Why We Watch Sports

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Dave Pollard
NJ DevilsThis morning I listened to two fans of the Saskatchewan Roughriders (Canadian Football League) talk about how they had supported their team for forty years despite the fact it had only won the Grey Cup twice in all that time.

It reminded me of my experience as a young child going to football games with my father. He organized a bus that picked up about 30 fans from the area of Winnipeg in which we lived, drove us to the game and then back home again afterwards. I would often fall asleep on the bus on the way home, but I loved every moment of this experience, even though I wasn’t much of a football fan. I knew all the players’ names by heart, however.

In the winter seasons I would watch all the Montreal Canadiens hockey games, in black and white on TV Saturday nights, since we had no local professional hockey team in Winnipeg. Because of the time difference we would never see the first period, since it would have interfered with the dinnertime CBC news, which was sacrosanct. My walls were covered with black-and-white photos of Les Habitants best players like Boom Boom Geoffrion and Rocket Richard, most of them signed by the stars themselves. My parents were forced to buy hundreds of boxes of teas and dessert mixes so I could get the treasured plastic Hockey Coins inside, each depicting one of the 120 active players in the NHL at that time.

In my adult years I ceased to be a sports fan, preferring to play rather than watch, and while I still partake of hockey playoff pools, I rarely watch sports of any kind. I briefly cheered on the Toronto Blue Jays during their two back-to-back World Series championships, and got to know all the players then, but a year later they were all but forgotten. For all kinds of reasons I am boycotting the corrupt freakshow propaganda circus called the Olympics, this and every year.

I’ve tried to figure out why I watched sports, and why so many still do, but it’s hard to fathom. Although for many Americans (and Chinese) winning seems to be everything, fans in most of the rest of the world seem to enjoy the sport no matter who wins. The endless kitsch of propagandist Hollywood movies where American (“Yoo-Ess-Ay!”) team X or individual athlete Y overcomes staggering odds to become the champion (at the last moment, when all seems lost), and in the process he/they find true love, just makes me nauseous. (When the underdog-turned-champ is a Canadian, or a furry animal, it’s no better.)

There is something at work here besides insecure nationalistic vicarious competitiveness. Why do we watch sports?

I started paying attention to my own occasional spectator behaviour. I noticed that I was more attentive when “my” team was on offense than when they were on defense. After the game I felt the same no matter which team or individual won, unless there was some cruel injustice served up by cheaters or corrupt or inept officials, in either team’s favour, in which case I was sullen. The Hollywood movies play on this relentlessly, of course, since it’s a cheap way to stir up audiences. Hollywood does the same in the endless and banal “women as victim” movies, which are essentially identical to the sports propaganda movies except they involve women losers-turned-victors instead of men, and take place in homes and courtrooms instead of arenas.

But when it was just a game, and I somehow got caught up in it, it was a wonderful feeling at the end of the event (barring having to face terrible traffic going home). The more I thought about it, the more I concluded that we love to watch sports for two reasons that have nothing to do with competition:

  1. Shared ‘expertise’: Real fans know who’s playing, and everything about them, and what they’re good and bad at. Armchair quarterbacks all, what they love, and love talking about, is what they know about the game, the expertise they share. We all love to be an expert, especially knowledgeable about something, and there is no easier way (with the possible exception of blogging?) to become known and respected as something of an expert than to study and follow a sports team.
  2. Affinity: We all love to belong, and sports teams are not called “clubs” for nothing. We are social animals, and we love to wear insignia that give us instant affinity with others, something to smile and talk about with strangers, and hence become friends. We actually spend more on sports affinity paraphernalia than we spend on tickets.

Alas, in the context of ‘professional’ sports all of this comes at a major cost. Propagandists (from political thugs to opportunist corporatist advertisers) have exploited sports to the point of ruin, and disgust. Ticket prices for professional teams are obscene, relegating all but the elite who can tax-deduct them to the bleachers and TV screens. Most professional sports are replete with cheaters (drug users — performance-enhancing and pain-numbing — and judge bribers), bullies, and arrogant hacks both on the field and in the media. To come second is a disgrace, the media tell us — heads should roll. And the health and fitness level of sports watchers who would never dream of actually playing a sport is abysmal.

The solution, I think, is to find entertainments that provide us with the opportunity for affinity and to develop an impressive expertise, that are not competitive. That is, entertainments (like ballooning, hiking, and theatre-going — other than to theatres that show the aforementioned Hollywood schlock) in which there are no winners and losers, only good, enjoyable performances and those that could be improved (and we’re all armchair critics) and which, most importantly, are participative, both for our health and for our level of social and intellectual engagement.

I keep saying we need to re-learn to entertain ourselves. We suffer from a dreadful imaginative poverty in our modern world. We are unfit, both physically and in our creative and critical thinking capacity. For all our information sources, we are appallingly ignorant about history, geography, the arts, science, and what is going on in the world. And we are fiercely, unnecessarily and destructively competitive.

From now on, every time I am tempted to watch a “spectator sport”, or a mass media information or entertainment production, I am going to stop myself and ask: What could I be doing instead that is more collaborative, and more participative, and take myself off the sidelines and out of the chair and into action, doing something, cooperatively, with others.

I hope you will too. There is a difference between entertainment and fun, and we’re buying far too much of the former and taking part far toolittle in the latter.

Category: Our Culture
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Understanding Media Redux: Making Better Use of Space and Time Online

Posted on August 20, 2008 by Dave Pollard
wordle poetry
Last month I contrasted the wordle (a collage of words with size proportionate to frequency of use) of the contents of my personal profile and my friend Siona’s, and commented on how hers seemed more reflective of me than mine did.

As a second experiment, I produced the wordle above of the contents of a collection of five of my own poems, and below it the contents of my favourite poem, TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. I was kind of hoping that the result would be poetic, and it really isn’t, but it is, I think, instructive. What jumped out at me immediately were the words time and world, in both wordles. It occured to me that most poetry, as re–present–ation, is essentially preoccupied with time and space, what happened where and when. Many of the prominent words in these wordles are temporal or spacial. The word now features in both, and while Eliot’s place is the sea, mine is the forest.

If poetry is infatuated with time and space, I wondered why most poetry makes such poor use of both to make its message. Most poetry is linear, row on row, though ee cummings for example was more playful with the placement of words on the page. Even spoken poetry adds little, and sometimes even detracts from the mood and meaning, since poetry is very much a conversation in which the reader takes part, fills in the blanks from his or her own experience, adds context, which a dissonant reading can destroy.

The poem below, Swan and Shadow by John Hollander, is quite clever in its use of space.

swan and shadow

What could we do, in the brave new world of the Internet, to make better use of time and space, in poetic ways? We know that the eye and the brain process information visually, from the centre out to the periphery, not linearly. Should we, could we write poetry that way?

We can now use video to make words move in ways that are both informative and expressive. Could we write poetry so it appears before us a few words at a time, at the speed we would read it, using text in clever and expressive ways, the way Michael Wesch uses animation to explain social media? I’ve spoken at business conferences about how visualizations can add meaning and value to information. Could they add meaning and value to poetry?

What role could/should sound and video play in enhancing, supporting, reinforcing the written poem? Is it like a spoken reading of a poem, that can make it better (if it’s well done) or worse (if it intrudes on the reader’s own sense-making about the poem)?

I’m interested in the answers to these questions in the context of poetry, because if the Internet presents us with opportunities to make poetry more communicative, evocative, ‘successful’ in some sense or other, then surely it can do the same for other written media, like blogs, newspapers, magazines, stories, novels. We have seen the addition of audio and video to these media, but in very prosaic, unimaginative ways. How could we do better? How could ‘multimedia communication’ be really innovative, integrative, reinvented from the ground up to convey feeling and meaning to us in richer, natural ways, to move us to the time and place of the writer of words, so that our conversation with him or her is more real, richer, more sensory, synaesthetic?

The Internet is itself innovative, but I can’t shake the nagging feeling that we’ve been very un-innovative in how we’ve used it to convey the meaning of language, that we’re too rooted in the hard-copy and one-way broadcast way of thinking about media. What do you think? If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, howwould he be using the Internet?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

What Will Canada Do When the US Tells Us “No”?

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Dave Pollard
harper bushIt is hard to imagine that the US doesn’t have a plan to annex Canada. A nation that has no hesitation in trumping up charges against a country half a world away when it is perceived to threaten its energy security, and then bombing the hell out of it, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of civilians and utterly destroying its infrastructure and social fabric, would not think twice about seizing control of a nation that offers it even more (and whose animosity would severely threaten its national interest).

There was a plan, in the years between the two world wars, to do just that. It was declassified decades ago and now makes rather quaint reading. But there is no question that there is an American “contingency plan” to annex Canada if need be, just as surely as there is one to bomb Iran as the next stage to secure the oil on which the entire American economy utterly depends.

There are reasons to believe that the US doesn’t expect it will have to do this. More than half of all Canadian business, by revenue, is foreign-owned, and the vast majority of that is American. The employment picture is probably comparable, although it’s hard to compute when franchisees of foreign companies are considered Canadian companies. Likewise, there are no records of citizenship or residence of land-holders in Canada, so determining how much land is in foreign hands is impossible to determine. But it is pretty evident that the Canadian economy is substantially foreign-owned and foreign-controlled. If we did something to displease our American owners, they could shut down our economy pretty effectively.

This sell-out has occurred over decades, with both Liberal and Conservative regimes dismantling Canadian ownership regulations consistently. Then we signed NAFTA, effectively ceding authority to write social or environmental laws any stronger than those of the weakest laws anywhere in the three countries. When you can’t write laws to protect your own people, you really have no sovereignty left. The right-wing Harper minority government has made no secret of its desire for full political and economic integration with the US, and the reaction of the Canadian people has been astonishingly blasÈ. Our economy is so dependent on the US already that the value of the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar moves in lockstep with the Dow.

There is reason to believe that this control will not be enough to placate those in the US concerned with trying to sustain that country’s unsustainable economy, however:

  1. The US desperately needs the oil from Canada’s bitumen sludge mines (the so-called “tar sands”), the worst ecological disaster on the planet. These operations are currently uneconomic, and it will take huge improvements in technology, and the energy from whole farms of nuclear power plants and natural gas from Canada’s fragile arctic, to extract the oil from the sludge. It will also take staggering amounts of Canadian fresh water. 
  2. Speaking of water, the US needs Canada’s Western glacial water to replace the rapidly disappearing glacial water that provides people, industry and recreation with most of their water in most of the Western US states. Canada’s water is also running out, except in the Arctic, but the US shortage will be much more severe and come much sooner.
  3. Electricity from Canadian hydroelectric plants supplies a substantial amount of US electrical needs. But Canadians are trying to shut down coal-fired power plants and use hydro power to make up some of the difference.
  4. As global warming melts the Arctic, there will be huge pressure to plunder the hydrocarbons in that area. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the US thirst for oil, but the US is desperate for anything they can fill gas tanks with. Much of this energy is under Canadian waters, but the US has recently said it will not honour Canadian sovereignty over these waters, and considers them “international waters”. Burning this energy will, of course, accelerate global warming.
  5. Likewise, as the Arctic melts, the lucrative Northwest Passage will be open for shipping year-round. It is clearly in Canadian waters, but the US disputes this sovereignty.

None of this bodes well for the future of Canada-US relations, and as the US starts to run out of land, the hunger for more land will make the situation even more volatile.

This could all come to a head if Canada were to do (or try to do) any of the following:

  1. Restrict foreign ownership of land, resources or assets or shares of businesses in ‘strategic’ industries.
  2. Increase social or environmental regulations to the point the bitumen sludge mining operations or Arctic development became non-viable at any price.
  3. Restrict taking of water from Canadian waters, or sale of electricity to non-Canadians.
  4. Proclaim sovereignty over Canadian waters.

These are not especially grievous things for a country to do — most countries believe it is their right to do these things in areas of their own jurisdiction.

But not Canada. If we were to try to do any of these things, the US would simply say “no”. They would start by protesting, and suing us under NAFTA and other extraterritorial laws. And if that wasn’t enough they would do whatever it took to get the restrictions on their untrammeled access to our resources, land and waters removed. Whatever it took.

Harper rolled over on NAFTA already, settling for a fraction (still unpaid) of what the NAFTA courts said the US stole from us illegally. He has no intention of doing anything to impede Canada-US integration.

But at some point Canadians will have had enough of Harper’s arrogance, just as they did with the previous Conservative administration of Mulroney, and turf him out of office. He is in power now only because his right-wing party competes with four left-of-centre parties who split the vote in our absurd first-past-the-post voting system. Most Canadians would be glad to see the end of him, and sooner or later they will get their way, and a party or coalition amenable to the majority will be elected. And that new government will almost certainly do one or more of the four things above. The US will then say “no” and do whatever it takes to have the restrictions blocked or removed.

What will we do then? I suspect we will do nothing. Four in ten Americans want to annex Canada anyway, according to a recent poll. In another poll, only 57% of British citizens would support action to defend Canada from US annexation.

Canadians are pacifists at heart. Most of us no longer believe the war in Afghanistan is worth continuing, and most of us always opposed the war in Iraq. We have among the most liberal immigration laws in the world, taking in far more than our share of refugees and immigrants (though now, under Harper, American war objectors are no longer accepted, but that will be a short-lived anomaly). We acknowledge, I guess, that our natural wealth was a fortune of birth, not something we really earned. It belongs to the world, to all of us, and if someone wants to steal it from us, we’ll just shrug and say “too bad, it was nice while it lasted”.

Americans, believers in manifest destiny, the private ownership of everything, might makes right, and the end justifies the means, can’t really understand this. They see it as cowardice, or complacency, tacit approval for their takeover of everything Canadian, and for their American worldview. They will turn the rest of Western Canada into a deforested and toxic wasteland, and Northern Canada into a melting, oil-slicked military stronghold. And we will let them, while convincing ourselves that It’s not really that bad, There is no other real choice, I don’tknow anything about that, or There’s nothing we can do about that.

That’s what empires do to colonies. And that’s what colonies do when they do it.
Posted in How the World Really Works | 13 Comments

Where Do You See Your Future Beginning?: U Journaling Practice

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Dave Pollard

finding the sweet spot circles
The first section of my book Finding the Sweet Spot is about discovering where what you’re good at, what you love doing, and what is needed in the world (that you care about) intersect. The book describes a number of exercises you can use to help hone in on this ‘sweet spot’. Over our lives, as we learn more (including more about ourselves) and change, this sweet spot will change, too. The search for the sweet spot is a lifelong, evolving one.

On the weekend I pointed you to an approach my friend Jean-SÈbastien has successfully used to help a group of people find their collective sweet spot — the work they as a group are ‘meant’ to do. Today I want to bring to your attention an approach you can use personally if you really haven’t a clue what you are meant to do — if you don’t even know where to start. It’s an exercise in acquiring self-knowledge, designed by Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Institute.

The exercise entails answering the following 17 questions, a process that Scharmer says should take you a couple of hours. It’s called the U Journaling Practice, and the questions are as follows:

  1. Challenges: Look at yourself from outside as if you were another person: What are the 3 or 4 most important challenges or tasks that your life (work and non-work) currently presents?
  2. Self: Write down 3 or 4 important facts about yourself. What are the important accomplishments you have achieved or competencies you have developed in your life (examples: raising children; finishing your education; being a good listener)?
  3. Emerging Self: What 3 or 4 important aspirations, areas of interest, or undeveloped talents would you like to place more focus on in your future journey (examples: writing a novel or poems; starting a social movement; taking your current work to a new level)?
  4. Frustration: What about your current work and/or personal life frustrates you the most?
  5. Energy: What are your most vital sources of energy? What do you love?
  6. Inner resistance: What is holding you back? Describe 2 or 3 recent situations (in your work or personal life) where you noticed one of the following three voices kicking in, which then prevented you from exploring the situation you were in more deeply:
    • Voice of Judgment: shutting down your open mind (downloading instead of inquiring)
    • Voice of Cynicism: shutting down your open heart (disconnecting instead of relating)
    • Voice of Fear: shutting down your open will (holding on to the past or the present instead of letting go
  7. The crack: Over the past couple of days and weeks, what new aspects of your Self have you noticed? What new questions and themes are occurring to you now?
  8. Your community: Who makes up your community, and what are their highest hopes in regard to your future journey? Choose three people with different perspectives on your life and explore their hopes for your future (examples: your family; your friends; a parentless child on the street with no access to food, shelter, safety, or education). What might you hope for if you were in their shoes and looking at your life through their eyes?
  9. Helicopter: Watch yourself from above (as if in a helicopter). What are you doing? What are you trying to do in this stage of your professional and personal journey?
  10. Imagine you could fast-forward to the very last moments of your life, when it is time for you to pass on. Now look back on your life’s journey as a whole. What would you want to see at that moment? What footprint do you want to leave behind on the planet? What would you want to be remembered for by the people who live on after you?
  11. From that (future) place, look back at your current situation as if you were looking at a different person. Now try to help that other person from the viewpoint of your highest future Self. What advice would you give? Feel, and sense, what the advice is — and then write it down.
  12. Now return again to the present and crystallize what it is that you want to create: your vision and intention for the next 3-5 years. What vision and intention do you have for yourself and your work? What are some essential core elements of the future that you want to create in your personal, professional, and social life? Describe as concretely as possible the images and elements that occur to you.
  13. Letting-go: What would you have to let go of in order to bring your vision into reality? What is the old stuff that must die? What is the old skin (behaviors, thought processes, etc.) that you need to shed?
  14. Seeds: What in your current life or context provides the seeds for the future that you want to create? Where do you see your future beginning?
  15. Prototyping: Over the next three months, if you were to prototype a microcosm of the future in which you could discover “the new” by doing something, what would that prototype look like?
  16. People: Who can help you make your highest future possibilities a reality? Who might be your core helpers and partners?
  17. Action: If you were to take on the project of bringing your intention into reality, what practical first steps would you take over the next 3 to 4 days?

The purpose of this exercise is not, as it might first appear, to create a roadmap of your future life and career. The real purpose is to get important insights about yourself. If you’ve never thought about your Gifts or your Passions, these insights are likely to come from questions 2, 3, 5, and 7 — but only if you give a lot of thought to them, and if you have either the experience or imagination to really know what the answers to these questions are or might be. If you can’t answer these questions easily, you may have to try some new things to discover what you really love, and what you really do well. You may also find that some of the things you’ve idealized, that you think you would love doing, you’d actually not like at all.

For others, more knowledgeable about their Gifts and Passions, the insights may well come from the “What’s holding you back?” questions 1, 4, 6 and 13.

Questions 8-11 are about perspective. In my book I suggest as an exercise writing your own obituary, assuming you’ve accomplished everything you hoped to in your life, to gain that perspective. Insights from these questions are likely for those who are so bogged down in their day-to-day existence they can’t see any way out, or forward.

If (or once) you have that perspective, the insights are likely to come from the “First next steps” questions 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. If the first 11 questions have forced you onto the high-diving platform, these last questions are the ones that will push you to jump. You may get cold feet and be tempted to go back and modify your answers to the earlier questions, and make those intentions and dreams more modest.

I hope you can resist this temptation. Better to sit down on that high lonely perch and think awhile, than to make the humiliating climb back down the ladder. I confess the last four questions are the ones that I found the hardest, and my tentative answers to them brought me the most startling insight. I’m a lifelong procrastinator, and even in my Last 37 Days exercise (another exercise I’d highly recommend for gaining self-knowledge) I was pretty damned complacent — saying it wouldn’t give me enough time to do anything new and important, so I’d just spend it in reflection, alone.

So my answer to question 14 was: My future begins with meeting a lot of new people, people I’ve intended or always wanted to meet, and inviting them to co-invent our future together. That will take a lot of courage, perhaps more than I have, yet. It will also require me to keep an open mind about the new people I meet, to love them more easily, and to see the opportunity to live and make a living with them, even if it may not be obvious at first. I think I know what I am intended to do, and to be, but perhaps this answer will change as I explore, collectively in conversation in community with people I love, our collective intention.

And my answer to question 15 was: It would be the first collective design of an (intentional) Natural Community with three or four Natural Enterprises operating within it. The very concept of a genuine collective design, of trusting other people enough to have them co-design your future, is very frightening. But I don’t think working models are likely to come from anyone’s individual genius — not social or ecological models anyway, since they are inherently complex. Individual genius is useful only for the merely complicated designs — technologies. And technologies aren’t going to fix what’s broken.

My answer to question 16 was: I haven’t the faintest idea. My initial answer was the people in my blogroll, and specifically that subset in my Gravitational Community shown in the right sidebar of this blog. But I don’t even know most of these people, not really. Somehow, however, I think we’ll awkwardly find each other. With lots of practice inviting others to explore these important questions with us, we might finally learn who we’re meant to live and make a living with. I am completely convinced it is not one person, not a nuclear family. In community is the future of the world, even though almost none of us remembers or knows what real community is about.

And my answer to question 17 was: Keep on being myself, and doing what I do, specifically: to play, to love, to learn, to converse, to give (ideas, energy, knowledge, capacities), to be self-disciplined in maintaining my health and expanding my personal capacity, to write, to reflect, and to be attentive. Some may say that is not ‘intentional’ enough, that it is not a clear vector towards my intentions in questions 14 and 15. But we can only control so much of our own lives, and we have to learn to trust that, by being the best we can be, and by being open, the paths we must follow, together, will emerge from our collective wisdom, and these paths will realize our collective intention.

We must not procrastinate, but we must be patient.

What insights did you get from answering these questions? What did you learn about yourself? Where do you see your future beginning?
Posted in Working Smarter | 2 Comments

Saturday (Sunday) Links of the Week — August 16 (17), 2008

Posted on August 17, 2008 by Dave Pollard
wet chipmunk
That’s the head of an exhausted, wet chipmunk peeking out of the towel, after I rescued him from our pool today. Our man-made world poses such strange perils for wild creatures! A couple of minutes after I took this shot, he jumped up and scampered away.

Birth of a Natural Enterprise: My friend Jean-SÈbastien Bouchard relates the story of how he put together his new enterprise Grisvert — for those who read French this is an inspiring and instructive story. He formed the business using a practice called the Five Breaths of [Collective] Design, which looks like a great methodology to assist in Finding the Sweet Spot.

Being Ready for the Crises Ahead: Chris Corrigan makes a list of what you can do to mitigate, adapt to and prepare for coming catastrophes, which is pretty close to my list.

No Simple Answers: Jon Husband reproduces an excerpt from a Thomas de Zengotita’s book that decries our insistence that every article, every exposition, every critical analysis, to be worth anything, must provide a solution. This is interesting to me, because I have often complained that reading news that is not actionable is a waste of time. But that is not what de Zengotita is arguing with — all he’s saying is that it is not up to the author to provide the action — and that in our modern complex world no one is (or can be) in control.

What Do We Want to Get Out of Blogging?: Cassandra laments the growing introspection and decline in community and interconnectedness she sees in the blogosphere, and then asks readers What do we want to get out of this activity? I confess I’ve been a bit discouraged that my blog’s popularity has flattened out, but I don’t think popularity is the main reason I blog. I tend to comment rarely on others’ blogs, as I prefer to write something here and trackback to them. Mostly I still think out loud on these pages, which is useful to me and apparently to others, and I love the fact that my readers point me to stuff I should read (which makes my online time much more productive). And that you keep me honest, telling me, usually gently, when my writing is not up to par, and why. I still think blogs are awkward conversational media, so I’m spending more and more of my online time in IM and v2v, but these media, at least the ones worth keeping, will eventually merge into one ‘voice’, Friendfeed plus a lot more all in one box.

The Death of the Oceans: Fertilizers and smog deposits running off into our oceans have created massive dead zones on coasts all over the planet, as the runoff creates algae blooms that suck oxygen out of the water, killing all marine animal life. Since most marine animals live near the coasts, our farms and cars are essentially killing our oceans. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

And Arctic Melting Faster Than Scientists’ Worst Fears: “The trouble is that sea ice is now disappearing from the Arctic faster than our ability to develop new computer models and to understand what is happening there. We always knew it would be the first region on Earth to feel the impact of climate change, but not at anything like this speed. What is happening now indicates that global warming is occurring far earlier than any of us expected.”

Misplaced Euphoria as the US Dollar Rises and Oil Price Falls: James Kunstler explains how the rising dollar and falling oil price are just pre-crash symptoms. Thanks to Bruce Stewart for the link and the three that follow.

The Future is Frugality: Mike Shedlock contemplates what a future after 2 trillion dollars in mortgage losses have been written off will look like. It’s a future without credit. And with no credit, our economy will grind to a halt. (The NYT chimes in with another in its excellent series on consumer debt, saying many consumers are paying an average of over 20% in interest and fees on their soaring debts, while the assets that secure them are in free fall — thanks to reader EJ for this link).

Advice for Graduates: Don’t Get Caught in the Corporatist Trap: George Monbiot suggests that young people starting work for a large corporation “leave the moment youíve learnt what you need to learn (usually after just a few months) and the firm starts taking more from you than you are taking from it.” It’s advice meant for aspiring journalists, but it applies equally to any career.

Lenders’ Troubles Worsening Fast: Karl Denninger looks at the fundamentals of the entire credit market, not just the sub-prime loans, and finds it hemorrhaging. (And it hasn’t helped that, on top of the $3 trillion and soaring US credit card debt, another $1.2 trillion was shifted from cards to home equity loans before the housing crash). (And Rob Paterson shows a scary chart comparing consumer debt/GDP in 1929 and now).

The Ball Is All That Matters: Several of my favourite bloggers are mourning the recent loss of beloved companion animals. Beth Patterson writes a lovely eulogy for Ling. Barbara Klaser writes about her dear Independence. And Sharon Brogan fondly remembers Spike.

Why People Commit Atrocities: Psychologist TherapyDoc asks how ordinary, sane people can commit horrific atrocities, as happened in Nazi death camps, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur, and is happening still all over the world, including in US-funded torture prisons, and in homes where people are abused, and in thousands of factory farms that most of us rely on for our food. I answered this question two years ago: It’s because we let them, encourage them even by our inaction or worse, when we say: It’s not really that bad, There is no other real choice, I don’tknow about that, or There’s nothing we can do about that. Without our complicity it cannot go on.

eco-man
Just for Fun: Create your own Superhero character. Mine is above (still deciding on a name for him, and his trusty sidekick). Thanks to Beth for the link.

Thought for the Week, from Sharon Brogan:

Love

I’ve looked everywhere:
the junk drawer in the kitchen,
the catch-all on the dresser,
in every cupboard and cabinet.
I scolded the cat and got down
on my knees to look under the sofa.
It’s not in the garage, the basement,
the attic. I cleaned out the car,
the glove-box, the trunk. I’ve swept
all the corners, emptied the desk.
I asked Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.
I searched Wikipedia, called
everyone I know. I switched out
the bed linens, shook out the rugs,
shuffled the pages of all the books.
It is not here. I’ve looked everywhere,
year after year, but I cannot find it.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments

More Than Just a Friday Flashback: Presencing and Theory U

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Dave Pollard
Otto Scharmer Theory U
Three years ago I reviewed, in glowing terms, and excerpted parts from, a book called Presence with four authors, one of whom is MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer, creator of Theory U, illustrated above, which is the backbone of the concept called Presencing, and of the book.

In light of yesterday’s post, in which I explained what “presence” has recently come to mean to me (a combination of self-awareness of which one of several dozen types of activities I am doing at any point in my day, and employment of the appropriate process for that activity, a process that has been allowed to emerge and continuously improve through practice), I thought it might be worth taking another look at my earlier review.

At the time, as excited as I was about the concept, I described the book and its ideas as flawed and tentative. Since then I have found the book really difficult to act upon. More and more I’ve come to realize that it was Scharmer’s Theory U that I liked, and that the rest of the book (notably Peter Senge’s apparent insistence on putting “institutionalization” at the end — top upper right — of the U, presumably to make it more appealing to business executives who want theory to be actionable in traditional command-and-control measurable-results terms) actually detracted from Scharmer’s theory. I’m pleased to see that Scharmer’s latest version, above, has eliminated the hierarchical junk from the model and made it more personal, where the assessment of learning and responsibility for action are left to individual team members, as they should be. Theory U is now more consistent with Open Space type methodologies that are trusting of individuals but allow the insights and actions to emerge from collaborative effort. In fact, his latest 2-page summary of the theory contains an even better, clearer graphic of the process:

Otto Scharmer Theory U version 2

Theory U is in essence a problem-solving (or more accurately perhaps a problem-addressing) process. Scharmer proposes this process to optimize both collaboration and innovation, and as a guide for coaches to use to enable collaborative and innovative capacity in individuals and teams working on (especially intractable) problems.

  • The co-initiating step includes self-organizing the team, studying patterns and paying attention — being aware. Its principal ‘product’ is an engaged and informed team.
  • The co-sensing step entails making sense of what you are now aware of. Its principal product is understanding.
  • The presencing step is the most challenging for traditional organizations to accept, I suspect. It is what Scharmer calls letting go and letting come, a being open to possibility, using imagination and critical and creative thinking. Its principal products are emerging approaches.
  • The co-creating step is one of iteratively exploring and experimenting with these possible approaches. Its principal products are working models.
  • The co-evolving step is the continuous and improvisational study, improvement and innovation of these models, collaboratively in peer production with the community of users of these models (the models ‘continuously becoming’ better and better products and services in practice — there is no longer such a thing as a ‘finished product’, just the latest and best evolved ‘version’). Its principal products are sustained innovation, relationships and resilience.

Those of you who’ve read the proofs of my new book Finding the Sweet Spot will probably recognize, as I did, that Scharmer’s U is a very similar process to the one I recommend for creating Natural Enterprises. These Natural Enterprises I’ve so long admired, places where work is responsible, sustainable, joyful, meaningful and natural, are theorganizational embodiment of Theory U.

And he says this about what happens to teams that have been through the U process together: “Often they begin to function as an intentional
vehicle for an emerging future.” So this process is also the process that Intentional Communities use to self-form and thrive.

Maybe I should get our mutual friend Andrew Campbell to introduce me to Otto.

Read my earlier review.
Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

Presence: The Practice of Self-Awareness and Self-Management

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Dave Pollard
research and innovation processes
Of late I have been practicing meditation, and it is finally starting to bear fruit. What I have realized is that I (and perhaps most people) have always lived life automatously: Reactive, un-self-aware of what I am doing, and why. Mechanically.

Now that I am starting to learn to pay attention to these things, I’ve surprised myself: I’ve caught myself on some occasions acutely aware of what I’m doing, the process I’m following, and why, and on (too many) other occasions, operating completely dysfunctionally, embarrassing myself. The difference, I’ve concluded, is that in the former cases I’m present, and in the latter cases, absent. I have no idea who this mindless idiot is that operates my body most of the time, but it can’t possibly be me.

There are two parts to this presence: The first part is this self-awareness — knowing and noticing and paying attention to what you’re doing. It is hard to both do something and to pay attention to yourself doing it, but it is not impossible. The second part is following a process, one that you’re comfortable with, but not so much that it’s subconscious.

I think the key to both is practice. We can learn to be both active, engaged, in the moment, and aware that that’s what we are. Being and observing ourselves being. And we can learn to use a process diligently, consciously — a process that we’ve found to work, and that we’re so comfortable with we can adapt it to suit each different circumstance. We’re so comfortable with it that we don’t have to think about it — but we do. These things take a great deal of practice.

I don’t like practicing. Perhaps it’s a vestige of being forced to practice things when I was younger. Perhaps it’s impatience, inattention, lack of self-discipline. Perhaps it’s that often what I have practiced (e.g. four-finger typing, bad musical instrument playing) have been poor habits, such that practice actually made me worse at it.

Here are just some of the things that I do all the time that I have started to become aware of my process for doing them (two of which are illustrated above):

  • processing information 
  • designing things
  • making things
  • solving problems
  • conversing
  • writing (fiction & non-fiction — different processes)
  • researching
  • crafting and telling stories
  • meditating
  • facilitating
  • sensing, listening, observing, paying attention
  • intuiting
  • explaining, teaching, coaching and interpreting
  • creating
  • imagining and envisioning, letting go and letting come
  • advising
  • collaborating
  • deciding
  • innovating
  • achieving consensus
  • self-directed learning, especially of things I like that are also needed
  • inviting
  • provoking and infecting others

For a few of these things, I have evolved a very good process, and do tend to follow it. But for most of these things, I have no process. I have no clue.

Some of these processes are linear. Others are iterative, or interactive, or improvisational. In some of them I adapt the process to suit others, and to suit their processes for doing these things. In others, I confess, I’m still far too dogmatic, still too fervent in the belief that my way is the best, or nearly so. In some cases my collaborators use different processes than I do, so everything in the collaboration becomes a building of bridges, a translation of frames, an adaptation and co-production. A dance.

I think it makes sense to develop (and evolve) a process for doing each of these things, and then practice using it until you become very competent (but not dogmatic) at it. And then, each day, each moment, as you begin to do things, be aware consciously of the various activities you do, and the process you use, deliberately, to do each. That doesn’t mean designing new processes for everything you do. It means simply being aware of what process you do use, and letting it evolve to become better. And also being aware of being aware, self-aware, present, deliberate.

Chop wood, carry water, as my friend Rob Paterson reminds me. Do each task, mindfully, until you understand exactly what you are doing and why you’re doing it precisely that way. Practice, consciously, getting better, improving the process and the execution of the process, refining, getting faster, more skilled and competent, presently aware, managing, adapting oneself.
This is a different take on the being versus doing discussion I’ve had here, and with myself, lately. Presence requires you to be self-aware as you do the activity using the process.

At last I understand when meditators speak of mindfulness, what they are referring to. Simply being aware of what you are and what precisely you are doing, and how, and why. The word attention is from the Latin “to stretch to”. Such folly to be constantly stretching, in all directions,without knowing, being aware of where or how or why you are stretching.

Aha.

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 1 Comment

Dominoes

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Dave Pollard
credit
Last year I described thirteen economic, political and environmental crises that are long overdue, and which will almost certainly occur at some point in this century. These crises will be the result of our generation’s short-term thinking, greed, and mismanagement of the the economy, of power and of the Earth’s resources. Our actions, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century and to some extent even before, have been irresponsible, shortsighted, selfish and unsustainable. What’s worse, rather than accept responsibility for this behaviour, we have mortgaged the future to try to sustain our unsustainable lifestyle and actions just a little longer, in the misguided belief that technology or innovation will find some way to solve them, and allow rampant population growth and consumption growth to continue indefinitely.

The generations that will inherit the mess we have created over the next three generations should rightly be furious at us for doing so, but unlike the boomer generation, who rioted in the streets in the 1960s and swore to “never trust anyone over 30”, our successors have been sanguine, pragmatic, even timid about the challenges we have foisted upon them.

Recently, I was asked which of the thirteen interrelated looming crises I thought would be the first to occur, the first domino to fall, and when.

In answering this, I would offer a few caveats:

  • Prognosticators have a long track record of overestimating the rate of change in the near future and underestimating the change over the longer term. Unlike many of the experts in economics, ecology, technology and social trends, I think the next twenty years or so will be merely tumultuous — the real crises, the ones we are unlikely to be able to cope with, probably won’t occur until the 2030s. 
  • This doesn’t mean that we’re not going to have some earlier previews of the crises to come, and some short-term improvements in some areas that might give us false hope that the longer-term problems had been solved. For example, we’re going to have a series of serious recessions before 2030, I think, but the next Great Depression will not likely occur until after then, after we have had some temporary respite from the smaller downturns. And while Peak Oil is inevitably going to make the price of oil unaffordable for almost all endeavours we now take for granted, we will see spikes and retrenchments of oil prices in the interim, in response to short-term events, that may blind us to the inevitable long-term energy crisis that awaits us.
  • The longer-term crises that will prove to be our undoing are likely to be masked by short-term crises that will distract us from paying attention to them. The media will worsen this situation. Only in retrospect will we realize which of the burning issues of the day were the ones that were really important.

Because they’re interrelated, some of these crises will precipitate others, and our ability for forestall some of them will delay the occurrence of others. And the timing of some of them, like pandemics, is largely unpredictable — if they occur soon, they might cause some of these other crises to occur sooner than I’d expect, and if they occur later, they might delay the onset of others.

Having said that, here is my wild guess about when these crises will occur. I’d welcome your “second guesses”:

First Wave: Approximately 2010 to 2030

  • Consumer Credit Collapse: After a brief upturn in the housing market in the US particularly, housing prices will plunge again as the orgy of consumer spending that has occurred since 1990 (see charts above) comes to a sudden halt, after a whole series of bank collapses cause a severe tightening of credit. Since 1970, in real dollars, per-capita total assets have doubled, financed entirely by debt, so that net worth of 95% of the population has actually declined. The apparent wealth of bigger houses, second cars and expensive furnishings is all an illusion, and the tightening of credit will throw all these overpriced assets into the market at fire-sale prices, and bankruptcies will soar. Between 2002 and 2007, $1.2 trillion of credit card debt was shifted into mortgages. With home prices falling further, that debt will be called, and added onto the expected $3.0 trillion in other credit card debt, carrying double-digit average interest charges, will crush millions of consumers.
  • $US Collapse, US Debt Crisis and Trade Imbalance Crisis: Even the most optimistic economists have acknowledged that the US debt and trade deficit, each around $10 trillion and growing at an astronomical rate, cannot be sustained. The recent “small collapse” of the $US reflects this, but it is not enough to solve the problem. It simply cannot be repaid, even if interest rates are suppressed and the US economy keeps churning out more and more money to paper it over. Ultimately creditors (in Asia, and in the Mideast), realizing their receivables from and investments in the US are essentially worthless, will balk, and the dollar’s collapse will be sudden and total, just like all the overextended and mismanaged currencies that have preceded it.
  • Inflation and Interest Rate Spikes: The real rate of inflation in affluent nations has long been in excess of 10%, but government authorities have fudged the numbers to report low rates to justify low indexing of pensions and wages, artificially low interest rates on debt, and to enable them to blame consumers for their inability to make ends meet. Rates on loans and mortgages are already jumping even as governments keep pushing down the interest rates they pay to bondholders and charge to banks and corporate lenders. As commodity prices leap and credit tightens, and as the $US goes into freefall, we will start to see the hyperinflation that plagued mismanaged economies throughout previous centuries. These spikes will exacerbate the housing and credit collapse and bankruptcy rates, and slow international trade to a crawl.

Second Wave: Approximately 2030 to 2050: Continuation/recurrence of the above crises plus:

  • Economic Collapse in China and India: These economies, overheated, dependent on sales to affluent nations that will no longer be able to afford their products, dependent on cheap energy, and facing unending environmental catastrophes because of exhaustion of the soil and pollution of the air and water, will crumble. Factories will be abandoned, riots will break out, civil order will break down, and famines and civil war will rage.
  • Severe Water Shortages: Water will become a scarce resource and economic activities dependent on it will become unaffordable and, with rationing, impossible to sustain. Irrigation in agriculture, tar sands development, and most mining operations will cease. Hydroelectric power plants will shut down. Human settlements in dry areas on all continents will be abandoned. The US may invade Canada to access fresh water.
  • Oil Shortages and Permanent Price Spikes: As new oil projects prove incapable of producing significantly more energy than they consume, realization of the end of the oil economy will finally dawn on us all. Oil prices of 5-10 times current levels will require a permanent and painful adjustment to economies and ways of life. Areas that are inhospitable without fossil fuel heat or cooling will be abandoned. So will suburbs and areas far from employment, as outlined in The Long Emergency. Large-scale re-localization of economies will occur, as long-distance transportation of goods and people becomes uneconomic. Industries dependent on oil, such as agriculture, plastics, textiles, paints, chemicals and pharmaceuticals will face massive restructuring. Economies dependent on foreign trade will be shredded.
  • Stock Market Crash and Global Depression: The combination of most or all of the above will bring about a crisis in capital markets, a huge shrinkage in consumer spending, and an unprecedented dislocation of people and industry, precipitating the second Great Depression. The last one ended with a massive government investment in war and social service spending. This time, governments will have no money to rescue the economy, so the depression could continue for decades, just as the boom of the last century endured for an unprecedented period.
  • Pandemics: The concentration of monoculture agriculture, the horrific overcrowding of farmed animals with almost no genetic diversity, and human overcrowding, combined with global warming and the destruction of tropical ecosystems will, together, inevitably unleash pandemics that will affect all species of life on Earth: humans, plant crops, forests, farmed and wild animals, birds and fish. The economic losses and economic disruption caused by these pandemics will be far more devastating than the simple loss of human life. Such pandemics will become more frequent as ecosystems become more crowded, less varied and more fragile. They could happen anytime.
  • Bioterrorism: As these crises start to occur with greater regularity and greater severity, a sense of desperation and hopelessness, already seen in some of the more overpopulated and desolated nations of the planet, will become more widespread. Bioterror is easy for desperate groups to perpetrate, and need no national sponsorship, and the spread of knowledge and new technologies will make it even easier. With so much of our population, food supply and infrastructure centralized, it will be impossible to prevent, and its success will encourage more of it.

Third Wave: Approximately 2050 to 2070: Continuation/recurrence and worsening of the above crises plus:

  • Conventional Civil & Regional Wars Escalating to Global Wars: In socially and environmentally stressed and overpopulated areas such as Pakistan/India (two nuclear powers), the Mideast, South America, Africa and Southeast Asia, already endemic local warfare and genocides will escalate and spread into regional wars, which, as resources become scarce and nuclear and biological weapons become more affordable, will engulf the whole planet. 
  • Climate Change Crises: Large-scale desertification, droughts, heatwaves, the death of the oceans, widespread, violent weather events and rising sea-levels caused by glacial and ice-cap melt and ocean current disruption will all wreak havoc on an already crisis-weary planet. Some projections suggest that, by the latter part of the century, as many as one billion people in low-lying coastal areas will be permanently displaced.
  • Food Crises, Famines and the Collapse of Industrial Agriculture: A combination of oil scarcity, water scarcity, diversion of cropland to fuel production, and desertification and other climate change disruption is likely to make the industrial agriculture model completely unsustainable. The switch to local, subsistent permaculture will be difficult and painful.
  • Large-Scale, Endemic Unemployment: Most of the planet has lost the capacity and knowledge of how to make a living for themselves. As larger corporations prove to be unsustainable and close their doors, the immediate effect will be large-scale chronic unemployment (already evident in many struggling nations). It will take generations for citizens to re-learn the long-lost skills of feeding, clothing and looking after themselves.
  • Infrastructure Collapse: For many years the global infrastructure of utilities, distribution, transportation networks and production has been neglected and underfunded. This neglect will worsed as the economy weakens, and large parts of the infrastructure previously maintained by either tax dollars or private consortia will crumble and fall into disuse, and will just be abandoned.
  • Endemic Chronic Disease: It was interesting to see that the gnomes of Davos identified the soaring rates of chronic diseases in affluent nations as one of the top ten global business risks this year. We will soon, I predict, discover that this is caused mostly by the toxins in our food, air, water and soil, and by the nutritional and micronutritional poverty of the modern industrial agriculture diet. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done, and the soaring rates of these debilitating chronic diseases will bankrupt health systems, cripple the workforce, and create an unbearable burden on the healthy.

Not a particularly bright picture, I admit, and more than any species can possibly hope to overcome. All civilizations end, and so will ours. It won’t be pleasant, or sudden, but this is how I see if unfolding, based on a combination of a lot of study of history, anthropology, economics and current events, and a bit of intuition. If you think I’m missing something from this list, or if you think my timing is off, or that something else will be the first domino to fall, please jump in. If you think that technology, or ingenuity, or leadership, or spirituality, or some great collective consciousness and global collaboration, is going to rescue us, there are lots of other sites with readers anxious for your reassurance, but I’ve heard it all, and I’m past such wishful thinking.

In the meantime, this world is still a wonderful place, and it needs our attention to the issues at hand, and to the creation of models of a better way to live for the survivors of the sorry mess we’ve (with the best of intentions) created. Let’s have fun, fill the world with love, conversation and community, do what we can to make things better, or at least no worse, and let the future unfold as it will. Fare forward, o brave fellow passengers on this lovely fragilelittle spaceship.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 8 Comments

Working Smarter

Posted on August 11, 2008 by Dave Pollard
working smarter
Last week in Quebec City I had the pleasure of meeting with about 20 senior librarians and information directors at a workshop to discuss the trends in and future of Knowledge Management and research, and the evolving role of Information Professionals.This included an interesting debate on the different “information behaviours” of most members of Gen Millennium, such as:

  • Their preference for just-in-time, conversational, real-time knowledge exchange (e.g. face-to-face, voice-to-voice or IM rather than e-mail or voice-mail). In this, they are much like their grandparents, except they use technology (such as videoconferencing with screen-sharing) to expand their reach to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
  • Their aversion to e-mail, groupware and other one-size-fits-none and over-engineered tools.
  • The fact that their learning style is self-directed and self-motivated; they don’t expect or wait for their employer to tell them what learning programs to sign up for.
  • The fact that they mark a return to an oral culture, and lack the patience (and some think, the ability) to craft well-articulated written research or arguments; they do have a skill for telling stories more effortlessly than previous generations however.
  • They expect to have 12 different jobs during their career; the downside of this is that they’re unlikely to ever know the business of their employer (as distinct from their particular area of specialty) well enough to know how what they do fits with and adds value to (or could add value to) what everyone else in the organization does.

Over the past year I’ve been writing about KM 2.0 (I’ve given up calling it KM 0.0 — a little too cute I think), and last week’s discussion refined my thinking somewhat about what this will entail. I’m now convinced that “knowledge workers” in the 21st century (i.e. anyone who spends a significant portion of their time processing information, which these days is most of us) need skills (S), tools (T) and processes (P) in six areas, none of which they currently possess:

  1. Personal Content Management (S,T,P): Help, and tools, that enable workers to organize their own knowledge (on their hard drives and wherever else they keep it), and ‘subscribe’ to others’ content and ‘publish’ their own. I put the terms ‘subscribe’ and ‘publish’ in quotes because this is simple, informal, RSS-based publishing of and subscribing to informal content (blogs etc.), for no charge. This is the model that is replacing the old KM 1.0 process of ‘submitting’ information to large, centralized, indexed repositories.
  2. Simple Virtual Presence and Enabling Conversations (T,S,P): Real-time, intuitive technologies that enable recordable IM, VoIP, desktop video, file-sharing and screen-sharing, and allow users to switch between them simply, and to find and connect with the people who have the knowledge they seek. This technology is needed to help people self-organize communities of passion and converse easily and competently with people in these communities.
  3. Environmental Scanning and Sensemaking (S, P, T): The capacity to add meaning, sense and value to information, in at least five ways:
    • Alerts and Briefings: Filtering the firehose of new information to decipher what’s both new and important, and prÈcis what people in the organization need to be aware of
    • Research: Asking the right questions about information to distil what it all means, what it implies, and the risks and opportunities it presents
    • Guidance: Competent, understandable, practical, strategic advice on what actions are recommended in the organization
    • Events: Peer-to-peer, community-of-passion-organized and -managed events (physical and virtual) that allow knowledge-sharing and collaborative conversations among the people who care about the issue
    • Self-Assessment Tools: Means by which those affected can self-assess their knowledge, skills, strategy, and capacity to act on an issue
  4. Professional Research Capacity and Risk/Opportunity Assessment (S,P): Everyone needs to be a competent researcher — this is essential to innovation. Most people think research is the same as search, and very few schools teach how to do research properly. Information professionals need even deeper research skills, to teach and assist the other employees of the organization, and they also need to learn their employer’s business, to make effective use of the research they do. In doing so, they develop the capacity to understand and articulate the risk implications and innovation opportunities that emerge from new information, and the cost of not knowing. Some current examples of risk areas for assessment: The impact of climate change, the threat of pandemics, exposure to currency collapse, interest rate spikes and oil price spikes and shortages, business continuity and reputation risks, and the threat of disruptive innovations by companies not currently seen as competitors.
  5. Just-in-Time Canvassing (P, T): Only rarely do front-line employees have sufficient lead time to obtain precise, accurate, detailed information, and most of the time they don’t need it. They need a fast, approximately-right, summarized answer, now. To get it they need a process for quickly canvassing all the people who might provide that approximately-right answer, in next to real time.
  6. Story Crafting, Story Telling, Story Collecting and Story Recording (S,P,T): We are learning that one of the most effective ways of conveying information with the necessary context to know what it means is through stories. Crafting a story entails re-creating it in an understandable, visual, concise way. The new book Back of the Napkin presents a simple and compelling way to do this, but there are many other methods. Also needed are multimedia tools that collect and record stories and anecdotes, and the skills to use them.

I see the role of Knowledge Management and of Information Professionals in the 21st century as facilitating the development of these skills and introduction of these processes and tools in their organizations. I’m not sure what we call it. Probably not KM. I’ve referred to it as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Work Effectiveness Improvement, Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) but none of these accurately encompasses the six enabling roles above. Maybe we should call it Working Smarter, and staff it with a cross-functional project team with a five year mandate to measurably improve these six capacities in organizations. A couple of years ago I wrote about creating a magazine called Working Smarter that would address this capacities; perhaps it’s time to resurrect this idea, and not fuss about whose function it is.

This would be a big undertaking in most organizations. In order to free up resources for it, many organizations would have to face the distasteful prospect of admitting that their KM 1.0 investments and infrastructure, including intranets and websites, are ineffective and could be substantially dismantled at a considerable saving and without significant consequence to the organization.

I don’t expect to see this happen overnight. Many organizations are quite wedded to their existing websites, groupware and centralized repositories, and have employees whose full-time job is just indexing, maintaining and creating search tools for all this content. But in order to rise to what Peter Drucker identified as the greatest business challenge of the 21st century — improving the productivity of “knowledge workers” — we will have to make the transition from content to context, and from collection to connection.


PS: Several of my readers have asked me why I bother writing about knowledge and innovation when I’m predicting cascading crises and the collapse of civilization in this century. It’s a good question, and here’s how I answered it in a recent comment thread: I have no difficulty bifurcating what is happening and what needs to be done in the short-term (which, human nature being what it is, will be business as usual until we have absolutely no choice but to change everything we do), and what will inevitably happen in the longer term (and I’m learning that most predicted crises happen later than when the brightest prognosticators think they will, but ultimately end up changing things more than they think). What happened in 1929, and in 1939, and in 1989, and in 2001, were all predictable decades in advance by those with foresight and the knowledge of history. We will continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic even after the first of the civilization-ending catastrophes befall us, because that is what humans do — we concern ourselves with the needs of the moment, and prolong the inevitable as much as possible. I don’t think we’ll see any sea-changes in behaviour in my lifetime (statistically another 20 years) and that’s a whole generation. So I think it’s useful, and fun, to prognosticate about technology changes over that period. My guess is that we’ll face another Great Depression in the 2030s (although there will be some grim recessions before that) and the cascading crises will increase thereafter until it becomes impossible to deny that our civilization is coming to an end (about 2060s or 2070s). By then it will be too late. This is essentially what John Gray says, and I find his argument compelling. I’m not depressed about it, nor do I think it’s avoidable. Just going to do my best to create some working models for the (few) survivors to follow, which is now taking up half of my time. The other half is having fun, here, now, in the context of all the ultimately irrelevant issues, toys and inanities of the day. Short of suicide, it’s the only way I can see to deal with things. Musicaldeck chairs, anyone?
Posted in Working Smarter | 4 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week: August 9, 2008

Posted on August 9, 2008 by Dave Pollard
rock balancing
The ultimate test of your rock-balancing finesse, via Forum Ouvert (Open Space) practitioner JS Bouchard, who, with his family, were such wonderful hosts to me during my visit yesterday to QuÈbec.

Mainstream Media Finally Pick Up on Ivins-Squalene Connection: The motive of Bruce Ivins to send the anthrax-tainted letters to media and politicians — to get the US to attack Iraq so that his vaccine, with the unauthorized and dangerous additive squalene, could be quickly fast tracked and tested on a guinea pig military — has finally been discovered by the NYT, more than a week after I wrote about it. Squalene puts the immune system into overdrive, by generating what has been called a “cytokine storm“, but can also lead as a result to permanent autoimmune hyperactivity diseases when the immune system never reverts to normal function. The result is severe inflammation and irreparable damage to critical healthy cells and tissue, which can be crippling, agonizing, or fatal, as in arthritis or diabetes or lupus or endometriosis or MS or chronic fatigue syndrome or asthma or allergies or inflammatory bowel disease or any of the dozens of other chronic immune system hyperactivity diseases. Hey, but what’s a few lifelong disabilities and deaths when it comes to testing out a wacky vaccine against bioterror? What’s more interesting is that the people who had the most to gain from provoking an unjustified war against Iraq so they could test this vaccine, were the senior Homeland Security and Bush administration officials desperate to develop such a vaccine. Of course the FBI has its patsy now, and dead men tell no tales, so we’re never likely to find out who really sent the anthrax letters. Now the mainstream media have made the Ivins-Squalene connection, will one of them connect Squalene to the companies and higher-ups who wanted it tested despite its monstrous side-effects? For example Glenn Greenwald points us to a NYT article (by Judith Miller) written a week before 9/11 on the Pentagon program to develop a vaccine-resistant anthrax for its own biowarfare program. Guess they’d need their own ‘special’ vaccine for that, huh?

The Coffee Shop as Social Gathering-Place: Chris Corrigan picks up on an idea in Architect Magazine on how coffee shops might morph into the business and community gathering places of the future. I recently predicted the end of offices, and with their demise will come a need for such f2f gathering spots, equipped with videoconferencing and screensharing and other social tools to allow others who can’t attend to be part of the conversation.

Building in Space for Nuance: Amy Lenzo points out Seth Godin’s suggestion that, while design solutions/ideas should be intuitive, they also need to create space so that those who don’t intuitively ‘get’ the solution/idea (or some subtle and ingenious facet of it) can ask questions without feeling foolish or critical. This perhaps ties into the approach of Back of the Napkin, which basically lets you recreate how you came up with a solution/idea by telling an illustrated story, one step at a time, with the opportunity for Q&A and collaborative conversation.

The Disconnect Between the US Election Campaign and the Life of Americans: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been inviting real American voters to tell them about the economic problems they’re having. The letters are heart-wrenching and show just how irrelevant the election campaign and the media coverage of “the issues” is to them. Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone about this, tells some of the stories and concludes (thanks to Jon Husband for the link):

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

The Virtue of Beauty: A lovely piece of contemplation by Pohangina Pete on our obsession with the utility of things with poetic interjections like this:

The sun comes and goes, and a cold wind with it. A woman carrying a surfboard returns from the beach, wringing water from her hair with one hand, the board clutched under the other arm. She slides it into her BMW and drives off, leaving the winter beach empty except for the roar of the surf, the scurrying wind, the arcs and jinks of swallows. Something splashes in the creek, down among the dry dead raupo, and a duck calls. Then the rain arrives, drizzle at first then heavier, then the sun follows, shining through the haze of rain and out at sea a rainbow forms. Tell me what this is useful for.

The Climate Change Paradox: In the last few months I’ve met several climate scientists, and they’re scared. Changes are occurring much faster than they predicted even a couple of years ago, and accelerating. There’s increasing evidence that some of these changes are self-reinforcing, and pushing past tipping points that will careen us into out-of-control climate changes. They’re now working to try to recommend steps that will reduce global warming by 2 degrees celsius this century, while forecasting and trying to develop adaptation plans for 4 degree changes, because they know the politicians’ plans to keep it to 2 degrees have no chance of working. The problem is, a 4 degree change would be catastrophic. So if they’re honest, and admit what is likely to happen and what it will mean, they’ll be ridiculed by the climate change deniers, and people will just stop trying to deal with the issue. But if they lie and say that fixing the problem is possible, and if people do what they suggest and it’s still not enough, they’ll be accused to saying too little too late. They can’t win. And alas, neither can we.

Why McCain Will Win: I’ve been predicting a McCain win since I spoke with Joe Bageant and read his book. Now the polls are tipping his way, and others are trying to explain it by blaming the media. But people don’t believe the media much — they believe their friends, and the people they see and hear. The 40% who are uneducated, white, working-class Americans therefore believe McCain when he says the Iraq war is winnable, and that he cares about their values. That’s all they need to hear. To win, Obama needs 84% of the remainder of voters, an impossible stretch. And as Elizabeth Kolbert reports, McCain has thrown away all his previous principles and jumped on the pro-big-business, anti-environment bandwagon to line up the big right-wing corporatist campaign donors. On top of all that, says Sara Robinson, Obama supporters are from the Quaker/Puritan cultural heritage who don’t fight back, giving advantage to the muckraking and mudslinging McCain supporters from the Scots/Irish/Cavalier heritage. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the Robinson link.

…and Bush Steps Up Iran Invasion Plans to Help Him Win: Sy Hersh has the latest startling news about the Bush regime’s covert war on Iran, and plans to provoke violence to justify another all-out war.

Debunking the Hydrogen Economy…Again: European Tribune debunks the irrational hysteria surrounding the MIT announcement of a more efficient way to produce hydrogen. Once more, for those who missed it: Hydrogen is not a fuel source, merely a (not very efficient, yet) way to store the fuel once it’s produced.

Borrowings From the Fed, since 1910: A scary curve of desperate borrowings to cover reckless loans. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

woodland home

Permaculture Building: A Model for Intentional Community?: The 500sf home above was built using local, healthy, natural materials into a woodland hill in Wales, is sustainable and energy-efficient, and cost about 1500 hours plus £3000 ($6000). They’re planning on creating whole communities of similar homes, but are, of course, having problems with zoning authorities. Imagine a whole Intentional Community of such buildings, blended together into the natural landscape! Some good links on this website, BTW. Thanks to Mattbg [OOPS CORRECTION: Thanks to Matthew Jewkes] for the link.

Quotes for the Week: In response to a question I asked at the IFLA conference in QuÈbec City yesterday What is the essence of good research?, David Stern of Brown University replied: “Asking the right questions”. And from Justin Kownacki in a Twitter comment: “Social media is populated largely by people who are not good at being social in real life”.

Thought for the Week: Looking Away from Beauty: From Orion Magazine, by Rebecca Solnit, to think about if you’re watch the tainted Olympics:

Bodies in peak condition performing with everything theyíve got are an image of freedom, as are pristine landscapes like Yosemite and the Tetons. But the reality of freedom only exists when these phenomena arenít deployed to cover up other bodies that are cringing, starving, bleeding, or dying, other places that are clearcut, strip-mined, and contaminated. Television coverage of the summer Olympics probably wonít cut away from those sleek athletes to the charred bodies of massacred villagers and the anguished faces of young gang-rape victims in Darfur, or the bloodied heads of young monks and uncounted corpses and prisoners in Burma and Tibet. But the associations between the two are crucial to our sense of compassion, and of what it means to be a partof a global community. 
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