader and now deputy leader Peter MacKay at a recent conservative gathering. “I think it comes down to being a values issue,” said Ralph Wingnut, a spokeswoman for the International Fund for Conservative Welfare (IFCW) which is opposed to the hunt. Despite the efforts of activists, hunting of Canadian conservatives has long been a way of life for some. “There is really nothing new about this year’s hunt,” said Roger Wilco, a Liberal government spokesman. “They’re really responsible for their own demise”, Wilco added. “They breed like flies, and they’re constantly attacking each other. We’re actually doing them a favour by putting them out of their misery before they starve or kill each other. And they eat like pigs — we think they’re responsible for the decline of our fisheries, and maybe even for Mad Cow”. Many conservatives are found in Alberta and British Columbia, where two cases of Mad Cow disease have recently been uncovered. In the US, large cattle herds and conservatives are also known to frequent the same areas. The conservative-hunters insist that their actions are not cruel. “These doddering beasts are not intelligent, they don’t even know what’s happening to them”, said local conservative-hunter Jack Hoff. “They have very tiny brains, and they have repeatedly shown that they are incapable of feeling pain, or anything else”. Canadian conservative leader Stephen Harper compounded conservatives’ misfortunes this week, praising George Bush as a great leader, and saying Canada made a mistake to refuse to participate in the US Missile Defence program and the Iraq War. “I would have sent all five members of Canada’s armed forced to Iraq”, he insisted. He also opposed Canada’s approval of the Kyoto Accord, and is threatening to force the minority Liberal government into an election over that issue. Critics pounced on Harper’s statements as further evidence that conservatives are incapable of sentient thought or feeling. The government insists that the conservative hunt protects against overpopulation of the species and provides jobs in economically depressed parts of the country. “With the demise of the fisheries industry in Canada [due to overfishing], we needed to find something else for the people in the industry to kill”, said former fisheries minister (now minister without portfolio) Wilbur Wackjob. “These are very proud people. They have a great history of indiscriminately overharvesting Canada’s natural resources, and that’s something this government supports.” The government is also investigating a West Coast conservative hunt to provide much needed jobs for BC’s loggers, since aggressive clear-cutting of Canada’s old growth forests has decimated the province’s natural beauty and forestry employment is suffering. “The use of chain saws will be much more effective than the clubs used in the East Coast hunt”, a spokesman said. He defended the proposal, pointing out that Canada’s mismanaged forestry industry is predominantly owned by conservative American conglomerates. “That just shows how brainless they are”, the spokesman added. “They won’t feel a thing.” |
March 25, 2005
Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?
| The Idea: Three Words: Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration, are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.
Recently I specified the requirements for collaboration: Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively
but I didn’t define the term. The term is being cheapened (”collaboration tools”, “collaborative environments”) to the point where in many people’s minds it’s indistinguishable from cooperation and coordination, which are less elaborate and less ambitious collective undertakings. How can we differentiate between these terms in a meaningful way? Here are a few ways that I think they differ:
Where do teams, partnerships, think-tanks, open-source and joint ventures fit in this schema? The general definition of a team is an interdependent group, which suggests that collaborative groups are teams, coordinated groups are not, and cooperative groups may or may not be. Partnerships and joint ventures are both, I would argue, primarily cooperative undertakings, whose objectives evolve over time. Open-source developments can run the gamut among all three types of undertaking. So theoretically can think-tanks, though in reality most think-tank work is solitary and not really collaborative. Even the work of scientists on major international projects is, I am told, substantially individual, with a lot more coordination and cooperation than true collaboration. The last two rows of the above chart may seem somewhat paradoxical. It is relatively easy to coordinate the activities of a ‘virtual’ group that must work remotely and asynchronously, and much harder (but not impossible) to achieve virtual collaboration, especially if the collaborators already know each other. But once the ‘design’ of the collective work-product is done, the implementation work of a coordinated group is usually very explicit, while the implementation work of collaborators is necessarily more improvisational. So what? Well, in many cases, collective work may be dysfunctional because it is organized as one of these types of undertaking when what is needed is another type. Or, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the collective effort, the wrong resources and tools are provided, or the preconditions for success are not met. And collaboration is not always a better approach than coordination or cooperation. In situations where the Wisdom of Crowds is valuable (prediction, optimization and coordination problems), independence of ‘crowd’ members is essential, and cooperative or collaborative processes can lead to ‘groupthink’ and actually detract from the crowd’s ‘wisdom’. There is nothing more frustrating than being invited into a supposedly empowered, collaborative team and then being charged with a task that needs nothing more than a good project coordinator. It all comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. The ‘Purpose of Using This Approach” row of this chart is therefore perhaps the most important. A hammer, a wrench and a screwdriver are not interchangeable tools, and none is best for all situations. |
March 24, 2005
Appreciative Inquiry, Complex Systems, and the Four Practices of Open Space
 The Idea: A combination of the Appreciative Inquiry approach, Four Practices skills and attitudes, and Open Space meeting protocols might be the ideal combination for dealing with complex systems — which we are learning most systems are.I was initially put off Appreciative Inquiry by the name: “Appreciative” sounded too close to “affirmation” and “positive thinking”, while “inquiry” refers to more formal investigations driven by mandate, versus “enquiry” which is a more fluid process driven by curiosity. But I was provoked by blogger Chris Corrigan, with whom I had an astonishing Skype conversation yesterday, to take a closer look. Principal author of ‘AI’ David Cooperrider describes it as nothing less than “the end of problem-solving”. And Cooperrider does indeed use words like “life-affirming” and “spiritual” to describe AI. If you wade through this you get to the approach, described as follows (I’m paraphrasing extensively since I find some of his terminology unhelpful):
Cooperrider uses as an illustration an organizational system and a challenge of dealing with rampant sexual harassment in it. The initial problem-focused Topic Choiceó”How do we reduce sexual harassment in the workplace”, is replaced by the more visionary, strategic, human and affirmative “How do we develop a model of quality cross-gender relationships in the workplace.” The process you then follow to explore that topic (or those topicsóthere can be more than one) and realize the vision has evolved substantially since AI was first developed, and is very different from the prescriptive process used in traditional problem-solving approaches. The best way to appreciate the approach (it’s deliberately not rigid enough to be called a methodology) is to look at the four skills/attitudes you need to acquire to facilitate or participate in AI effectivelyówhich Chris explains as the Four Practices of Open Space, citing his colleague Michael Herman (no paraphrasing from me this time):
Each of these ‘practices’ can be conducted holistically throughout the four stages of AI. There is an enormous sense of personal responsibility in this, as contrasted with the high level of structure and assignment of tasks in problem-solving methodologies. There must be passion around the topic to keep participants engaged — and permission for those that lose that passion to take time out or move to rekindle it (the Law of Two Feet). And respect is a critical componentó in my discussion with Chris yesterday I was so enthused by his explanations of this that I often interrupted him. He was kind enough not to point that out to me, and he never interrupted me. He was practicing what he was trying to teach me. And the medium by which most of this is carried out isóand this is criticalóconversation. Chris is an awesome conversationalist. Every word he says is nuanced by and guided by the Four Practices. I learned more in an hour of conversation with him (including learning about myself) than I have ever learned in a week of intensive study. And the critical content of the conversation is never analysis or argument, but contextual stories. If you’re not familiar with the concept of Open Space meetings, please read this short explanation now. I think you should then be able to see how the Appreciative Inquiry approach, the Four Practices, and the Open Space meeting protocols fit together. I don’t know that there’s an umbrella name for these three components, but let’s just call them The Approach.
Coincidentally (or perhaps not?) this month’s running dialogue on the AOK Knowledge Management forum is led by Dave Snowden of the Cynefin Centre on the topic of sense-making in complex systems. Complicated systems are what we have generally assumed we are dealing with in business and in local ecosystems. Methodologies can be developed following sufficient analysis to solve the problems of how to intervene in the system to achieve the desired change or correction. Senge’s ’systems thinking’, which I have used extensively in these pages, is a wonderful tool for dealing with complicated systems, where the cause and effect of things is not obvious or simple, but is knowable. Sense, analyze and respond. Complex systems are another matter entirely. In such systems no cause and effect is knowableóthere are just too many, perhaps an infinite number of, inter-related variables. When consultants’ analyses and solutions fail to solve a business problem, or scientists’ prescriptions or economists’ forecasts don’t pan out, it’s often because they’ve tried to use approaches meant for complicated systems to address complex ones, and have (deliberately or inadvertently) oversimplified or overlooked some or many of the variables. Especially since the acceptance of the Gaia theory, that all life (and all matter) on Earth is part of a single, complex system, we are realizing that most of what we thought were complicated systems are in fact complex, not completely knowable. This is galling to scientists, rationalists, business leaders, and the rest of us that are solution-oriented. Even the human body, it turns out, is more of a complex system than a merely complicated one. And each attempt to find a unifying theory or a fundamental constituent of all matter or the precise size and shape and nature and age of the universe leads to the discovery of more exceptions and variables, and realization that most things are more complex than they appear. This is where The Approach comes in. It is the embodiment of Snowden’s probe, sense, respond method for dealing with complexity. It uses discovery (probing), with an acknowledgment that not all can be known, rather than analysis. It looks at design as the consideration of possibilities and options instead of the creation of plans and blueprints. It seeks to realize a vision through the knowledge-sharing and ideation of conversations, rather than to do so by implementing an action plan and assigning ‘who will do what by when’. It trusts individuals to act upon the emerging understanding of the group and in the collective interest, improvisationally, unhampered by orders and hierarchical channels, rather than prescribing precisely what must be done. The Open Space meeting method optimizes the learnings and teachings of the group instead of hamstringing them with structure and process. And the Four Practices serve to guide and show each individual how they can most effectively contribute to that collective learning and doing process. No ‘command and control’, no ’solutions’. Just powerful learning, collaboration, and doing. Of course, none of this is new. It’s been used by aboriginal communities for centuries to guide decision-making and steer communities in their collective best interest. As I keep saying, there are no new ideas, just the (re-)discovery and application of old ones in creative and appropriate ways, and the unlearning of all the myths and misinformation we have been led, quite voluntarily and innocently, to believe. I had just finished designing and sharing with some of my colleagues a quite elaborate model for a Solution Centre/Think Tank. Oh, well, back to the drawing board. |
March 23, 2005
A Short History of Progress
 The Idea: Archaeologist-historian-novelist Ronald Wright summarizes and analyzes six spectacular civilizational collapses from throughout our history, and reads us the riot act about what we need to do now to avoid another collapse, this time a global one.
It is impossible to avoid comparisons between Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, which was broadcast by CBC last November as the 1994 Massey Lecture series, and Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which came out only a few weeks later. Both books describe incidents of civilizational collapse from human history (Wright covers Easter Island, Sumeria, Rome, Maya, Egypt and China), both draw lessons from those stories, and both point out how similar our 21st century global civilization is to these examples just prior to their collapse. Both stress that, for the first time since we arrived on this planet three million years ago, a single culture is so ubiquitous on the planet that its collapse could bring not only the end of a dynasty, but species extinction. Both identify the factors that presage civilizational collapse. The difference (besides brevity — Wright’s book is a mere 132 pages, excluding the 70 pages of exhaustive notes and references, with 90% fewer words than Diamond’s) is one of tone. As I reported in my review of Collapse, Diamond lays the responsibility for preventing collapse clearly at the feet of the masses, and asserts it can be done. Wright’s tone is considerably darker, and he sees the challenge as considerably greater.
This does not bode well for our ability to think, invent, or collaborate our way out of the crises that threaten to topple today’s civilization. We have repeatedly fallen victim to what Wright calls “progress traps” — collective judgement errors that lead us to believe that if a small amount of X is a good thing, a larger amount must be even better. Paleolithic hunters who killed two mammoths instead of one had made progress, but when they drove 200 over a cliff “they lived high for awhile, then starved”. The taming of fire, the perfection of hunting, the agricultural revolution, each have been major lurches forward in human progress, and each has brought with it progress traps. Since the early 1900s, world population has multiplied by 4 and the economy — human load on nature — by more than 40. We have reached the stage at which we must bring the experiment [that of a species shaped more by its own culture than by nature] under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers. It’s entirely up to us. If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.
Wright explains the extraordinary similarities between the culture of Spain and the culture of Mexico when they clashed 500 years ago, after being completely out of touch for at least a millennium, as an indication of the inherent and perhaps inevitable human drive for a very similar and unsustainable vision of progress. He explains that agriculture and civilization were precluded from happening even earlier in our evolution only by the unimaginable instability of climate — fluctuating wildly from decade to decade — for a period of half a million years that lasted until the retreat of the last ice age just 12,000 years ago and brought a period of unprecedented climate stability — which of course we are now threatening. He quotes this extraordinary poem written by Ovid in 60 B.C.: earth…had better things to offer — crops without cultivation,
fruit on the bough, honey in the hollow oak. no one tore the ground with ploughshares the shore was the world’s end.
clever human nature, victim of your inventions,
disastrously creative, why cordon cities with towered walls? why arm for war? He describes the “unsavoury truth that until the mid-19th century most cities were death traps, seething with disease, vermin and parasites. Average life expectancy in ancient Rome was only 19 years”, This is consistent with Richard Manning’s research findings in Against the Grain. He explains: Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up…In civilizations, population always grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply, and all civilizations become hierarchical — the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around…Human inability to foresee or watch out for long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the evolutionary social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.
Another revelation of the book is the state of the Americas when they were pillaged by Europeans 500 years ago. At that time, civilization was as advanced in the new world as in the old, and the ‘conquering’ of the Europeans was only possible because of the devastation caused by smallpox and other diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity. “[By 1500] all temperate zones of the US were thickly settled by farming peoples. When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, the Indians had died out so recently that the whites found empty cabins, winter corn, and cleared fields — ‘widowed acres’ — waiting for their use: a foretoken of the colonists’ parasitic advance across the continent. “Europeans did not find a wilderness here”, US historian Francis Jennings has written, “they made one”. At the end of the book, Wright quotes from Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: One of her characters asks, “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?” By hope? Well, yes. Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.
That takes us to the present day, where the “concentration of power at the top” continues to hoard resources, steal from everyone else, ruthlessly suppress opposition, and prospers as the environment and the general populace suffer. And we, strange creatures of our disconnected and self-made culture, cling desperately to the hope and false assurances that we will be saved by our gods, or our ingenuity, that what we are doing to our world is beyond our control, is not our fault, not our responsibility, and is not so bad in the global scheme of things anyway. The idea that the human race has, under the harsh rules of Darwin, bred compassion out of the gene pool in favour of more ’successful’ savagery, and that it is this ruthless and relentless violence, rather than our ’superior’ intelligence, that has led to our staggering numbers, is not new. But it casts the lessons of our history in a different, and darker, light. It is serious enough trying to deal with one fatal character flaw — our propensity to hope things will get better without the need for radical change or the learning of lessons from history. Add a second fatal character flaw — a preference for murder and genocide over more peaceful and compassionate solutions — and the outlook gets much bleaker. Perhaps this explains the finding that the best informed people in modern society tend to be the least optimistic. Fortunately, they also tend to be the most determined to make things better. Power struggle, anyone? Postscript: There are two interesting on-line interviews with Wright here and here. |
March 22, 2005
Innovating from the Ground Up, and the Idea-Implementation Disconnect
 The Ideas: (1) Instead of thinking about technological innovation that applies top-down (improving our cities, our institutions, our communities) what if we thought about such innovation at the personal level, bottom-up, the way nature does? (2) Why are we so inept at moving from brilliant ideas to ubiquitous delivery of solutions?
I have long been an advocate of bottom-up, front-line-focused, personalized solutions to business problems, because I’ve seen them work, and because I’ve seen imposed top-down one-size-fits-all management solutions continually fail. And I’ve proposed bottom-up, community-based solutions for our political, social and economic woes. Everything I’ve learned so far tells me that bigger-is-worse, that there are no economies of scale, that centralized is much less effective than decentralized, and that the people at the top of power and money elites are totally disinterested in solving real problems, and merely consumed with further increasing their power and wealth. So if bottom-up problem-solving is the best answer for business, social, political and economic challenges, how about technological challenges? I have mentioned my revelation at a recent wind energy conference where a large number of people seeking to become personally energy-independent overwhelmed one gentleman who wanted the state to set up more centralized, “efficient” wind farms for all, and how I, as a liberal accustomed to the role of the state in organizing things for the greater benefit, was at first ambivalent, but by the end of the day was won over by the self-interested. While I still believe innovation and technology need to be focused on solving basic human needs, I’ve begun to think that they might better solve those needs by looking at personal bottom-up solutions instead of institutionally-deployed ones. I’m even wondering whether community-based renewable energy co-ops are too centralized. No, I haven’t suddenly become a libertarian or a Dawkins selfish-gene adherent: Nature, in its technological design and innovation (look at birds’ wings and the thermal design of feathers), doesn’t use centralized solutions — animal communities are bound together by social imperatives, not shared technologies. Why should we be any different? Here are some of the fragments of ideas that I’ve been kicking around since I contemplated this. Since I was thinking at the time about renewable energy, the End of Oil and global warming, that’s what most of these ideas are focused on: What if solar energy collectors were designed to look like trees, not like flat panels — more surface area, better fit with the environment? Could they even be ‘grown’ using fractal patterns and crystal-forming ingredients?
What if hats were designed as personal solar energy collectors — instead of just protecting us from the sun’s rays, why not have them harvest them? What about hair, even, which again has more surface area. Could our shampoo double as an application of wireless nanotech energy collectors?
What if we could harvest our nervous energy, and the energy expended when we exercise? I’ve heard of PCs and flashlights powered by hand-crank devices. Why not PCs and TVs powered by foot pedals, or ergonomic bicycle-type devices under our desks? Deskwork and good exercise at the same time. What if instead of heating and cooling whole buildings, we designed our clothing (the design of which now is, let’s face it, pretty useless, not nearly durable enough, and quite silly) to heat and cool our bodies? No more fighting over where to set the thermostat — we each set our own. And don’t tell me it would look geeky or restrict our movement — good design can solve that. Just use birds as models. What if we merged the technologies of the Smart Car (lightweight materials, miniaturization) with the technologies of the recumbent bicycle, the electric scooter, and the Segway, to create a human-powered enclosed vehicle that would achieve highway speeds and give us good exercise while using no fuel whatsoever? Can’t be done? That’s what they told the Wrights. What if we developed a toilet that produced fertilizer instead of sewage, and delivered it through the sprinkler system right to your garden? Yes, I hear you saying that these aren’t new ideas, they’ve been tried, some are even being used as we speak. But how do we make them commercial, mainstream, available to and affordable by everyone? After all, millions of houses are still being built with wasteful, inefficient North American style hot water heaters instead of the long-coil European “instant hot water” heaters. If we’re going to save the world and stuff we can’t quit when people nod and say “good idea” — we need to commercialize it, make it better, experiment with real working models, and drive it out until everyone has one, so the need for the old technologies that these ideas replace — power plants, the electrical grid, furnaces, air conditioners, internal combustion engines, passive hot water tanks, toxic non-recyclable batteries, maybe even buildings (to the extent their primary function is to keep heat in, or out) — can be done away with. What is the reason that so many bottom-up ideas and innovations never make it into the commercial marketplace? I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories that corporations deliberately buy up and suppress more durable inventions to keep them from cannibalizing their market. I think it’s more likely that people with good ideas are just disconnected from those with the skills and resources needed to implement those ideas. And vice versa — those with commercialization skills and resources are rewarded by the market (and by shareholders) for not fixing what ain’t broke, for not changing what they’re doing until and unless they have to. So on the one hand we have an astonishing and unprecedented flood of good ideas, made possible by the democratization of knowledge (the Internet etc.), and on the other hand we have this incredible inertia by those who could make those ideas reality, change everything. Not dissimilar to the paradox of our staggering surplus of cheap (thanks to subsidies) foods and medicines at the same time we have epidemics of hunger, malnutrition and disease. “It’s the distribution system”, some say. “It’s the lack of security and ethics in the areas of suffering” say others. “It’s the whole economic system, which is designed to artificially create scarcity to drive up demand and hence profits”, say others. It’s time to stop excusing ourselves and blaming others for these disconnects. It’s time to stop amusing ourselves to death with fake-reality shows and the fate of some poor brain-dead woman in Florida. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. It’s a question of priorities, of combining energies, and of collaborating in a focused, informed and urgent manner to fix the disconnects and make it happen. We have a responsibility to make it happen. We certainly have the money, the ingenuity and the organizing technologies to make it happen, so what are we waiting for? We need to get past our learned helplessness and start talking to each other about things that matter, things we can fix, and enrolling ourselves to do so. Are we just disorganized, or is our passivity, our inaction, our feelings of helplessness, are these things symptoms of something deeper, darker? Or is all this noise, this online cacophony, the sound of a billion revving engines just now shifting into gear? |
Maybe we need to merge the great cradle-to-cradle design thinking of guys like Bill McDonough, who creates wonderful 
