Sunday Open Thread — October 7, 2007

Posted on October 7, 2007 by Dave Pollard
boracay Second Life
Me in Second Life. (Everyone here is beautiful)

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

Coping With the Strategy Paradox: I met recently with Michael Raynor, who wrote The Strategy Paradox. He’s now looking at what else we can do to deal with this paradox, and he poked some holes in my argument that what we need is resilience, not planning.

Does Our Formal Education System Preclude Natural Enterprise and Natural Community?: There is some strong evidence that the education system destroys our creativity, and our natural propensity and ability to collaborate, self-organize and self-manage. Can we hope to have Natural Enterprise and Natural (Intentional) Community unless we first re-form, or blow up, the education system? Is the kibbutz a better environment for learning, or does it merely invoke and reinforce social tyranny, conventional wisdom, short-term, uncreative thinking and industrial-economy action without allowing time for research, imagination and reflection?

What Do We Do With Old Social Network Content?: When MySpace was succeeded by FaceBook, what happened to all the old MySpace stuff? Perhaps old blog posts are like old newspapers, of no use to anyone except historians. If our posts are essentially ‘forgotten’ once they slide off the home page into the archives, perhaps we should just delete them and, if they become important again, resurrect and update them. This ‘loss’ of thousands of terabytes of ‘information’ into forgotten archives may be just a reflection of its conversational, transient nature, rather than a catastrophe of unprecedented loss of collective memory.

A Coming Class/Generational War?: Exploding economic disparity, and the widening wealth and opportunity gap between the old and the young, may be sowing the seeds for a class war between the old & wealthy, and the young & poor, that could transcend geographic borders.

Second Life as a Platform for Videoconferencing and Distance Learning: I’m part of an upcoming forum on the future of education — the forum is being held in the virtual reality environment Second Life. After just an hour there, I can already appreciate why it has such enthusiasts, and how it might revolutionize videoconferencing and distance learning.

Why We Handle Risks So Badly: In our failure to prepare for and mitigate risk, as decision-makers, citizens and investors, we play out our essential human nature.

Why We Need a Public Persona: The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary before you can make the world a little better. As de Mello said, this journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies us. We are rewarded by society for doing so. I find the ‘figments of reality’ thesis helpful in this hard work — realizing that our minds are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs of our bodies for their purposes, not ‘ours’. That ‘we’ are, each ‘one’ of us, a collective, a complicity. What makes it so hard is that becoming nobody-but-yourself opens you up to accusations of being anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, arrogant etc. So we end up, I think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not genuine, not ‘us’ at all. That’s hard. How can we make this public persona as thin and transparent as possible?

Why are Gas Prices So Low?: Delayed until I have some clue as to what the answer might be. This has got me stumped.

Vignette #6

Blog-Hosted Conversation #2: This week I’ll be publishing my narrated, edited interview of Jon Husband, which I recorded earlier this week, on hierarchy, community and education, and recording a third interview.

Possible Open Thread Question:

What would happen if we just abolished the education system, and in its place allowed communities to create their own sets of learning objectives, programs and assignments, which would be done hands-on, collaboratively with others of the student’s choice, mostly involving research and practice out in the community, and completion of which (at the student’s own pace, their own way, self-managed) would entitle themto claim certain credentials, apprenticeship-style?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – October 6, 2007

Posted on October 6, 2007 by Dave Pollard
inconvenient truth
Image from An Inconvenient Truth: Blue curve is average temperature on Earth for the last 650,000 years, red is amount of CO2 in the atmosphere for the same time period. Lower yellow dot is today’s CO2 levels. Top yellow dot is where it will be in 2030 (median projection). That’s Gore on a forklift beside it.  Difference between top and bottom of the blue curve is half-a-mile-thick ice at the bottom (ice age) and today’s climate at the top.

Videos of the Week:

Charles Hall Explains Peak Oil in Ninety Minutes: A thorough explanation of the concept, with some great graphics in the accompanying slides.

James Surowiecki on the Future of the Organization: A rambling half-hour video of the Wisdom of Crowds author on theory X (we work only because we must) and theory Y (we work for a creative outlet and self-actualization as well), bottom-up self-managed communities (open source etc.), the failure of top-down motivation, Goldcorp’s Wisdom of Crowds online exploration of where to mine for new gold, how humans and primates behave altruistically and respond to status symbols, and why experts and leaders are over-rated.
Thanks to my colleague Gordon Vala-Webb for this link and the one that follows.

Malcolm Gladwell  on Collaborative Genius: A half-hour video by the Tipping Point guy from small-town Ontario who argues that individual genius is not as valuable as that resulting from collaborative effort. Modern complex problems, he says, requires persistance rather than genius, and assessment of large numbers of diverse ideas rather than a few great ideas.

News of the Week:

Canada Knuckles Under to US Blacklist and Refuses Entry to US Protesters: The Bush regime has blacklisted protesters at the last International Women’s Day demonstrators arrested for passive civil disobedience, and the Harper regime in Canada is using this US blacklist to prevent liberals from entering Canada. No coverage on this in the mainstream Canadian media.

Plexus Tackles the Complex Problem of MRSA: The Plexus Conplexity Institute is working on complex solutions to the challenge of MRSA, one of the growing epidemic of antibacterial-resistant strains of germs plaguing hospitals and communities. The major challenges are complacency and the alarming lack of compliance with hygiene practices by hospital workers, especially doctors. The approach to coping with these perplexing challenges is to engage the wisdom of crowds in the hospitals themselves (some of the best ideas come from housekeeping staff and patients) and use the complexity principal called ‘positive deviance’ (the principle that some people have much better approaches and practices than others doing the identical work). Notice how similar this is to Gladwell’s point above? Thanks to education reform guru Barbara Dieu for the link.

Co-op America Finds the Best Green Businesses are All Small: A fascinating survey of America’s greenest businesses from the Responsible Shopper Boycott List guys suggests that to be really green you have to be small and community-based. This should not be surprising, but it is important.

Why is the Dow So High?: HTWW wonders why, given the credit crisis, the collapse of the US dollar, and $80/barrel oil, the Dow is at record highs, especially since the price of US homes and volume of home sales are still plummeting.

9/11 and the Anti-Feminist Backlash: A great Salon book review (of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream) by Rebecca Traister wonders if 9/11 has given the anti-feminist movement incredible power and impetus to reverse decades of gains, and how our reaction against Arabs in the wake of 9/11 echoes our reaction against First Nations people during the first decades of our invasion of the Americas. Fascinating ideas here.

Why is Google Stock so High: Dave Snowden wonders why Google stock is still so high when no one lloks at the ads on their pages.

Sy Hersh Explains Why Cheney/Bush Will Attack Iran: Bad news all around, and Hersh is usually right.

Thought for the Week: It’s World Animal Week. Ten ways to make the world better for animals (from WSPA via Common Dreams):

  1. Help reduce animal overpopulation – Every year, between 6 and 8 million dogs and cats enter shelters in the U.S. Sadly, about half of these animals are euthanized because there are not enough homes for them. This problem is made worse by ìfactory-styleî dog-breeding facilities known as puppy mills, which put profit above the welfare of animals. You can help by:
    • Adopting your next new friend from an animal shelter or rescue group instead of buying from a breeder or pet store.
    • Making sure your new companion animal is spayed or neutered.
    • Doing research to ensure you select the companion animal that’s right for your family.
  2. Report animal cruelty – Despite the fact that animal cruelty is illegal, it remains prevalent in our society and often goes unreported. Not only do these acts cause animal suffering, they are linked to violence within families and society. You can help by:
    • Learning how to recognize signs of cruelty, abuse or neglect.
    • Reporting cruelty to your local humane society, animal control or law enforcement agency.
    • Educating yourself and others about how to properly care for companion animals.
  3. Live in harmony with your wild neighbors – As urban development continues to destroy wild habitat, animals are forced to live in closer proximity to humans. Hereís how you can help:
    • Prevent conflicts with wildlife before they occur by securing garbage cans, feeding companion animals indoors, blocking holes in your home.
    • Control nuisance animals humanely.
    • Keep your cat inside.
    • If you find an orphaned or injured animal, contact your local wildlife rehabilitator, police, or animal control officer. Never approach or try to handle a wild animal.
    • Create a haven for wildlife in your backyard by planting trees or shrubs, providing water and limiting your use of pesticides.
  4. Make more humane food choices – Billions of farm animals are raised and killed for human consumption each year. Most of these animals are subjected to cruelty behind the closed doors of factory farms, where they are treated as little more than meat-making machines. You can help by making informed, humane choices:
    • Beware of misleading labels such as ìnatural,î which have no meaning in terms of animal welfare and may be placed on products from animals raised on factory farms.
    • Choose only free range or organic meat, milk and eggs, or products certified as coming from humanely raised animals.
    • Make healthy food choices by adding more fruits and veggies to your diet and reducing your consumption of meat.
  5. Use the power of the purse – Every year, untold numbers of animals are subjected to painful procedures in safety testing for cosmetic and household products. Hereís how you can help:
    • Shop with compassion. Choose only products that you are sure have not been tested on animals. Look for the Leaping Bunny Logo ñ the highest level of assurance that a company is cruelty-free.
    • Write or call companies to let them know you will not be purchasing their products until they stop testing on animals.
  6. Live light on the land – Pollution poses a threat to animals in many forms. To help, follow the three ìRsî:
    • Reduce. Don’t use “throw-away” products like paper plates, napkins, and plastic silverware.
    • Recycle. Rinse all recyclable glass and plastic containers that might attract animals and cut apart each ring in plastic six-pack carriers before discarding them.
    • Reuse. Take your own bags to stores to carry home your groceries and shopping.
  7. Be a compassionate traveler – The exploitation of animals is a common by-product of the tourism industry. Cruelty, confinement, neglect and abuse is the price millions of animals worldwide pay for tourist entertainment. Hereís how you can make a difference:
    • Support animal-friendly services and avoid those that exploit animals.
    • Don’t accept culture as a justification for cruelty.
    • Never pose for a photo with a wild animal.
    • Never use animal rides or transport that could cause suffering.
    • Never buy wildlife souvenirs or products that may have endangered or caused suffering to animals, such as ivory, tortoiseshell, fur, and horns.
  8. Avoid establishments that keep wild animals in captivity – The public display industry exacts a heavy physical and mental toll on wild animals. Meeting the complex needs of wild animals is nearly impossible in captive situations. Hereís how you can help:
    • Don’t visit marine parks, zoos, or other establishments that hold wild animals in captivity.
    • If you want to observe animals, visit places that allow people to view them in natural and humane conditions such as national parks, nature reserves, animal sanctuaries, or rehabilitation centers.
    • Try wild dolphin or whale watching. These eco-friendly excursions enable tourists to become immersed in the natural world of marine mammals without threatening the health and welfare of wild species.
  9. Be prepared for disaster – Tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes can strike at any time, with little or no notice. Without an easy-to-execute plan, families are sometimes forced to choose between their own safety and the safety of their beloved animals. Be prepared by:
    • Assembling an emergency kit in advance for your family including companion animals.
    • Evacuating early, if you can, before a mandatory evacuation order is issued.
    • Taking your animals with you and making sure they wear identification tags.
  10. Support international recognition of the importance of animal welfare – Billions of animals around the world rely on people to treat them with compassion. WSPA believes that an international agreement on welfare standards should become a key goal for the animal welfare movement in the 21st century. A Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare at the United Nations would recognize animals as sentient beings and act as acatalyst for better animal welfare provisions worldwide.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Saturday Links for the Week – October 6, 2007

Baby Boom in Affluent Nations: Population Bomb Still Ignited

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Birth RatesFor decades, the United Nations and the US Census Bureau have been accusing those who have called for strong measures to curb global population growth scare-mongers and neo-Malthusians. Restricting population growth is politically very unpopular. It flies in the face of the world’s dominant and most irresponsible religions. It conjures up fears of eugenics and Big Brother restrictions on individual freedoms. China’s “one-child” policy is notorious for the corruptness and arbitrariness of its application. And most couples, come hell or high water, want between two and five children, with the average around 2.5.

So it’s not surprising that population forecasters are pressured to repeat the popular and reassuring mantra that global population growth is slowing down, that soon population will start to decrease, and that in many nations the problem will be too few babies, not too many.

You can, of course, develop statistics to support just about any prediction you want to make, including that one. The problem is that the basis for this prediction is the one that has got us into so many problems before — that what has occurred in the past will continue to happen in the future, only more so.

Unfortunately, it never happens that way. That’s why the predictors always give themselves wiggle room by predicting a ‘low estimate’ and a ‘high estimate’ along with the ‘best estimate’. Here’s what the UN and USCB say these will be for this century (population in 2000 was 6.1 billion, today we’re at 6.7 billion, up 0.9 billion in the past decade):

2050: Low 8.0 billion, Median 9.5 billion, High 11.0 billion
2100: Low 7.0 billion, Median 10.0 billion, High 14.0 billion

These median forecasts assume that struggling nations’ fertility rates will continue to rapidly converge on the affluent country fertility rates of 1.85 children per couple (i.e. below replacement level). There is no basis given for this forecast — it is simply a projection of current trends. The projection ignores several facts:

  • That in affluent nations, the presumption that population will go into permanent decline is proving false. The charts at right attest to this. Not only is absolute number of births increasing, the fertility rate (children per couple) is increasing at the same rate (i.e. this increase isn’t due to the ‘baby boom echo’). The UK has acknowledged its baby boom is creating a desperate shortage of midwives. 
  • That in affluent nations, fertility rates among older women are soaring — couples who have waited until they are financially secure are making up for lost time, having more than one child late in life, with a record number of multiple births due to use of fertility drugs.
  • That exploding populations in many struggling nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America will have to be accommodated in affluent nations of Europe and North America, to prevent a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions, driving birth and fertility rates way up in affluent countries as immigration soars.
  • That whenever couples are surveyed, across the world, they always report wanting to have more children than they have been able to (I’ve reported on this before). So the presumption that fertility will converge ‘magically’ on 1.85 children per couple, and stay there, when the average couple wants 0.5-1.0 children more than that, makes no sense whatsoever. Even if all the struggling nations’ fertility rates were to plunge to a more reasonable 2.35 children per couple, population would be at the High estimates above (i.e. 11 billion by mid-century and 14 billion by end-of-century, and still climbing). 

Given the accelerating footprint of the average human on the planet, in every nation, none of us can imagine what a world with 14 billion humans would — will — be like. It will be desolated beyond our comprehension, its oceans turned to giant sewage lagoons and devoid of life, its forests razed to the ground and largely turned to desert, all non-human creatures extinct except for zoo specimens, and energy, breathable air and clean water desperately scarce.

It’s another ‘inconvenient truth’ for us to consider. Not that we have much of an appetite for considering such truths. Easier to bury our head in the (expanding areas of) sand and hope for magical solutions.

Sources: Governments of Canada, US and UK — vital statistics departments. UN and US Census Bureau population forecasts, 2006 revisions.

Category: Overpopulation, the Crash Catalyst

P.S.:

KM World & Intranets 2007, November 5-8, San Jose California, McEnery Convention Center. I’ll be there, presenting on the first three days. Ifyou’re going to be there too, drop me a line.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 4 Comments

Sketching the Future of Innovation

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Dave Pollard
sketchLast spring I wrote about Bill Buxton:

Many years ago, when e-mail and Internet access were just becoming the norm in business, I met a guy named Bill Buxton, who was then with Alias Research. His passion was trying to make virtual ‘presence’ imitate, as much as possible, physical ‘presence’, to get the technology to adapt to our preferred information behaviours, instead of the other way around.

Bill’s mantra was:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

To that end, he had computer screens around a circular table in his office, each showing the head and shoulders, and the computer desktop, of one his meeting participants, so that virtual meetings were as analogous as possible to ‘real’ meetings. He had another screen above his office door with a picture of a door on it, that he could virtually ‘open’ or ‘close’ to signify whether he was, or was not, available for impromptu e-consultations and e-conversations.

It was a little hokey, but Bill was (and still is, in his new work) on the right track.

Since then, Bill has moved forward with his work on the Customer Experience and written a book called Sketching User Experiences. The concept of ‘sketching’ is summarized in the graphic above. It is a “low-fidelity representation” of the customer experience that is detailed enough to provide context for how the customer lives/works/uses your product, but short enough that it doesn’t consume inordinate time to do so. The video (1:26:00 in length) explaining this in detail is here. He’s very entertaining, though the technical quality of the video is not great, and the first half is more valuable than the last half, IMO.
 
The key points he makes in the video and book are:

  1. Nobody creates new products from scratch — almost everything produced today is a sequel, incremental, “n+1” product.
  2. Innovation only comes from inside organizations when “someone misbehaves and it turns out well” — through skunkworks and other ‘unauthorized’ activities.
  3. The software industry (and, I would argue, just about every other industry) therefore only innovates and grows through acquisition.
  4. What is needed to remedy this is a much better creative design process.
  5. Apple was rescued from the brink of extinction when a returning Steve Jobs authorized its exceptional and long-suffering, long-ignored lead designers to do what they do best — the result was the iMac and then the iPod. Although the iPod was best-of-breed and quite innovative, it still had (and has) many serious design flaws stemming from disconnects among the various groups of designers and engineers (“I have 50 different songs on my iPod all named ‘Adagio'”)
  6. If we critiqued books the way we critique technologies, the reviews would all be about the binding and the type font. We need to start critiquing all products by the quality of the user experiences they deliver, not by their features.
  7. Great successes only happen when they are preceded by miserable failures. That’s why you need to do lots of experiments and fail often and early in order to learn how to succeed. The Prototype blog (who I thank for pointing out Buxton’s new work to me) relays a great story that Buxton uses to illustrate this:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
  1. Sketching is fundamental to ideation, and ideation is the critical ‘front end’ to any good design process. Unlike prototypes (see diagram above) sketches are freehand, gestural, and they telegraph intent and emotion. They are caricatures, exaggerations — like the drawings of concept cars and new fashion models, accentuating what’s different and engaging. They are tentative and exploratory, and the best ones resemble the design-idea sketches of Renaissance thinkers. They are quick and inexpensive, plentiful (so you have many alternatives to explore), and clear about what problem they’re investigating.
  2. A challenge with sketching is: How do you sketch interaction? You need to practice a lot to become skilled at conveying feeling, phrasing, intention, movement in a sketch.
  3. As you move from ideation (sketching) to pre-production engineering (prototyping) you get more invested in fewer alternatives, the idea gets harder to change and criticize, and there is less room for new ideation and innovation. Sketching is getting the right design, while prototyping is getting the design right. Two different skills needing two different kinds of people. The more sketches you offer, the more open you remain to constructive criticism, iteration, learning from failure. Ideas are not valuable — it’s what you do with them that brings value. So entertain as many as possible, and use sketches to ensure they get a fair airing.
  4. The more persistent (how long and extensively it is available for review and consideration) and the more malleable a sketch is, the more thorough the iteration and the better the ultimate design. You need to give ideation time and space. You can’t afford not to.
  5. Sketching, like music, involves both a craft (the technical skill) and an art. You need to learn the craft first. Both need practice to become good at doing them. Not everyone is good at it — just make sure someone in your organization is.
  6. The art of sketching is to some extent a wizard’s art — it is about simulating and representing reality using ‘illusion’. In the video Buxton shows several examples of how inexpensive illusions that simulate user experiences produce ‘aha’ understanding of unmet needs and design problems, and allow exploration of solutions to them. For example, he shows how, by pinning a complete newspaper to a wall and then trying to read it through a cutout cardboard ‘window’, you can start to appreciate the user experience of looking at a window on a computer screen without the context or awareness of all the rest of the content in the site, and start to think about ways to start to create information landscapes and context-setting mechanisms that overcome this online limitation.
  7. We have a dangerous propensity to think we understand things intellectually, like our customers’ wants and needs, without reproducing the customer experience in sufficient depth to really understand their experience, and hence to ‘get’ experience.
  8. We also need to be good ‘collectors’ of information that could have value later. We need to be constantly paying attention. Buxton carries a camera everywhere he goes.

This approach seems to work well for technology companies (hardware and software producers) but suppose your ‘product’ is, say, research reports, or improved health outcomes for your community? Can you ‘sketch’ new product design ideas using Buxton’s techniques?

I think you can. And I think that’s where the idea of customer anthropology comes in. This anthropology is one of the techniques you use to research unmet customer needs. The transcription of the customer observations and interviews is a kind of “sketch” of your customers, and the needs that your enterprise might fill. But this isn’t what Buxton is getting at when he talks about sketching — he’s referring to the process of ideation to address those needs.

In my new job, we’re starting to use customer anthropology to get a deeper understanding of our customers. We’ve identified about 15 distinct customer ‘segments’ with clearly different needs for the five types of research ‘products’ we offer:

  • Awareness products: Reports that filter and distill the firehose of information out there down to short, succinct explanations of what’s happening in the economy, the industry and society as a whole that would appear to be important and will probably affect our customers.
  • Research products: More in-depth reports that explain what these current developments and trends mean to our customers — how these developments are affecting our customers and how they’re dealing with them.
  • Guidance products: Reports that suggest what our customers should do in response to these developments.
  • Events and spaces: Facilitated seminars, workshops and meetings, in physical or virtual space, that allow our customers to help each other learn about or act on these developments.
  • Tools: Applets, online or on flash memory or CD, that help our customers self-assess their knowledge or understanding of these developments and their implications to their businesses.

As regular readers know, I generally tend to believe that things are the way they are for a reason, and before I propose changing things I want to make sure I understand those reasons. So my hypothesis is that the current design of these products is pretty good. But my instincts tell me that, like most products out there, the design could be much better.

So I’m going to try to develop “sketches” of possible new designs for our five types of products, that draw on understanding how the current design has evolved, and on the results of our customer anthropology into what our customers want and need that they are not currently getting. I’d love to get Bill Buxton, a fellow Torontonian, involved in the process, to see how his technique translates to non-technology product design.

I suspect I may have to ‘hire’ a sketch artist, though I’m certainly going to scour our organization to see if we have some hidden talent in this area.

If this is successful, it could become the standard ‘front end’ to our ideation and innovation process– the means by which we respond in a consistent, disciplined and creative way to identified unmet customer needs and develop new and better products.

What do you think? Is this a process that might work in your industry? Is there a sketch artist in your future?
Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

PODCAST #1: An Interview with Chris Corrigan

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Capacity for: Actions:
1. ATTENTION sense, probe, observe, listen, find patterns
2. INSTINCT perceive, intuit, let come, know subconsciously
3. APPRECIATION discover, play, learn, laugh, understand, thank, care
4. REFLECTION suspend, consider, open, let go, entertain, explore
5. INTENTION love, have passion. persevere, follow through
6. CRITICAL THINKING question, infer, deduce
7. ELICITATION incite, provoke, draw out
8. IMAGINATION conceive, ideate, let emerge
9. COLLABORATION facilitate, help, connect, cooperate, co-develop
10. RESPONSIBILITY care, nurture, cultivate, mend, sustain, groom
11. RESOURCEFULNESS bring to bear, supply, give, equip, prepare
12. CREATIVITY model, recreate, innovate, realize
13. COMMUNICATION relate stories, convey, converse, explain, describe
14. DEMONSTRATION offer, show, exhibit
15. IMPROVISATION respond, decide, try, experiment, perform
16. RESILIENCE/GRACE self-change, adapt, accept, self-manage

My list of 16 essential human capacities

THIS IS PODCAST #1 (16:40) — CLICK ON THIS ARCHIVE.ORG LINK TO LISTEN TO IT. TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS.
DAVE: On September 24, I had the chance to interview Chris Corrigan, author of the Parking Lot blog and one of the leading voices for Open Space methodology, a technique for addressing complex problems. Chris has applied Open Space most notably with aboriginal peoples, and discovered that this methodology is very similar to the way First Nations people tackled challenges in their communities for millennia before the Europeans arrived and imposed their much less effective command-and-control methods.

As a prelude to this interview, to tell you a bit about this very wise young man, I want to share a quote from Thomas Merton that Chris posted on his blog today:

I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of ‘answers’. But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life?

My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit. I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear and peopled by specters which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.

How to Save the World has been talking about the need for what I call Let-Self-Change, a process of self-learning, adaptation and building of self-sufficiency and resilience that is, I believe, what we must all do before we can hope to be able to make the world a better place, a more sustainable place, and before we can start to create models that will be useful to future generations when our civilization starts to fall apart from its own excesses and fragilities.

So the first question I asked Chris was about capacities, and specifically what capacities he thought were necessary for us each to acquire and nurture in others as agents for positive change.

He identified three capacities. The first was capacity to act. This capacity entails the freedom to act, the courage to act, and the wisdom to know what actions to take. Getting that wisdom, through community and communication, is the second capacity:

CHRIS:  Sometimes it surprises people to learn that I’m a really big fan of action, of doing things. So, I think the first capacity is being able to act… The second capacity is ‘how do you gain wisdom’? … I have this thought that what you need to do to gain the wisest possible action is to sit down with other people. We can make a plan to change the world but we don’t really know the limits of our own wisdom until we sit down with a group of other people and say ‘what is the wisest course of action here?’…

So the second capacity is the capacity to get wisdom from others by sitting down with them and re-learning how to be in communication with them. I was reminded of a teaching from the Nuu-chah-nulth tribes here on the West Coast of Vancouver Island that says that it is a mark of a person’s character if you’re able to ask for help when you need it. The person who can’t ask for help is held in low esteem.

DAVE: The third capacity, Chris said, is sustainability of one’s actions, and all three capacities are connected.

CHRIS: The third capacity is that, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of acting and gaining wisdom from others, is to make it last. So sustainability is the third capacity. And sustainability is all about being in relationship — to others, to the enterprise, the environment, the community. If you’re not in relationship with something, you have no stake in its future, no investment in it. If you have a relationship, there is a level of accountability, like in the old days when business was done with a handshake. There is real accountability when we’re working with friends…

So sustainability depends on your ability to have a deep relationship with whatever you want to see lasting…So for me those are the three capacities. Taking action. Taking wise action. And taking wise action that lasts.

DAVE: I said to Chris that I thought the third of these capacities, sustainability, must surely be the hardest, because it entails a huge commitment of time and energy and attention, in a time when we are all just too busy to sustain attention on anything. Chris mentioned a speech he attended by Desmond Tutu in answer to this:

CHRIS: What separates you and me from Desmond Tutu is that he wasn’t a citizen of his own country, he wasn’t able to speak his own mind, he wasn’t able legally to organize, and yet he did all this stuff, and it was just a question of what he chose to do with the 24 hours in his day. It’s a question of being selective about what really has heart and meaning for you.

DAVE: We talked then about how you can help engender these capacities in others. I was aware from previous conversations that Chris’ children, and many of the children in his community, are home schooled. I asked him how he found time for this along with all the other important and demanding things he was doing. He told me it required looking at learning a completely different way from the way school systems do:

CHRIS: We call it Life Learning, the positive appellation of ‘Unschooling‘ ..

One of the things Life Learning has taught me is that the more you let go of inappropriate control the easier things get, and this is a lesson also from Open Space, by the way. We feel the need to be in control of our children’s education, and lots of people who decide to introduce home schooling feel the need to reproduce the school environment in their house, to know how and what their children are learning. They look to the education system to show them how to do this, so lots of home school parents will do things like test their kids to give them confidence that it’s all working. We don’t do any of that in our house, because it’s not conclusively known in the education system whether any of that testing works…

It forces you into a more narrow box, and doesn’t allow the child’s learning to uncover the complex relationships that actually make up the world. They divide the world into subject ‘chunks’ when the world isn’t made up that way. The world wasn’t designed with math, geography, physics etc., all separate. So having a much more interrelated experience of the world is our approach. In terms of finding time to do this, this is something my partner and I are pretty single-minded about. We carve out a whole lot of time to be present with our kids.

My daughter and I both subscribe to StumbleUpon and we’ll send each other interesting items and she’ll be all over it, so then for the next week we’ll be talking about sacred architecture or quantum physics or Edgar Allan Poe [DAVE: So the focus is on helping her discover, rather than teaching?] Right, it’s enabling her to learn rather than teaching her. This ‘strewing and conversation‘ approach applies to websites, to books, to people, to opportunities, we just throw them out there, and some of them the kids take up, and some they don’t. And then we talk about it, about the experiences, and engage with them and be present with each other.

DAVE: Chris went on to explain that this approach, rather than providing a shallow education on a lot of subjects, allows children to learn profoundly by studying subjects that they feel passionate about in more depth than a school curriculum would normally allow:

CHRIS: The experience of watching my children and other unschooled kids who dive deep into something is that the entire world is accessible through any door, so that whether you decide to become a martial arts master or study medicine or learn circus arts like my kids are doing right now, or my daughter who’s looking at sacred geometry…

When you engage deeply into these spheres, the whole world is there for you, the whole world opens up. That’s where you see sustainability happen…So my kids develop relationships with ideas, they develop relationships with other people, they develop relationships with our community, so that when it looks as if something is going to happen with those ideas, with that community, they’re right there.

DAVE: At this point we talked about entrepreneurship, and the terror and self-doubt most young people have about making a living for themselves. I asked Chris, as an entrepreneur himself, if he had any advice for young people thinking of creating an enterprise. He talked about the advice that John Holt, one of the grandfathers of the unschooling movement, offered on this subject:

CHRIS: It’s not particular knowledge you need, it’s just the ability to know how to learn. Because we’re not going to know what’s going to be needed in the future. You need to be able to learn and adapt to new environments and new knowledge, knowledge we don’t even know is needed. So the first thing you need to do is let go of the idea that somebody can tell you how to do this, to run this business or to be in business at all. I know lots of entrepreneurs who didn’t have a clue what they were doing, didn’t go to business school. That didn’t stop them. They just knew that this was a useful thing to do, that it should be possible to make a living doing it, that they could contribute.

[Because of technical problems I turned off the recorder at this point. You’ll have to take my word that I’ve captured what Chris said during the last few minutes of our conversation.]

DAVE: Chris went on to say that his advice, and perhaps John Holt’s, to aspiring entrepreneurs would be: Just Do It. Converse with prospective customers and partners and people who know more than you do. Make those relationships a permanent part of what drives and informs your business decisions. Most importantly, he said, echoing the message of my book, never try to do any of this alone. He also recommended an out-of-print book on entrepreneurship called Get a Life, that I reviewed and summarized on my blog, and refer to as well in my book.

We then transitioned to the concept Chris called ‘active relationships’ which, he stressed, are much deeper and more pervasive than just ‘networks’. Chris consciously uses the terms ‘relationships’ and ‘communities’ instead of ‘networks’ and I got the sense that he finds mere ‘networks’ to be unsatisfying and shallow because they often lack essential elements of active relationships and true communities, elements like passion, commitment, accountability and responsibility.

I asked Chris how we can go about finding people with whom to build meaningful active relationships, for business partnerships and for other reasons. His answer was to draw on another critical element of Open Space — the Invitation. A well-crafted invitation, he reiterated, will attract the right people for any endeavour, whether it be an Open Space event, a prospective business partnership, or any other important activity involving relationship. 

Active relationships, he said, are built not on role or control but on friendship, trust and shared passion. I’ve gone so far as to use the word ‘love’ to describe these relationships.

My last question for Chris was what books he’s read that have taught him the most, and about what. His answer, perhaps not surprisingly, was that he doesn’t read books for instruction, he reads them for inspiration. You learn, he said, by doing. What a book can do is to inspire you to do, to act.

We ended up talking a bit about leadership, and the cult of leadership that seems to pervade many businesses, where the executives are credited, unduly, for almost all of the enterprise’s success, and criticized, unfairly, for almost all of its failures. What, I asked Chris, can we do about that, to get organizations to realize that a business is nothing more than the actions of all of its people. Perhaps, Chris replied, we need to discover that we don’t need leaders. Hey, he said, there’s an interesting subject for your next podcast.

And indeed that will be the subject of Podcast #2 next week. Stay tuned and tell me, at How to Save the World, what you thought of this one, and how I can make future podcasts better. Until then, this is DavePollard. Thanks for listening.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 10 Comments

The Collapse of the US Dollar: A Scenario

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Dave Pollard
US Dollar September 2007
Things are worth what people think they’re worth. It’s all psychology. It was psychology that had the stock market trading at unprecedented multiples of earnings in 1929, and people believing there was no end to profts to be made, and psychology that caused a collapse that created widespread human suffering that lasted a decade and was only resolved by governments spending billions (they did not have) to fight the second world war.

Why are people willing to pay $25 for a CD, or $4 for a box of brand name breakfast cereal that costs only pennies to make? Because they think the price is fair, reasonable. That can change in an instant. The fact that used house prices soared to an average of over $300,000 (and much higher in many cities) despite the fact that you could build a house yourself for a fraction of that cost, was due entirely to psychology. People believed that prices would keep rising forever, so it was a good investment to pay 300% of replacement cost, because someone else would soon pay 500% of replacement cost. Especially when lenders would give you 110% of the money you needed to buy that house, with no payments or no interest for six months, even though you had no collateral for the loan except the house itself.

The Fortune 500 has been able to increase profits by double digit percentages for several years, mostly by buying up smaller companies and competitors, offshoring the labour costs, Wal-Mart-squeezing their suppliers for price reductions on materials every year, lowering quality and eliminating service. Pull off this magic trick enough years in a row and people will think you can do it forever, so they’ll pay more and more for stocks. Just like in 1929.

In order to fund all that offshoring, you need to either pay cash, or get the foreign manufacturers to loan you the money, denominated in your own currency, at next to zero interest rates. If you have no cash (because you aren’t producing anything yourself) you need to keep rolling over those debts. The countries doing all your manufacturing need to be confident that the dollars you’re promising, one day, to pay back, are worth something, and that there isn’t a safer or higher-yielding investment for their money than a big receivable from you in your currency. Or else they need to be so heavily invested in your currency that they don’t dare call in the debt, because they know that you couldn’t pay it — so they become co-dependent on you. Psychologically, you reach the stage where you both have to keep lying to each other, and to yourselves, that the risk is manageable, that everything is OK, as long as both of you keep your story straight.

And in order to keep the cost of oil, which drives your economy, down, you need to wage staggeringly expensive wars to secure most of the oil that is left. And to keep the stock market going when options to squeeze a bit more cost out of each product and keep profits rising run out, you need to massively subsidize the large corporations with taxpayer dollars, and reduce their taxes and regulations. To do that you need to convince the world that the staggering debts you’re piling up can be repaid from future increases in taxable income, that your insolvency is temporary. So you need to project endless huge increases in taxpayer wealth so that people aren’t panicked by how maxed out you are now. And the people have to believe that these future taxpayers — the current taxpayers’ children and grandchildren — will somehow be able to repay the monstrous debts you are burdening them with today. And of course, that interest rates will remain perpetually low, so that those debts don’t suddenly balloon even higher.

It’s all like a tightly wound spring, with all the screws holding it together ratcheted ever tighter, and the presumption that as the stresses on it increase, not only will it hold forever, but we’ll be able to squeeze ever more tension out of it. If one of those screws pops, the whole thing flies apart and comes undone. The bubble bursts. The dominoes fall. Just like in 1929.

The screw that is popping is the value of the US dollar, shown above. It is plummeting against all other global currencies, even though they are all increasingly interconnected. No one benefits from the collapse of any major currency, so it is in everyone’s interest to keep them all ratcheted up, in relative balance.

The problem is, the currency speculators, who don’t care who might suffer in a collapse as long as they get theirs, can see that the US dollar has nowhere to go but down. The US economy is dependent on Middle East oil and Chinese labour, on low interest rates and on citizen ignorance. Its national debt and its foreign balance of payments deficit are both unprecedented in the history of civilization, and both are soaring ever-higher by the month. If OPEC were to abandon the US dollar in favour of the more stable and solvent Euro, or if China were to want to refinance its huge receivable from the US in the new Asian currency, it’s game over for the dollar — the spring comes unsprung. There is then no limit to how far the US dollar could fall, and how fast, because there would no longer be anything propping it up. Panic selling would ensue. Just like in 1929.

So the currency speculators, like the child pointing out “the Emperor has no clothes”, are taking their money and running. That’s what’s slashed the value of the US dollar by 12% over the last year, and by over 1% in one day on Friday. Suppose you’re a supplier in the Middle East or China and your investments, denominated in US dollars, lost 12% of their value last year, and 1% on Friday alone, for no other reason than the weakness of that foreign currency. At what point do you say “enough is enough” and insist on being paid in a currency that has some fundamentals supporting its value?

I think that point is imminent. The panic reduction by the US Fed in interest rates to try to calm fears about the collapse of the housing market and the reckless lending practices that this collapse uncovered, will, I believe, be seen as the trigger — the acknowledgement that the bubble of the entire US economy is bursting. It was a desperation move, and investors around the world have seen right through it. It’s no accident that Greenspan’s book of economic ‘deathbed confessions’ has been rushed out now.

So let’s suppose the US dollar collapses, from its level of 87 a year ago to 77 today to, say, 67 by year-end and 57 by next Spring. What does that mean? First, it will mean that the US dollar will no longer be a monetary standard. The Euro will take that role, and perhaps the Asian Currency Unit (ACU) which has been proposed for years but which could take the place of the Asian currency ‘basket’ quickly if the Asian nations needed a hedge against the dollar’s collapse. That will continue the collapse, and ensure that the US will have to start buying in these stronger currencies. This will quickly produce (as has always been the case with currency collapses) runaway inflation in the US, so prices of many goods, and of energy, will be reposted upwards daily. Panic buying will ensue (as is always the case with hyperinflation), leading to empty store shelves and long lineups. That will be followed by an abrupt halt to consumer spending, since nothing will be affordable at the new prices.

When inflation soars, so must interest rates, so double-digit interest rates will quickly become commonplace for mortgages, consumer loans, corporate loans, and government debts. Foreclosures and corporate bankruptcies will soar, there will be runs on the banks, and the government will have to step in to bail out the banking system.

The problem is, the US treasury has no reserves to bail out anything. It will have to institute large tax increases, and slash spending (including war spending) and services to keep from falling into total bankruptcy. It may have to ask for IMF forgiveness on its debts, which may cause the Middle East and China to refuse to trade with it at all, except on a cash basis.

Where it gets complicated is that so many economies are so dependent on the US economy, that they will collapse as well. As usually happens in struggling non-democratic nations when their economies collapse, the result in the Middle East and China will likely be civil war, and substantial cessation of trade with other nations as war disrupts transportation and production.

Canada, whose governments have recklessly allowed our economy to become totally dependent on the US economy, will be sucked down into precisely the same cycle of crisis the US will be facing, probably within months. Europe will fare better, but not much better — so much of the economy is globalized now that to some extent we’re all co-dependent. We might be able to absorb the meltdown of the Argentine economy, but not the American.

With consumers unable to buy, and debtors unable to pay their debts, the stock markets will collapse, taking with them the lifetime savings and pensions of billions, and billions of jobs. The first few million families to default on their mortgages will suffer foreclosure, and lose everything. After that, the banks will realize that it makes sense to let delinquent homeowners stay in, secure and maintain their homes, since there will be no buyers to take their place anyway, so those who can afford to pay their mortgages a bit longer will probably be spared eviction. Just like in 1929.

There will be no winners in this. The people who will suffer least will be those who are self-sufficient (living in communities that are able to produce much of their own food, and whose members can look after themselves and each other) and who are debt-free. You can forget about your investments and pensions — there will be no safe haven. Even gold is worth only what people think it is worth, and if no one has money to spend on it, it will drop in value too. Those who depend on the automobile to get to work will, if they still have work, have to find another way to get there. Those who don’t have work will have to learn to make a living themselves. Very few of us have the skills to do so. Perhaps, like in Argentina, we will learn by occupying abandoned factories and figuring out how to run them as collectives.

I’m sure most readers think I am wildly exaggerating the dangers here. I used to believe that those who warned of a second Great Depression were simply fear-mongers, angry and jealous at being left out of the economic boom. The more I study the lessons of history, and the way economic systems work, the more worried and more pessimistic I become. We have been operating our economy at a level of reckless excess for most of the last half-century. We have come to believe that what we have known in our lives will continue forever, that it can continue forever. It’s that psychology of recklessness and groundless belief in unlimited growth and endless prosperity that is ratcheting the screws ever tighter, blowing the bubble ever larger, moving the dominoes closer to the tipping point, and blinding us to our economy’s terrible fragility and our lack of resilience. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think Iam.
Posted in How the World Really Works | 5 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – September 30, 2007

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Dave Pollard
US Dollar September 2007

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

The Collapse of the US Dollar: 2007-08 Scenario: I think the chart above, showing the value of the $US against a basket of other currencies, is telling us that a collapse of the dollar is imminent. It’s time to lay out the scenario for what this will mean in the year and decade ahead. No I-told-you-so gloating: there will be no winners in this.

Birth Rates Rising Again: The Population Bomb Is Still Ignited: Some new data suggests that those who think population growth will stop on its own are dreaming in technicolour.

Why We Need a Public Persona: The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary before you can make the world a little better. As de Mello said, this journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies us. We are rewarded by society for doing so. I find the ‘figments of reality’ thesis helpful in this hard work — realizing that our minds are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs of our bodies for their purposes, not ‘ours’. That ‘we’ are, each ‘one’ of us, a collective, a complicity. What makes it so hard is that becoming nobody-but-yourself opens you up to accusations of being anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, arrogant etc. So we end up, I think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not genuine, not ‘us’ at all. That’s hard. How can we make this public persona as thin and transparent as possible?

Why are Gas Prices So Low?: Delayed until I have some clue as to what the answer might be. This has got me stumped.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #6.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: This week I’ll be publishing my narrated, edited interview of Chris Corrigan, which I recorded earlier this week, and recording a second interview on the same subject: “What is your model of a better way to live, and what capacities do we need to develop or re-learn to live that way?” Haven’t decided who the second interviewee will be, yet.

Possible Open Thread Question:

When the price of oil has risen 40% since May, why have gasoline prices gone down?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – September 29, 2007

Posted on September 29, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Water Scarcity
NYT interactive map of global water scarcity areas (brown)

A real mixed bag of interesting, thoughtful and disturbing news and information this week:

Water Scarcity Analysis: The NYT series Choking on Growth turns its attention to water. The map above shows areas of current water scarcity in brown (the darker the colour, the greater the population density). The brown area is exploding, as, for example, China’s water table is falling by as much as 18 feet per year due to soaring demands of population, agriculture and industry. With glacier melts, the whole West half of North America will be added to the brown area within a couple of decades. Note that most deserts are not shown in brown, because there are no demands for water there — people have adapted to geographic reality. Not so in the rest of the world.

Preparing for Emergencies the Wrong Way: A great thread in the FluWiki explains that top-down institutional plans for emergencies (as we saw with Katrina) will inevitably fail. Social and environmental phenomena like health and natural disasters are complex phenomena, and simplistic solutions cannot work because it is impossible to predict the severity, locations or public reactions to them. Only community-based, bottom-up, self-managed approaches that involve, self-educate and rehearse reactions to such emergencies will work. What is urgently needed, the wiki’s healthcare experts tell us, are experts who will say this to the ‘leaders’ who still rely on these unworkable and expensive top-down ‘plans’, and to the media who are not listening either.

Why Most Americans Will Never Get Decent Health Care: The US Green Party has, justifiably, called the Clinton and Obama healthcare compromise plans a fraud, since they propose to subsidize the powerful HMO and insurance industries for the costs of expanding limited coverage to those who cannot now afford it. Such a plan, in addition to giving these private organizations a windfall from the US taxpayer, would be financially extravagant and provide only rudimentary coverage to the poor. Even this pathetic compromise will never pass anyway because, as any student of previous attempts to get universal healthcare plans approved can tell you, the US political system (which would require strong and courageous support for such a scheme from the House and Senate) won’t let it happen. Only Kucinich and the Greens support equitable universal single-payer healthcare. Won’t happen in our lifetime.

Free Software of the Day: Giveaway of the Day lets you download commercial software free. Each offer lasts one day, so you have to visit often, but this is much better than ‘trial’ versions that expire. Includes ratings by people who downloaded each giveaway.

US Bar Association Refuses to Be Associated With Guantanamo Kangaroo Court Trials: Claiming that lack of habeus corpus rights makes the trials a sham, the ABA won’t offer legal aid to defendants.

Buy Less, Buy Local, Pay More: That’s what it will take to move our economy to sustainability, and we should be proud, not embarrassed, to do so. Dave Smith explains why more is less and less is more. He also summarizes Thomas Berry’s Seventeen Rules for Sustainable Community, and explains that “small-scale, decentralized communities designed around permaculture principles, local and regional economies, smart management of local natural resources, local community government, passive solar and renewable energy systems, are all transitions that make common sense, going from living lifestyles to living real lives with meaningful purpose.”

FCC Fines “Fake News” For First Time: PRWatch, one of the excellent sites of the Center for Media and Democracy, reports that, for the first time, the US FCC has fined a broadcaster, Comcast, a small amount ($4000) for broadcasting a video news release (a packaged video created by a commercial, political, front or lobby group) as if it were “real news”. It’s a start. But also from PRWatch, a report card shows that Patrick Moore’s paid pro-nuclear propaganda is still being covered by the Canadian media as the viewpoint of legitimate, independent environmentalists. Like their US counterparts, the mainstream Canadian media just believe and report verbatim everything they hear from corporatists — no research, no fact-checking. Disgraceful.

Thought for the Week: Two quotes from Anthony de Mello via Eric Lilius:

First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates. Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.

When asked what he did for his disciples, the Master said, “What a sculptor does for the statue of a tiger: He takes a block of marble and pounds away at anything that doesn’t look like a tiger.” When his disciples later asked what exactly he meant, the Master said, “My task is to hammer away at everything that isn’t you — every thought, feeling, attitude,compulsion that adheres to you from your culture and your past.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Saturday Links for the Week – September 29, 2007

Introducing Social Networking Tools and Social Networking Analysis to Business: What To Do

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Dave Pollard
tipping pointI attended a meeting yesterday of a self-managed KM group facilitated by the Conference Board of Canada. The subject was Social Networking in Business, and we talked about the tools in general, and social network analysis in particular. Here’s what I learned:

Criteria to Use to Determine Which Social Networking Tools to Introduce, and How (in approximate order of importance):

  • The tool must meet an acknowledged and urgent or important need (there should be no necessity to ‘sell’ users on it)
  • It must be simple and intuitive to use (there should be no necessity to train people to use it)
  • It must be available to everyone, including those outside the organization (not just an elite group)
  • It must be relatively inexpensive to introduce, support and maintain
  • It must be reliable
  • It must start with a small-scale experiment, with a ‘champion’
  • It must simply ‘work around’ excessive organizational security without posing a serious security risk
  • Its use should be encouraged, supported, appreciated, funded and rewarded by management
  • There should not be too many tools with the same functionality
  • It should enable transfer of advice, not just information
  • It should appeal to the different generations using it
  • If its use is project-specific, it should be simple to archive it or take it down when the project ends
  • Some applications require a ‘critical mass’ of users
  • It would be better if it didn’t duplicate functionality of an existing ‘legacy’ application in the organization
  • It would be better if its availability was useful to the organization in recruiting
  • It would be better if it worked on portable technologies

Which Tools Participating Organizations Were Planning to Introduce (by type, using the typology of my earlier post on social networking tools):

  • People-Connector Tools: People-finders, social network mapping, proximity locators, affinity detectors: Lots of curiosity but no plans for use of new tools of these types. Good old-fashioned directories of expertise are still sought, and still elusive to create and maintain — the challenge is automating collection and maintenance of as much of the data as possible, and motivating people to self-maintain the rest.
  • Social Publishing: Blogs, podcasts, social bookmarkers, photo journals, memediggers, product evaluators, personal diaries (FaceBook etc.): Again, lots of curiosity but no plans for use of new tools of these types. Using blogs accessible only within organizations was considered by some to be self-defeating. Most organizations assumed their people just didn’t have time to keep or read blogs. In some organizations, social bookmarkers are used by librarians to create linked lists on subjects of interest to professionals.
  • Wikis: Tried, with varying success, mostly by small groups already familiar with wikis, for projects with a sense of urgency and a short life. Not much appetite for using them beyond that.
  • Discussion Forums, Commercial Collaboration Tools: Tried by most, almost always unsuccessful. “Solutions in search of a problem”, and the collaboration tools were too complicated. The new Lotus Connections seems to be encountering the same problems and same resistance from users.
  • Mindmaps: Used by quite a few organizations, but not really as a social networking tool.
  • VoIP, Virtual Presence: Some use of Skype, many users of various desktop videoconferencing tools, mostly quite successfully. The most interesting one was called ePresence, an open source software that is free (you provide the server; they host a public directory of e-presentations) and can be used for small-group desktop videoconferencing and for broadcast videoconferences.
  • Peer Production, Open Space: Not used by any of the participants at this session.
  • Virtual Reality/Gaming: A couple of ‘showcase’ applications of Second Life.
  • IM: Not sure if it qualifies as a social networking tool, but most participants used IM and found it very successful in some communities.
  • Electronic Discovery: One participant used an application (Trampoline SONAR) that draws real-time network visualizations of the relationships of various types of data.

Value of Social Networking Analysis:

Patti Anklam skilfully took us through the history and basics of analysis, including the most popular tools (like Valdis Krebs’ Inflow) and the analytical methodology (largely developed by Rob Cross and his colleagues, which I explained in this earlier post). My friend Ted Graham took us through a case study of his organization’s use of one such tool, and while it was very interesting, I remain unconvinced that this analysis is likely to be worth the significant time and cost needed to do it properly. My takeaways on social networking analysis were therefore:

  • If you’re going to develop social network maps, do it to understand the reason why the de facto networks are the way they are, not to try to change them. You can’t coerce or bribe people to network with people they aren’t inclined to network with. The best you can do is work around the disconnects. And understand how others work around organizational problems and obstacles, and that sometimes the maps can help you understand these workarounds — why the organization is nothing like what the organization chart suggests.
  • These maps are severely limited by the fact they only map relationships within the organization. Some people who are intensely connected to customers might therefore appear ‘disconnected’ on the maps when they are anything but.
  • These maps can also be easily ‘gamed’ by people with agendas, biases or personality conflicts. Those who refuse to participate in the mapping organization (often because they are too busy, or because they feel, with some justification, that it’s an unnecessary invasion of privacy) can also seriously distort the map results. 
  • The maps, flawed as they are, are visually attractive and draw you into analyzing what they mean. For getting resources for KM, they therefore have substantial PR value.
  • I really liked two of Patti’s points: That work today is so complex that no one can do any significant task alone, so networks are essential to one’s work productivity and functionality; and that we are all in networks of one kind or another, all the time.

A ‘wow’ moment from Ted: The first year e-mail became really substantially used in business was 1998. It’s only been around as mainstream technology for a decade. And already Generation Millennium are abandoning it in favour of newertechnologies for everything except “communications with The Man”.

An interesting event. Thanks to the organizers, hosts and participants.
Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 2 Comments

Being Spun

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard
ahmadinejadLast evening I watched Charlie Rose’s PBS interview of Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

What struck me was how much his style of communication mimicked that of GW Bush. The same attempt to conceal bald lies with swagger and squinty smile and smirk. The same transparent insincerity obvious when you look in their eyes. The same propensity to stick fiercely to rehearsed ‘talking points’ and refuse to answer any question for which they have no rehearsed answer.

Both of them are blatant propagandists — their choice of words, the use of slogans, the constant repetition of expressions with distorted meanings and disinformation, the deliberate appeal to base emotion, to the point listeners are no longer interested in or prepared to listen to reason.

What astonished me was the utter inability of Charlie Rose, who has access to exceptional research resources and is himself extremely bright and well-prepared, to handle the brash and clever Ahmadinejad. A friend of mine at the CBC, Ira Basen, has studied this phenomenon extensively. He has explained how politicians, with the help of their wealthy supporters, PR/media whores and other spin doctors, have effectively abolished open press conferences and other unrehearsed opportunities for media dialogue, and replaced them with scripted ‘production numbers’, often with visually appealing backdrops or stunts, designed purely to misinform and obfuscate, and ti reiterate the carefully-crafted ‘talking points’ and Orwellian slogans. In other words, to turn them into pure propaganda events, like the infamous Bush photo-ops.

Bush and Canadian PM Harper, right-wing birds of a feather highly distrustful of a media that might reveal the truth behind their orchestrated disinformation campaigns, are practiced experts at this type of production. We just learned that Harper’s ultra-conservative military cohorts script-wrote the speech that Afghan President Karzai mouthed last year during his visit to Canada.

The mainstream media are just putty in these propagandists’ hands. What would it take for them, if they were so inclined, to restore some of the integrity and balance to the reporting process it once had? My suggestions:

  1. Insist that the ‘stage’ be shared with someone with opposing views. The problem with this is that you can end up with two propagandists just talking past each other and trying to shout each other down. The media don’t like this because it makes their job of ‘dumbing down’ the news more difficult, and belies the presumption that their coverage is somehow accurate and factual.
  2. Be rude. If the propagandist doesn’t answer the question, interrupt the rehearsed speech and keep asking the question until the propagandist either answers it or demonstrates they are incapable of doing so honestly. Don’t let them change the subject. Argue with them. Call them a liar and confront them with the facts. Don’t let their managers manage your interview and program.
  3. Refuse to cover ‘managed’ events. Make it clear you won’t be anyone’s mouthpiece. Be faithful to the principles of the fourth estate.
  4. Do investigative journalism. When you find and report news that no one else has, you cease to be dependent on the staged press conferences that your competition lets pass for ‘news’.

This would take courage. As Bill Maher has said, “the job of the media is to make what’s important interesting”. You can’t do this with mindless regurgitations of pre-packaged propaganda productions manufactured by vested interests. You can’t do it with CNN-style blather about the minutiae of what various people think these productions mean, or should mean. Just because the mainstream media show up in droves to cover it, doesn’t make it news.

I’m not optimistic that any of the mainstream media will do any of these four steps. If public broadcasters can’t seem to handle the propagandists, we can hardly expect the mainstream media outlets in the corporatists’ pay and thrall to do so. It’s too controversial and too expensive for their tastes or risk appetites.

So we’ll have to continue to depend on the indymedia for real news. Unfortunately, that means that we’ll almost never see interviews with the rich and the powerful, or those with something to hide. But if these interviews are mostly just disguised propaganda anyways, perhapsthat’s just as well.

PS: The CBC, in addition to running Ira’s series on Spin, has done some excellent investigative reporting (check out this startling hidden-cam expose of doctors’ failure to follow basic hygiene in hospitals, despite knowing this causes thousands of deaths) — but their focus seems to be on everything except political parties’ and leaders’ misdeeds and lies. Too risky for publicly-funded media to be seen as taking sides, I guess.

Category: The Media
Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments