• A vehicle and methodology to explore and discover approaches to complex issues, from global warming and violence and poverty in the Mideast to the dysfunction and lack of innovation in large organization. We know that complex issues can’t be addressed using the old merely-complicated approaches (like systems thinking, reengineering, cause-and-effect analysis, etc.) — three years later you look back at the project you poured so much sweat into and nothing has really changed. AHA! implements Einstein’s advice that we won’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking that gave rise to them. Complexity theory is new and largely untested in this area but there are some fascinating and powerful techniques that seem well-suited to support a complex adaptive system ‘discovery-and-learning based’ methodology.
• A group of people who will develop AHA! and will then certify others who have the capability to apply it to the many complex problems and challenges that other methodologies and approaches have failed to solve — people with the experience to know what works and what doesn’t, and why.
• Completely open source and creative commons licensed. We may charge for-profit organizations to help them apply the methodology, but only for the purpose of funding sessions to use the methodology to solve the world’s most intractable problems for free. 

Some readers have asked if AHA! will be based in one or more physical centres — we don’t know yet. Other readers have asked whether AHA! will be software — it will be more than that, but there will undoubtedly be software and other tools that will be part of the methodology. And some readers have asked if AHA! will use Open Space methodology — we will use Open Space extensively in developing the AHA! methodology, but we don’t know whether it will be a significant part of the final methodology. It will be what it will be.

My AHA! colleagues are agreed on the following:

• It is essential that AHA! differentiate itself clearly from all the other methodologies out there that claim to have the ideal approach to solving all the world’s problems. Perhaps the only way to do this is to use it to ‘solve’ a problem that none of these other methodologies has solved.
• Developing and using AHA! is going to take a significant commitment of time and energy of its core group, and ultimately of anyone who wants to use it effectively. This is not a ‘spare time’ project. The purpose of the design session is not academic, it is to set out a plan for a lot of people to do a lot of work to accomplish some remarkable results.
• We need to just start. One initial design session, start of November, invitations to go out by the end of this month, invitations to be open to anyone (including you) who is interested and can make it and cares enough to invest some time and a bit of travel money (we are trying to get sponsors to cover other costs) to get there (either Toronto or San Francisco) — and that session will:
•  ’create the container’ for what AHA! is, 
• set the agenda for where AHA! goes from there, 
• establish the business model for AHA! (how it will make money),
• identify what kinds of problems and challenges it is appropriate for, and
• then begin to offer it to the world
• AHA! needs to create a bridge between reasoned cynicism and reasonable optimism:
• it must appreciate why so many existing and promising methodologies have failed, yet
• it must acknowledge that there are some astonishing activities occurring right now (most of them very focused, one-off, but employing radical, leading-edge thinking) that could be leveraged and incorporated into AHA!

My AHA! colleagues also disagree significantly on the following:

• Should the objective of the initial AHA! design session be just to develop the methodology (by grappling with why all the old ‘complicated system’ methodologies don’t work), or to simultaneous develop and apply it to try to solve one intractable problem? Advocates of the former say the latter is too ambitious for one session, while advocates of the latter say that we’ll attract more exceptional and diverse people if we really stretch and focus on one ‘burning platform’ issue, than if we try to ‘get people energized about process’.
• Will business be willing to invest in AHA!, or are business leaders too incapable of thinking outside the box, too timid and risk-averse, and lacking in any sense of urgency for change to participate in this? We are quite split on this, and as a cynic and an idealist I’m torn on this question. I had imagined business funding AHA! (both to solve its own problems and also via some altruistic funding of its use to solve broad social problems) and also hoped business would bring some (often much-needed) business perspective to intractable non-business problems that AHA! might grapple with. But if business is going to opt out, we’d be better off looking for other sources of financing and stick to people who really will have passion around AHA! and what we believe it could accomplish.

It would be presumptuous and premature (and contrary to the spirit of collegiality and collaboration) to try to lay out some preliminary vision of AHA! (I am willing to ‘let go’ of AHA!, and let it go wherever the consensus of those involved see it going). But I think we are agreed that it would be useful to create a list of some of the problems, issues and challenges that a complex adaptive systems approach like AHA! might be able to deal with to a degree no other tried-and-true approach could.

So here’s my list* of the world’s 10 most intractable problems, and my preliminary assessment on the degree to which (on a scale of 1 to 10) AHA! or some other complex adaptive systems approach might address each problem better than all the approaches that have failed so far:

1. Creating a health care system that works, based (probably) on preventative care and self-diagnosis and self-treatment, instead of on learned helplessness and dependence. (8)
2. Creating an education system that is based on just-in-time learning by doing, learning from acknowledged experts, self-discovery and peer-to-peer collaboration, in the field, in critical life skills selected by the learner and learned the way the learner learns (and graded by the learner), instead of on ‘teachers’ in expensive remote facilities in one-way lectures with grades assigned by the teacher. (8)
3. Achieving energy and other resource self-sufficiency and sustainability, based on renewable and non-polluting sources and conservation, using mechanisms like radical tax shifts, real R&D on sustainable energy, and local energy co-ops. (8)
4. Creating a food system that does not inflict massive suffering on animals, does not waste billions of acres of land in inefficient monoculture, does not require billions of dollars in annual subsidies to keep it afloat, does not involve absurdly inefficient transportation and overpackaging of products, does not exploit farmers and divert desperately needed food from poor to rich, and does not create massive waste disposal problems and contribute substantially to global warming. (8)
5. Reforming corporate conduct through constructive public-private agreements and partnerships so that business is encouraged (financially and through reputation and customer goodwill) to pursue socially and environmentally responsible policies, instead of discouraged (through taxes, sanctions, laws, regulations and other often-unenforced or unenforceable means) from being irresponsible. (6)
6. Creating integral, intentional communities based on love and commonality of interest and beliefs instead of economic standing and proximity to the workplace, and in the process, weaning communities off cars — by integrating personal and work life in one place, by eliminating the roads that fragment communities, and by making all transit public (e.g. a shared fleet of community vehicles on the outskirts of the community and a community-run bus/limo service for community members). An essential part of this is resolving the tragedy of the commons, so that instead of fragmenting and destroying community and collective responsibility by making everything privately owned and laissez-faire, we are encouraged to acknowledge that the value of community property is much greater than the value of our individual share of it. (5)
7. Reducing over-crowding and over-population by e.g. using smart urban design (that creates more psychological space than physical space), by eliminating space waste (more effective, modular, changeable house configurations), and by developing physical (not chemical) contraceptives with zero risk of unwanted pregnancy, use of which becomes the easy, default behaviour until and unless conception is actually wanted. (4)
8. Reducing poverty (and economic and political inequality in general) and by doing so reducing violence (there is substantial evidence that levels of violence correlate closely to inequality, at every political level). (4)
9. Increasing business innovation. (4)
10. Increasing wilderness and biodiversity.(3)

If you have comments on resolving the two areas of disagreement, or any suggestions on approaches to any of these 10 problems that appear to really work (or have a real chance of working, rather than just being wishful thinking), I’d love to hear from you. More about AHA! when the date is nailed down, and the invitation finally crafted (soon!).

* Jason Kottke loves lists, and I’m grateful for some of the new traffic he has brought to this blog.

The North Pond connects our back yard to the Albion Hills Conservation Area, and since it is sheltered by trees on all sides it is a popular hangout for shyer wildlife — deer, foxes, birds that shun the feeder, and even occasionally wolves and coyotes. You can pull up a deck chair and peer through the trees unobserved, and if you look closely, and if you are patient, you will often be rewarded. It took a while staring at the scene in the first picture below before I noticed the motionless creature right in the middle of the frame. If you don’t see it, look at the second picture. It was accompanied by a set of three creaking sounds, a song I’d heard before. But it was white! Not a great blue heron, which we’d seen before, but an immature little blue heron, before it gets its remarkable slate-blue feathers and red-brown neck. The full neck extension indicated high alert, and I tried desperately but vainly to catch it on film as it rose magnificently into the air, flapped its enormous, graceful wings, and disappeared into the curve of the pond.

Frustrated by my inability to catch the heron in flight, I started paying attention to other bird movements around the pond. I learned that catching a bird in flight on film is a bit like playing hockey — you need to anticipate when they’re going to fly and also guess correctly where they are going and position your camera there, not where they are currently perched. It took several failures before I finally figured this out — and caught a common tern in flight, below:

Pumped by my success, I then tried to capture an insect — ideally a dragonfly — in flight. I’d posted my photo of a dragonfly at rest before:

But I learned to my chagrin that insects don’t fly at one speed or in one direction — they stop, and veer, on a dime. So finally I had to settle for another insect that had landed, a paper wasp:

More on my Flickr page.

As anthropologist Dr. Craig Stanford of USC explains, clues to how our diet has evolved are best found by looking at our closest (98.5% shared DNA) cousins, the chimpanzees. Of the various ‘higher’ primates, including gorillas, orangutans etc., only chimps and humans hunt and eat meat. For chimps, meat is a supplement eaten rarely, and hunting occurs almost exclusively during very dry months when the plant species that are the main natural diet of all primates become scarcer. Even chimps are 98% vegan, and their meat diet (sorry to burst your bubble, macho hunters) consists almost exclusively of the babies and adolescents of a tender-fleshed primate, the colobus monkey (the colobus adults are too smart to be caught). Chimps need to organize in parties of up to 40, corner a young colobus in a treetop, and then grab it and bash it against the tree trunk until they can get through the hide at the flesh inside. For all this work, there is generally only a taste — an ounce or so per chimp — to go around.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Looking at the bodies of any primate, you can see immediately from our teeth, (lack of) claws, lack of strength and lack of speed that we’re just not the hunting type. Until we invented stone (and later metal) tearing tools, we wouldn’t have known what to do with an animal even if we could bring one down. There are theories that we were meat scavengers (like our fellow large-brain-to-body-ratio creatures, the crows and ravens) before we learned to hunt ourselves, waiting until the canids or felines (animals that are made for hunting, and are naturally carnivorous) had sated themselves before moving in on the leftovers, already cut open for us. But even this theory is suspect — chimps have the opportunity to scavenge, but many studies indicate they don’t.

Why do chimps hunt at all? In part because in dry seasons, especially when their territory is encroached upon, they need a small amount of meat to supplement their vegan diet. And in part because infant chimps fed a small amount of monkey meat tend to be healthier and stronger than those that aren’t (infants of all species tend to be more vulnerable to deficiencies of any element in their diet than adults, which is probably why breast-feeding evolved, and why infants eat more in general than adults). And in part because the hunt is a social and exciting activity, rewarded hormonally by their bodies just as all social and learning activities are.

All other major primates don’t hunt because they don’t have to — it’s a pretty inefficient way of getting calories when you just don’t have the makeup to do it well, and when your body is perfectly able to get what it needs by foraging. All primates, including early humans, are gatherers, not hunters.

Just as we developed tools, and then agriculture, because we had to to survive, it is very likely, then, that we took up this very unnatural activity of hunting because we had to. When because of overcrowding or climate change (ice ages) our natural vegan foraging no longer provided us with enough food, we had to supplement it with other food-obtaining methods. So then we started scavenging, eating the leftovers of the kills of real hunters. And then, probably by learning from ravens and crows, we struck up synergistic relationships with the smaller-sized real hunters (the ancestors of dogs and cats) — we’d help them locate and corner prey, and share the spoils with them. The invention of the arrowhead would allow us, for the first time, to catch and kill and tear the flesh of prey ourselves — a huge evolutionary advantage for those of us who had left the forest and its vegan food abundance, and this in turn would allow us to spread across the planet.

So now we quickly changed from an almost purely vegan species to an almost purely carnivorous one, for two reasons: Few of our new non-tropical habitats offered us much in the way of edible fruits, vegetables and nuts. And our new technology allowed us to bring down and carve the abundant large mammal species, so we had more food than we could eat. This in turn had two consequences, both of them unfortunate: With the new surplus of food, human population soared. And, to supplement the unnatural and inadequate meat diet, we needed to find another food source, and we found it in grains. And unlike our natural diets, we had to cook most of these new foods to make them edible, destroying much of their nutritional value.

Richard Manning’s book Against the Grain explains how grain monocultures led to agriculture, and then to civilization culture — human settlement in one place, urbanization, and power hierarchies. The new unnatural foods — meats and grains — led to massive malnutrition, addiction and all kinds of dietary diseases that were previously unheard of — obesity and heart disease, osteoporosis and tooth decay, vitamin deficiencies, alcoholism, scurvy, goiter and other thyroid and metabolic disorders, and diabetes and hypoglycemia, just for starters.

But what can we do to correct this error now? Over the most recent million years or so, our bodies have evolved to accommodate and tolerate this strange new diet, to the point that we can’t simply go back to eating what was our natural vegan diet. Even the cats and dogs whose forebears helped us migrate to our new diet have changed metabolically to the point that their natural (raw meat) diet can no longer be tolerated by their digestive and immune systems (and they now suffer from many of the same diseases and illnesses that the grain-based diet we feed them has afflicted us with).

The answer, I think, both for us and for our pets, is to realize that what we eat is making us sick, and wean ourselves off our addictions to fat, sugars, starches, salt, alcohol and other unnatural substances gently. That means taking it one step at a time, gradually reducing our intake of these unnatural substances and replacing them with healthy, natural ones. It’s taken more than a million years to adapt ourselves to eating this crap, and we’re not going to be able to adapt to healthy eating overnight, or even completely in our lifetimes.

But, like they say at AA, awareness of our sickness is the first, and most important step, in overcoming it. Just as we have been able to rise up and fight back against the tobacco companies, we need to rise up and fight back against the agribusinesses that have addicted us to fats, sugars, starches, salt, alcohol and other unhealthy ‘foods’. We need to sue them for what they have done to our health (not to mention to the health and well-being of the many suffering creatures they exploit) and shut them down. They need to be held accountable for the epidemic of human disease and illnesses that they have precipitated and profited from. The proceeds from dismantling these corporatist disease-mongers should be distributed half to our overburdened health care system (largely their legacy) and half to supporting small, local, organic growers of the foods we should be eating.

And at the same time we need to take personal responsibility for the health of those we love, and get ourselves and each other, one step at a time, off the toxic crap we eat and drink. We need to start looking at the family in the grocery store with the cart full of sugar cereals, pork chops, potato chips, pop and candy bars the same way we look at crack addicts — with sympathy, and alarm, and the motivation to look for answers.

Oh, and what should we do to replace the social bonding and hormonal high some men, like their chimp cousins, get from the macho ‘sport’ of hunting? I suggest paintball.