Knowledge in the Workplace: Have It Your Way

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Dave Pollard
 have it your way
I‘m trying to understand why social networking applications (and to some extent online research) are still not getting much mainstream traction in organizations. The vast majority of SNA use, it seems, is for personal purposes, or by technology geeks. Meanwhile, researchers and buyers of external databases continue to lament the underutilization of their skills and resources.
 
Recently I devised what I called Pollard’s Law for communication and collaboration tools (“they have to be simple and ubiquitous and meet an urgent need, or they won’t be used”). But what about the other types of SNAs and research applications — the ones focused on collection rather than connection?
 
Marshall McLuhan famously said that all technologies are extensions of the organs of the human body, to compensate for our bodies’ inherent limitations. So for example the automobile is an extension of our legs (giving us more speed and endurance), and the telescope is an extension of our eyes (giving us more acuity and reach). The personal computer, he predicted (it was still in its infancy when he was alive) would be an extension of our brains — our thinking processes, memory, and social networks.
 
Humans, at least modern ones, have a predilection for wanting to own, rather than share, such bodily extensions, so they are available precisely when, where and how we choose to use them. In the workplace, too, people want their own stuff — their own phones, offices, PCs etc., even when they may be unnecessary to the effective performance of their jobs. So perhaps it is not surprising that we want the information that we get in the workplace, our way, in our own space, organized in the way it makes sense to us. We resent getting sent information (e-mail and snail mail and by telemarketers) that we did not ask for and do not want.
 
If you look at the vast majority of websites on the Internet, and most of the social networking applications that are content-rich (weblogs, libraries and databases, news pages and feeds, public weblogs, ‘groupware’ etc.), you’ll find that their content has been put out there by its author or webmaster just in case it is of interest to others. Some of it is filtered, specialized and intended for specific communities (meant for you to browse, if you’re a member of one of those communities). The rest of it is unspecific, general or uncategorized (meant for you to search). Most of us browse only when we have the luxury of time to do so, and search only when we can’t find what we’re looking for more easily by just asking someone.
 
This content is not served up our way. For the most part, you cannot easily save it in a format that is easy to retrieve, change, annotate or otherwise ‘make your own’ (though many SNAs have been developed to try to let you do this, awkwardly). If you participate in an online forum or post comments to someone’s weblog, you will probably not recall what you said or where you posted it — it’s lost from your ‘extended memory’. Try to track all the interesting stuff you stumble on and you’ll end up with huge blogrolls and bookmark folders that are utterly unmanageable, and you still won’t be able to find what you’re looking for, even with Google Desktop, without a tedious search.
 
Consider the analogy of our transportation network, which, like online networks and technologies, enables us to meet with people and to find stuff we’re interested in. Imagine if the transportation system was so complicated that we gave up trying to meet with some people because we just couldn’t master the technology, or imagine the technology was so unwieldy that we couldn’t actually use it to take home most of the stuff we bought — every time we wanted to use it, we’d have to get back on the system and go out and use it at the store, and then return home.
 
Perhaps that analogy is stretching it a bit, but given the power of technology, why shouldn’t we have all the information we want, organized the way we want it, in our virtual ‘home space’, and why shouldn’t we be able to ‘bring additional stuff home’ and put it precisely where we want it? This awkwardness is, I believe, a key reason why so many are averse to using information on the Internet and averse to using content-focused SNAs. It will take a change in focus from content-provider to user-need, to overcome this.

The following table shows what I think is the average organizational user’s perception of the value of today’s main communication, collaboration and content-‘delivering’ applications:

Tool / Application Value as a Conversation & Collaboration Medium
 (how easy to use & ubiquitous is it?)		 Value as an Information Transfer Vehicle
(does it deliver content ‘your way’?)
Websites n/a poor
Groupware poor poor
Document libraries n/a poor
Discussion forums fair poor
E-mail good fair
IM fair good*
Skype & desktop videoconferencing fair poor
RSS newspages n/a fair
Weblogs poor poor**
Wikis poor poor
Telephone good good*
Face-to-face meetings excellent good*

* content is delivered in context    ** great for the author, not so useful for the reader

This is not to say SNAs like blogs, wikis, desktop videoconferencing and groupware are not useful — just that they will not become mainstream in organizations until they become easier to use, ubiquitous and/or provide information content in a format that lets individuals save it in their own ‘space’ their way.

I would give Facebook and MySpace the same scores as Weblogs, and predict that this type of structured personal page will not make headway in most organizations either.

 
This table also explains why people are deluged with too many e-mails, phone calls, teleconferences and meetings in most organizations. These methods get the highest scores, but they are sub-optimal for many purposes. The problem is that the methods that work better just aren’t easy and ubiquitous and don’t give people the content they want their way.

Acceptance of these new technologies is exacerbated by security officers in many organizations who actively (and often unfairly or arbitrarily) discourage their use. It’s also true that researchers in organizations tend to browse more (because it can provide better context, and because they often know where to look) than researchers outside (who often have to depend on hit-or-miss searches across the whole web), so technologies that depend on such broad searches are considered a last resort.

 
The graphic at the top of this post depicts what I think the average organizational user would ideally like as an ‘extension of his/her brain, memory and social networks’. All of the content s/he wants would be in one physical (hard drive) or virtual ‘place’. That place would list all his/her networks with one-click connectivity to those networks and the people in them, using simple and ubiquitous communication and collaboration tools.

The remaining content would be ‘collected’ in three ways that are analogous to how our brain collects information:

  • Using just-in-time canvassing tools to ask people in his/her networks who/what they know (and then use the communication & collaboration tools to collect that information),
  • Using just-in-case and just-for-fun RSS syndication tools to collect information that s/he has chosen to subscribe to, and
  • Using just-in-time harvesting tools to automatically collect information on new topics that s/he has decided s/he needs to know more about, in an ‘inbox’ in his/her preferred format, so it can be sorted, browsed, read and disposed of at his/her leisure

The idea is that you would never have to go ‘out’ for information — it would all be ‘delivered’ in the format and according to the schedule that s/he chose — his/her way.

This content could include his/her personal and collected files, messages, music and video, photos, bookmarks, weblogs, addresses and contacts — any stuff, both personal and professional, both authored and ‘adopted’ by him/her, that s/he wants at his/her fingertips. This ‘auxiliary memory’ would be completely portable: We expect people to take charge of their personal career and learning now, and it’s important that, subject to confidentiality requirements, people not be forced to give up information when they change jobs, any more than we expect them to forget what they learned in previous jobs.

So, just as the most valuable communication and collaboration tools/media will be those that are simple and ubiquitous, the most valuable content-and-collection tools will be those that transfer and deliver information content the way the user wants it, direct to the user’s ‘home space’. Give it to ’em their way, and they’ll value it, use it, and make it their own.

I think it’s possible that, with some practice at managing all this ‘stuff’, some kind of natural neural organizational structure might emerge. But all of this is a long way off. In the meantime we need to start to think about how the next generation of SNAs should be designed. And, in our experiments in the workplace with these tools, we need to be cognizant of how and why people like to use, or resist using, information and information technologies.

Until we can improve the scorecard in the table above, we can expect the process of getting acceptance of SNAs in theworkplace to be slow going.
 
Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 2 Comments

Can You Run Out of Things to Say When You Never Say Anything At All?

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard
My newest short story is an exercise writing in an unfamiliar (female) voice, and using fiction as a medium to expose provocative ideas. Let me know if you think it succeeds at either, or both.

pool candle
Natalie, dear friend, I need your advice!…
 
I know you always told me that a girl had to be crazy to answerthose personal classifieds, but this one was just too unusual to resist… (more…)

Category: Short Stories
Posted in Creative Works | 9 Comments

Living a Natural Life

Posted on June 25, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Natural Economy
I mentioned in a recent post that I am torn between

  • the temptation to create Natural, Intentional Communities and Natural Enterprises as ‘working models’ that can help the survivors of our civilization’s inevitable collapse later this century, and 
  • the temptation to just walk away, be selfish, live a radically simple lifestyle (a ‘non-working model?’), and be happy living in the moment.
Some of my readers have suggested that ‘working naturally’, the means by which Natural Enterprises should work, might be an oxymoron. Look at creatures in natural environments, or even gatherer-hunter human cultures, and you find almost all of their time is spent doing four things: eating, sleeping, playing/learning and relating. Play in nature is serious business (it is the means by which the young practice and learn skills they need to survive) but it is also fun and lifelong (exploration, discovery and recreation keep wild creatures fit, alert and connected without the provocation of stressful situations, and are also part of what makes life worth living, and hence leads to evolutionary success). I group playing and learning into a single activity because in nature they are inseparable.

A fifth activity, fighting, enters the picture in situations of scarcity, but in the world of abundance in which ‘uncivilized’ species (mostly) live this is a rare occurrence (contrary to what some wildlife documentaries would have you believe).

A sixth activity, working, which is defined in the dictionary as “extended activity directed to producing or accomplishing something”, but which generally connotes activity that is somewhat onerous, tedious and stressful, is not, to them, a natural activity at all. Gathering food in an area where it is abundant is not work, any more than migrating or caring for the community’s young is work. If it is work, that’s a signal that some change in behaviour is needed (moving to a different area where food is more plentiful, reducing fertility so resources are not so severely taxed, etc.) In nature stress demands adaptive change to eliminate the cause of the stress and put life back into balance. Having to work means something is wrong .

If you love doing what you’re doing, however, even if you ‘work’ hard at it, it’s not onerous, tedious or stressful. It’s a ‘labour of love’. I would argue that in this case it’s organized and directed playing/learning and relating activity. It has a conscious purpose, which distinguishes it from playing/learning and relating that is purely recreational or social. But it is still playing/learning and relating, not onerous, tedious, stressful ‘work’. Think about the most joyful workplaces you know. Wouldn’t you describe their ‘work’ as mostly playing/learning and relating?

This is my idea of Natural Enterprise, the way ‘work’ should be — playing/learning and relating activity directed to producing or accomplishing something. My upcoming book will profile existing and emerging Natural Enterprises and explain how to find, evolve and create them.

Although Natural Enterprises can and do work in any economy, ideally they will become part of the natural, networked ‘world of ends’ economy illustrated above. In a Natural Economy, Natural Enterprises are an integral part of Natural Communities, communities which are largely self-sufficient, self-managed and self-selected (Intentional). The Natural Economy consists of unintermediated, peer-to-peer networks of Natural Enterprises offering their surplus production in ‘price-less’ exchange for the surplus production of Natural Enterprises in other Natural Communities. This enables struggling communities to ‘catch up’ to affluent communities without creating debt or dependency in the process.

What distinguishes Natural Enterprises most markedly from traditional corporations is the absence of internal and external adversarial and competitive behaviour in Natural Enterprises, behaviour that is the very hallmark of traditional corporations, plus the fact that Natural Enterprises replicate (what works) rather than growing, so they always stay small.

All of this got me thinking about the people I would love to ‘work’ with in Natural Enterprises and live with in a Natural Community. They would be people who are already living natural lives, people who refuse to ‘work’ doing onerous, tedious, stressful jobs, and who adapt themselves and their lifestyles so they don’t have to. Somehow they are able to spend their whole lives eating, sleeping, playing/learning, and relating, joyfully. This is partly a function of a positive state of mind — how they look at ‘problems’ and situations — and partly a result of considered choices about what they want, need and do. Zaadz entrepreneurship leader Siona argues that this starts with self-acceptance and self-love, “the willingness to abandon the belief that I can or should be anything, or in any way, different, from what I am.”

 
Such people do give a damn — they are not deluded that everything in the world is perfect — and they engage with others doing ‘work’ that is “extended activity directed to producing or accomplishing something”, but because of how they approach it, it is always joyful, never tedious or stressful. These are people who love everyone and spend their entire lives ‘making love’ — not in the sexual sense but in the sense that all their playing/learning and relating activities are infused with love and with creating love unconditionally and reciprocally with others.
 
I’m sure you know people like this. They are charismatic, indefatigable, uncompromising and relentlessly positive. They attract others (especially their opposites, the inconsolable and relentlessly negative cynics) like moths to a flame. They evoke (alas) jealousy from those who wish they could be like them, from those who worry that their own loved ones will be seduced away by them, and, most of all, from those who want to keep that generous love all to themselves.
 
The women I know who love everyone this way are always worried by male affection (because of their experience with males who cannot be trusted to love them back openly and unconditionally without resenting sharing that love with others). The men I know who love everyone this way have few male friends — perhaps because their love is unnerving to other men.
 
When I watch wild birds and animals in their communities, I can sense this constant unconditional love for other creatures and for all-life-on-Earth. They are constantly ‘making love’ in the way they live fully and joyfully in the moment, every moment infused with love of life and love of their place and love of learning and discovery and love for the astonishing wonder of every creature they meet. Every second is ecstatic, even the moments of intense fear, flight and death, where they resign themselves to their life’s ending, give themselves back to the sacred Earth in partnership with the creature whose life is sustained by their death. Perhaps this is why it is so easy for wild creatures (other than the designated breeding pairs) to refrain voluntarily from sexual activity to prevent overpopulation of the flock — because everything they do is ‘making love’.
 
The people who are able to live like this can be activists without being angry, competitive and confrontational. They understand that the purpose of political action is to reduce scarcity, to strive endlessly and hopefully but without expectation of success to restore the balance on Earth so that there is no longer a need for anyone to do onerous, tedious, stressful ‘work’, and so that perhaps one day everyone will once again be able to spend their lives joyfully eating, sleeping, playing/learning, and relating. So that everyone can once again live a natural life.
 
I remember, when I was very young, living with this state of mind and this intentionality. It was not conscious or learned, it was just a natural way to live. I didn’t know any other way. But soon enough I encountered negative people (including other children) — people who were jealous, critical, acquisitive, selfish, greedy, mean-spirited. And soon enough, not understanding, I became depressed, shy, frightened. I ‘learned’ that I was living in a terrible world.
 
At various stages in my life I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to get back to that state of mind and intentionality. I think when we fall in love we rediscover it — that love makes us temporarily immune to the negativity all around us, in our modern, crowded, struggling, work-filled world. I vacillated between being a political progressive (angry, confrontational) and a social progressive (optimistic, loving, believing). I have always understood both, and have never been particularly good at either — I instinctively avoid confrontation and handle stress very badly, but I see the world too darkly to trust that just doing small things in our own sphere of influence will ever be enough. The resulting paralysis has defined me throughout my adult life.
 
Recently I have become disenchanted with the possibility that political activism can achieve any meaningful sustained change. I believe that, as The Rebel Sell explains, “you can’t jam the culture” and that, to some extent, our bankrupt and unsustainable corporatist society depends on angry progressives winning and being satisfied with small illusory victories to co-opt and quieten them so that no real change ever occurs. Perhaps, then, I am finally ready to start to become one of those relentlessly positive, joyful people who have so impressed and puzzled me (and made me feel inadequate by comparison) all my adult life.
 
I say start, because I suspect that it will be a lifelong and halting journey. I have a lot of fears to abandon, a lot of cynicism to free myself from, a lot of trust in myself and others to regain, a lot of important lessons to relearn. But I feel I am on my way. I am free from my illusions that I will save our world from civilizational collapse, and now believe that (as grim and tragic as it will be) civilizational collapse will be how the world saves itself from us. I am happier and more positive and more full of love than I have ever been (save for those brief, ecstatic, invulnerable times when I was deeply, utterly ‘in love‘).
 
Yet I am still impatient, still consumed with unbearable grief for Gaia. Still too often angry, disengaged, inattentive, weary. Cognizant of Siona’s words above, I have always believed I cannot change who I am. But perhaps who I really am is still hiding, waiting to emerge when I am finally ready. And now perhaps I am finally ready to emerge, and to become who I always was. (Now you know the meaning of the butterfly on this blog’s masthead).
 
If so then the dilemma of what to do that I outlined in the first paragraph of this article will disappear: I will no longer want to walk away and be selfish, because the ‘work’ of creating and showing others how to create Natural Enterprises and Natural Communities, and perhaps ultimately creating a model Natural Economy and being a model of how to live a natural life, will not be work, it will be easy, joyful, playing/learning and relating, ‘making love’ with everyone, unconditionally, and living in the moment that never ends.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 3 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – June 24, 2007

Posted on June 24, 2007 by Dave Pollard
MadeInChina

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Performance Art: A group of us in Toronto are spreading the project started by artists Melisa Christensen and Matt Lein in NYC last month. It involves putting their poster (Canadian version above) in coffee shops and other sympathetic places, with an envelope attached full of their beautifully-designed stickers inside. We expect the stickers to show up in some surprising locations, and perhaps get some media attention. If you’d like to take the project to your city, let me know.

Learning How to Live a Natural Life: I’ll be writing more next week about Natural Enterprises and how, ideally, they fit into a model of Intentional Communities which are further networked into a Natural Economy. This has got me thinking about who I would love to work with in Natural Enterprises and live with in Intentional Community, and also about the nature of work and why so much of it is soul-destroying. I’ve concluded that it’s because of the people working in them and how they’ve been socialized to behave in modern society. There are some people I know, however, who are living what I would call truly Natural Lives. They refuse to be negative, to hate, to give up hoping and trying. They genuinely love everyone and are always ‘creating’ love. I’m beginning to recall being that way, when I was young, before I got angry, shy, bitter and depressed. I recall wanting to be that way at various points in my life since then. I think perhaps my next self-change will be in that direction. It will not be easy for me, though. I’m so impatient, so quick, still, to judge.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #4 and #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. Still working on practice podcasts, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium. Be patient with me.

Open Thread Question:

Who do you know who’s relentlessly positive, forgiving, understanding and loving, despite the fact they know the crises we’re facing in thecoming years? What’s their secret?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 9 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – June 23, 2007

Posted on June 23, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Terry Krysak
Photo of a cat looking through a screen by local photographer Terry Krysak

What’s Important This Week:

“The Earth Today Stands in Immediate Peril: ..and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change” — the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Thanks to several readers for the link.

Birds Beginning to Vanish, Too: Verlyn Klinkenborg reports on an Audubon Society report about massive drops in the population of meadow birds in the US. This comes soon after reports of similar drops in bee populations. Klinkenborg always has a way of eloquently telling us what the news really means: “What they [birds and other wild creatures] actually need to survive, it turns out, is a landscape that is less intensely human…We look around us, expecting the rest of the worldís occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.” The Sixth Great Extinction continues.

Making a Personal List for Self-Sufficiency and Radically Simple Living: Zane Parker at Lichenology has created a list of things he wants to learn to make himself — foods and foodstuffs, clothing, electricity, tools, furniture, recreation. I am watching his experiment with interest. I would prefer to learn to do these things collectively with others in an Intentional Community, which means I’ll be far behind Zane. But as he says, for now, we have time. [Also from Zane, this link to the US Drought Monitor]

The Qualities of an Effective Activist: Avid, influential, self-directed, independent, collaborative, provocative, methodical, curious, and, most interesting, specialized: “All [activists interviewed] have settled on a community or two that suits their circumstances. None reported wide participation across many different types of communities.” In other words, find where your unique gift and passion intersect; do one or two things really well. Is this the essential difference between those of us who write and those who act? Thanks to Dave Riddell for the link.

Global Oil Demand Growth Rate Has Doubled This Year: This suggests a sharper rise in oil prices, and a sharper fall as production peaks and what’s left is used up that much faster.

What To Do With Dead & Broken Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: Many of us have made the switch to these durable, energy-efficient bulbs (and in Canada we’ll soon have no other choice), but disposal is a problem — they contain small amounts of mercury. Here’s a link to what to do with them when they break or wear out. We urgently need a simpler way to safely dispose of these, and batteries. Thanks to sagefool for the link.

Thoughts for the Week:

Inmates’ Words: The Poetry of Guantanamo

Wendell Berry’s Seven Steps to Eating Responsibly (from the Centre for Ecoliteracy — thanks to David Parkinson for the link):

  1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can.
  2. Prepare your own food.
  3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.
  4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.
  5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.
  6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
  7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible,of the life histories of plant and animal food species.

I know, preaching to the choir. But as long as someone is listening…
Posted in Collapse Watch | 2 Comments

Standing Up to Conservative Bullying

Posted on June 21, 2007 by Dave Pollard
iraq war
Child victim of the war in Iraq. Photo from Newcastle-Emlyn anti-war site.

Canadians, for the most part, love peace and nature, and we are progressive in our thinking. Unfortunately, we are also complacent, naive, and poorly informed. This has allowed a small but determined conservative minority to steal the vast majority of our country’s resources and sell them, cheap and raw, to foreign corporations who often use them to manufacture goods they then sell back to us at a huge markup.

It has also allowed warmongers with a right-wing ideological agenda to commit our defence forces to a partisan role in the Middle East, not the peacekeeping role we were duped into believing we were committing to.

In the last few days, two important events have set the stage for a war of wills between a passive progressive majority and an aggressive conservative minority:

  1. Imperial Oil (ExxonMobil Canada) announced that the cost of the Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline, planned to run from the fragile arctic permafrost and caribou grounds to provide cheap energy to the rapacious Alberta Tar Sands, is $9B (120%) over budget, and threatened to walk away from the project unless the federal government funds the shortfall.
  2. Three more Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan (bringing the death toll to 60). They were killed while traveling in an open vehicle in a supposedly secure area by what a military spokesman termed “a determined enemy”. The incident followed hard on the heels of yet another bombing error by the foreign occupying armies, which killed seven children.

tar sands
Alberta Tar Sands sludge mining, in what used to be pristine boreal forest. Photo: Melina Mara, Washington Post

Classical neocon tactics are being used to spin both events:

  • Brinkmanship is being used to force the federal government to write a blank cheque for the pipeline, and indemnify Exxon against ecological disasters and further cost increases. If they don’t, native communities that have invested in infrastructure to prepare for the construction influx left in the lurch, and the entire massively expensive, ill-conceived (it currently consumes 0.7 gallons of energy to produce every gallon of energy produced) and ecologically devastating Alberta Tar Sands project will be threatened.
  • Absolutism (Bush-style “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” framing) is being used to bully Canada into committing to keep our troops in the midst of the anarchy and civil war in Afghanistan. The PR from the military is increasingly using the term ‘enemy’ to describe anyone in Afghanistan who opposes the continued presence of foreign troops in their country. The ideologically rabid Harper Conservative minority government routinely uses the “if you don’t support our war, you don’t support our troops” line to disparage anti-war groups. And today a military spokesman lambasted the Canadian media for daring to publicize opinion polls showing Canadians’ strong opposition to the war, saying it was “demoralizing our troops”.

George Lakoff and others have explained to Americans how these devious and manipulative ‘end justifies the means’ tactics work, and how to fight back against them, but for Canadians, used to gentler, fairer debate, this is new territory, and progressives and moderate Canadians have fallen for the neocon rhetoric, or at least been cowed into silence. The conservatives’ vile US-style ‘attack ads’ personally ridiculing Liberal leader StÈphane Dion have been blanketing the airwaves, a warning to those who would dare challenge the neocon program.

Someone needs to stand up to these dangerous people; they do not speak for the majority of Canadians, even though the majority of Canadians are now too confused or too frightened to speak up.

Those who remember the last (Mulroney) Conservative government’s use of brinkmanship will recall how close we came to having our country broken apart by it — anglophone and francophone Canadians were pitted against each other and told that unless they both agreed with the Mulroney constitutional plan (to cripple the federal government and transfer most power to the provincial governments), each ‘side’ would reject the other permanently. Instead, Canadians of both languages united and rejected the Mulroney government, which fell to obscurity and was taken over by Harper’s right-wing Reform party.

The only response to brinkmanship is to push back, to refuse to choose between the artificial alternatives presented. We must reject, once and for all, environmentally ruinous and financially unsupportable ‘development’ projects. The fact that the pipeline is economically non-viable, despite soaring energy costs, is not because of approval delays, but because it is simply too risky, too extravagant, and too inadequate (the amount of natural gas available just doesn’t justify the expenditure, at any price). Like drilling in the Alaskan ANWR, and the colossally expensive and ecologically ruinous Tar Sands, this is just a dumb idea, which is why the government is being asked to subsidize it and indemnify the corporations involved against the massive risks it poses. We must kill these moronic resource megaprojects once and for all. There are many ‘renewable’ uses for this land, like ecotourism, that provide a much more compelling, low-risk, sustainable ‘return’ on investment.

The only response to absolutism is to reframe the debate in terms that reflect the real complexity of the situation. Afghanistan and Iraq are countries that have been economically destroyed by despots and occupying armies. Decades-long wars will not ‘rebuild’ them, and our presence merely sets us up as a convenient military and rhetorical target for the combatants. These countries need to solve their own political problems, and what we should be doing is providing economic and social assistance to them, but only when it is safe to do so and when we can be assured the assistance will not be diverted to corrupt regimes and warlords. This is an immensely difficult task, but it is not solved by our wading in and taking sides and fighting their wars for them. We must withdraw our military forces and cease military activities in the Middle East immediately. Yes, this will probably result in a greater power vacuum that will intensify the civil war, but that war is inevitable and we are just delaying its full onset with our presence. We should try to help in humanitarian and infrastructure (economic, educational and social rebuilding) ways, but until order re-emerges from the current anarchy we may be helpless to push this process. And yes, this further jeopardizes our energy security. That’s our problem, not theirs, and we should refocus our efforts on addressing it, through tax shifting, investments in renewable energy and large scale conservation programs. Not by waging futile wars of occupation.

It’s time, not just in Canada but throughout the affluent nations, to stand up to conservative bullying and say enough. How many times must we make the same mistakes before we learn the lessons of history and find better ways to deal with the intractableproblems of our time?
Posted in How the World Really Works | 4 Comments

The Company We Keep, and the Company (Chelsea Green Publishing) I’ll Be Keeping

Posted on June 20, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Working Naturally
John Abrams’ The Company We Keep is the story of a Natural Enterprise, with all of the qualities necessary to be a sustainable, responsible, joyful business (in stark contrast to most traditional corporations):
  • It’s egalitarian, not hierarchical.
  • It adapts to circumstances and lets solutions to problems emerge, rather than ‘imposing’ prescribed solutions.
  • It’s collaborative, not competitive.
  • It buys respectfully. and finances purchases organically, rather than by beating suppliers down to the lowest price and then depending on low interest rates and government subsidies and ‘incentives’ to stay afloat.
  • It communicates its products virally, not through propagandist advertising and marketing.
  • It strives for responsibility, effectiveness and zero waste, rather than externalizing its costs and wastes for short-term profit.
  • It evolves through innovation rather than through growth.
  • It identifies and satisfies needs, rather than trying to create them.
  • Its strategies are improvisational, not preemptive.

Abrams’ story is detailed and refreshingly candid — he admits to the bad decisions, false starts, missteps and the continuing work in progress that his enterprise is. This makes his insights utterly credible, and his story immensely educational. Most of the corporate profiles in business management books and MBA ‘case studies’ are whitewashed and self-serving. Abrams, by contrast, gives us the unvarnished truth — what really works, and what doesn’t.

The book is divided into eight parts, each addressing one of the “building blocks” of Abrams’ South Mountain Company, a homebuilding enterprise on Martha’s Vineyard:
  1. Workplace democracy: Every employee is an owner, and control of the enterprise is vested collectively in its thirty partners.
  2. Sustainability without growth: “We think about ‘enough’ rather than ‘more'”, he writes. South Mountain adopts Thomas Princen’s principles of sufficiency, and vows never to grow beyond Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘rule of 150’ (the maximum number of people anyone can sustain deep, healthy social relationships with).
  3. Goals of well-being not wealth: Profit is merely one means to achieving meaningful goals that benefit all the partners and the community in which they work.
  4. Commitment to place and community: The island is a place South Mountain’s people live in, know intimately, care about, and strive to make a better place for all.
  5. Everyone doing what they do best: The idea of craftsmanship, of pride in excellence, of doing what its people do well and are passionate about, imbues everything the company does.
  6. Conserving communities: Building community in an age of restlessness and forced transience is a great challenge. Conserving what matters — love, deep relationships, local economies, the natural environment and all its inextricably intertwined elements — depends on people being there, for a lifetime, who care, conserving the community.
  7. Being an integral part of the community: This means taking an active part in community activities and investing time, energy and resources in problem-solving that extends far beyond the immediate interests of the company.
  8. Thinking long term: Abrams calls this “cathedral building”, citing Charles Handy. It is all about imagining inspiring possibilities and then working towards their realization, with the knowledge that this will benefit future generations, not today’s, and that that is a good thing.

He explains, in a painstakingly careful and detailed narrative, how South Mountain learned of the importance of these building blocks, and applied them, ultimately with remarkable and delightful (and still evolving) success. He cites many of the same influences I have written about in my articles on Natural Enterprise: Charles Handy, Herman Daly, the Mondragon Co-op, Bill McKibbon, Patagonia, Seventh Generation, Bucky Fuller, Michael Shuman, WL Gore. He writes:

If we are lucky in life, work becomes an expression of who we are and one of our most important anchors of meaning.

What most impresses me about him is his modesty and humility (reminiscent of the qualities of another great natural entrepreneur, Dave Smith), and how these qualities have guided him and his partners through the uncharted struggles of entrepreneurship. They made South Mountain intensively attuned to their customers and their community, attentive, observant, adaptive, never reckless or arrogant. He expresses this caution about generalizing his own success story to some larger truth magnificently:

Is it a stretch to say that the more fully we are fulfilled in our work, the more fully we can love both our children and our community? And that the more fulfilled we are, the more we can help build a future that’s sane and just? If I overreach, it is only my enthusiasm for the possibility that is at fault. Here then is one small business on one small island. Its lessons emerge from its story, but it is only one of many stories of small-business experimentation that are unfolding today in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known…Perhaps, combined [with others’ stories] they might together alter, in some small way, the chemistry of our culture….[citing Lee Halprin] “All truth knows only a little of what it is…Certainly a lot of writing does not show that it knows the slightness of its knowledge“…I’ll be trying to remember the slightness of my own knowledge…and trying to separate what I think I know from what I’m certain I don’t.

Read this book, and discover the important message Abrams conveys when he says “At South Mountain, we are struggling to get the dog part right.”

. . . . .

I am delighted to report that Chelsea Green, who are the publishers of Abrams’ book, have contracted to publish my book about Natural Enterprise and ‘working naturally’. I am blown away that my book has been accepted by the publisher of the works of extraordinary writers like Derrick Jensen, George Lakoff, Hazel Henderson and John Abrams. I second Abrams when he writes, in his acknowledgements, “I’m grateful for Margo Baldwin’s confidence — she’s been with it all the way from the start, and I look forward to a long association with her and Chelsea Green”. I also thank my agent, John Willig, for his confidence and perseverance in helping me evolve this book into one worth publishing.

The objective of my book will be to draw upon the stories of over a hundred companies that I have worked with or studied that are, or are becoming, Natural Enterprises, and relay their learnings, war stories, and their secrets of achieving success on their own terms. The book will offer a suggested roadmap for those looking to find or create what Dave Smith calls “meaningful work”, but I will endeavour to follow Abrams’ example and advice and provide the unvarnished truth about what works and what doesn’t, and what I’m not at all sure about, in acknowledgement of the “slightness of my own knowledge”.

And I’ll try to get the dog part right.

. . . . .

I am also pleased to report that I have been asked, as a result of my recent article about the possibility of making Downsview Park a model community — car-free, sustainable, self-sufficient — to meet with the Downsview Lands Community Voice Association, the “watchdog” on the Park’sdevelopment. I hope to connect them with John Abrams, Cradle to Cradle architect Bill McDonough, and others who can help them, and all of us, imagine what a community (in the middle of the city) could be.
Posted in Working Smarter | 6 Comments

Getting People to Give a Damn

Posted on June 19, 2007 by Dave Pollard
abuse poster Toronto
In yesterday’s article I prescribed a two-part process for prompting people to change (their beliefs, and/or their behaviours):

  1. find a way to make it easy for them to change, and
  2. find a way to make it real and personal for them so they care about it enough to change.
Two readers protested: “You can’t make people care”. They’re mostly right — you have to wait until they’re ready for what you have to show them, or tell them. But what you can do is inform them, so that, if they would care if they knew, they will.
The best way to inform people depends on what I have called their ‘information behaviour’. Some people respond to stories, while others need to see for themselves. Showing is usually better than telling:
If you’d take the train with me, uptown, thru the misery
Of ghetto streets in morning light, it’s always night.
Take a window seat, put down your Times, you can read between the lines,
Just meet the faces that you meet beyond the window’s pane.

And it might begin to teach you how to give a damn about your fellow man.

Or put your girl to sleep sometime with rats instead of nursery rhymes,
With hunger and your other children by her side,
And wonder if you’ll share your bed with something else which must be fed,
For fear may lie beside you, or it may sleep down the hall.

Come and see how well despair is seasoned by the stifling air,
See your ghetto in the good old sizzling summertime.
Suppose the streets were all on fire, the flames like tempers leaping higher
Suppose you’d lived there all your life, do you think that you would find

That it might begin to reach you why I give a damn about my fellow man;
And it might begin to teach you how to give a damn about your fellow man
But, if what you’re showing is too stark, or perceived to be manipulative (think of the ads for charities that show starving children), it can backfire. Showing someone what they need to see in person is best, but films, photos, music, personal accounts and other stories, and even novels ( e.g. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and CM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello) can be effective ways to inform people in ways that will engage them emotionally and get them to care, and then to change — if the change is not too hard.

Yesterday I gave the example of getting people to care about the cruelty of factory farming by showing films of what goes on inside them, while at the same time inventing wholesome and delicious meat-substitutes that make it easy to become vegetarian (or creating distribution markets for local, organic, free-range farms); the two steps together could bring about the necessary change of eliminating the demand for factory farmed foods.

A woman’s shelter in Toronto is running ads that try to walk the line between grabbing attention and turning people off, featuring pictures and data on the abuse of women, children and seniors. One of them is shown above. The people I’ve talked to are split about whether they ‘work’ or not. These are PETA-style tactics — The real question is whether the hotline telephone number rings more because of them — whether it makes the ‘hard’ behaviour of reporting abuse ‘easy’ enough.
So what’s your favourite cause, and how might you be able to make it real, personal, something that people care about, and easy for people to change? If you can’t think of one, here are some to put your mind to:

  • The need for an effective, patent-centred, equitable, universal healthcare system
  • The need for a self-directed education system, with facilitators and coaches instead of bums-on-chairs lecturers
  • The need for intentional, sustainable, responsible, self-sufficient, car-free communities
  • The need to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Palestine and elsewhere, once and for all
  • The need to give struggling nations back their resources and economic solvency and work with them to create viable nations
  • The need to get people to live radically simpler lives, buying local and responsibly only what they need
  • The need to redistribute wealth within and between nations so that the poor have a chance to lead decent lives
  • The need to quickly reduce greenhouse gases by 90%
  • The need to protect wilderness and biodiversity, in large enough, connected areas to prevent ecosystem collapse
  • The need to end xenophobia, and allow all people the right to live where they want to live
  • The need to smash corporatism, end corporate crime, gerrymandering, political graft and corruption

Answering the question “How can we make these issues real for people who don’t care or can’t relate to them?” is about making it personal. It takes a lot of imagination to do this: Why should someone who’s lived all their lives in a city care about protecting rainforests, other than conceptually and abstractly?

Answering the question “How can we make it easy for people to become part of the solution?” is about innovative thinking. It takes even more imagination to do this. If carbon credits and donations to charity are the best we can do to makeit easy, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

And if we can’t answer these two questions, or believe there is no answer, we are guaranteeing failure.

Thanks to The Toronto Observer for the copy of the poster
Posted in Collapse Watch | 3 Comments

The Lessons of the 1960s

Posted on June 18, 2007 by Dave Pollard
portrait Dave Pollard 1970sA day late for Father’s Day, this article is a tribute to my father. Life has not been terribly fair to him, but he greets every challenge he has faced with equanimity and grace, and he is kind and generous to a fault. He taught me to think for myself, and then to fight for what I believe in, no matter what. I just hope I will be able to pass on a fraction of the wisdom to others that he has. He has always been, and remains today, my role model, my intellectual foil, and my inspiration. Take a bow, Dad.
There are a lot of people — seemingly mostly embittered born-again conservatives, professional cynics, and disengaged academics — second guessing the 60s these days, on this the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper and the Summer of Love. They would have us believe the era was one of illusory and untenable change, of the co-opting of humanism for economic gain, and of lazy uncommitted people jumping on a convenient ‘revolutionary’ bandwagon as an excuse to take drugs or start riots.
 
I suppose this was to be expected. The collapse of that amazing social revolution left many of us depressed, disillusioned and angry. Some of those who missed out are, I suspect, a bit envious and all too willing to embrace the schadenfreude of the revolution’s demise. There is no small amount of guilt from those who, for selfish reasons, abandoned the lofty ideals of the day to make fortunes in real estate or finance or law — the slogan of the day was “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem”, and many of us, if we were to be honest, would have to admit that we have become part of the problem. Easiest, then, to associate those days with hopeless naÔvetÈ and write it all off as a bad trip.

Not so fast.

What was the 1965-1975 social revolution really all about? It was, first and foremost, a power play — a statement from a large cohort of young people (mostly quite well-off but disconnected from the political and economic mainstream) that the values and ways of living that were popular in 1965 were no longer acceptable, a protracted protest that “we weren’t going to take it anymore”. “It” was:

  • conformity
  • soulless consumerism
  • war- and hate-mongering (notably the Vietnam War)
  • xenophobia, racism, and sexism
  • elitism and inequity, and 
  • corporatism (then described as “the military-industrial complex”).

The values that we espoused to take their place were: love, peace, justice, spirituality, social experimentation, an organic, communal lifestyle, and “power to the people”. This was not that long after the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the US, and these ideals were extremely threatening to those who believed fiercely in law and order, in respect for the “establishment”, in obedience to authority, in the endless struggle of “good” against “evil”, and in the ethic of hard work. When Timothy Leary advised an entire generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out” this was seen by many as heretical, dangerous, even criminal. Very few bothered to understand what he really meant.
 
This revolution had two factions: the political progressives, who wanted to overthrow corrupt corporatist regimes and replace them with true egalitarian economies and societies, and the social progressives, who thought that was a waste of time and felt it was more useful to get back to the Earth and learn to commune with each other and with nature. I tried, without real success, to reconcile the two, and so I never really belonged to either group.
 
This was the only time in my life I ever really argued with my father, a lifelong and very thoughtful progressive: When I started talking about the need to “tear down the walls”, and to organize before “the Man” began to arrest us and shoot us down, he told me, angrily, that I made no sense, that I was ignorant of the facts and lacked critical thinking skills, and that my generation’s uninformed and paranoid views threatened to undermine the credibility of a progressive movement that had been struggling for lifetimes — his and those before him, since the dawn of the industrial era — to help the poor and powerless live better lives. He told me to keep my mouth shut until I knew what I was talking about. (He was right, though of course I did not follow his advice.)

Some of the things we strove, clumsily, to espouse and create — the peace movement, the search for true justice, self-change and spirituality, egalitarianism, and living healthy, natural lifestyles — are enjoying something of a subtle, pragmatic resurgence, and have been since the 1990s. It is a motley crew advocating these things, a mix of 1960s diehards who have held onto our idealism, and two or three new generations who seek similar things but are doing so their own way, with their own cohort, using a somewhat different language to describe it: Communes are now Intentional Communities, “finding yourself’ is now self-actualization or self-improvement, and Power to the People is now equal opportunity, equity and heeding the Wisdom of Crowds. I think it is a bit sad, and illustrative of the degree of fragmentation and isolation in our modern society, that each generation is to some extent working towards these things independently, rather than together — a series of ironic new unintentional Generation Gaps. Some things never change.

What intrigues me is trying to understand why some of the goals of recent social revolution have been substantially achieved, while others, just as urgently needed and just as worthy, have not. Here’s my scorecard, 1965-2007:

Significant Change Achieved Mixed Success at Achieving Change No Significant Change Achieved
Opportunities for Women Rights for Homosexuals Community-Based Society
Reduction in Tobacco Consumption Reduction in Racism Reduction in Cruelty to Animals
Easing of Workplace Dress Codes Reduction in Spousal/Child Abuse Peace Movement
NoLogo Anti-Consumerism Movement
Reduction in Xenophobia
Reform of Corporatism
Environmental & Energy Responsibility
Economic Mobility and Opportunity

Two things seem to differentiate the successful movements from the failures: How easy it is to make the change, and the number of people who perceive that they have a personal stake in the change. Communities that are ethnically and racially integrated have been able to achieve greater cultural harmony than those that are segregated because it’s easier for them (they experience diversity daily), and because they are more likely to have neighbours of different cultures and ethnicity, so they have more at stake in getting along with them. The horrific cruelty to animals in factory farms is deliberately kept invisible to us, so we have no personal stake in their suffering, and we’ve been convinced by the Big Agriculture oligopoly that small family farms are not viable and that factory farmed foods are ‘economic’, so we perceive supporting local, small-scale, humane, free-range farming as too hard.

The impact of the political lobbying and massive PR spending of the corpocracy (with full mainstream media complicity), has ensured that change that threatens established economic and political interests is seen as hard to achieve and ‘radical’, and change advocates have been deliberately ‘depersonalized’ so that peace activists, anti-globalists, pro-immigrant groups, the people of Iraq, environmentalists and ‘liberals’ are seen as ‘others’, and their labels stigmatized. We are easily brainwashed (by our aversion to change and fear of the unknown) to see them as dangerous, a bit weird, so we can’t relate to them, or their issues, personally (“what is ‘the environment’ they are talking about anyway, and how can I personally get worked up about the ozone layer and greenhouse gases — it’s just too abstract”).

Those of us who have struggled unsuccessfully for the changes in the right column above have tended to beat ourselves — and each other — up for our failures, but we shouldn’t. We can’t care for something we can’t see, and life is challenging enough without being told that we must make hard changes — we will wait until we have no other choice, whether that’s too late or not.

This is perhaps why the social revolution of the 1960s fizzled out in the early 1970s. Our causes were too hard and too abstract. Once we ended the War in Vietnam (which was hard but not abstract) we were spent.

So what do we do, those of us still fighting for these causes, and those of us who’ve just discovered them? Find a way to make it easy. And find a way to make it real, personal. If you hate factory farming, work to invent plant-based meat substitutes that are inexpensive and delicious and taste like meat. And then smuggle a camera into the factory farm your meat comes from and show the film to your neighbours. Make it easy for them to change, andmake them care. 

My Dad told me that, forty years ago. He’s still teaching me.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 8 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – June 17, 2006

Posted on June 17, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Victoria Sims self-portrait
I’m intrigued at the idea of self-portraits as a means of learning to love and understand yourself better, and perhaps as a means to Let-Self-Change. UK photographer Victoria Sims, whose self-portrait is above, is a master at this.

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Grasping at Straws: Figuring out how to make the world a better place. I’ve given up on the ‘free market’, political system reform, social consciousness movements, and technological innovations — these are all part of the problem, and we’re deluding ourselves to think they will be part of the solution. The solution must be bottom-up, community-based, resilient, experimental, collectively self-managed, and infused with love for each other, and oriented to creating ‘working models’. Beyond that, I don’t know, we’re just going to have to make it up as we go along. But we have to get going.

What Happened to the Spirit of the Sixties?: A new generation is now dissecting the phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has concluded that it wasn’t as big a deal as it seemed at the time. I’m not sure sure, and I was there. To understand what that era was about, I think we need to understand what happened to the momentum that it created.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #4 and #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. Still working on practice podcasts, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium.

I’m psyched, I’m upbeat, I’m happier than I’ve been in decades. But I’m so damned impatient. I need to learn to learn from everyone I meet, every observation, every experience. I need to learn patience, generosity, grace.

What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 9 Comments