how to save the world

Friday Flashback: The Next War of Independence: Natural Community, Natural Enterprise, Natural Economy

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Dave Pollard

A short article from last year, that generated a fair bit of buzz, reproduced in its entirety:

olympic 2
The independent media have been telling us for several years now that the US is no longer a free country, nor is it any longer a democracy. It is a corporatist aristocracy — a corpocracy — where the laws are written and enforced for the benefit of a small elite of corporate oligopolies and their political benefactors, and where thanks to a two-party political hegemony, a corrupt electoral system, gerrymandering, vote-machine rigging, and repression of minority voting rights, even the vote, the last vestige of democracy, is meaningless.

For those of us who do not live in the US, the situation is hardly better. The corporate oligopolies own or control most of the industry, land and resources in most of the world’s struggling nations and many affluent nations, and anti-democratic ‘free’ trade agreements subvert domestic laws to the ‘right’ of global corporate oligopolies to freedom from regulation or restriction of trade in any signatory nation, regardless of the social and environmental damage that ‘right’ brings with it.

As a consequence, the systems that govern us are not governed in our interest:

You can either work obediently for a large corporation that is part of an industry-controlling oligopoly, or you can struggle on the Edge of that economy.
You have no say in how your tax money is spent, so most of it is spent on subsidies and bailouts to the corporate oligopolies and military and other adventures that secure resources for those oligopolies.Substantially all of the additional wealth created (at enormous social and environmental cost) in the last generation has, as a result, accrued to a tiny elite.
You have no say in what happens to the land in the community where you live. The municipal politicians are owned outright by the development industry, and they encourage development that extinguishes all non-human life and any natural features, and replaces them with bland, artificial, homogeneous subdivisions which are unsustainable, wasteful and anonymous — convenient only to the corporate employers who want pliable, transient and undemanding workers and consumers.
The education system brainwashes us that our way of living is the only way to live, that things are better than they have ever been, and that the only way to make a living is to start at the bottom of a corporate oligopoly company and crawl your way up. Entrepreneurship is portrayed as a brutal, risky struggle.
The mainstream media are propaganda machines designed to dumb us down so we don’t realize what has happened to us, and they never present information threatening to or critical of the corpocracy. 1984 has arrived, while we weren’t paying attention. Orwellian (‘Leave No Child Behind’, ‘Clear Skies Initiative’) slogans and messages are everywhere, and they’re unchallenged by the complacent media.

The US war of independence was fought against an elite occupying force imposing its will on the majority. The only differences today are that the occupation is global, and that the means of control are more technologically advanced and pervasive.

So how could we take back our land, our resources, our civil freedoms, our democracy, our economic and education systems?

The first step, I think, is to realize that we still have the power, if we have the will to exercise it. This world is too vast and complex for any group to control it, and even its human systems cannot be controlled by any elite without the acquiescence of the large majority.

The second step is to realize that Bucky was right: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We won’t win zoning battles or economic control battles or electoral system battles or proportionate representation battles in the courts or the election campaigns or the markets that are controlled by the elite. We must instead walk away from these corrupt and dysfunctional systems and build new ones, responsive and responsible and sustainable alternatives that others can look at and say “yes, that works much better”.

So here is what we need to do:

Organize in our own communities to create principled local economies that make us self-sufficient. Decide what we need and then create it, locally, responsibly, sustainably, entrepreneurially. Local natural foods, durable hand-made clothing, natural buildings, local theatre, information, entertainment and recreation, renewable energy co-ops. These local economies will let us work, shop and live in our own communities, without the need for private automobiles or any of the addictions of corporatist culture. Then we can easily boycott everything made wastefully, elsewhere.
Take responsibility for our own education. Deschool our communities and learn independently and from each other how to learn, how to think critically and creatively, and the other essential skills that make us self-sufficient and responsible, not unthinking consumers, cogs in the corporatist machine.
Patiently and relentlessly blockade development of community resources by outsiders. Make it more trouble than it’s worth for them to exploit and degrade local land and resources. When they give up and go away, when the land become worth less to them, quietly acquire it and create local community trusts in perpetuity that prohibit exploitation or sale to outsiders forever, and which are governed by principles of stewardship and respect for the land and for all those living on it.
Because these local economies are not profit-oriented and are self-sufficient, by doing these things we are effectively starving the corpocracy of the only four things it values — our tax dollars, our cheap obedient labour, our consumption of their crap, and our attention to their propaganda. Without these things they cannot survive. They need to sell more and more every year just to keep their share prices from crashing. They need our tax dollars to finance their global wars to acquire the remaining scarce resources. They need our eyeballs glued to the idiot box to hawk their products and propaganda. They need us indebted to them. They need us fearful and helpless. They need us to be dependent.

We do not need them. That is the power we have that they do not. All it takes is a willingness to use it.

I think it’s just a matter of time. I believe more and more of us are realizing what we have lost, including our independence. It is human nature to want to be independent, to be self-sufficient, to seek meaningful community, and if necessary to fight for these things. We’ve done without them long enough. It’s time to build a new model, a betterway of living. We need to be free.

Category: Building a Community-Based Society

Posted in Collapse Watch | 8 Comments

The Politics of Conversation

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Four years ago I read and reviewed Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, in which he explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions. He describes an example of physical dominance and submission (status displays) in our encounters with strangers:

Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It’s straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they’re equal, both move aside. If they both think they’re dominant (or if one isn’t paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn’t happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It’s only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way — it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately ‘not notice’ others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.

Shortly thereafter I read and reviewed Peter Collett’s The Book of Tells that teaches you to read status displays in body language, and specifically these six displays:

Dominant/Threatening-Possessive (DT) signals — “I’m the boss, do what I say or else”
Dominant/Relaxed-Confident (DR) signals — “I’m the boss, so I can let my guard down”
Dominant/Controlling-Protecting (DC) signals — “I’m the boss, and I make the decisions”

Submissive/Deferring-Inviting (SD) signals — “You’re the boss, make your move”
Submissive/Anxious-Shy (SA) signals — “You’re the boss, don’t hurt me”
Submissive/Helpless (SH) signals — “You’re the boss, what should I do”

The picture above (selected randomly off the net), for example, includes several dominant displays (sitting very straight, turning away, arms raised or extended, sitting slouched back with legs extended, sitting at end of table) and several submissive displays (slouching forward attentively, sitting in middle of long side of table, sitting with legs drawn up beneath chair).

Collett includes, in addition to body, hand, eye and face signals, some examples of spoken signals of dominance and submission:

Dominant: talking first, talking most, interrupting, speaking loudly, speaking deeply
Submissive: talking breathily, high-pitched speech, ending phrases with upturn in pitch, dropping names, ingratiating speech

In my review of Impro, I lamented: “What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures — communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is — a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding — and what it isn’t — a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?”

Since then I have been speaking about the importance of Love, Conversation and Community, and specifically the integration of the three: Facilitating non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer conversations among people in community (i.e. with shared passions, shared objectives, or shared problems) who care about each other and their community. Today I asked myself:

Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving?

Since our bodies are always ‘saying’ much more than our words, even if we monitor and try to extinguish (as facilitators) more obvious dominance behaviours (bullying) and submissive behaviours (wallflowers), there is almost nothing we can do to reduce non-verbal signals. Yes, we can create circles and get rid of tables, but you will still see a ton of such displays, in posture, eye, face, hand signals and tone of voice.

The courses I have taken in facilitation don’t teach you to recognize or try to alleviate such behaviours, perhaps because it would be an impossible task. I know I am prone to slouch back, legs extended, hands on head with elbows out like antlers, a multiple dominance display. It must be very confusing to others when I try consciously to speak in an inviting, questioning, open-minded way while making such an aggressive non-verbal display!

Likewise I have witnessed people speak passionately and articulately about something, but leave the audience unimpressed because their body language betrays a lack of self-confidence in what they’re saying. In particular I have watched a woman speak in a soft voice (raising her voice slightly at the end of each phrase) and be completely ignored and discounted, while a man a few minutes later, speaking in a soft, measured voice, said the same thing and was hailed as brilliant, everyone scribbling down what he said word for word.

So what do you think: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as conversationalists, to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom?

Last Saturday I mentioned an article by Andrew Campbell that retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on ‘Dead Language’ vs ‘Live Language’ and how power politics in conversation ‘deadens’ the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. Language in conversation, the article explains, is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.

This is a second, more explicit ‘abuse of power’ in conversation. You know how it works: There are amazingly effective conversation-killers that those uncomfortable with change can use to stomp it out in a way that is almost impossible to defend against. “We tried that last year and it was a disaster.” “If we allowed people to do that, we’d have chaos on our hands, costs would soar and productivity would fall.” “We’d need to get the authority to do that from x and for reason y that would be almost impossible to get.” Andrew’s article provides more examples.

This raises a second question: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as listeners, to challenge and reject ‘dead language’ that stifles energy, innovation, courage and other collective qualities of a group necessary to bring about change?

I am very good at imagining possibilities (and throwing them out for consideration) and for gently (and not so gently) provoking people to want to change (themselves), prodding them to intend to act. I think these capacities are helpful in conversations in community. Maybe I’m meant to do these things in conversations, rather than being a ‘neutral’ facilitator. But since my imagined possibilities and provocations often produce these hostile dominance displays and ‘dead language’ responses, if I really want my ideas to get traction, I think I need to learn how to deal with thesebehaviours. What’s your experience?

Category: Conversation

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

Three Mini Book Reviews: The Back of the Napkin, Landscape & Memory, and Edible Forest Gardens

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Dave Pollard

The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam

“Visual thinking means taking innate advantage of our ability to see, with our eyes and our mind’s eye, in order to discover ideas, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and share those ideas with others in a way that they simply ‘get'” This book is a brilliant elaboration on Bill Buxton’s idea of sketching, with a catch.

The brilliance is in the simplicity and elegance of the model:

people understand things better, and find them accessible, when they’re sketched, competently and articulately, one step at a time, by hand
collect everything you can look at that’s relevant, lay it all out, organize and orient it, and then do triage on it
define the problem using the 6 questions in the chart above, and illustrate it with the 6 corresponding types of graphic
explore the 5 dimensions of ways of looking at the problem: simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison, and change/as-is
when presenting the results of your problem-solving, start looking aloud, keep seeing aloud, continue by imagining aloud, and close by showing aloud (i.e. recreate the process you used to solve the problem) and then ask the audience if they agree with what you’ve shown (show, don’t tell, and this question answers itself)
this works best for complex problems
all good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but do need to be explainable

This may seem a bit cryptic, but a single read through the book and this is all you need to use this powerful technique for both solving (or at least coming to grips with) problems, and getting buy-in for your solution.

The catch? The drawings in the book are simple but beautiful. Doing this well takes lots of practice, both in conveying your meaning graphically (the expressions on your stick men, and their poses, are critical to the audience’s appreciation and understanding), and in using this technique to solve seemingly intractable problems. I intend to try it, but I’m so poor at drawing that it will take me a long time to get my sketches right. Fortunately, I’m really good at imagining possibilities, so my only problem with the technique will be my artwork. Really recommended.
landscape and memory by simon schama
Landscape & Memory, by Simon Schama

This hugely ambitious work was recommended to me by three friends. The notes and bibliography of this book alone are longer than some books I’ve read. Schama attempts to show, through a rigorous and detailed study of history and human behaviour, that we are all innately naturalists, that our bond with Gaia has always been powerful and that our sense of ‘apartness’ from nature is illusory. He says, at the outset:

If the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement not memory is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction. At the heart of this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story.

Many of the stories he tells are rooted in his own ancestors’ stories, and the book is intensely personal. He takes us through millennia of passion for nature and place, and our apparent fear and loathing of it. But right up to modern times this ambivalent relationship and “being-a-part ness” still resonates, he says:

The designation of the suburban yard as the cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of the old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks of pesticide and industrial strength mowing machines.

I was not impressed by his arguments, which seem somewhat nostalgic to me, in this age of relentless and ruthless ecocide. But he is an amazing story-teller, and teller of the stories and lessons of history, and the book is compelling even when it is not persuasive.

Even more compelling are the stunning artworks which run through the whole book, such as the one above, that argue much more powerfully than words the inseparability of human spirituality from our love of and roots in nature. The book is an armchair visit to a vast science and history museum, and its stories of human altruism, savagery and struggle to live within and without nature, rootless and yet inexorably drawn to place, to home, stay with you a long time.

plant hardiness zones
Edible Forest Gardens (Books 1 & 2), by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier

What is most remarkable about this exhaustive and practical course in temperate climate (zones 4-7) permaculture is that only about 40 of its over 1000 pages are about the work of planting and maintaining an “edible forest garden” (“a perennial polyculture of multipurpose [native] plants”); the rest is understanding what to plant, when, and why. The whole idea of these gardens is to enable you to harvest an abundance of varied foodstuffs with almost no maintenance.

The theory takes up the whole first volume and needs every page. The challenge, you see, is that even what we might perceive as ‘wilderness’ is in fact nothing of the sort. Humans, right back to First Nations thousands of years ago, have utterly altered the vegetation that now looks so wild and ‘natural’. On top of that, climate change has, since the ice ages, been continuously changing what grows where.

In order to allow nature to provide you, effortlessly year after year, a harvest of abundance, you first need to discover what naturally grew and what naturally will grow where you live. You need to study the botanical history of your home. Then, since it cannot be quickly ‘restored’ to natural, sustainable state (succession goes through many long intermediary stages and can take centuries to achieve equilibrium), you need to be smart enough to plan for a 20-30 year ‘hurry-up succession’ that will chivy the process along. You have to plant in stages, knowing that early stages are just preparing the soil, the ecosystem and the ground cover and canopy for later stages, and that some of the first things you plant won’t be around at the end of the succession at all if you’ve done your job right. This takes serious knowledge and study, a lot of patience and relearning what our ancestors learned as a matter of course. It’s in many ways a course in what Derrick Jensen has called “listening to the land”.

There probably isn’t anything you could learn that would be more important, for your soul, for your community, for your resilience in the coming age of climate change and other disasters that will require us all to become much more self-sufficient than we are today. Start now, and when cascading economic, social and ecological catastrophes hit us in the 2030s and bring existing food production and other systems to their knees, you’ll be ready to gather the fruits ofyour labour.

Category: Activism: What You Can Do

Posted in Collapse Watch | Comments Off

Memorandum to All Employees

Posted on July 21, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Delivered By Hand

To all employees:

Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees’ time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.

A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee’s work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.

Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee’s calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others’ time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive ‘telephone tag’ our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.

Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:

For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company’s Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters — if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company’s Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to ‘share’ the contents of each other’s screen while they converse.
For ‘FYI’ type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company’s E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company’s Instant Survey tool.
For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company’s E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company’s Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.

Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find itliberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox.

Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!

Respectfully yours,

The Management

(well, we can dream anyway)

Category: Communications Technology

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 7 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week: July 19, 2008

Posted on July 19, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Photo from birdstar.org, one of the amazing shots from the Bond brothers of SW Ontario.

Disparity, Poverty and Environmental Health: I’m reading HervÈ Kempf’s How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (review next week). His message, from France, is essentially the same as Ian Welsh’s in his new article There Was a Class War. The Rich Won. The message, and the messages that naturally flow from it, are:

For the last 30 years, everywhere in the world, income and net wealth for the poorest 95% of the population has been, in real terms declining, even as income and net wealth for the richest 5% has doubled and redoubled. Disparity of income and wealth has never been higher. The top 1% in the US alone now receive almost 25% of its total national income.
This economic improvement for 1-5% has come at an astronomical environmental cost, a massive increase in pollution and waste, the desolation of much of the Earth, surpassing the climate change tipping point, increasing global indebtedness to staggering proportions, pushing us over the edge to the End of Oil and Water, ruining ecosystems in much of the world and accelerating ten-fold the biodiversity loss that heralds the sixth Great Extinction in the planet’s recorded history.
There are no economic ‘market’ or technology fixes for either the economic disparity or the environmental devastation that continue to accelerate every day. What is left is belief in violent political revolution, belief in a collective new social consciousness that will drive a spontaneous plunge in global consumption and a massive redistribution of wealth, belief in the Rapture, or belief that our civilization is inevitably in its last century.

You know which I believe. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

A Plague of Economic Locusts: Andrew Leonard at HTWW adds up the factors that have caused me recently to liquidate most of my investments. Favourite quote: “Faith-based economics seems like an unsound management philosophy, for those of us without the power to part the Red Sea and make a getaway from a falling dollar, rising oil prices, and insolvent banks”.

Gaia Lee Welles A Symbol for Gaia: When I write about a better way to live, or about wilderness, or the need to connect with all-life-on-Earth, I’ve been using a photo of a temperate rainforest in the US Pacific Northwest Olympic range to “illustrate” the article. This is because there doesn’t seem to be a symbol or logo for Gaia, for living in balance with nature. When I did a search I found the old 1960s environmental symbol (a take on the Greek letter omega). I also found the symbol at right, developed by gaia.com member (and author of the Gaia Girls book series published by Chelsea Green) Lee Welles. I really like the logo, since it taps into the aboriginal importance of quartets (four elements, four seasons, four directions etc.) and is based on a circle. During the search, Barbara Dieu pointed me to flickrcc, which shows you a collage of photos on any subject you key in. Birds in flight, forests and waterfalls prevail for photos tagged ‘Gaia’. To me this is a fascinating way to capture “the wisdom of crowds” about a subject visually.

Booking Time for Real-Time Chat: Google now allows you to put a badge, like the one below, on your blog to indicate if you’re available for an IM/VoIP chat via GMail/GTalk. You don’t even have to have a GMail account to ping me. Problem is, I’m not available for such chats very often. So before I put the badge on my sidebar, I need to add to it a Google Calendar showing my ‘conversation office hours’, the times when I will be available. Ideally, it would be interactive, allowing readers to say what they want to chat about, so I can invite others to join in. May take awhile for me to set up.

Imagine, blogs as a medium for real-time conversations! Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link.

Manipulative Language, and the Abuse of Power in Conversation: Andrew Campbell retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on Dead Language vs Live Language and how power politics in conversation ‘deadens’ the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. I’m learning how to listen more attentively to conversations, their nuances, what is said and implied and unspoken, unconsciously conveyed. Now I’m discovering I must also learn to observe the way in which language in conversation is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.

amy stein
The Wrenching Photography of Amy Stein: The photo above is an example of Amy Stein’s disturbing and ominous photographs. Her full collection entitled ‘domesticated’ is here, and if you’re not faint of heart it’s worth a look. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Thanks to Emily & Daisy at Our Descent for the link.

Why Is It Called a “Retreat”?: Evelyn Rodriguez writes about the need to turn off the noise from external sources, and to withdraw to our true selves, to rediscover them, to find our true bearings, our centre, before reconnecting with others, in order not to become too much Everybody-Else.
geoff brown civ bubble
Geoff Brown Sketches the Civilization Bubble: A fascinating Nancy White style drawing by Geoff (above) shows us within Gaia, as a bubble, and the ways in which nature is pushing back against our unsustainable ‘inflation’ are depicted as pins, each threatening to burst the bubble if it expands any further. Brilliant.

Games for Change: If we’re going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Thanks to Graham Clark (who also supplied the quote in the thought for the week below) for the link.

This is the World Now: Another delightful miniature in words and images by Pohangina Pete. The world now does not make sense.

Thought for the Week: variously ascribed to Al Rogers or Eric Hoffer:

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Join Me September 28-October 1 in BC

Posted on July 18, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Bowen Island by Richard Smith

I‘m going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills — World CafÈ, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry — and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP — it’s not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there!

PS: If you can’t make that, I’ll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 andVancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you’re available for a meetup!

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Friday Flashback: Twelve Ways to Think Differently

Posted on July 18, 2008 by Dave Pollard

In May 2005 I wrote this post that, after it was picked up months later on Digg and other popularity lists of web articles, turned out to be my most-visited article ever:

yin Our minds are like our bodies — fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What’s worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, ‘best practices’, systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design — all tend to reinforce ‘one right answer’ thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually.There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout.

Read the Twelve Ways

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Reframing Questions

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Kathy Sierra over on Twitter has been throwing two types of teasers at us this week. The first are what she calls ‘rules that aren’t always useful’, that I’d call ‘false myths and limiting generalizations‘, such as:

don’t feed trolls
two heads are better than one
nobody reads the manual
there is no money in [x]
the customer is always right
grow or die
you can’t be both profitable and socially responsible

In case you think ‘false myth’ is a redundant expression, a myth (literal meaning= word of mouth) is anything that has received such a wide degree of acceptance, or such passionate acceptance, that it is rarely questioned. Some myths are true.

The problem with the false myths are that they can blind you to the truth if you accept them uncritically. They can constrain your imagination of other possibilities that are contrary to the false myth ‘conventional wisdom’. They can lead you to make very bad decisions.

The problem with limiting generalizations is that they can lead you to oversimplify (“to get ahead in business women have to think and act like men”), to draw false dichotomies (“we either have to find new domestic oil or be forever dependent on foreign suppliers”) and to stereotype (“working class whites will always vote Republican” which can lead you to draw false inferences from correlations, to write off classes of people, and to inhibit your creativity.

The second teasers Kathy has been tweeting are what she calls ‘perspective hacks’ that I’d call ‘reframing questions‘, such as:

What might change if you view the Big Thing You’re After as a component/subsystem of a greater whole?
That really cool very specific thing you learned… what happens if you ask what else that might apply to?
Instead of trying to change this behaviour, what if we tried to understand how it came about and adapted ourselves accordingly?

Kathy has a flair for this type of thought-provoking meme. As I thought about what I’d put on my list of false myths and limiting generalizations, and reframing questions, it suddenly occurred to me that these two are linked: for every false myth or limiting generalization, there is at least one reframing question that can get you out of the uncritical, unimaginative thinking trap and help you discover new possibilities and achieve breakthrough perspectives.

Here, for example, are ten false myths and limiting generalizations that I encounter nearly every day in business, and how, instead of arguing with those who spout them, I might reframe the discussion with a question to show those people, gently, another way to see the situation.

false myth or limiting generalization	reframing question
talent shortage: if you want smart people to work for you, you have to pay them a competitive rate for their time	what if you could produce an invitation so compelling that smart people would be willing to come together and solve a problem for free?
business needs hierarchy: without instruction and supervision, work just won’t get done	what if you gave people an interesting, challenging, attainable objective and just trusted them to figure out how to achieve it?
if you have a new business idea, you need to find ‘angel investors’ to finance it or there is no hope of it succeeding	what if you got the prospective customers for your new idea to ‘invest’ in it, in return for a say in design and a better rate of interest than the bank pays?
if you want to deploy a social network tool in the organization, you need to produce a ‘business case’ showing ROI and addressing security issues	what if you just did an experiment, outside the firewall on your own time, using young tech-savvy employees, and then just showed everyone how easy, inexpensive and useful it is?
marketing is expensive: if you can’t achieve an x% market share with a new innovation in y months, it’s not worth the risk	what if you just developed a simple, inexpensive demo/beta/prototype, and showed or gave it away, and relied on word of mouth to ‘sell’ it?
a company needs to provide an ROI to shareholders that is commensurate with its risk, or no one will buy shares in it	what if you organized the enterprise as a cooperative, with members who received products for their investment instead of shareholders demanding profits and dividends?
to make a new technology successful, you have to persuade management to make training compulsory for all, because otherwise people won’t use it properly	what if you only used technologies that are so simple and intuitive that they need no training, and are open source and public so they need no development?
you need performance objectives and bonuses to motivate people to work hard and work smart	what if you made work fun, and let people choose their own hours, and then asked them what else it would take to get them to do their best?
a business that doesn’t grow is doomed to die	what if you set the objective of the business to grow better without growing bigger, and left it to the employees to figure out how to do that?
you need to show your finished, quality product to customers; they won’t ever buy an ‘idea’	what if you abolished the idea of ‘customer’, and instead partnered with the people who might buy your product and co-developed it with them

Isn’t this cool? It’s a bit like the technique in some martial arts of parrying with a deflection, defusing the attacker’s momentum by changing the rules of the contest and putting them off balance.

What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?

Category: Our Culture

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Five Ways to Make a Point

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Take a look at this article from salon.com, written by UC Prof Mike Davis. The words that came to mind when I read it were succinct, witty, provocative, and well-researched. He manages to capture the essence of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse in just two pages, packed with data, rhetorical questions and persuasive argument. This is the kind of writing that moves people to action, to change their minds, and to pass along the essay or its contents in conversations with others, virally.

Davis is, I expect, preaching to the largely converted. His work is rhetoric, which despite its modern negative connotations means simply persuasive, effective oratory (the word predates the printing press and hence initially referred to speech, not writing). Whereas some people believe that debate is the best means of persuasion, I have come to believe that most people will only accept an assertion or idea if they’re ready for it. If they’re not, a debate will only tend to polarize their view, put them off. Rhetoric at its worst can inflame ignorance, but at its best it can inform and stimulate those who are already inclined to believe something, so that they can then decide how to act on it, and pass on their learning, rhetorically, to others who are so inclined.

A rhetorical question is not (necessarily) one for which the answer is self-evident, but rather one presented for persuasive effect, to provoke thought consistent with the arguments the speaker has just made or is about to make. It is intended to evoke emotion, either positively or negatively. If the audience is ignorant, inclined to groupthink, insecure, frightened or incapable of critical thinking, it can be dangerous (“Are we going to let these people take what we worked so hard for?”)

If the audience is informed, independent, self-confident and thoughtful, however, such questions are powerful and useful, because they force you to think, and sometimes to challenge conventional wisdom, to think differently. They are often preceded or followed by another useful device, the rhetorical or oratorical pause. Such a pause (which many speakers are afraid to insert into oratory in case it merely causes audience discomfort) is intended to cause tension, to force the audience to try to anticipate what will come next, or to reflect on what has just been said that was presumably important.

Davis’ article is so compelling, I think, because of a combination of new information, provocative questions, and great rhetoric.

Recently I’ve been listening, paying more attention to conversations: their flow, their pacing, their iteration of ideas and comprehension and meaning, the power politics often present inside them, their effectiveness. Because Generation Millennium has somewhat rediscovered (texting notwithstanding) the oral culture of the pre-Gutenberg era, I’ve been listening to them practice conversation. Their ability to achieve comprehension (largely by successive approximation, iteratively, Q&A, action and reaction, until consensus is reached) is extraordinary: very effective and hopelessly inefficient, but done so quickly that it succeeds. But it is the opposite of rhetoric. Good rhetorical oratory rarely contains the most frequent two words in Gen Millennium speech: “I mean“.

I also find that modern conversation contains few rhetorical questions or pauses: There is simply no time for them. And there is little time for information. When information is presented that is new, and not consistent with the worldview of the listener(s), and not presented in the context of a simple “A or B” dichotomy (“Is Obama better or worse at…?”), it is as if the audience simply doesn’t know what to make of it. If you listen to this speech (thanks to David Parkinson for the link) you can see how new information that makes an oversimplified debate more complex leaves the audience (in this case mass media talking heads) utterly dumbfounded. If the new information doesn’t fit, it is discounted, ignored, considered as outrageous, an affront. You didn’t answer our simple dumb question!

Which of course it is: It is intended as an affront (literal meaning of affront: in your face). While this may not work in the context of dumbed-down mass media reporting, it can be extremely effective when the audience has the patience, curiosity and self-confidence to be affronted.

Generation Millennium has learned one traditional (and now rare) conversational skill: storytelling. They have discovered that the easiest way to create a context for understanding is to tell a straightforward (“and then...”) story, instead of preparing and presenting an analysis. They ‘get’ that if they understood what happened, and what should be done about it, then so will the audience if they hear an accurate narrative that ‘recreates’ the speaker’s learning.

Recently I’ve learned of another effective means of communicating information in a presentation or conversation: the use of simple visuals. I would highly commend to you Dan Roam’s new book The Back of the Napkin, which explains how to use elementary visuals, skilfully sketched by hand on a napkin or whiteboard while the audience watches, to convey information and to persuade (the illustration above is from that book, and a video explaining the ideas in the book is here). It draws on the fact that we are all programmed, in our pre-civilization DNA, to learn, discover and understand visually, not by reading text. One of my most popular conference presentation subjects is Adding Meaning and Value to Information (largely through visuals), and most of my presentations now have no bullet points, just pictures that I talk to.

So in short I think there are five techniques that can be used to make a point effectively, in a conversation, presentation or written article:

Present new information, clearly and articulately.
Ask provocative questions.
Tell memorable stories.
Use visualizations to convey meaning.
Employ powerful rhetoric — be clear, logical, clever, funny, well-paced, original, truthful, concise, provocative, and passionate.

All of these things take practice. There is no better way to get better at them than by putting yourself out there, and asking your audience for their honest assessment of what you did well and how you could do better.

How would you score yourself on the use of each of these five techniques? I think I’m pretty good at #1. I don’t do #2 nearly enough, or well enough. I’m still poor at #3 (I need to craft and memorize my stories). I’m getting better at #4 but I need to practice sketching, and making my visualizations clearer and less dense. Dan Roam says: “All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they need to be explainable.” And my rhetorical skills need a lot of work: I still often lack the courage of my convictions, and I tend to be too serious and too long-winded.

How about you (that’s a rhetorical question)?

Category: Conversation & Language

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Making the Transition to a Natural Economy

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Dave Pollard

I‘ve written before about the idea of creating a responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Economy, and about how difficult it is to ‘get there’ because the brutal industrial economy we live under is The Only Life We Know.

Most of the prescriptions for getting there require (or involve entirely) top-down, government actions. Yes, ideally we should have import duties that prevent products produced by slave labour in ruined environments from coming in. Yes, ideally we should have a tax regime that taxes bads, not goods, and redistributes wealth. Yes, ideally we should have land ownership reform that prohibits absentee ownership and speculative trading. Yes, ideally we should have laws that break up monopolies and oligopolies, and that put megapolluters and corporate criminals in prison with the rest of the mass murderers and thieves.

But we’re not going to get them. If we wait for them, we’ll wait forever.

Also, ideally, if we were to create working models of a better way to live and make a living, they should attract enough attention that others would emulate them, in sufficient numbers to undermine the old economy. But as my friend Flemming says, sometimes you have to wait for the old deadwood hogging all the sunlight to collapse before the new seeds can germinate (or else you need to be a fungus).

So what can we do while we’re waiting?

Here are a few ideas:

Get the facts out: Let people know that the real inflation rate is closer to 10% than 2%. That businesses with over 500 employees are actually destroying more jobs than they’re creating. That over the last 30 years the real income and net wealth of 90% of the population has actually declined (it’s just exploding levels of debt that have created the appearance that people are better off). That affluent nations have produced half of the world’s environmental destruction while paying only 3% of its costs. Tell people what’s really going on with a combination of real (little known or misunderstood) information and clever presentation. Ask people provocative questions. Tell compelling and illuminating stories. Don’t just listen to the misinformation, oversimplification, and propaganda, say something! Most people are capable of critical thinking with a bit of a nudge: They’re just out of practice.
Learn (and then teach) how Natural Enterprise works: We are desperately short of the skills needed to create our own responsible, sustainable, joyful enterprises. You won’t learn it in high school, or business school, or executive training courses, or MBA programs. Unschool yourself. Go out and find and meet with successful entrepreneurs who’ve discovered you don’t have to work 80 hour weeks, mortgage your assets or sell your soul to succeed. Read my book, and/or any of the books listed in its bibliography. Discover the competencies that any enterprise needs. Seek out and partner with people whose unique skills, passions and competencies dovetail with your own and who share your purpose. Learn how to do real, world-class business research, to find out what unmet needs you can fill. Learn how to innovate rigorously, continuously, and effectively. Learn how to make your enterprise powerfully networked and resilient. And then teach all this to others in your community.
Start a grassroots campaign to get people to buy local, buy organic, buy durable quality, and buy less: Be willing to pay more, but expect more for it. Tell the owners (not the sales clerks) of the stores you visit that you won’t buy from them if they sell poor quality crap that takes jobs and dignity away from local workers. Patronize, celebrate, and start businesses who sell only 100% local/organic products. Be patient with new local businesses — quality craftsmanship and quality service are lost arts, that will need to be relearned.
Learn and help others become self-sufficient: Work where you live, even if that means creating new, local, community-based enterprises, so you’re not dependent on cars and oil. Grow your own food. Learn to make and fix your own stuff, including your own clothes. Make your own entertainment (games, music, art, theatre, films, sports), instead of depending on expensive canned entertainment from studios and extravagant commercial establishments. Create local cooperatives for community energy self-sufficiency (renewable of course). Unschool yourself and your children — teach them how to learn for themselves and with and from each other. Value your time more than your money.Do all of these things collectively, in collaboration with those in your community. Trade the products of your know-how for theirs, for free, generously. An economy of self-sufficiency is a Gift Economy, and unlike one based on competition and growth, it’s sustainable.
Extinguish your debts and don’t take on any new ones: Debt and consumption are addictions, and the corporatists are determined to keep you addicted. Break the habit, as quickly and completely as you can. That will probably require you to own less. Are you ready for that? If you judge yourself and let others judge you by how much you own, breaking the habit is going to be doubly difficult, and doubly necessary.
Create local networks: Use technology to organize, trade among your community, and share information. Use these networks to create relationships, and trust, to collaborate and partner, to help find what is needed and ensure it’s of high quality, to innovate together, to keep each other healthy, to create consensus, and to establish Peer Production.
Eat well and look after your health: The industrial health system is approaching total collapse, and the sooner we wean ourselves off it the better. Learn how to research health matters, how to prevent disease and how to diagnose and treat it yourself, as much as possible. Become a vegetarian: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Stay fit. And be good to yourself — you’re doing all the right stuff!

If enough of us do these things, will it be enough to transform our economy into a responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Economy? Probably not. But it will put us in good stead when the industrial economy runs out of steam (and oil).

While we can work now to starve the industrial economy of the four things it values from us (our tax dollars, our cheap and obedient labour, our consumption of cheap imported crap, and our attention to its political and commercial propaganda), the scourges of climate change, constant ever-expanding wars, overpopulation, the End of Oil, the End of Water, the Death of the Seas, the Death of the Forests, human pandemics, pandemic diseases of farmed animals and monoculture plants, and bioterror, will collectively bring that economy to its knees.

It won’t go easily, however, and as it slowly collapses it will be the poor and the young who will suffer the brunt of its struggle to keep going — desperate and indiscriminate drilling in the oceans and arctic, strip-mining for dirty coal and bitumen sludge, privatization of scarce water, massive incarceration and curtailment of civil freedoms, more cities written off like New Orleans, ghastly famines and floods in struggling nations, the eradication of life savings and pensions, the collapse of health systems, expropriation of property, soaring suicide rates, and unimaginable ubiquitous poverty.

At that point those who have started the transition to a Natural Economy will be able to withstand the collapse of the industrial economy, and will be the pioneers of its replacement. The transition is likely to be a painful one for most, unfortunately — all ‘normal curves’ have a sudden and precipitous downside, and studies of past overheated economies and civilizations suggest our economy’s will be no exception.We never seem to learn the lessons of history.

Category: Creating an Alternative Economy

Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments