Saturday Links of the Week: May 5, 2007

Posted on May 5, 2007 by Dave Pollard
hugh laurie by jessie145
Sketch of Dr House (Hugh Laurie) by Dutch artist Jessie145

What It All Means This Week:

Monbiot’s Global Warming Solution is Already Out of Reach: George Monbiot’s Heat prescribed a radical but feasible way to prevent the more catastrophic effects of global warming, based on years of dedicated research. When I reviewed the book I praised Monbiot for his imaginative plan, but doubted it would ever be implemented. Now Monbiot has acknowledged that it won’t, in an editorial full of desperation and despair.

‘Psychopathic’ Chinese Corporatists Tell It Like It Is: Unlike the deceitful corporatists of affluent nations, Chinese corporations own up to their psychopathy: They put toxic ‘protein’ in pet food because they can get away with it, and because it’s profitable. They know it kills, and has zero nutritional value. They likewise poison cosmetics, household products and human foods, including baby foods. That’s their job: make it cheap, maximize profit for shareholders. No conscience necessary or permitted. In affluent nations, corporatists clamour for deregulation, and bribe and bully corrupt governments and regulatory agencies not to enforce existing laws, and to grant them immunity from prosecution by the public, so that they can do the same. They’re just doing their job. What will it take before the free-market lovers realize the madness of the modern corporate model?

Why We Don’t Act Until It Is Too Late: Today’s NYT has two editorials that merit some reading between the lines. The first, on the US health care system (available only to premium readers) argues that as dysfunctional as the US health care system is, it is human nature not to fix it until it is utterly broken. The second argues that we can and should take some relatively simple technological steps that will go a long way to addressing global warming, easily and painlessly (the report referred to is here). Of course, not only is it our human nature to do nothing about global warming until we see its horrific effects (just as we did nothing to prevent New Orleans from the inevitable Katrina until it was too late) — it is our human nature to do the easy painless stuff and then convince ourselves (although the report says the opposite) that that is enough. Such a strange species we are, doing things that are opposed to our own long-term self-interest (and not doing things that are essential to it).

Canada’s Version of ‘Rendition’: The Canadian government justifiably complained when Canadian citizens like Maher Arar were kidnapped by US Homeland Security and transported to foreign torture centres. But we’re learning that Canadian authorities’ hands are far from clean when it comes to ‘rendition’ activities. We’ve learned that the Canadian RCMP was complicit in the Arar affair, though the cover-up continues despite a government apology and payment to Arar (no charges of negligence, incompetence or malicious prosecution have been laid against the RCMP perps who set up Arar). And now we learn that Canada’s ‘peacekeepers’ in Afghanistan have been turning their captives over to Afghan torture squads, with the full knowledge of the Canadian Minister of Defence Gordon O’Connor and the Canadian chief of defence staff Rick Hillier. This is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, and puts Canadian troops in enormous danger (not to mention blackening the reputation of Canadian citizens).

The 100 Mile Diet: Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has often used her stories to convey an activist message, and we know how much more powerful a story can be than an editorial. Now, she’s written a non-fiction book on eating locally, but in her own style, she presents it as a personal story of her family (and others’) struggle to live on locally-raised food alone, and avoids the tendency to prescribe action for readers. As in her novels, her way of making her point is by showing what’s possible, rather than telling what’s necessary.

Environmentally Friendly Tissues: Kleerkut lists the brands of toilet paper (anyone learned the Sheryl Crow ‘one square’ trick yet?) and tissues that don’t come from ravaging old-growth forests. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Thought for the Week: There are some strange synchronicities occurring in my life these days, that I’ll speak more about as they emerge in the next few weeks. But Andrew Campbell has just sent me a passage that he ascribes to Jung that speaks of synchronicity, so it is naturally the thought for the week:

I am about to publish a little book on one symbolic motif only and you will find it hair-raising. I had to study not only Chinese and Hindu but Sanskrit literature and Medieval Latin manuscripts, which are not even known to specialists, so that one must go to the British Museum to find the references. Only when you possess that apparatus of parallelism can you begin to make diagnoses and say that this dream is organic and that one is not. Until people have acquired that knowledge I am just a sorcerer. They say it is un tour de passe-passe. They said it the Middle Ages. They said, ‘How can you see that Jupiter has
satellites?’ If you reply that you have a telescope, what is a telescope to a medieval audience?

I do not mean to boast about this. I am always perplexed when my colleagues ask: ‘How do you establish such a diagnosis or come to this conclusion?’ I reply: ‘I will explain if you will allow me to explain what you ought to know to be able understand it’. I experienced this myself when the famous Einstein was Professor at Zurich. I often saw him, and it was when he was beginning to work on his theory of relativity. He was often in my house, and I pumped him about his relativity theory. I am not gifted in mathematics and you should have seen all the trouble the poor man had to explain relativity to me. He
did not know how to do it. I went fourteen feet deep into the floor and felt quite small when I saw how he was troubled.

But one day he asked me something about psychology. Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage. It leads you in way too far, so that you cannot explain any more. You might allow me to talk to you about seemingly elementary things, but if you will accept them I think you will understand why I do reach such and such conclusions. I am sorry that we do not have more time and that I cannot tell you everything.

When I come dreams I have to give myself away and to risk your thinking me a perfect fool, because I am not able to put before you all the historical evidence which led to my conclusions. I should have to quote bit after bit from Chinese and Hindu literature, texts and all the things that you do not know. How could you? I am working with specialists in other fields of
knowledge and they help me. There was my late friend Professor Wilhelm the Sinologist; I worked with him. He had translated a Taoist text, and he asked me to comment on it, which I did from the psychological side. I am a terrible novelty to a Sinologist, but what he has to tell us is a novelty to us…

Psychology can learn no end from old civilizations particularly from India and China. A former President of the British
Anthropological Society asked me: ‘Can you understand that such a highly intelligent people as the Chinese having no science?’ I replied: ‘They have a science, but you do no understand it. It is not based on the principle of causality. The principle of causality is not the only principle; it is only relative’.

People may say: What a fool to say causality is only relative. But look at modern physics! The East bases its thinking and it evaluation of facts on another principle. We have not even a word for that principle. The East naturally has a word for it, but we do not understand it. The Eastern word is Tao.

My friend McDougal has a Chinese student, and he asked him. – ‘What exactly do you mean by ‘Tao?’ Typically Western! The Chinese boy explained what Tao is and he replied: ‘I do not understand yet’ The Chinese went out to the balcony and said. ‘What do you see?” I see a street and houses and people walking and tramcar passing’. ‘What more?’ ‘There is a hill’. ‘What more?” Trees’ ‘What more?” The wind is blowing’. The Chinese threw up his arms and said: ‘That is Tao’.

There you are. Tao can be anything. I use another word to designate it, but it is poor enough. I call it synchronicity. The Eastern mind, when it looks at an ensemble of facts, accepts the small quantities. You look, for instance, at this present gathering of people, and you say: ‘Where do they come from? Why should they come together?’ The Eastern mind is not at all interested in that. It says: ‘What does it mean that these people are together?’

That is not a problem for the Western mind. You are interested in what you come here for and what you are doing here. Not so the Eastern mind; it is interested in being together. It is like this: you are standing on the sea-shore and the waves wash up an old hat, an old box, a shoe, a dead fish, and there they lie on the shore. You say: ‘Chance, nonsense!’ The Chinese mind asks: ‘What does it mean that these things are together?’ The Chinese mind experiments with that being together and coming together at the right moment, and it has an experimental method which is not known in the West, but which plays a large role in the philosophy of the East. It is a method of forecasting possibilities. – This method was formulated in 1143 B.C.

When people ask me “How can you possibly believe that our civilization is in its last century?” I try to tell them. I point them to my Save the World Reading List to explain what research and study I have done on the subject (my intellectual knowledge). I point them to all my writings, in sequence, on the environment and the state of the world that let me think out loud to formulate what I believe (my emotional knowledge). I take them out for a walk in the forest next door and let them see and feel and smell and taste and hear what all-life-on-Earth is telling us (my sensory knowledge). And I confess that instinctively, too, I know this to be true (though that knowledge cannot be imparted because to do so would require others to trusts my instincts). It is the synchronicity of these four types of terrible knowledge, all converging on the same ghastly truth about our future, that has led meto this conclusion.

And then I shrug and say that I can’t explain it any better than that. I just know. I have been ‘led in so far I cannot explain any more’.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Debate versus Dialogue

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Dave Pollard
 Third Way 4
A couple of weeks ago I weighed in on readers’ comments about my response to Dave Snowden’s argument favouring debate over dialogue, even when it produces some friction. I owe some further explanation and elaboration.
 
My thesis on how we establish our beliefs, and how we learn, is as follows (based on nothing more than personal observation, and on an appreciation that this thesis makes some Darwinian sense):
  • We tend to accept, on any new subject, the first point of view we hear that is not inconsistent with our established worldview (our ‘frames‘).
  • After that point, we tend to reject any information or argument that is inconsistent with that point of view, and accept any information that reinforces or ‘fills in’ that point of view. There are three exceptions when we may accept information or an argument even if it is inconsistent with, or changes, our point of view:
    • if the information or argument comes in a conversation with someone whose judgement we trust,
    • if the information is rich in context and apparently objective (e.g. stories, some works of art, personal observation or video footage that let you ‘see for yourself’), or
    • if the information or argument comes wrapped in an emotionally powerful package (e.g. a tearful speech, a heartfelt plea, a rock anthem, or clever propaganda with an emotional punch).
There is a strong psychological and emotional side to all this that defies rationalization. I think this is because our process for learning (internalizing knowledge), and the resultant process of forming beliefs, are complex. I’ve tried to illustrate this in the graphic above, which shows Jung’s four forms of learning and knowledge — sensual (through the senses), emotional (through the heart), intellectual (through the mind) and instinctual (through the body/genes). Conversations of all types (including debates and dialogues) are variously effective at helping us acquire these four types of knowledge:
  • Intellectual knowledge can be relatively easily imparted through articulate speech. 
  • Emotional knowledge can be imparted through our choice of language, our tone of voice, our body language, and the visual and other stimuli we may use to provoke it (consider the images of poverty and tragedy that charities use to ‘educate’ us as to the need for us to support them).
  • Sensual knowledge can be imparted directly through exposing us to sensory experiences (showing us something personally, using film or stories etc.) 
  • Instinctual knowledge cannot be imparted; it is hard-wired into us, inherited genetically at birth.
These four accumulations of knowledge make up what we understand, and that in turn drives what we believe, and makes up our worldview, the frame through which we filter (i.e. assess the credibility of) all arguments and information.
 
There are several different types of conversation, each with a different effectiveness at imparting knowledge  and therefore influencing our beliefs. Otto Scharmer has argued that there are four types, which he rates judgementally in increasing order of value as follows (I’m paraphrasing):
  1. Polite conversation: Cautious discourse which does not attempt to impart information or influence beliefs.
  2. Debate: Espousing conflicting points of view, selectively presenting information and arguments favouring those points of view, with the objective of influencing the beliefs of others of opposing points of view, or previously uncommitted participants.
  3. Reflective dialogue: Empathic listening while suspending judgement (‘letting go’ of conceptions).
  4. Generative dialogue: Open, collaborative, creative conversation to allow emergent understanding (‘letting come’).

This is a tich new-agey to me (and I can hear Dave Snowden gnashing his teeth). As a model, though, is such a distinction fair, and is it useful?

I’m not sure it is either. Debates need not be manipulative or selective in the information they introduce. Yes, debates are adversarial. They attempt to present two different points of view to allow the debaters and their audience to contrast the credibility of each. Our legal system thinks this is a good thing. So do those who think that advocacy ads (I just saw one by a BC anti-abortion group that masqueraded as a health advisory!) should be immediately countered by one providing a contrasting point of view. And debaters are often better prepared for conversation (they’ve put more effort into research) than participants in other types of conversation.

But advocates of the alternative disputes resolution process think adversarial conversations are destructive and cause both sides to exaggerate the truth, lie, withhold information and try to coerce. Debaters can get caught up in their own rhetoric and defensiveness and stop listening to reasonable arguments for other positions. Some people like to debate purely for the pleasure of fighting and defeating an ‘enemy’ — they have no interest in learning. Brainstorming sessions and other conversations with either a creative or collaborative purpose are usually not helped much by adversarial discussions. I’ve argued before that a good conversation is like a dance, and a dance is a cooperative performance, not an adversarial one. 

The obvious conclusion is that there are some situations when a debate is the better form of conversation, and others when a dialogue is more suitable. There are certain protocols appropriate for both (the need for good research, and cues, signals and facilitation steps to disarm bullies, liars, manipulators and conversation hogs).

What’s even more important is that we each achieve an understanding of our own worldview, our blind spots and our biases, and hone our listening, judgement-suspending, creative, imaginative and critical thinking skills. And of course, practice, attentively, our conversational skills. If we were all better at these things, it probably wouldn’t much matter which type of conversation we chose for any particular situation.

My own point of view on all this? Well, in this article I’ve tried to present the arguments for both types of conversation, so while I don’t much like adversarial conversations, I can see the value in laying out the arguments for conflicting viewpoints. But if there’s a more peaceful way to get those divergent viewpoints on the table, I’m not much of a fan of debate. When I’m listening to and participating in a conversation, I’m internalizing more than just what is being said. I’m watching body language, tone of voice, word choice. I’m listening to what my instincts are telling me. Like those in aboriginal cultures, I’m filing all of this away to sleep on it, and to allow my subconscious knowledge to factor in before I any conclusions emerge. I’m thinking about what I want to do and see and read later as follow-up research. None of these things can be articulated well in a debate, but they’re all important to our individual learning.

I love to be part of dialogues. But while I’m often attentive when others debate, I’m rarely willing to enter into them. That’s probably selfish of me — if I were more active in debates, others might learn more from me. I’m too preoccupied with my own learning, my own Let-Self-Change process, to be as generous as perhaps I should at helping others learn along with me. But I’m still practicing, and maybe if and when I get as good as Dave Snowden at debate, or as good as Chris Corrigan at dialogue, I’ll become moregenerous at both.

Category: Conversation
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Joe Bageant’s Personal Liberation

Posted on May 2, 2007 by Dave Pollard
green turtle
Green Turtle at home in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, described in David Ehrenfeld’s book Beginning Again

My friend Jon Husband sent me the latest Joe Bageant article this morning. If you do nothing else today, please read it. Don’t be fooled by the “aw shucks” writing style — this guy is brilliant, funny, and very thoughtful. Here’s the last 5 paragraphs to tease you into reading the rest:

Exactly one month prior to this Earth Day 2007, I was standing in the coral sand of a tiny atoll in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean at night amid several other vanishing species. Less than a hundred feet at its longest point, its sands were scattered here and there with the bleached skeletons of ancient lobster traps and sea turtle shells, and etched by the tracks and tailings of turtles, small birds, and all sorts of strange crawlies from the tide pool. Swarms of translucent little crabs with huge black and white target-like eyes on stems coming out of their heads scurried furtively, avoiding the cormorants and other kinds of birds hugging the atoll against the same sturdy winds that once carried disease and guns into the new world and Spanish gold away from it. During the day the sun on that sand was blinding. But at night there was just that wind and absolute blackness with millions of stars and the cries of birds.

Seldom have I ever felt the presence of the earth’s spirit and the terrible beauty of creation so strongly, where the world flourishes and struggles and dies right before your eyes. Thousands of colorful worms go by in the shallow water, winking on and off and schools of tropical fish are plainly visible right at the water’s edge, their fate hanging with the frigate birds suspended overhead.

And while standing there — frankly, taking a nocturnal piss — the wind rose and grew stronger. And as I closed my eyes against the billowing coral sand, that wind blew away all the flesh from my bones. Then blew away the very bones themselves. And what I was left with the core of selfness, just the awareness of awareness — that center of humanness that exists in pure duration before any thought or word is even formed, the unarticulated stuff that exists in the womb of woman and in that great frothing amniotic soup of the mother of us all — the sea. It was just me and the overarching black canopy of the world, as if god’s own infinite bowl of stars itself had been overturned, dumping them upon my fallible and pitifully meaningless outer self — the one presently engaged in pompous scribbling about the liberation of man, yet unable to save a single one of those tiny crabs or glowing sea worms in the tide pools from their own destinies, from their return to the sea via the gullet of a vanishing petrel.

Western civilization began by smashing the faces of beasts with stones, determined to “conquer the wilderness,” hammering at both matter and mind on the anvil of the millenniums until finally, we pulled down mountains and made atoms scream in tortured orbits. Now the day of deliverance comes, casting our shadows in merciless hydrogen light, illuminating not only our latest war crimes, but also crimes of trade and finance and greed during what has come to pass for peace, when our darkest commercial cannibalism feasts upon the naked wondrous bodies of the innocents. And now destruction dances in infinite rooms, singing in dark chords for the brute who smashed open the celestial clock, hungry to eat the ticking heart of god.

For all that the study of history could have taught an amnesiac America about the fall of empires and civilizations, it is doubtful it can prepare anyone for what is fast coming upon us, because it has never happened before and by definition can only happen once. Though the Wiccan priestess, the fundamentalist preacher, the rabbi, and environmental biologist call it by different names — as if renaming an apocalypse made much difference — we need a liberated theology, epistemology, or ontology (again, that obsession with naming rather things than doing things). Something to liberate “the within” of we who find ourselves traveling together amid gathering darkness toward the long promised kingdom of sanity and justice. That kingdom which rests at the end of no mortal road, but was always within us. Just like Jesus and Buddha and the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood said it was.

I was saying to Dave Snowden that as I get older I see myself, if I’m smart, becoming more and more like Joe.
 
The gist of the article is that what he calls personal liberation (essentially what I’ve called Let-Self-Change) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for saving the world. And that personal liberation is as open to disillusioned neocons and the uneducated and uninformed (but instinctively sensitive or just pissed off with how the outrages of this world affect them personally) as it is to those of us who’ve studied and learned how the world really works. And that the most important part of Let-Self-Change is changing one’s actions, one’s life, not just one’s ideas and beliefs. What to do? Trust your instincts and just start.
 
The obvious question, which Joe wisely refuses to answer is, If Let-Self-Change is a necessary but not sufficient condition, what are the other necessary conditions that together will be sufficient to save the world? I get the sense that he agrees with me that they don’t exist — that it is impossible that enough of us will Let-Self-Change to be able to alter the momentum of our civilization over the cliff to collapse. That’s why he’s already done what I mused about last week in my post Walking Away to the Next Human Culture — he’s walked away, made the migration to a warm Central American climate where there is room (physically and politically) for him to live as close as one can anywhere anymore with all-life-on-Earth. He says it’s a safer and more comfortable viewpoint from which to observe civilization’s inevitable collapse. Every migration needs a scout, and I suspect he’s ours.
 
Joe’s already said everything else I had to say on the subject.
 
Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 4 Comments

Are We Violent By Nature?

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Bonobos2Jason Godesky at anthropik.com has taken issue with the ‘violent chimps vs. peaceful bonobos’ debate, pointing out that Jane Goodall’s misbehaving chimps, for example, were coerced (with food bribes) into proximity with her research team over years of study and hence might no longer behave ‘naturally’ but rather in a ‘civilized’ manner. He’s also pointed out research that suggests that orangutans, though genetically less similar to us than either chimps or bonobos, behave much more like humans than either.
 
What all this suggests to me is that:
  • Most creatures are peaceful whenever they can be (in natural environments of abundance and sustainable population density), but violent when they must be (in environments of scarcity and overcrowding). Hall’s studies of mouse behaviour certainly bear this out.
  • We are a product of both genetics and culture. As Beamish’s studies of whales have indicated, and the recent work on the pirah“ people has substantiated, natural environments of abundance and sustainable population density favour ‘now time’ cultures of leisure and joy, in which instinctive and sensory forms of knowledge and learning (and hence of cultural evolution) prevail, whereas environments of scarcity and overcrowding favour civilized, frenzied ‘clock time’ cultures of intensity, stress and hierarchy, where emotional and intellectual forms of knowledge prevail. If one or the other type of environment prevails over long periods of time, the culture of the species in it will evolve accordingly. And culture evolves much faster than genetics.
So the answer to the question “Are We Violent By Nature” is yes and no: Genetically (so far) we are peaceful creatures (our bodies handle stress quite badly, especially when it is protracted), while culturally (for the last 30,000 years of scarcity and overcrowding, anyway) we have evolved, as we had to in order to survive, to be violent creatures.
 
I have hypothesized that our modern obsession with violence and crime is an instinctive attempt to make our bodies (including our minds) more resilient to stress by inuring (=habituating to something undesirable by prolonged subjection)  ourselves to it, so it doesn’t hurt (as much) any more — a kind of ‘self-hazing’ behaviour. Not very successfully, however — our culture can never compensate for the weaknesses of our genes, which is perhaps why technophiles are so fond of trying to escape our bodies and their genetic codes entirely, into an artificial shell (which would nevertheless be subject to much different vulnerabilities, like rust).
 
We discharge stress and its complications (personal illness) by removing the cause of the stress, either peacefully or violently. Since stress was, until 30,000 years ago, rare and brief, our bodies have evolved to discharge it violently: fight or flight. Meditation, rationalization, chemical self-tranquilizing, ‘turning the other cheek’ and other modern vehicles of passively resolving more chronic stress are not intuitive. We are not, by nature, pacifists, because until 30,000 years ago we had no need to be, and so have not evolved genetically to be. It is not who we are. That doesn’t mean we are violent by nature. It just means we are when we have to be. And alas, in our modern, horrifically overcrowded world of scarcity, most of the time, we have to be.
 
I think about this a lot now, when I lose my temper, when I feel depressed (which is, I think, a form of internalization of that natural propensity for violence by those who would like to be pacifists, if only it were in their nature). This is who I am. I can no sooner deny or sublimate my anger than flap my wings and fly. The fact that, in our terrible world, this violence no longer serves any useful purpose, is of no consequence. The fact that it makes us physically and mentally ill is tragic, but unavoidable. 
 
I take, reluctantly, some comfort in knowing that our civilization is in its last century, that the experiment with letting the apes run the laboratory for awhile will soon come to an abrupt (and unfortunately violent) conclusion. Because the alternative is even more horrifying: That we will find some way to escape our bodies in some sustainable manner (I can’t and don’t want to imagine how) so that the physical stress of our civilized world no longer cripples us; and find some way to escape our emotions so that an artificial, desolated world no longer causes us distress. If we could do that, we would no longer be human, we would be machines, unfeeling, immortal (at least until the shells into which we’d evolved broke down).
 
I can’t conceive of such a disconnected life. I’m not sure it even meets the definition of life. I am sure I wouldn’t want to experience it, even for a moment. I’ll take this damaged and irrationally violent life, as a flawed part of the staggeringly wondrous all-life-on-Earth. I’ll do what I must.

Category: Being Human

Update: Since a few people have been asking about Puc-Puc: She’s back today after a month’s absence (I thought she’d given up on me and left to find a mate), still running alongside me in my backyard track, and jumping up on my shoulder when I turn my back. I’m wondering: Does she think I’m running around trying to get up speed to fly, and therefore trying to show me, big clumsy slow learner withscrawny wings that I am, how to do it?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 13 Comments

An Open Source Legislative Process

Posted on April 30, 2007 by Dave Pollard

we the peopleI‘ve been a member of the Green Party for many years, but I’ve frequently duelled with them over their preoccupation with getting candidates elected rather than getting good legislation passed. In Canada, although ‘private members’ bills’ have an uphill battle to get time on the legislative agenda, they are often introduced and occasionally even passed into law.
 
I can appreciate that, a hundred years ago, it may have been necessary for elected politicians to hammer out legislation in smoke-filled back rooms. Communications and travel were slow and law-making is an iterative process, requiring not only consensus-building but also multiple redrafts to incorporate matters that the original draft forgot to consider.
 
But today there is no reason why the legislative (law-making) process cannot be completely transparent and draw on the collective wisdom of many citizens. In order for that to happen, I would propose a radical change to the way in which that legislative process occurs:
  1. Each jurisdiction would have a wiki where any citizen or group of citizens can post, contribute to and comment on proposed new legislation. Such draft legislation would begin, as is the tradition, with the ‘whereas’ clauses that lay out the policy and rationale for the proposed legislation. The drafts would include both the legislation and the regulatory enforcement mechanisms that would assure that, if it were passed into law, it would be properly enforced. The drafts would have to meet standards of simplicity (as short as possible), clarity (understandable language, not legalese) and consistency (each bill for one purpose, with no pork or other irrelevant riders attached).
  2. Political parties and independent candidates would be required to commit in writing, prior to any election, precisely which draft legislation they would propose to pass into law if they were elected. Once in office, they would be bound to vote on all draft legislation in accordance with these commitments: There would be no need for votes. The purpose of elected officials would be simply to carry out their mandate, to ensure the legislation that they committed to approving is passed and that the resources and budget necessary to ensure enforcement of such legislation are put in place.
  3. Individual elected officials would be able to break ranks with their party on a specific piece of legislation if and only if they had committed in writing prior to the election to do so.
  4. If an emergency situation required the passage of additional legislation that had not been committed to in advance of the last election, a new election would have to be held within 60 days of its passage to ratify and/or amend the legislation. During this time, the wiki would be used to discuss and amend the legislation. The first order of business after this emergency election would be to ratify or amend the emergency legislation in accordance with the commitments of those elected, failing which the emergency legislation would expire.
  5. Failure to provide adequate resources for enforcement of the law (as determined by government auditors) would constitute a breach of duty and be an indictable offence.
Such a process would have a number of benefits:
  • It would drastically reduce the power and authority of elected officials, and therefore the value of lobbying and other anti-democratic activities. Pork-barrelling would be impossible, as would subsidies to big corporate oligopolies.
  • It would drastically reduce the cost of legislature, the salaries and sizes of staff needed to draw up legislation and to respond to lobbyists. Through citizen participation this would become a zero-cost, more inclusive process. The cost savings could be used to ensure proper enforcement of laws, which are now routinely and conveniently ignored by governments that don’t like them.
  • It would engage citizens, think tanks, unelectable minority parties, scientists and others in the legislative process, and lead to a great deal more reasoned, evidence-based legislation, instead of legislation designed to respond to knee-jerk reactions of citizens, to get re-elected, and to pay off political campaign contributors.
  • It would educate citizens in the political process and reduce the propensity of citizens to abrogate their responsibility to be informed and involved in the process.
  • It would direct the majority of political energies towards the drafting of legislation instead of towards the influencing and election of candidates to do so without proper oversight.
  • It would democratize the legislative process without the use of oversimplified, emotionally-charged and ill-conceived referendums.
  • It might well eliminate the need for presidents, cabinets and prime ministers, and reduce the need for the judiciary to have to interpret (and the propensity of ideologically-driven judges to distort and misinterpret) ambiguous, poorly-formed, politically-motivated laws.
This proposal is directly analogous to the Wisdom of Crowds process I’ve recommended to devolve authority and decision-making in organizations from overpaid, isolated executives to a much broader, more informed (collectively) and more representative groups of employees and customers.
 
It’s not a panacea. It would reduce but not eliminate the need for comprehensive, real campaign finance reform towards a fully publicly-funded system. It would not reduce the need for the elimination of partisan, gerrymandering redistricting groups in favour of independent electoral boundary commissions. It would reduce but not eliminate the need for single transferable voting or other proportional representation systems of election.
 
I know, it’s a radical change and one that will be loathed and opposed by politicians and big political parties because it strips them of power. But it would not be at all difficult to do, if there was the political will to do it. We might even get groups like the NRDC and the Green Party to start the ball rolling by setting up sites to collectively draft scientifically-supportable, concrete, workable environmental laws and regulations, and get political candidates of all parties to announce where they stand on adopting them before the next elections. If that worked, such that instead of debating vague and emotionally-charged policy planks we were debating real legislation, we just might find that this becomes the way a true 21st century democracy operates.

Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – April 29, 2007

Posted on April 29, 2007 by Dave Pollard
green logoWhat I’m planning on writing about soon:

  • Are We Violent By Nature?: Are we more like chimps or bonobos? [My research on this is taking longer than expected; I’d also like to thank the readers who have sent me articles and links on this subject]
  • We Are Not Who We Think: Our ability to Get Things Done (and not procrastinate), to control our temper, to become ‘better’, more responsible individuals — these things are all at the mercy of our bodies and what they choose to do (and to a lesser extent what our culture brainwashes us to do). We actually have little choice in the matter, and should be a little easier on ourselves, and a little more aware of what our bodies are telling us to do, and to be, and why. Just over a year ago, in my review of the book Figments of Reality, I wrote:
Living species, including humans, are emergent properties of (what Daniel Dennett has labeled) the ‘pandemonium’ of the body’s semi-autonomous processes — We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures’ actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not ‘ours’.
  • Good Working Models of Social Networking: The other day I prescribed a methodology for introducing Web 2.0 social networking applications into your organization. But what’s missing are good working models, ‘templates’ that we can use to sell the concept and to illustrate to the unfamiliar what is possible with these tools and methods. So, for example, is there a way to ‘pre-structure’ a wiki for a particular purpose (say, to enable virtual collaboration on an intractable organizational problem) so that it will be more likely to succeed in that purpose? Is there an ideal layout or template for a group blog for a particular purpose (say, to integrate and leverage the work of a disparate community of practice) so that it will be more likely to succeed in that purpose?
  • Telling the Politicians What’s Possible: Much of the rancorous debate on environmental issues is directed at appealing to ideological audiences — getting elected (or re-elected) rather than getting anything done. What we need are groups outside of the political process to produce policies and laws that offer a practical alternative to what we have (and don’t have) today. Example: Big Oil and US conservatives recently provided the ultra-conservative Canadian minority government of Stephen ‘mini-Bush’ Harper with a blueprint for appearing concerned about the environment while actually doing nothing. Not surprisingly, the opposition parties, and Canadian environmentalists (David Suzuki) and US environmentalists (Al Gore) have all denounced it. But now the debate is all about what is wrong with this (non-)policy, when it should be about what policy, programs, and immediate actions to take instead. What we need is for non-politicians like Suzuki and Gore to actually draft a national policy with specific, year-by-year targets, laws and penalties that would enable Canada (and then, perhaps, the US) to surpass our Kyoto targets, and meet the more stringent, urgently needed targets set out in George Monbiot’s Heat. In other words we need to reframe the debate about what’s possible, rather than what the corrupt, inept, out-of-touch politicians indebted to corporatist funders table as party policy. Then we can get people talking openly about real actions instead of obfuscations, and challenge the political parties to adopt these scientifically-based (not politically-based) policies as is, without compromise or back-room deals. And then instead of Tweedledum or Tweedledee, on election day we can choose between parties that have the courage to commit to specific actions, and parties that don’t. And if no party shows that courage, we can start creating new parties that will.
  • Honest Dialogue: In response to the excellent discussion in last Saturday’s comments thread, I said (and want to elaborate on) this:
I think it is necessary to strike a balance between closing yourself off to contrary points of view too early (which I think we are by nature predisposed to do) and getting so ‘rapt up’ in the debate that it becomes an end in itself and an excuse for permanently deferring action. I also think many debaters, and listeners to debates, are dishonest — the debaters too often are really seeking to reassure themselves, and the listeners too often selective in their listening to only hear what agrees with their preconceptions. And to me a dishonest debate is a waste of time and worse than no debate at all. And finally, debate can only put what we think we know and believe intellectually up to scrutiny — much of what we know and believe is emotional or sensory or intuitive, and our languages are just inadequate to debate these, and so debates tend to belittle non-intellectual knowledge, which biases us against this important knowledge and renders much debate merely academic. [PS: there’s a fascinating story in today’s NYT about the “curious” debate – “more like a dialogue” between French leftist candidate for President SÈgolËne Royal and the third-place finisher in the first round FranÁoisBayrou]

Lots to think about here. I’d welcome your thoughts on these, or anything else that’s on your mind.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 2 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — April 28, 2007

Posted on April 28, 2007 by Dave Pollard

lions gate studios laura tomona
Painting, Lions Gate Studios, by my neighbour Laura Tomona

What it all means this week:

The Coming Geriatric Crisis: The New Yorker points out yet another looming crisis that we’re not prepared for: the explosion of geriatric patients that no one is trained to, or wants to, care for. Some frightening data:

We cling to the notion of retirement at sixty-fiveóa reasonable notion when those over sixty-five were a tiny percentage of the population, but completely untenable as they approach twenty per cent. People are putting aside less in savings for old age now than they have in any decade since the Great Depression. More than half of the very old now live without a spouse, and we have fewer children than ever beforeóyet we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone.

Equally worrying, and far less recognized, medicine has been slow to confront the very changes that it has been responsible foróor to apply the knowledge we already have about how to make old age better. Despite a rapidly growing elderly population, the number of certified geriatricians fell by a third between 1998 and 2004. Applications to training programs in adult primary-care medicine are plummeting, while fields like plastic surgery and radiology receive applications in record numbers. Partly, this has to do with moneyóincomes in geriatrics and adult primary care are among the lowest in medicine. And partly, whether we admit it or not, most doctors donít like taking care of the elderly [they’re difficult patients to care for and their illnesses are unglamourous and often incurable].


Entrepreneurs Tell Their Stories: NPR interviews some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs to learn their secrets. An interesting mix of self-congratulation, hackneyed, discouraging conventional wisdom and brilliant insight. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link.

Research That Matters: Aaron Swartz is collecting examples of research that, if it were acted upon, could change the way we think about and work to solve intractable problems. The response to date is remarkable and thought-provoking. Kind of like a collaborative freakonomics. Bookmark this page! Thanks to Jeff Donner for the link.

Visualization Tools: An interesting visualization portrays 100 different visualization tools you can use to add meaning and value to information. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

More Ideas for Greening the World: Anti-poverty crusader Jonny Platt offers 155 ways you can fight climate change.

How Bush is Closing Down US Society: Naomi Wolf explains how authoritarians shut down societies to curtain opposition and dissent, and how the Bush regime is following precisely in their footsteps.

victor papanek design function complex
The Paradox of Design & Innovation: The image above is from Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World. Papanek and Bucky Fuller were the environmental design gurus of the 1980s, before guys like Bill McDonough took it to the next level. Papanek, says Africa-blogger John Powers, argued for the need for design to be responsive and responsible, as well as imaginative and creative. This responsibility is reflected in the ‘telesis’ component of functional design. Telesis is defined as “progress that is intelligently planned and directed to the attainment of desired ends by the application of intelligent human effort”. Papanek relates telesis to design: “[C]ontent of a design must reflect the times and conditions that have given rise to it, and must fit in with the general human socioeconomic order in which it is to operate.” I think this is the design counterpart to the human adaptability I call Let-Self-Change. What makes it so difficult for us to manage the challenge of problem-solving is this paradox:

  • We can’t begin to design solutions until we have a rich understanding of the local context of the problem; but
  • If we don’t get outside of that local context, our imagination is constrained by The Only Life We Know

Powers cites Ethan Zuckerman as saying this is why Africa is such a great place to focus problem-solving attention:

Something thatís very important in technology research is problem selection. If you choose a boring problem to solve, you get boring technologies. If you choose a fascinating problem and are able to solve it, you can start a revolution. Right now, there are much more interesting problems in African technology than there are in the developed world, in my opinion. I think that smart computer science students around the world should be looking at the developing world for challenges to address ñ power usage, wireless networking, non-verbal interfaces, computer-based systems for microentrepreneurship. Itís a huge advantage for African innovators to be surrounded by interesting, worthwhile problems.

So, says Powers, if we think about energy problems from a North American perspective, our thinking is constrained by our awareness of the coming End of Oil and our addiction to it. But in much of Africa the End of Oil is not a significant constraint, and other problems take centre stage. What we need to do is develop and reconcile what Powers calls our Local Soul (that which knows and appreciates local context) and our Global Soul (that which can draw upon radically different contexts and ideas that have arisen in them). One way to do that, he says, is through stories, like those that the Totnes Transition Culture intentional community is compiling about a post-oil future. As these stories enrich our understanding of the context of the future, it can help us to better design ways to transition to that future.

Truly Radical Islam: Irshad Manji fearlessly challenges the misogyny, fear-mongering, self-oppression and scapegoating of much contemporary Islamic thought and dares Muslims to rediscover and embrace Islam’s proud and peaceful roots, reports PBS. Thanks to fellow Torontonian Mahjong Cory for the link.

Lawyers Doing Good Work: I trash lawyers a lot on these pages, but the lawyers at EarthJustice are doing some good work. They have a good library for environmental activists, and need our help boycotting farmed salmon.

…And Judges Doing Despicable Work: The US supreme court, in a strictly ideological and partisan decision, has upheld the Bush abortion ban, and stripped doctors of the ability to make medical decisions in the best interests of their patients. So much for the last shreds of its credibility.

Layoffs Are Bad for the Economy: James Surowiecki eloquently challenges the conventional wisdom that poor profits (and falling stock prices) can be remedied by layoffs.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Saturday Links for the Week — April 28, 2007

Walking Away to the Next Human Culture

Posted on April 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard
olympic 2
Last month I reported on the first part of Curtis White’s two-part article in Orion, lambasting self-righteous and passive environmentalists, called The Idols of Environmentalism. At that time I included these extracts:

We can, however, look at ourselves and see all of the ways that we conspire against what we imagine to be our own most urgent interests. Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called ‘the visible God’: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys…Needless to say, many people with environmental sympathies will easily agree with what I’ve just said and imagine that in fact they do what they can to resist work and consumption, to resist the world as arranged for the convenience of money. But here again I suspect we are kidding ourselves. Rather than taking the risk of challenging the roles money and work play in all of our lives by actually taking the responsibility for reordering our lives, the most prominent strategy of environmentalists seems to be to give back to nature through the bequests, the annuities, the Working Assets credit cards and long distance telephone schemes, and the socially responsible mutual funds advertised in Sierra and proliferating across the environmental movement. Such giving may make us feel better, but it will never be enough… We’re willing to be generous in order to ‘save the world’ but not before we’ve insured our own survival in the reigning system…

Even when we are trying to aid the environment, we are not willing as individuals to leave the system that we know in our heart of hearts is the cause of our problems. We are even further from knowing how to take the collective risk of leaving this system entirely and ordering our societies differently. We are not ready. Not yet, at least.

Now Orion has posted the second part of the article, entitled The Ecology of Work. White is so eloquent that, rather than try to paraphrase, I wanted to tease you to read the full article (and to subscribe to Orion) with these additional extracts (emphases mine):

I don’t believe that capitalism can become green, simply because the imperatives of environmentalism are not part of its way of reasoningÖ Ever the optimistic gambler with other people’s money, the capitalist is willing to wager that, while there may be costs to pay, he won’t have to pay them. Animals, plants, [future generations], impoverished people near and far may have to pay, but he bets that he won’t. If called upon to defend his actions, he will of course argue that he has a constitutionally protected right to property and the pursuit of his own happiness. This is his “freedom.” At that point, we have the unfortunate habit of shutting up when we ought to reply, “Yes, but yours is a freedom without conscience.”[And so the world of nature is externalized in our minds to become merely] a place to go for a weekend hike before returning to the unrelenting ugliness, hostility, sterility, and spiritual bankruptcy that is the suburb, the strip mall, the office building, and the freeway (our “national automobile slum,” as James Howard Kunstler puts it).

The violence that we know as environmental destruction is possible only because of a complex economic, administrative, and social machinery through which people are separated from responsibility for their misdeeds. We say, “I was only doing my job”Ö It is only possible to conclude from our behavior for the last two hundred years that ours is not a human society; that it is a society outside of the human in some terrible sense…The kind of work provided by capitalism [is] alienating. That is, it [has] made us something other than what we are. It [has] dehumanized usÖ We all have our place, our “job,” and it is an ever less human place.

We have two options: First, we can simply wait for the catastrophic failure of global capitalism as a functioning economic systemÖ[Or] we can start providing for a different world of work now, before the catastrophe. We need to insist on work that is not destructive…[This requires] leaving a culture based on the idea of success as the accumulation of wealth-as-money. In its place we need a culture that understands success as lifeÖ Most of us want to believe that our quarrel is just with [a few] rogue corporationsÖand not with capitalism as such. But thinking this is simply a form of lying. We deny what we can plainly see because to acknowledge it would require the fundamental reshaping of our entire way of living, and that is (not unreasonably) frightening for most people.

The risk I propose is simply a return to our nobility. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on a recognition of the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from frogs to forests, simply because they are. [This] would entail a refusal to play through to the bloody end the social and economic roles into which we happen to have been born. What lies beyond the environmental movement is not only the overcoming of capitalism but self-overcomingÖThe deeper problem is our own integration into an order of work that makes us inhuman and thus tolerant of what is nothing less than demonic, the destruction of our own world.

White is telling us we must do what Daniel Quinn has been telling us to do for a decade: walk away from civilization culture. He acknowledges how frightening the prospect of doing this is. He acknowledges that instinctively we know that this is what we must do. And he acknowledges that what I have called Let-Self-Change is the first, hardest step. It requires that we let go of the only life we know, to pursue, as a matter of intuition and faith, a better way of living, one that, for now, we know nothing about, that we are not equipped for, and which could, in the short run, cause us and our loved ones considerable hardship. We will be like the pioneers first landing on a new continent, except, unlike them, we in our overcrowded world will have to do that pioneering right in the midst of the culture we are walking away from, and liberate the land and ourselves from that culture. And we will have to do it with almost none of the self-sufficiency skills that previous pioneers had.

We will be looking (we are already looking) for leaders who can show us the way. We will look in vain until it is too late, until our culture collapses and we have no choice but to try to create a new one in its ruins, when we will have no resources or time left to do so and when all our energy will be expended just trying to stay alive. We’ll be carried along on the long right tail of all civilizations in their slow, final slide into oblivion.

Though there are no leaders to follow, there is a model on which we could, together with other brave new pioneers, create a new culture, now. It is the model by which every non-human creature on the planet lives, if we only cared enough and paid close enough attention to see it. It is a model where land and the rest of nature and all-life-on-Earth are treated with respect. It is a model of abundance, not scarcity, of living in balance, not in conflict. It is a model of joy, not suffering. It is a model of partnership, not hierarchy. It is a model of caring for, not competing with, each other. It is a model of responsibility, not exploitation. It is a model of steady-state slow evolution, not rapid growth. It is a model of community, not empire. It is a model of well-being and self-sufficiency. It is a model of constant learning and adaptation. It is a model of love and of peace. It is a model where we are always home, and never homeless. It is a model that exists and thrives all around us, in the midst of our culture, yet is not a part of it, is free from it, untouched by it, indifferent to it.

If we learn, quickly and soon, to listen, to imagine, to pay attention, at least some of us might, in community, find the courage (and courage is really just not having any other conceivable choice) to walk away, to live lightly and freely and joyfully, to join our fellow creatures in another, thriving, healthy culture in the midst of our terrible, struggling one. The answer is right in front of us, and our patient, furred and feathered fellow citizens of Earth are calling us, waiting to welcome us home.

I will be writing another article on how we might do this, soon. In the meantime, help me imagine how such a Next Culture, much more radical (in the true sense of the word) than anything White or Quinn has envisioned, might emerge right in the midst of dying civilization culture. What if we just opted out of civilization’s economic and political systems, like the Anasazi and some others who saw their civilizations collapsing did. Renounced citizenship, liquidated all we owned and put it in a shared trust, for emergency use only, by a trustee we could really trust. Refused to recognize ‘ownership’ of land. Commenced a long migration to a land where we could gather natural, healthy food naturally, where we would need no permanent shelter, no heat, no clothing, nothing to buy or own, no place to have to stay. Where we could spread out so that our presence would have a light touch and not oppress the land we occupied. A new triberelearning how to live in balance with the rest of life on Earth.

Can you imagine that?

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 16 Comments

A Methodology for Web 2.0 Collaboration Experiments (in Reluctant Organizations)

Posted on April 25, 2007 by Dave Pollard
web 2.0 collaboration methodology
I‘ve been having a lot of conversations lately about how to help organizations become more effective at enabling collaboration. The people I know who have tried to do this keep running into three walls:

  • What’s perceived as urgent in most organizations (i.e. what’s keeping management awake at night) isn’t collaboration or innovation or technology or worker effectiveness, it’s cost reduction and risk management. Nothing else gets any executive bandwidth.
  • You can’t change an organization’s culture (short of firing everyone and starting over with new managers and staff). The best you can hope to do is help people adapt to the existing culture in useful, valuable ways.
  • Organizations are, mostly, complex adaptive systems, so one-step needs identification is futile. You have to let a full understanding of the organization’s problems and needs, and the solutions that address those needs, co-evolve. By the time you have an intelligent answer, your understanding of the problem is usually vastly different from what it was at the outset.

So any methodology that hopes to help improve collaboration in an organization needs to be very adaptable, modest in resource demands, sponsored, and attuned to the complexity of collaboration challenges. I think I’ve come up with a methodology that meets these requirements, and it’s illustrated above. Here’s how it could work:

  1. The Champions Self-Organize: I know you’re used to me starting innovation process charts with ‘needs’, but in this case I think it makes sense to start with people. What I call ‘champions’ consist of three groups: 
    1. the organization’s thought leaders ñ people who, regardless of seniority or title, are considered innovative and ‘ahead of the curve’,
    2. current users of web 2.0 applications ñ kids who use blogs and wikis and RSS feeds and mindmaps and forums and people-finders and social bookmarkers and all the other social networking tools, and can get the others up to speed on how and when to use them effectively, and
    3. what I call ‘respected sponsors’ ñ people whose use of new collaboration methods and tools will raise eyebrows and get others on-board for fear of falling behind, and who will invest the time to use these methods and tools continuously and regularly, not just during a one-shot launch. 
I think these groups need to self-organize, rather than waiting for senior management to organize them or approve their work. That means the champions must have the passion to invest some personal time into this, and the courage, perhaps, to charge ahead (intelligently) and ask forgiveness instead of permission. The ‘respected sponsors’ need to be coached, not only to deliver the elevator pitch to others for new collaboration methods and tools, but also to actually use these methods and tools effectively.
  1. The Champions Meet Face-to-Face: I think it’s asking too much for all the heavy lifting of new collaboration projects to be done virtually, at least at first. No question that the champions need to use the tools for their own activities, but there is much work to be done up-front to understand the opportunities and challenges, and some sleeves-rolled-up face-to-face is needed to do this. These meetings should start with a learning event to get those unfamiliar with the tools, the applications, and the current state of the business, up to speed. Brainstorming just to get a lot of ideas and possibilities on the table should follow.
Most important is understanding the current state: Things are the way they are (i.e. not very collaborative) for a reason, and the team needs to know that reason.

  • They need to appreciate the tensions between hierarchy and networked processes, between openness and security, between intermediated and unintermediated etc., because these dynamics won’t be changed easily. 
  • They need to understand the aversion to change, to any risk, and to anything new to add to the already heavy work burden, that is common and understandable in many businesses. 
  • They need to know what’s keeping the executives awake at night (probably reducing costs and risks), so they can appreciate and address lack of management enthusiasm for any investment in collaboration or innovation. 
  • They need to know which communities and groups inside (and reaching outside) the organization are co-located (in which case face-to-face collaboration probably makes more sense) and which are not (requiring more virtual collaboration methods and tools). 
  • To get front-line worker participation, they need to understand the impediments to work effectiveness that are causing pain to the people in the field and to their customers. 
  • They need to know where the low-hanging fruit for new collaboration methods and tools may be (e.g. which silos could be more effectively sharing product information, processes and process information, work tasks, and market/customer data; who’s already ‘publishing’ newsletters in the organization; who’s struggling to coordinate communities of practice; and which subject matter experts are information bottlenecks, too busy to help others with what they know). 
  • And they need to know what the capacity and cultural fit for additional collaboration is, and work within that capacity and culture rather than trying to overtax and change it.
Once they understand the current state, they can start to identify feasible, small-scale experiments that have the greatest chance of success, and select appropriate tools to implement them. They should then self-form into one or more peer-to-peer steering groups to monitor and oversee the implementation of the experiments. To do this they will need patience ñ the initial pre-conceptions about the opportunities for greater collaboration are likely to be largely wrong, and it will take time for real, new sustainable collaboration successes to emerge, and with them, a better understanding of the real collaboration problems and needs of the organization.
  1. Design & Create Experiments: Then, with this knowledge and some inexpensive ‘infrastructure’ in place, the organization can start launching, and encouraging, the most promising collaboration experiments. These should meet five ‘design rules’ (and while lots of experiments should be encouraged, those that defy these rules should be questioned at the outset, since they are more than likely to fail):
    • Participation should be easy (or else new collaborators will get discouraged quickly), intuitive (or else collaborators will go back to using e-mail and other ineffective methods), open (to participation of any employee or customer who wants to contribute), and voluntary (the quickest way to kill enthusiasm for a new idea is to make it mandatory).
    • The collaboration process should extend and build on existing relationships and conversations. Social networking and web 2.0 are all about strengthening relationships and capturing and sharing the learnings from conversations. This relationship-building and these conversations are occurring anyway, so rather than forcing them to occur a different way, collaboration experiments should encompass and help capture, facilitate and improve this knowledge and learning without interfering with how it occurs now.
    • The new collaboration processes and tools should be integrated with existing processes and tools like e-mail, PDAs, CRM, IM, HR and other systems and collaboration tools and ‘spaces’ that are currently being used (with varying degrees of effectiveness) to collaborate. Rather than trying to prohibit e-mail and IM for collaboration, for example, link from them to wikis, mindmaps, forums and other tools that more effectively capture and facilitate collaboration, to wean e-mail addicts painlessly away.
    • The experiments should be self-managed. Let the people who stand to benefit from new collaboration methods and tools figure out how to use them, and for what. They will need to learn and practice, and you can’t do that for them.
    • You must build in personal ‘what’s in it for me’ attractors. People want to do their jobs more effectively, but not at the expense of working harder or longer. Give them their own personal space (e.g. through a blog or personal web page that hosts collaborations or conversations) that offers ‘pride of ownership’. Don’t forget that ‘commons’, even collaborative virtual ones, will usually suffer from the tragedy of the commons.
  1. Run the Experiments: Give them time, space and nurturing, but don’t get in the way. Be patient. Focus on the learning. Give people the opportunity to practice safely using the new method or tool, until they become confident and proficient using it. A great way to do this is to show a wiki or mindmap evolving in real time on-screen at the front of the room during in-person meetings and by ‘sharing your screen’ electronically during virtual conferences. Let people see how these tools capture the essential learning and consensus from a meeting. Let them practice using them, until using these tools in all collaborations, face-to-face and virtual, becomes ‘the way we do things’. And be sure to grant permission to fail — many collaborations will turn out to be unsuccessful, but they’re still valuable learning opportunities.
  1. Monitor and Celebrate Success: Identify the attempted collaboration experiments that just aren’t working, for whatever reason, and kill them. Don’t force people to use a collaborative method or tool that just frustrates them. Instead, watch for successes, and craft stories that explain how and why they worked, in the context of your own organization — these will be the models that will spawn other successes. Leverage learning and successes, and steer people to the methods, applications and tools that have worked in similar situations, using the story as your ‘selling tool’. It works!
Some of my collaboration colleagues believe the champions should work to break down barriers that are preventing successful uses of collaboration methods and tools. I’m ambivalent about this: I prefer to trust the judgement of the self-managed collaboration team to break down barriers as they see fit. I’m not sure we need a ‘Chief Collaboration Officer’ out there doing that job.

I should note that this methodology is just intended for web 2.0-enabled collaboration projects. There are other types of collaboration (peer production and idea markets most notably) that organizations may benefit from as well, that would perhaps require a different approach.
I’m going to try this methodology out in the organization I’m currently doing contract work for. The opportunity there is great, but the cultural barriers are high and a sense of urgency is lacking. Even with these challenges, I think it could work. I’ll keep you posted.

I’d like to thank New Paradigm for facilitating a workshop today, and also the bright participants in the workshop from a couple of dozen organizations, who helpedcrystallize my thoughts on this. I’d also like to thank my online collaboration colleagues and the members of my Toronto KM breakfast club, for their contributions to these ideas.

Category: Collaboration
Posted in Working Smarter | 4 Comments

present, tense

Posted on April 24, 2007 by Dave Pollard
chickadee 2
the end of winter this year is long and cold, but veek does not mind. his feathers, fluffed up for the night as he sleeps with his flockmates in their dense evergreen roost, keep him perfectly warm.

as he awakens in the early dawn he becomes aware of zif, his play-mate, nestled into his side, still asleep. he chirps in her ear:

wake. morning.

she stirs slowly, enjoying the comfort and warmth and companionship of their bodies together.

soon the dawn chorus begins: the males of the flock each take turns serenading the females, one-to-one, calling them by name, welcoming them back to waking life, and the females return the song. this is what chickadees do, an expression of their love for each other. veek and zif’s flock is ten chickadees strong, the alpha breeding pair and eight juveniles, unrelated to any others, who have joined the flock from neighbouring flocks to vary and enrich the potential gene pool, and perhaps vie for the rights, this year, to be the breeding pair for this twelve acres (five hectares), this flock’s home.

in the morning sun the birds shake off their night-time torpor as their body temperature rises as much as ten degrees celsius (eighteen degrees fahrenheit) to equip them for the day’s activities. veek preens zif’s feathers, gently. she sings to him:

hungry. thirsty. let’s play. come.

veek retrieves a cache of seeds from a crevice in a branch in the tree’s highest branches, one of his thousands of caches, each committed infallibly to memory. in mock-play of the breeding male feeding the breeding female, he offers part of his find to zif. she takes it, and flies off in search of water, which she finds in a pool of heavy morning dew.

she soars up, 150 metres (500 feet) into the sky, and calls:

catch me.

veek replies with a scolding cluck: there are hawks and eagles about, and such play is dangerous. she shrugs him off, just flying, joyfully, silently.

reluctantly veek joins her, and soon two other juveniles of the flock soar up as well, unable to resist this cosmic dance, this expression of boundless freedom and happiness.

let’s migrate, she calls. go a mile high and thirty miles (50 km) an hour.

chickadees rarely migrate, but when conditions are harsh or numbers too high to be comfortably accommodated, small spontaneous migrations to a different part of their natural habitat will occur.

zif settles back on the branch beside veek. he climbs onto her tail feathers. she chastises him:

get off, silly. we’re not the breeding pair.

we could be, veek replies. sex ten times a day, lovely cloacal kisses?

no way, she sings back. not ready. try being the female! ovaries swollen to 1500 times normal size, so you’re so immobile you have to be fed by the male. then six or eight eggs, one a day, each nearly the size of your head. then that raspy, desperate voice where your clear voice once was. then 14 days on the nest ’til they hatch. then 17 days before the chicks can leave the nest, and another 14 before they can feed themselves. it’s exhausting, your feathers all start to fall out.

besides, she continues, play-mating is just as much fun. the pleasure of flirting without the responsibility of the consequences of breeding.

as the breeding pair scouts nesting sites, the juveniles spend the day snacking, exploring, chatting and playing.

farik, the slow, wise chickadee, is going away, alone, observes veek. he always tells us useful things, but he is too slow now to escape the owls and eagles.

spiders, yum, signals zif.

humans are foolish, sings veek. look. this one runs around in circles for no reason. see, the grouse bird jumps on his shoulder as he runs to tell him so. ‘slow down’, she tells him. ‘be with me, here, now’. but he keeps running. the silent creature the human wears on his wrist looks like a parasite, but seems to tell him what he must do. he looks at it, and then he runs faster. maybe this parasite is like our slow, wise chickadees. but its advice makes no sense. see, he looks at the parasite again, and now he stops running and, exhausted, walks back into his big cage and locks himself inside. nothing these humans do makes sense! and they’re so ugly. i am happy that there are no ugly birds.

the humans are parasites themselves, zif replies. look at that one, climbing into the big noisy creature they call ‘car’ that only runs in straight lines. these poor car-creatures do nothing by themselves. they are kept in cages like the humans’ cages only smaller. they only move when the humans tell them to. and the humans feed them, a strange food that smells like the bones of dinosaurs and makes their poop smell foul. we keep telling and showing these humans how to live, to be part of all life on Earth, to set free their ‘car’ slaves and free themselves from the parasites they wear on their wrists, but they don’t hear us. they’re not listening.

i’m glad they leave us all the food outside their cages, veek trills, but if they were all to suddenly disappear that would be good too.

they seem so unhappy, concludes zif. let’s leave them be. come, hear the spring peepers in the pond. see the colours of the forest and the sky...

oh look!, cries veek. that little bird flies into the invisible wall of the human’s cage. ouch! when i fly into something, i hurt. i want to stop his hurting!

it is sad, replies zif, but there is nothing we can do for him. if he’s strong, he will fly again. if not, he will be like the slow, wise chickadees and go away, returnto the Earth. we must not grieve. what is done is done.

come. enough sorrow, she sings, urgently. fly with me. be one with me, with all life, here, now, in joy. we must be strong. we must show the little ones the way.

and the foolish ones the way home.

Category: Fable
Posted in Creative Works | 3 Comments