 The Idea: Author Laura Kipnis argues that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and our ecosystem as well.
Laura Kipnis, despite the title of of her 200-page “polemic”, is not Against Love. Rather, she’s against the trappings, the rules, the rituals that our culture imposes on love relationships. She goes even further — she sees marriage, the institution, as every bit as repressive, suffocating and unnatural as our mind-numbing employment in modern hierarchical organizations, and draws strong parallels between the slavery of the workplace and the slavery of the matrimonial home. These two canons of civilization: our need and responsibility to devote our daytime hours to meaningless subordinate labour, and our need and responsibility to devote the rest of our hours to boring, stifling and unsatisfying monogamy, work together diabolically to keep us suppressed, and in our ‘place’ in society. Small wonder, she says, that one of our most enduring conventional wisdoms is that “a good marriage takes work“. If this protestation against the rigours of monogamy, fidelity and marriage-slavery as the complement to wage-slavery sounds familiar, it’s because it’s very similar to the argument that Glenn Parton made in his essay posted first on these pages last year entitled “Love Politics“. Glenn’s argument is that we have become so emotionally numbed by our twin bondage to job and marriage that it has made our hearts cold and hard, uncaring of the plight of our planet and of others, and that this is a direct cause of the destruction of our world. “If I’m miserable, why should I care about anyone else?” Dare to love more than one person, he suggests, and the shackles of this self-imposed imprisonment are broken, and the inrush of emotion will shock us into awareness of, and eagerness to heal, the massive emotional and physical illness of our entire planet. Why should we, why do we subject ourselves to this one-love-partner-slavery as easily and as passively as we do to wage-slavery? This is the subject of much of Ms. Kipnis’ book. Her prose is so adept and so powerful I won’t attempt to paraphrase her arguments. Here are a few teasers: Is it the persistence of the work ethic that ties us to the compassionate couple and its workaday regimes, or is it the ethos of compassionate coupledom that ties us to sould-deadening work regimes…Resenting the boss? Feeling bored or overworked or dissatisfied? Getting complaints about your attitude? Whether it’s “on the relationship” or “on the job” get yourself right to the therapist’s office, pronto. There are only two possible diagnoses for all such modern ailments: it’s going to be either “intimacy issues” or “authority issues”. You’ll soon discover that the disease doubles as the prescription at this clinic: You’re just going to have to “work harder on yourself”…
Take the modern consumer. Clearly, routing desire into consumption would be necessary to sustain a consumer society — a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill. Or better still, take the modern depressive. What a boon to both the modern pharmaceutical and the social-harmony industries that such a social type would be. These are merely hypotheticals of course, since it’s not as if we live in a society of consumers and depressives, or as if the best strategy for the latter weren’t widely held to be strategically indulging in the former — “retail therapy”…Love’s proper denouement, matrimony, is also of course the social form regulated by the state, which refashions itself as a benevolent pharmacist, doling out the addictive substance in licensed doses…What about re-envisioning [marriage] or… insisting that social resources and privileges not be allocated on the basis of marital status? No. let’s demand regulation! Not that it’s easy to re-envision anything when these intersections of love and acquiescence are the very backbone of the modern self, when every iota of self-worth and identity hinge on them…Domestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship, a training ground for gluey resignation and immobility… Ms. Kipnis suggests the same lack of innovation that permeates the workplace in the 21st century also permeates domestic institutions: Different social norms could entail something entirely different: yearly renewable contracts for example. And if we weren’t so emotionally yoked to the social forms we’ve inherited that trying to envision different ways of having a love life seems intellectually impossible and even absurd, who knows what other options might present themselves?…It behooves [our] society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure, starting over is shameful, and wanting more satisfaction than you have is illegitimate…As love has increasingly become the center of all emotional expression in the modern imagination — the quantity without which life seems forlorn — anxiety about obtaining it in sufficient quantities and for sufficient duration has increased to the point that that anxiety suffuses the population, and most of our cultural forms…Uncoupling [then] can only be experienced as ego-crushing crisis and inadequacy…[and] the grief of failed love is exacerbated by inevitable feelings of personal failure…
Much of the latter part of the book is focused on the psychological gymnastics of all three (or more) parties in the polygon of adultery, from the rationalization that hiding the affair is to protect the feelings of the cuckold, to the feelings of self-hatred and self-flagellation of the ‘sinner(s)’. She also discusses the awkward mechanics of the ultimate break-up of either the marriage or the affair (or both), and the degree to which children of the relationship become hostages, or excuses for deception, or excuses for the boredom that gave rise to the deception. Of course the book also talks about famous infidelities in high political circles, and the twisted hypocrisy of conservatives’ opposition to same-sex marriage, as well as the equal-opportunity-for-misery desire of lesbians and gays to gain access to the sad and repressive regulation of ‘official’ marriage rather than ‘settling for’ merely the legal and resource rights that come with equivalent-to-married status. And there’s also a discussion of the pragmatic phenomenon of “serial monogamy” — the fall-back that there’s nothing wrong with marriage per se, it’s just that we were all married to the wrong person. All of this is complicated (even more) by the emergence of the Two-Income Trap, which imposes a financial prison on top of the emotional one in marriage. We have to stay together because we can’t afford to live apart. I am convinced that this one factor is overwhelmingly responsible for keeping the rate of divorce from reaching astronomical levels. It is also probably helpful in keeping birth rates in the West below replacement levels — Not only can we not afford children, we certainly don’t want any (or any more) with the spouse we’re economically shackled to. And having one with the secret love is just too messy. In my recent article predicting a baby boom, perhaps I underestimated the sheer perverseness of a socioeconomic system that not only makes parenthood financially reckless, it also suppresses fertility rates by its expressed moral repugnance for having a child by someone other than your boring spouse. A lot of people, some of their own free will, and many more who have been pushed, have recently broken free of wage slavery and are now working, mostly for much less income, for themselves. That’s probably a good thing in many ways — it reduces the supply of the remaining wage slaves, which might actually, in time, allow them to bargain from a position of at least a bit of power. It increases self-sufficiency. It reduces excessive consumption. What if there were a similar revolution against marriage slavery? What if a whole generation just refused to define themselves (in more ways than one) as married, or to live with the constraints of monogamy, and instead opted for a polyamory life-style? Paternity ‘rights’ and responsibilities would both probably suffer, as the new family unit would be a woman (or possibly, and more logically, a group of women, in self-selected community) and their children. They would have the power, and could strike whatever contract they chose with males who wanted the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. The nuclear family and the ‘single-family dwelling’ would disappear. Conjugal relations would not attach to parental responsibility, and could be negotiated between any two people as individuals on a one-shot basis, with no responsibility other than the responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. This would probably be bad for the oldest profession, as the supply/demand ratio for quick couplings would soar. Jealousy and the consequent domestic violence that is the scourge of our nuclear spouse-as-property society would, slowly (old habits die hard), disappear. I think the vast majority of men, driven by million-year-old biological imperatives, once they reached a certain age, would choose to attach themselves to one of the matriarchal communities (if so invited), and would do their share to provide for its well-being, in return for the company and sense of purpose that would bring. We are told it takes a village, a community, to raise a child. Perhaps the community is necessary, and sufficient, for far more: To break us all free from both the emotionally numbing subjugation of wage-slavery and the misery and boredom of marriage-slavery. The community would then become truly self-sufficient in every respect, and we would be happier and freer than we can, or dare, imagine. Cartoon: By Peter Steiner from The New Yorker, in the Cartoon Bank |
March 21, 2005
Against Love: Love Politics Revisited
March 20, 2005
Pictures Worth a Thousand Words
| The Idea: Five sites that effectively convey information through visuals in ways that would be impossible with words.
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March 19, 2005
Political News of the Week
 I‘m too discouraged by the US Senate decision to authorize drilling in the ANWR to talk about it. The NRDC says there’s still hope and advises what to do about it. Here’s the rest of the week’s important political news:
Bush Now Produces His Own Ready-to-Broadcast Propaganda — just in case Faux News and the other media outlets don’t get his spin quite right. Now your station doesn’t need any reporters or any news budget whatever. Just roll the prepackaged government productions. And if you’re smart, you can even get kickbacks from the government for doing so — it’s all the rage these days. Bush the Small Animal Torturer — an interesting editorial by David Podvin suggests the real George Bush has a life-long record of cruel and psychopathic behaviour. A little over the top, though there is evidence that torture of small animals as a child is a hallmark of future criminal and psychopathic behaviour, and there’s also a long history of psychopaths striving for and achieving leadership positions. Salon Weighs In on the End of Oil — Robert Bryce provides a balanced accounting of what oil reserves actually are. Most compelling: Increasing evidence that OPEC, whose share of global remaining reserves will soar past 50% in the next few years, is pushing its production capacity to the limit, and, as Algeria’s energy minister, Chakib Khelil, said, “OPEC does not have the production capacity to increase its quotas.” Historically, these kind of supply/demand tipping points precede huge price shifts. The US Energy Board has raised its annual estimate of average wellhead prices for 2005 oil from $29 (last year’s estimate) to $50. Like all commodities these days, expect prices to yo-yo, but inflation, here we come. Wolfy’s Plan to Topple OPEC — In related oil news, Greg Palast reports for the BBC and Harper’s that new reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Wolfowitz, Chalabi, Bush & Co planned long before 9/11 to topple Saddam, seize Iraqi oil and sell it off to private oil interests. The more pragmatic corporate oil oligopoly balked at the last part of the neocon plan, saying that destabilizing OPEC was in no one’s best interests, and preferring instead a state-owned oil company that the US would effectively control. On the losing end, Wolfy has now been banished to the World Bank, a place better suited to his megalomaniac tendencies. US Predicts Likely Terrorist Attack Areas — Another document that Bush was trying to keep under wraps, but was inadvertently posted on the Hawaii State Government site, lists urban nuclear devices, biotoxins in office complexes and bombs in sports arenas as the greatest threats, and says there are too may possible targets in each category to list. Blowing up chemical plants, bioattacks in airports, and infecting food animals with diseases or poisons are next on the list, which also includes three natural disasters (earthquakes, influenza epidemics and hurricanes), but has taken plane hijackings off the list because they’re presumably no longer possible thanks to those brave and brilliant Homeland Security guys. Planning calls for about 1500 different, coordinated actions in the case of any of these incidents, regardless of where in the US they occurred. Bin Laden must be rolling on the ground laughing. Hey, does duct tape work when it gets wet? Former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Writes to Condi — A savage op-ed by Lloyd Axworthy (whose campaign I worked on many centuries ago) explains to Condi Rice why Canada chose not to sign on to the US Missile Defence system. You tell ‘em Lloyd. Help a Fellow Blogger — Blogger Darren Barefoot is fasting for 30 hours as part of a WorldVision project to raise money to defeat world hunger. I’ve pledged some money to help, and would encourage you to do so as well. |
March 18, 2005
Virtual Collaboration: If You Can’t Work Side-by-Side
 The Idea: What do you do if you need or want to collaborate, but you can’t do so in person? What purposes are best served by weblogs, wikis, and other types of online collaboration tools, spaces and media? 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. This is challenging enough face-to-face in real-time. It’s doubly difficult virtually and asynchronously. But there are examples of great music, literature, invention, scientific discovery and problem-solving that have come from such handicapped collaboration. How did they do it, and can you improve the likelihood of brilliant virtual collaboration by using the right tools and media? Let’s take a look at some of the alternatives:
There are three levels of collaboration based on duration of contact:
A collaborative conversation may be provoked by an interesting or important idea or an urgent one-off need for information or assistance. Much of the time spent in business is consumed in consulting with others, in canvassing for ideas or suggestions or comments, and in making decisions on what something means or how to respond to it. These are generally quick, collaborative conversations. In large organizations these conversations are usually peer-to-peer (where trust is stronger than up or down the hierarchy), and as size increases further they tend to be more and more intermediated (one middle-manager recently told me that 70% of his e-mail and 50% of his telephone calls are of the “Who should I talk to about X?” variety). In smaller organizations, these conversations are more likely to draw on external networks, and to involve the use of today’s clunky social networking tools like LinkedIn and eCademy. I have argued before that the next generation of social networking tools should include ‘people-finders’ that streamline and automate the process of finding the right person (inside or outside the organization) to talk to, so that more time can be spent on actual conversations with those people. Once you’ve found the right person to converse with, if they’re close and inexpensive to talk to in person, that’s likely what you’ll do. But what if they aren’t? How do you quickly provide your Conversation Collaborators with the context they need to converse with you effectively when you can’t put a chart or a piece of paper in front of them and brief them? Organizations have found that if the person you want to converse with face-to-face is more than two minutes walk (or elevator ride) away, the probability of you making the effort to converse with them in person drops precipitously. If you have a blog, an audience, and a little time, your blog can serve this need well. Ask a question on a popular blog and you’ll probably get an informed answer quite quickly (thank you readers!) Most businesses, alas, have few established blogs and even less time. Preferred conversation tools in business, when face-to-face is impossible, are now IM and the telephone — with IM trumping the phone for its self-documentation, its suitability to multi-tasking, and because it’s easier to browse than voice-mail, and the phone trumping IM if a lot of iteration is needed to provide context. White-boarding and document-sharing applications, awkward as they are, can be helpful additions to IM and telephone conversations if the participants are savvy enough to use them properly (most aren’t) and if documents and graphics are needed to provide more context. E-mail is the increasingly unpopular fall-back. Discussion forums are the ultimate tool of last resort for conversations, because of the disadvantages listed above. In most of the companies I am familiar with, they are only sporadically used and quickly grow stale. A variety of tools have been developed for more enduring project collaborations and alliance collaborations. Because they tend to involve more participants than conversations do, the logistics get tougher and the effectiveness of these tools gets more challenging. And the threshold point for giving up on the viability of in-person collaboration rises dramatically. I think this is an absolutely critical point. It is the reason large corporations, with the internal resources (people and money) to sequester, have the capacity to collaborate more effectively than small corporations and loose, unfunded collaborative groups (though whether they use that capacity to advantage is another question entirely). Open Source project teams and alliances have pioneered low-budget, virtual, asynchronous collaboration, and are the role model to follow. But is the reason for this perhaps that Open Source collaborations are generally undertaken by exceptionally tech-savvy groups, very agile at using and even inventing their own collaborative tools to get the job done? They usually have a good GUI for the non-techie, but wade into the material and collaboration technology behind a lot of these groups and your head will start spinning. What about the other 95% of the population? If I want to set up a virtual collaboration team to design a model intentional community (with people I might end up spending the rest of the my life with) or to invent a post-capitalist economy (a large project if there ever was one), what tools and media should I use? Wikis are one place to start — a bit nerdy and physically inelegant but functional and not that hard to learn once you take the plunge. They are, however, asynchronous tools, which is a significant barrier to true collaboration. There are some more robust collaborative ‘spaces’ for communities of interest and communities of practice to adopt, but some of the best ‘groupware’ (like Groove and Exchange and eRooms) costs money and requires considerable learning to use its different tools effectively. These tools generally also require a coordinator to invest a lot of time to setting up and managing the ‘space’. There are a variety of document-sharing technologies in the market, which allow several people to see a document at once and to ‘take control’ each in turn to change that document. Ideally, using a combination of
would be a close approximation to an in-person collaborative session. But that’s a lot of technology to juggle on your screen, to hog and interfere with your bandwidth, and (if you opt for the more powerful tools in these categories) can also require some outlay of money. My experience has been (thanks in no small part to the valuable insights of online communication wizard Robin Good and Skypemaster Stu Henshall) that video-conferencing (seeing the people you’re talking with online) is a “nice to have” not a “need to have”, especially when bandwidth limitations force you to choose which applications to have running at any one time. I am confident that, as bandwidth and processing power continue to expand, we will soon see:
Now that would be a real virtual collaboration environment. |
March 17, 2005
Baby Boom Ahead?
 The Idea: The recent UN projection that global population will level off at 9.5 billion is based on the flawed assumption that a recent phenomenon — families having fewer children than they want due to economic and political constraints — will continue throughout the century and become a global phenomenon. Remove those constraints and the linear growth of nearly a billion more people per decade will continue, and precipitate a great ecological challenge to our planet. Take a look at the historical demographic trends and you see that, with only a few exceptions in different places and times, people have the number of children they want. During pioneer times in North America, fifteen children were needed to run the farm, so that’s how many most families had. In Niger, Africa today men want 12-15 babies each, and women want almost as many, and that’s how many they have. In the last thirty years, a remarkable and global gap has arisen between the ideal number of children wanted and the number of children actually born. This gap has a number of different explanations, all of them transient. There is no precedent for such a gap continuing, and no reason to believe it will continue. When that gap closes, the average number of children per family will rise by between 0.50 and 0.75. The chart above shows what that will mean to world population. The entire basis for the projection that global population will peak at 9.5 billion and then level off is based on the assumption that this recent anomaly — families having 0.5 children fewer each than they want — will continue as a global phenomenon for the rest of the century and beyond. Every year a whole set of surveys are taken throughout the world on what people consider the ‘ideal’ family size. Here are some of their findings:
These ideals are, on average, between 0.5 and 0.75 children more than actual fertility rates. In other words, people are having fewer children around the world than they would like to. The 2004 UN population projection says “In the medium variant, fertility is projected to decline from 2.6 children per woman today to slightly over 2 children per woman in 2050. If fertility were to remain about half a child What are the reasons for the recent phenomenon of families having 0.5 to 0.75 children fewer than they want? They vary from country to country:
From this data, a very troubling hypothesis presents itself. We have taken great comfort from reports that correlate lower birth rates with higher education, especially of women. But it appears we may have missed the real cause and effect here: Higher rates of education for women mean, as the Two-Income Trap so eloquently explained, higher rates of participation of women in the workforce, which means more supply of labour relative to demand and hence ability to offer lower wages, and also means more price-pressure on housing in prestige areas especially near good schools, driving up the price of housing and forcing women to stay in the workforce longer and defer having children longer, or even until it is too late. So it is possible that it is the cost of living, not education, that has temporarily slowed soaring human population. That deferral will eventually start to crimp the availability of cheap labour (although offshoring could sustain it a bit longer). When that happens, wages will have to rise and women will once again be able to leave the labour force long enough to have the children they want. And then we’ll see a baby boom, leading to the red line in the chart above — 14 billion people by the end of the century. That will happen even with HIV and other epidemic diseases and famines — historically human population has always ‘bounced back’ from these setbacks by having more children to compensate for the ones that die young. Of course there’s always the possibility that the Two-Income Trap could become a permanent and global phenomenon, with wage increases always pushing housing and other prices up to negate any real increase, so people will forevermore have fewer children, and start having children later in life, than they would want to. Except that the Trap is not sustainable without the pressure of more and more people competing for wage-slave jobs and scarce resources. Alas, the 14 billion human population isn’t sustainable either. I know readers of How to Save the World don’t like my ‘pessimistic’ posts, and I suspect some will jump in with reasons why the red line forecast won’t happen, or say I’m just being an alarmist. I think expecting people to have the families they want is realism not pessimism, and while the idea of 14 billion humans troubles me, I think it makes sense to consider the possibility, and how to deal with the fact that our species, for the past several millennia, seems predestined and biologically driven to procreate at more than replacement levels until we hit a wall. Sources: Gallup International polls of ideal family size; the Guttmacher Institute family values studies; papers to the 2004 World Congress on Bioethics; Johns Hopkins INFO project reports; papers to the 2001 World Population Conference; the European Foundation quality of life studies; UN Population Prospects 2004 Revision report. |
March 16, 2005
Seeing the Big Picture (Building a Bigger Frame)
 The Idea: It’s going to take a new, more expansive kind of thinking, by many people with different points of view working in collaboration, to solve the world’s most intractable problems. Here are some thoughts how we could achieve that kind of ‘synthetic’ thinking.
This morning, as I slowly awoke, I had an ‘aha!’ moment. I will tell you about it soon. I think I finally know what I was meant to do. Even more than writing, though writing is a small part of it. It came to me when I was combining things — goals, ideas, and perceptions. And then I suddenly saw the big picture, how all the pieces fit. It’s an amazing experience, and one that we should all have more often, and learn how to make happen. Let’s take an example. On Monday I posted a conversation with myself about how to save the world, showing two very different approaches. It was genuine, not written for effect — I have these arguments with myself all the time, which is why this blog sometimes comes across a bit schizophrenic. What was interesting was that quite a few readers, in the comments thread, via e-mail and even over at Grist, seemed anxious to take sides — which argument, the green or the beige, made more sense, and what was wrong with the other side? Which side was the real Dave’s view? The debate was not a rhetorical device. It was an example of our constant struggle to decide between, or reconcile, different goals, choices, conceptions or perceptions. But it seems to be a proclivity of Western thinking that we always try first to decide, to dismiss, to discount one of two dissonant ideas as inferior, and accept the other as the right one, the better one, the lesser of two evils. The result is polarized thinking, and in the West it has become something of a cultural disease. Most of Lakoff’s work on frames is about trying to reframe debate, change the perspective of the opposing side, so that the right (or more accurately left) point of view comes out on top, looks better. Why is there no effort instead to understand the ‘opposing’ view, not as a means of capitulating to it or becoming vulnerable to it or defeating it, but rather as a basis for finding a third point of view that encompasses both. The words we use for this process betray our distaste for it: accommodation, compromise, reconciliation. There is a latent aggressiveness and intolerance in our disinterest in finding more holistic answers: “Those guys aren’t looking for a win-win answer so why should we?” To the Eastern mind this must appear bizarre, militaristic, even self-defeating. As citizens and as consumers we are inundated with alternatives and choices, and forced to ‘choose one’: Coke or Pepsi, Toyota or Ford, Windows or Mac or Linux, Democrat or Republican, public or private, Red or Blue or Green, Black or White. Your choice determines which community you belong to, whether you’re with us or against us, good or evil, winner or loser, patriot or traitor, friend or foe. Even those who talk about peace want it on their terms: No peace without justice, no peace without security, no peace without freedom. No surprise that there is no peace. Synthesis is the outcome of the merging of two or more things: in Hegelian philosophy it is the emergence of the combination of thesis and antithesis. Synthesis is not compromise, it is transcendence, a higher conception than either the thought or its contradiction. “The combining of separate elements to form a coherent whole”. The great discoveries of human history and science have often come from synthesis of previous ideas, conceptions and points of view thought by lesser thinkers to be irreconcilable. What made Einstein such a brilliant thinker was his ability to synthesize, transcend, come up with unified theories. Yet in common parlance, the terms synthesis and synthetic are most often used to mean artificial, not real. Synergy is “the interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects, cooperative interaction among groups that creates an enhanced combined effect.” It is used to describe the supposed positive effects of the merger of two corporations, two corporate cultures — yet 85% of all such mergers actually destroy value rather than creating it, leaving morale and productivity worse off than before, and usually resulting in the ‘acquirer’ involuntarily imposing their culture on the ‘losing’ one. So the prevailing response to calls for, or assertions of, synergy has become one of cynicism and raised eyebrows. Integration is “combining into a complete and harmonious whole”. But for those that aren’t in mathematics or semiconductor construction, we most often think of the term as the forced desegregation of US school-children, or the absorption (and disappearance) of one thing into another. Holistic means considering the inseparable nature and interrelationship of all of the elements of a system. In the West, our normal approach to dealing with systems is the opposite: Piecemeal – the doctor specialist treating just one symptom or part of the body, the traffic and planning departments deciding what roads to build in isolation from impact on other communities, and corporations completely disregarding ‘external’ costs (degradation and reduction of the commons, social and environmental damage, non-renewability of their assets) and long-term impacts to focus narrowly on only the costs that appear on the income statement and the impacts in the next fiscal quarter. Holistic approaches are openly ridiculed by specialists and self-styled pragmatists as impractical, idealistic, and unscientific. Not surprisingly, we tend to use these four terms incorrectly or disparagingly when we use them at all. And our adulation for specialists and the way we teach our children reinforce this narrowness, this denigration of and antipathy towards the big picture and the long view. Why do we do this? And more importantly, what can we do to rectify it? How can we teach ourselves, and our children, how and why to think synergistically and holistically, and to synthesize and integrate ideas and information? My guess as to why we do this is that Western ‘scientific’ man has come to loathe uncertainty, mystery and imprecision. The whole notion of complexity and chaos theory triggers revulsion in many people: “What do you mean we can only use systems thinking in complicated systems, not in complex ones?” “Who says most of our systems are complex and therefore largely unknowable, and the best we can do is look for meaningful patterns that, at best, modestly improve the probability that our predictions for the future will be accurate?” The whole Gaia theory, which perceives the world to be a single, complex, self-managing organism was scorned for a generation until more and more evidence emerged that it was a better model of reality than the parochial theories it synthesized. We hate not knowing, and we love simple answers and simple choices — from political leaders, from the hawkers of commercial brands, from preachers in the pulpits, and from the education system (when we are young) and the media (as we get older) that lay out those answers and choices for us.
My sense is that there is no easy answer to this, as much as we might want one, and as much as some advocates of various theologies and ideologies will push them forward as answers, as holy grails to ascend to a “higher level of consciousness”. Programmer Dale Asberry has pointed me to the intriguing but opaque Reciprocality site which suggests most of us have been indoctrinated to unlearn how to see the big picture, because living in an artificial and limited world is easier and keeps us in line. It says some people are just naturally able to see the bigger picture. I’m neither that optimistic (I don’t know anyone that sees synergistic solutions easily) nor pessimistic (I believe anyone should be able to learn or re-learn how to do it). I believe we will probably have to teach, and learn from, each other to become better at this. True collaboration is a synergistic process, so it makes sense to me that holistic, synergistic thinking is probably best learned by collaboration with others. I am sure that there is a synthesis of the two opposing views in my conversation with myself Monday on how to save the world, for example, but I am skeptical that any one person (other than perhaps an Einstein) is likely to be able to come up with that synthesis. If we’re going to learn how to do this, we’re going to have to learn together. That means lots of practice. I also believe state of mind is important in this process. My ‘aha’ synthesis this morning was a semi-conscious application of the 7-step mantra that Cyndy at MouseMusings and I developed, though I wouldn’t presume to believe it would work for others:
What do you think? If we’re going to save the world and stuff we’re going to have to follow Einstein’s advice: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” I sense that thinking that bridges, unifies, synthesizes conflicting points of view might be the kind of thinking that Einstein used to solve problems. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. |
March 15, 2005
Seeing What’s Next: Porter, Drucker and Christensen
 The Idea: An overview of Michael Porter’s, Peter Drucker’s, and Chris Christensen’s approaches to innovation research. Research is probably the most undervalued, and poorly done, process in Western business. It’s not rocket science, but doing it well takes practice, a disciplined process, and strong creative, analytical and communication skills. Clay Christensen’s new book Seeing What’s Next is essentially a book about doing good research, directed at accurately predicting the future of your business, or of an entire industry, and the market forces that affect it. Whereas most predictions of the future done by analysts and accountants are essentially projections, and assume little or nothing will change except perhaps the volume and margin of sales, any really useful, strategic prediction must be a forecast, which identifies what will, or might, significantly change, disrupt the market and the status quo, and how your company can react to these anticipated changes. The forecast is the net result of these anticipated external market and non-market changes and your company’s planned response to them. The key to being able to competently anticipate such changes is knowing where to look and knowing what to look for. Michael Porter, in his book Competitive Strategy, identifies ‘five forces’ that provide one approach to doing so:
The last two of these five forces are the source of what Christensen in his earlier books called disruptive innovations — the ones that are often not foreseen when your focus is intently on customers, suppliers and competitors. So one way to predict the future for your company would be to do thorough research in each of these five areas, see what changes are occurring or what changes your company could precipitate, and how those changes and your company’s responses to them would ‘play out’ in the marketplace. It is not uncommon for research of this nature to use scenario planning techniques — to write several different ‘stories’ of how these changes might play out, and allow management and experts in the industry to assign probabilities to each before deciding what actions to take. I have already written about Drucker’s approach, in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, to knowing where to look and what to look for. For completeness, my synopsis charts of his innovation process are reproduced in the charts below. His ‘where to look’ is the seven innovation sources illustrated in Fig.2 below. His approach to analyzing these potential ‘change producers’ is described in Fig.3 below. His approach to identifying what changes may be coming is similar to Porter’s — look for the sources, do your research, and then analyze the implications critically — but he slices the ‘universe of change possibilities’ differently: Customers:
Competitors:
Strategies:
Just as a reminder, here from my earlier article are Christensen’s definitions of sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations:
I like all three models — Porter’s, Drucker’s, and Christensen’s — and if I were to be assigned to do some innovation research today, I would use a combination of all three approaches, looking at the markets, and potential markets, and the forces that drive them, from all three perspectives. That way you can actually get a ’3-D’ forecast of the future of your, or your client’s, business or industry, or the entire economy. I would also integrate into the research process Imperato and Harari’s Thinking the Customer Ahead approach, a type of primary research (i.e. face-to-face, as contrasted with secondary research, which is looking at written documents in the public domain) that entails helping the customer to imagine where their business is headed, and then working backwards to assess the implications of that on where your client’s business is headed. I would use the Pyramid Principle methodology to document the research and perform the analysis. And I would probably structure the results as scenarios or future-state stories, embedding the results of the identified strategic innovation and differentiation responses I would recommend the client undertake. If you want to practice applying these theories and doing your own research, analysis and “what’s next” forecasting, here are three intriguing exercises:
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March 14, 2005
A Circular Argument
| The Idea: A debate on how best to deal with the pressing global problems of overpopulation and overconsumption.
Dave talks to himself.
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March 13, 2005
How to Be Creative
 The Idea: Dave looks at some accepted wisdom on the creative process, and adds some of his own. When I was in high school, I was about as uncreative as you can be. My stories in composition class were derivative, copies of formulaic television programming. I didn’t ‘get’ art at all — I much preferred drafting class (though I wasn’t good at it either, since I had no patience for detail. I wanted to be creative — I was an admirer of Einstein, and respected his statement that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. But it just wasn’t ‘in me’. To me, creation was an imitative process. At the time, creativity was considered a talent. Either you had it or you hadn’t. My art teacher told me I didn’t have it. Even my daydreams were reruns. Even then there were a lot of books about creativity. One school of thought is that creativity is mostly about attitude and personal mental preparedness. Books like Ray & Meyers’ Creativity in Business suggest a variety of methods to get yourself in the right ‘space’ to be creative:
A second school of thought is that creativity is a learnable skill that can be greatly enhanced by practicing certain techniques. This approach is exemplified by de Bono’s Serious Creativity. Here are some of the techniques he recommends:
De Bono describes how each of these techniques can be used in day-to-day business thinking, both individual and group, how they can be used on a Creative Hit List (a mix of organizational problems, improvement challenges, design projects, whimsical ‘How could we?’ thoughts or concepts, and surfaced opportunities) posted for all employees to practice their creative skills on, and how they can be used more formally in facilitated sessions. He also talks about how to ‘harvest’ ideas that emerge during day-to-day work but which have broader potential application if time is dedicated to exploring them. I find both the ‘state of mind’ approach and ‘practiced techniques’ approaches to creativity useful, but I sense that to some extent both schools are preaching to the converted. Thinking back to my high-school days, I think I would have found such advice bewildering. Mental preparedness (meditation etc.) and creativity techniques like de Bono’s are very hard to learn from a book. Like any skills worth learning, they need to be shown to you, and honed by hours of practice. What is creativity? It’s not the same as innovation. Creativity is the ability to generate appropriate, useful ideas that don’t follow logically and analytically from the information available, It’s the ability to know, in a complex world where most of the relevant decision-making information is unknown or unknowable, which ideas might work, might make sense. Innovation is the effective implementation of such ideas. Both creativity and innovation are often the only ways to accomplish some of the most important value-imperatives in business:
How did I overcome my creative shortcomings? I think it was a fortuitous (because at the time I had no idea what I was doing) combination of four factors:
I was motivated by my growing passion for writing and dissatisfaction with the creativity of my written work (my own and my English teacher’s). I wrote every day. I had always read voluminously and broadly, so I had a lot of ‘raw material’ to apply to the creative process. And it was my peers, not my overworked teacher, who prodded and applauded my struggling efforts to become a competent writer of poetry and short stories, and were blunt in their criticism when those efforts fell short. My weblog now provides the same four critical factors. I believe all four factors are essential to creativity. If it’s not something you have a passion for, if it has no specific focus, if you don’t practice it regularly, if your knowledge is narrow, and if you don’t have someone to give you feedback, I don’t think you can ever hope to be creative. Like de Bono, I think you can learn it, even if it isn’t a natural talent. Unlike de Bono, I don’t think, in most contexts, solo creativity is nearly as valuable as collaborative creativity. I’m a great believer in the ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ power of collaboration, especially on creative projects, and I also believe in the Wisdom of Crowds as a critical evaluator of creative ideas. My creative problem-solving process, illustrated above, is therefore far from solitary. Here’s a brief walk-through of how it works:
The stages that require the most creativity are E, G and I. Creative state-of-mind methods like Ray and Meyers’, creativity techniques like de Bono’s, and my four essential preconditions for effective creativity can all be extremely valuable in making these stages, and hence the entire creative problem-solving process, productive and effective. I also recommend Idea Champions’ creative thinking tips. Stages A-D are focused on the problem, stages E-H are focused on ideas, possible solutions, and stages I-L are focused on the conversion of those ideas into innovations. My final advice is not to try to do this alone. Involving experienced creativity and innovation facilitators, at least until your own people have acquired these competencies, and seeding your solution teams with highly creative people and people who have the broad knowledge to draw on and experience at applying that knowledge to future state visioning and to diverse and challenging business problems, what Imperato & Harari in their book Jumping the Curve call Pathfinders, can be essential to success in applying the process — the difference between an exercise that merely produces some good ideas and one that produces great, transformational innovation. |
March 12, 2005
A Running Out Story
 More on the End of Oil:
And we’re nearing the End of the Bubble:
But if you Ask the People:
Meanwhile Nero Keeps Fiddling:
And Don’t Count on Business to Help Out:
There are disturbing signs that hot on the heels of the End of Oil will come the End of Water. So put a rainbarrel on your shopping list along with the hybrid or Smart Car. Thanks to reader David Parkinson and Innovation Weekly for some of the links. |
