The Fourth Turning, The Thirteen Cascading Crises and Generation Millennium

Posted on April 2, 2007 by Dave Pollard
trends time fourth turning
Graphic above is from a Rutgers University study exploring whether 9/11 was indeed the catalyst for the Fourth Turning. The graphic is available in a legible wall-sized version on the site.For those of you who have not read The Fourth Turning, its thesis is that history tends to repeat itself in four roughly twenty-year-long consecutive cycles, and that we are now on the verge of entering the fourth of those cycles, like the one we entered in the late 1920s which led to the Great Depression and World War II. Its authors argue that these long, somewhat predictable cycles of economic and political behaviours and results are the reaction of generations of cohorts to the damage done by previous generations of cohorts, and that each of these cyclic cohort generations has a unique personality that stands in stark contrast to the one(s) immediately preceding it. The baby boomer generation (those born in the 1940s and 1950s) is now two cycles old, and Gen X (those born in the 1960s and 1970s) are soon to pass the torch to Generation Millennium (those born 1982-2002), which is just coming into its own.

What I want to explore in this post is not the validity of the theory (which did accurately predict 9/11) but rather the characterization of Generation Millennium and the implications for our future, if the authors are right, and if my (and a growing number of people’s) foreboding about the crises to come in the next few decades is prescient.

Believers in the Fourth Turning theory would have us believe that the behaviours and actions of the boomers (initial idealism followed by a kind of jaded materialism and general disengagement from the political process), followed by the behaviours and actions of Gen X, the 13th generation since the cycles began (characterized by cautious dating and marriage, an embracing of risk, a preference for free agency over loyal corporatism, and political pragmatism and non-affiliation) has left the world stressed out and messed up. The combined psychology of the baby boomers and the baby bust of Gen X, in other words, is the lower right quadrant of Adams’ cultural profile shown below ñ neither liberal nor conservative, but deeply cynical, victimized by learned helplessness, and living for the moment in a spirit of anomie: disengaged, dissociated and afflicted with attention deficit.

values quardrants 1 adams

Liberals and conservatives have been alarmed and confused by this trend, and, surprise, Generation Millennium is too. Here’s how the Fourth Turning authors characterize Generation Millennium:

  • team players
  • value unity over diversity
  • carry out the agenda of others rather than creating their own
  • not creative or entrepreneurial
  • accepting of authority
  • upbeat
  • hard-working
  • obedient and conforming
  • self-censoring
  • dogmatic

Now consider the fact that there are today more people in Generation Millennium than there are baby boomers, both in the affluent nations and worldwide. Thought the population was declining? Think again. This 20-year cohort is substantially larger than the boomers 20-year cohort, because not only are boomers more than replacing themselves, their offspring are living longer. That’s why, for example, high schools are filled to overflowing and university professors are now considered the profession that will grow the most percentage-wise in the next decade (though, alas, only slightly more than a score of underpaid, menial job categories with a lot more people in them already).

So we are going to have a record crop of graduates whose personality is either obedient and diligent (glass half full view) or unimaginative and militaristic (glass half empty view). Whatever, they’re going to put a huge stamp, the largest in history, on the world they will inherit over the next two decades. And what will those decades bring, largely thanks to the negligence, indifference and greed of the two generations that preceded it? I call them the thirteen cascading crises, because they are inextricably interrelated, so that as any one occurs it’s likely to precipitate others. And thanks to our reckless, overextended, live-for-today attitudes (e.g. stealing from Gen X and Generation Millennium by grabbing the last of the world’s natural wealth for ourselves, polluting the air, water, soil and land thoughtlessly, and incurring massive debts that Generation Millennium will have to repay when we’re retired or gone) many of these thirteen cascading crises are long overdue:

  1. the end of oil
  2. the collapse of industrial agriculture
  3. the collapse of major currencies
  4. economic depression
  5. regional nuclear wars and genocidal civil wars
  6. bioterror by stateless idealists
  7. famine
  8. pandemic and epidemic disease
  9. large-scale infrastructure failures: utilities, production and distribution systems
  10. consequences of global warming
  11. housing collapse, foreclosures and ubiquitous squatter communities
  12. desertification, sandstorms, the death of the oceans and forests and other unregulated environmental crises
  13. the end of water

All of these crises are caused by our irresponsible, unsustainable behaviours: excessive population, excessive consumption, excessive waste and pollution, excessive indebtedness. Living beyond our, and the Earth’s, means.

By 2025, Generation Millennium will be between 23 and 43 years of age, and they will outnumber all other generations by a large margin. They will be facing the first waves of these thirteen crises, none of which they caused, and will have certainly learned enough by then to know that the worst is yet to come (the deniers and believers in religious or technological miracles, like those who argued the Earth was flat and the centre of the universe, will finally be silent). What will they do with this terrible knowledge, trying to cope with this world of constant and compound crises?

My fear is that, like so many of those who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, they’ll do what they’re told. The Great Depression and World War II was a time when many people flocked to charismatic, extremist leaders who scapegoated minorities and promised a way out of crisis, and clung to their ideologies almost fanatically. There was an appetite for hero-worship, repression and fierce authoritarianism, which usually only made matters worse (even the New Deal was widely denounced as Communism, and only received acceptance because of the popularity of its sponsor and the failure of all less-generous solutions).

A more hopeful view is that they (Generation Millennium) will do what they must. They’ll ration, they’ll sacrifice, they’ll jail those who exploit or exacerbate crises. They’ll figure out how to live with less instead of burning coal when the oil runs out, and instead of running nuclear-powered water desalination and filtration plants. They’ll mandate vegetarianism for all because it’s the best way to provide for the greatest number. They’ll stop competing and help each other out. They’ll embrace a Generosity Economy because the market economy will have simply stopped working. They’ll radically curtail travel and learn to live and work local because it’s good for the environment, good for the economy, and stingy on scarce energy. They’ll actually enforce social and environmental regulations.

Which of these two paths they’ll take (or more likely which combination of the two) will depend on who they are and what they’ve learned, and what their emotions and instincts lead them to do. Of most concern perhaps is that, in this ‘age of information’, ignorance of history, of science, and of how the world really works, is rampant, and I have little faith that we’re about to fix that ñ too many rich and powerful interests have too much invested in our collective ignorance and inaction.

If you’re a Generation Millennium member (i.e. under 25) I’d love to hear from you. Your cohorts from the previous Fourth Turning, the so-called GI generation born in the early years of the 20th century, are almost all gone, so we have no idea or memory of how Fourth Turning, ‘Hero‘ cohorts think or feel. All we know is you’re almost unimaginably unlike us, members of the silent ‘Artist‘ generation that came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, the boomer ‘Prophet‘ generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Gen-X ‘Nomad‘ generation that came of age in the last twenty years of the last century. That, I think, is a good thing, maybe our future’s greatesthope. The future, for better and for worse, belongs to you.

Category: Our Culture
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 14 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – April 1, 2007

Posted on April 1, 2007 by Dave Pollard
lesbian kissWhat I’m planning on writing about soon:

  • The Fourth Turning: The coming dark and turbulent era, and how Generation Millennium is likely to cope with it (Monday’s post). 
  • The ‘M’ word.
  • Squatter Communities (in struggling nations, which now contain as many as 1.5 billion people) as Model Intentional Communities.
  • Why We Hate: I weigh in on the root causes behind Kathy Sierra’s nightmarish experience and other hate-mongering, on and off the Web.
  • Nowhere to Go: Is the closest experience most of us have to a truly natural life the ‘endless summer’ vacation of our youth?
  • Getting Better: Why are there so few excellent craftspeople, and so few excellent conversationalists? Bad practice?


What I’m thinking about:

Another, simpler way to save the world? I was approached last week by a fledgling biotech consortium that is developing a drug that can be put in all the world’s water supplies, and which will cause everyone in the world to develop an insatiable sexual appetite. The theory is that much of the world’s violence is caused by repressed sexual desire, and if everyone in the world wants it all the time, there won’t be any more repression. And with all the endorphins produced, no one will want to fight anyway.

What’s more, with everyone having sex all the time (an average of 8-10 hours a day according to the simulations and pilot tests), there won’t be time, energy or money for all the activities that are causing global warming. We’ll eat simple, natural foods on the fly, drink lots of water (ingesting even more the drug), sleep ten hours a day blissfully and exhausted, and not do anything else. No consumer products, no new construction, no appliances, no clothes. No driving, so no cars and no CO2 emissions. No more wage slavery since everyone who can will live off their savings and everyone else will demand a large amount to work, since their leisure time will be so much more valuable to them. So only essential services will be staffed at all, and even the people who work for them will only work a few hours a week.

The potential drawbacks to me were unwanted pregnancies and STDs, but the consortium has convinced me that neither is a problem. It seems that, according to studies of males who spent eight hours or more a day having sex, those males end up spreading their sperm so thin that they effectively become sterile after the second day. And computer simulations indicate that although everyone will be having much more sex, on average they’ll be having 75% fewer different partners, geographically less dispersed, so with expected rates of use of condoms, STDs will actually decline 64%.

What they’re working on now are lubricants and balms that will be needed as a result of all the constant sexual marathons, to prevent blistering. The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any antidote to it, and since it goes through the digestive system and water treatment systems unaltered it just keeps recycling with no loss of effectiveness. So we need to besure it’s what we want to do before we introduce it.

Sound too good to be true?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 10 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – March 31, 2007

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Natural Community

Take a Few Paragraphs to Describe a Perfect World: That’s the challenge from zaadz. This is the subject of my novel-in-progress (the illustration above is from my draft), so if anyone can capture it in a few paragraphs I want to hear it. The responses on the zaadz site don’t do it for me, but read them over — they’re inspirational, and they’ll get you thinking. Thanks to Siona for the link and the one that follows.

Women Fight Stress Through Companionship: A UCLA study suggests that hormones produced by stress, which in men trigger fight-or-flight responses, in women also trigger a female bonding response. There is strength, and safety, in numbers committed to a common cause.

No Longer Out of Touch: Mike Morris tells his personal and slightly troubling story of how reconnection to the land generated renewed respect for it, and everything living on it: Excerpt:

The simple connection of bare feet and hands in contact with the soil… The simple connection of watching water fall from the sky, the music of it trinkling into your water tanks. Often, when it rains, I go into the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water, and drink it as I watch the rain fall outside the window: Now this rain falls through my body. No other water ever tastes as good. Then go outside and return the water to the Earth. Hard not to feel connected, then.

The Road to a Community-Based Economy: Bill McKibben joins the bandwagon, hoping his descendants will have the sense to realize that community self-reliance offers the only way to cope with looming and cascading social, economic and ecological crises.

Huge Bee Die-Off Linked to GM Corn: Not yet proven irrefutably, but until recently neither was the connection between human activity and global warming. Monsanto does it again, and this time the consequences for farmers who don’t grow from sterile trademarked seeds, and for wild plants everywhere, could be catastrophic.

The Looming War Against Iran and the Looming US Debt Crisis: Jeff Vail makes the connection. A half trillion dollars in high-risk US mortgage debt coming up for renewal over the next two years at much higher interest rates. And Bush determined to start yet another catastrophic Middle East war, this time with nukes. Yet the stock market is at record highs. Students of history are shaking their heads.

Not a Nation as We Know It: John Robb explains that the concept of a ‘virtual’ caliphate, which underlies much of the political and religious ambition in the Middle East, is utterly different from our notion of a nation-state, in that it has no firm borders or boundaries, political, social oreconomic, and is less hierarchical than rhizomic.

Latin American Assesses Gonzales: And they don’t think any more of him than we do.

We Don’t Know What We Need: Roger Schank’s observation that we need to observe and converse and understand what people need, instead of just asking them, has applications far beyond business.

When Global Warming Floods the Coasts, Will You Be Underwater?: Check out this Google Maps mashup to see. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

(Corrected): Hear me blather live April 26 at 11am EDT (GMT-5h) during an online forum on innovation. Get free tickets by e-mailing me or requesting them in the comments below (I have 20 to give out). More on this soon!
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Three New Trends in Innovation

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Dave Pollard
strategy canvas coffee

Disrupting the Disrupters

Paul Paetz at The Anti-Marketer does a brilliant analysis of the paradox Starbucks has got itself into. In line with the classic Christensen model, Starbucks, which introduced a series of New Market disruptive innovations, is now under threat from Low End disruptive innovators. To indicate how bad it’s getting, Consumer Reports’ expert panel recently rated McDonalds’ new coffee as nearly as good as the premium coffees, at a much lower price and (depending on circumstances) faster as well. The diagram above shows partial strategy canvases (as I see them) for the two companies.

Starbucks’ differentiation as a ‘third place’ offering a home-away-from-home experience has fallen off as a result of the ubiquity and sameness of its establishments, at the same time McDonalds is starting to offer some low-end ‘third place’ amenities like free wireless. McDonalds has also significantly improved its coffee quality, and is reportedly starting to use more wholesome foods, environmentally-friendly and fair-trade practices. So now, of the 8 differentiating qualities on the Canvas, Starbucks’ has lost its substantial edge over McDonalds on three qualities, and has a strong lead now only in coffee variety. Meanwhile McDonalds has maintained its edge on three qualities: price, speed and the variety of other foods served. This doesn’t bode well for Starbucks.

I’m not a coffee nut, and don’t patronize either of these places, and I prefer to make my own tea rather than buy it (I’m cheap, and sweeten with stevia). But my sense is that Starbucks’ best opportunity is to re-engender its ‘third place’ advantage. To do that they need to become even more ethical — no trans fats, nutritional focus, fair trade, no buying from factory farms (which Burger King has just announced they will do), etc. And they need to start sponsoring community events and running local community activities ñ customized to each community. That will be tough if the store managers don’t live in the community. They need to capture the wisdom of crowds by getting to know their local customers as intimately as British pub owners know theirs.

What would your advice be to Starbucks if it was your job to give them a strategy to sustain their innovativeness and market share?

New Innovations in Peer-to-Peer Technology

The BBC reports on a German company’s plans to introduce a combination of sensors, GPS-based dashboard notification systems, and peer-to-peer communication tools that will allow cars and their drivers to convey important information to each other, automatically and just-in-time ñ accidents ahead, dangerous drivers, traffic hazards etc. What intrigues me about this is that it involves person-to-person, machine-to-machine and machine-to-person communication and the coordination of all three, and also the fact that as much as possible this communication is automated and presented in real time.

I can envisage similar innovations in health-care (sensors to detect and report personal health emergencies, including those in accidents etc., and connection to systems that could pinpoint the nearest doctor, hospital, laboratory etc.). What other examples can you think of?

Next-Generation Biomimicry

Fast Company Online summarizes some of the major focus areas for business’ emerging social consciousness, including:

  • low-cost urban infrastructure for struggling nations
  • new reduce-reuse-recycle technologies
  • self-help and peer-to-peer help network solutions (a la Grameen Bank microlending)
  • products for socially and environmentally conscious consumers and 
  • peer production and mass customization

The focus that interested me most, though, was that on biomimicry innovations, that draw on how nature has evolved solutions that, for example:

  • enable durable sustainable building with local materials
  • purify materials effectively without waste using minimal amounts of energy
  • self-clean (a process that can be adapted for use in paints and clothing)
  • adhere without glue
  • produce hydrogen naturally
  • neutralize toxins and re-use waste, and
  • support a huge amount of weight despite weighing almost nothing themselves

I continue to believe that nature has millions of other answers to perplexing problems awaiting our discovery, answers that don’t pollute, waste, or demean us. All we have to do is learn to pay attention. Andto stop destroying nature before we learn what she has to teach us.
Posted in Working Smarter | 4 Comments

Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Dave Pollard
 dilbert 2
dilbert 3
Dilbert, by Scott Adams

Two questions Iím most often asked by people just given responsibility for Knowledge Management in their organizations:

  • What KM projects are most likely to achieve ‘quick wins’ — to get something out there quickly and inexpensively that will impress management and users and get more attention and resources for KM?
  • What longer-term KM programs are likely to offer the best value for money?

Most people are surprised that none of my answers involves creating big central ‘knowledge bases’, or websites, or community of practice ‘collaboration spaces’. While every organization is different, my experience is that these types of initiatives tend to produce disappointing results. As the top cartoon above suggests, these are easy to do, and often fun, which is perhaps why theyíre so tempting.

Again, itís dangerous to generalize, but I think programs that focus more on context than content, and more on connection than collection, often pay the biggest dividends. So hereís a list of possibilities that I think would apply in most organizations:


Six ‘Quick Win, Low Hanging Fruit’ KM Projects

  1. Make it easy for your people to identify and connect with subject matter experts: Create focused, managed directories of acknowledge experts in subjects that matter to a lot of people in your organization. Don’t try to create a directory of everyone and everything, because the maintenance and quality control involved are likely to be disproportionate to the return. And be careful of self-appointed experts: the list should come not from the organization chart or what people self-identify as their areas of expertise, but from who other people have identified as accessible experts both inside and outside the organization. It’s a reputation system, so the names of the people recommending each expert should be shown as well, and updated frequently based on feedback. You will probably find that some people will be very anxious to get on this list. That’s a good thing, but don’t compromise whatever standard you set for peer recommendation being the basis for inclusion on the list. Make sure the directory lists phone number and e-mail/IM contact info, and advises which is the expert’s preferred way and preferred time for receiving calls and requests for information. If the expert has a blog or personal web page, link to it too.
  2. Help people manage the content and organization of their desktop: Most people are hopeless at personal content management but don’t want to admit it. Provide them with a desktop search tool and show them how to use it effectively. Provide ‘cheat sheets’ to users that show how to organize (and name) documents on your hard drive and messages in your e-mail folders flexibly, memorably and consistently.
  3. Help people identify and use the most appropriate communication tool: Give them a one-page cheat sheet on when not to use e-mail and why not, and what to use instead. Create a simple ‘tool-chooser’ or decision tree with links to where they can learn more about each tool available. Make tools like IM and desktop videoconferencing available (they’re virtually free). Use every device you can to facilitate more context-rich conversations.
  4. Make it easy for people to publish their knowledge and subscribe to the information they want:. Use RSS to make all the essential information your people produce and use subscribable, and set up an aggregator ‘news’ page for each person. Encourage people to publish their information on blogs (or at least on personal web pages inside the firewall), and make these pages RSS-subscribable too. Likewise newsletters ñ don’t allow them to be sent by e-mail or to clutter up your Intranet or Extranet. The number of voluntary subscribers will tell you which ones are really valuable.
  5. Create a facility for just-in-time canvassing for information: Drawing on the expertise directories from project #1 above, and on existing mailing lists of communities of practice, create a template for requesting information that is needed in a hurry where the requestor isn’t sure who to ask for it. Make the template simple and easy to complete, and allow the requester to check which lists of experts and community members to send the request to. Whether you transmit the resultant requests by e-mail, IM or other routing system, make sure the subject makes it clear that it’s an urgent, targeted canvass and what exactly the requestor is looking for. Ideally, have a follow-up ‘information found’ message that the requestor can send onceís they’ve got what they’re looking for, so others who were canvassed don’t keep looking for it.
  6. Teach people how to do research, not just search: This skill isn’t just for information professionals (though there are many cases where the IP specialist really should do the research instead of the generalist), but if people are going to do their own research, they need to learn how to do it competently. Most of the people I know can’t.


Six Longer-Term Big Payoff KM Programs

  1. Make your information professionals anthropologists: Get them out of the library or research centre, and have them observe and interview users of the organization’s knowledge and technology resources, and show users how to use these resources more effectively. Just a 2% improvement in effectiveness of using these resources can provide a huge return on investment, and teach information professionals more about the organization’s business in the process, which will help them do their jobs better as well, as they learn what’s needed, not just what’s available.
  2. Embed intelligence in systems, processes and tools: Most of what we learn we forget before we use it. Exactly how you embed learning and knowledge into what people do at the point they do it depends on your organization and industry ñ in hospitals, for example, it could include putting posters showing proper procedure for putting on and taking off protective devices and clothing right beside the shelves containing those devices. In data entry it could include context-sensitive help. Whatever the business or application, make it just-in-time, instead of the less effective just-in-case.
  3. Teach your information professionals to be sense-making specialists: Upgrade their skills from rip-and-ship data managers to distillers, analysts, interpreters, visualizers, modelers, synthesizers. Most IPs have a natural flair for adding meaning and value to information, that precious few get the chance to exercise.
  4. Use knowledge to drive innovation: If KM elicits a yawn from management, just show them how innovation is impossible without it.
  5. Canvass the wisdom of crowds: Develop and institute tools that engage and elicit information from your organization’s employees and customers. It will help your organization make better decisions, predict the future more accurately, gather all the pertinent facts better, and better understand cause and effect in the market’s dynamics. 
  6. Collect, and attract people to use, stories and anecdotes: Most information that is collected and stored in anonymous, central repositories is context-poor. Stories and anecdotes take longer to read, but they provide the missing context that can prevent people from misusing and underutilizing the organization’s information and experiences. Except for hands-on practice experience and demonstration, there is no more effective way to learn something useful than by reading stories. And they’re often fun to read, so they’re a painless and low-risk way to learn as well. And they’re subversive ñ you can get people to change their approach or behaviour (for the better) using stories, by essentially making the readers think the change was their own idea. What’s more, stories can provoke remarkable creativity and insight, because they can reveal patterns, sometimes serendipitously, from disparate experiences and ideas. Finding patterns and applying them to problem-solving is something we’re all surprisingly good it.

If you’re new to KM, or an ambitious information professional striving to make a difference, you have a real challenge ahead of you. I hope thelists above can make your task a little easier.
Posted in Working Smarter | 4 Comments

The Evolution of Attention

Posted on March 28, 2007 by Dave Pollard
conversation
I had an interesting discussion with some of my colleagues this evening about how they, and the people they know, pay attention, and divide their attention, and how this appears to be changing from generation to generation.

Some of their observations were not new: We are all splitting our attention more finely than we used to. Younger generations are learning to do this even more finely than ours has, the phenomenon called continuous partial attention, though there seems to be some consensus that this dividing of attention is more a rapid sequential process than a simultaneous one. We seem to become bored more easily if there is insufficient stimulus to demand our constant, full attention, and start to browse the room (physical or virtual), consciously or subconsciously, for more stimulus when our minds and/or emotions are not fully engaged.

Some of their observations were, I thought, novel and provocative: Partly because we’re always fighting for attention, perhaps, the nature of spoken and real-time written (IM) communication seems to have evolved from relatively slow, thoughtful, considered communication to more rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness, iterative, successive-approximation communication. Efficiency and economy are sacrificed for effectiveness. Whereas I think I understood what you used to say, the first time you said it, today I know what you’re saying, because after ten clarifications and restatements there can no longer be any doubt. And maybe it takes longer today for that greater certainty, in the spaces between the clarifications and restatements I also understood what six other people told me on other subjects, interwoven with my conversation with you. If you were the only person I was conversing with at the time, I might well have become impatient with you. But increasingly, we constantly juggle and interleaf multiple conversations.

What is lost in this splitting of attention? When we pay attention to more and more things in rapid succession, we must inevitably stop paying attention to something else. I suspect that successive-approximation communication interferes with our ability to fully listen — there just isn’t time, enough mental cycles for us to do so. We are therefore, I’d suggest, missing nuances in the conversation — the meaning that is contained in silences, hesitation, inflection, tone, and the semi-subconscious awareness of what is implied by the choice of one word over another, by phraseology, by the connotation and implication and what might have provoked a statement, not just its denotation.

Even more, because we are scanning words while we’re listening, we’re missing the important visual clues that accompany a message in face-to-face or videoconferenced conversation: facial expression, body language, and what we can ‘read’ in the eyes of the person we are talking to. In fact, I suspect that some of the discomfort I see in young people engaged in one-on-one, face-to-face conversation is because they’re just not experienced or practiced in such conversation, and find its intimacy alarming and disorienting. At age 55, when I’m speaking with a woman who is looking at me intently as we talk, for example, I don’t think I am likely to misconstrue her attention (e.g. as coming on to me, staring at me because of something peculiar about my appearance, or angry at me). I’ve learned to interpret these signals in context, from practice. I’m not sure many young people who practice rapid sequential language processing have that acuity, and I’m a little concerned that, for lack of practice and attention, they may never develop it. And if so, that’s a shame, not only because some important communication need not or cannot be verbal*, but because I think the intimacy of non-verbal communication is important for our emotional well-being.

But maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic. Have you noticed any of this in your own conversations? In what other ways are the ways we communicate, and theways we pay attention, evolving, for better or for worse?

*Verbal means oral or written, i.e. using language. This word is often misused to mean just oral, spoken.

Painting “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Finding People to Make a Living With: Some More Thoughts

Posted on March 27, 2007 by Dave Pollard
A few people whose opinions I value highly have told me they’re disappointed with the model I proposed yesterday for finding people to make a living with. Their concerns fall into three categories:

  1. The model doesn’t accommodate people who have already done their homework and research and identified a solution (a product or service) that satisfies a deep unmet human need, and now are looking for partners to help them bring it to fruition.
  2. The model doesn’t work for simple businesses that are needed to provide an unmet need for a commodity (like quality local organic food or a local community-based renewable energy co-op).
  3. The model may actually discourage people from following their passion and trusting their instincts, no matter what the obstacles. There is a lot to be said for intentionality.

These are very valid criticisms, and they explain why the model I propose hasn’t received more traction already, and why a lot of us are still pursuing our passion alone. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

  1. Suppose the show was on the other foot, and you were to read about someone else’s entrepreneurial venture that had already been spec’d out carefully, and where the ‘owner’ was looking for partners with particular talents or resources s/he lacked. You’d probably think the ‘owner’ was really looking for employees, junior partners, passive investors. It’s an unequal partnership. It’s also one where the ‘owner’ is likely to be resistant to changes and new ideas. 
So what should you do if you’ve done all this work? How about this:

  • From the list of unmet needs that have been identified, find one that matches the one you think you have a solution for. Keep your solution under your hat.
  • At stages 1-2 of the model, providing the research you’ve already done, and listen to those who share your purpose with an open mind.
  • If the stage 3 invitation engages you, get to know the stage 4 participants and proffer your solution during stage 5. You are likely to find that the additional knowledge, perspectives and creativity will make your solution even better, or perhaps reveal it to be seriously flawed. Either way, you win.
  • And you’ve identified a group of people who have pride of ownership in the solutions you’ve collaborated on, so you don’t have to convince them to join you, they have full partner potential.
  1. The essence of successful Natural Enterprise is finding and filling an unmet need. Things are the way they are for a reason, especially when it comes to commodities. If your plan is to sell organic food to people in your community, or start a local renewable energy co-op, ask yourself why someone isn’t doing it already. It can’t be that easy. Whether the need is unrecognized, or the solution is unaffordable, or there are technical obstacles, or supply problems, you need more research, or innovation to resolve the problem. You need help. Following this model can give it to you.
  1. OK, so your passion is to be a singer-songwriter, and you play the bassoon pretty well too. All you’ve ever wanted to do is perform, to create music. What possible use is this model to you? Well, if you believe in the Hollywood myth of people being discovered and making it big, nothing. 
Or suppose your passion is to find a cure (or the cause) for some chronic, perplexing disease. You’re going to stick to this task, even if you have to do it in your basement, burning the midnight oil. This one’s a little easier to see, isn’t it? The truth is that things get done when a group of people with a shared sense of purpose and passion, who between them have the gift to make it happen, get together and make it happen. That’s not to say you don’t need to hone your craft, and make time to practice your gift until you truly do it better than anyone else. That’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. There’s always a need for great art, and great science, but collaboration, using a model like this, is far more likely to being that genius to light than waiting for serendipity.

An issue I haven’t spoken about is: Where and how do we collect the needs? I’ve already said that an online database isn’t enough, that we need to engage the majority who are on the other side of the digital divide, and that we need to facilitate a million conversations to surface, articulate, qualify, and refine the needs.

On this issue, I’m stumped. Maybe we need more than one place to collect, and more than one mechanism to discuss, these needs. How can we reach everyone, on a regular basis, often enough and long enough to get them sync’d up with people who share their purpose, and their passion, so that they can discover if they were destined to makea living together?

What do you think?
Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

Finding People to Make a Living With: A Methodology, Take One

Posted on March 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard
finding people
For some time I’ve been thinking about ways we could more effectively find ‘like minds’ to make a living with or even just to work on projects we have a shared passion for. Too many of us are working alone, and if we’re going to make a real difference, and experience the full joy of Natural Enterprise and Intentional Community, we need to start working with others whose talents complement our own, and who we can come easily to love.

This search for partners need not (indeed it must not) involve compromising what we want to do, or our values. It should enable us to do what we do best, connecting and collaborating with others, on our own terms, in our own context, developing our own plan of action, doing our own thing in sync, in community with others. Though it does require knowing yourself: What your personal Gift, Passion and Purpose are!

I concluded quickly that the mechanism for finding others won’t be a website, database or other online technology: It needs to draw on a broader pool of talent and passion, including those on the other side of the digital divide.

Likewise, the mechanism for finding others cannot be one of agency, because person-to-person connection agencies are fatally flawed by their intrinsic conflict of interest. As James Surowiecki has explained, the agent gets rewarded for making connections, and for that reason s/he will always be tempted to exaggerate the potential of every relationship, and to accept bribes to favour some parties over others.

So what we need is a low-tech, peer-to-peer mechanism. That had me stumped for a while, but now I think I have a first iteration (illustrated above) of a method that might work. Here’s a walk-through; tell me what you think:

  1. Articulate Unmet Needs (That You Care About): Regular readers will not be surprised that the mechanism starts not with solutions, but with deep, unmet human problems and needs. This is the exact opposite of the usual approach, which starts with ideas, solutions, proposals or manifestos. The idea is to approach a problem with an open mind and as much data as possible, and engage others to help solve it. The need needs to be probed, substantiated with evidence (especially stories), and discussed extensively. Students of complex systems know that an understanding of the problem co-evolves with the emergence of possible solutions, so what is important is to articulate the problem or need, and not rush to solutions. Who needs your gift now?
  2. Appeal to People’s Sense of Purpose: Your purpose is what you were always meant to do, why you’re here. It’s personal, and the articulation and discussion of needs will draw in people whose purpose is aligned with solving that problem or filling that need. This is not a persuasive process — you’re appealing to the latent interest that people already have in the subject. Those who respond will bring additional stories and additional research to improve the articulation and substantiation of the need.
  3. Craft the Invitation: You already have part of the solution team by virtue of having appealed to people’s sense of purpose. Now the invitation, Open Space style, is crafted to draw in people who have the gift and passion to come up with solutions.
  4. Complete the Solution Team: Now you bring together people who share your purpose, and those who have the genius (the gift and the passion) to help you find approaches to address the problem or need effectively. When you find people who have both (the shared purpose and the genius) you’ve found the partners you want!
  5. Brainstorm & Innovate: Using an Open-Space type technique, now you put it all together, and brainstorm innovative and adaptive approaches (like biomimicry) collaboratively. You’ll end up with the raw material for a host of experiments. Some of them will work, others won’t. But now you’re working with people who share your passion and purpose, and whose gifts complement your own, you won’t stop until you’ve found a set of solutions that make a difference. And in the process, you’ll learn more about the needs and problems you’re grappling with, and evolve even better answers.

OK, I know you’re asking What’s the Business Model? How can anyone make a living off this? Well, in the first place, this solution co-development process will give those who want to make a living a huge amount of research and ‘qualification of need’ at little or no cost. And if some of the experiments need some additional investment of time or money to get from the successful experiment to the ubiquitous product or service stage, it should be pretty easy to find partners to provide it, since the risk has been largely eliminated. The network that has been immersed in qualifying the need and brainstorming solutions will provide ready-made viral marketing for commercial solutions. And ultimately this is a reputation system: Your involvement co-developing both the articulated needs and qualified approaches and solutions will give you instant credibility to partners and customers alike. Yeah, it’s an open source co-development and the intelligence is all out there. But you have the inside track because you’ve been immersed in the details since day one, so you (and your new partners) can do what even the richest and cleverest outsider can’t: implement first and best.

No, you won’t make a million from this approach. There is an element of the Gift/Generosity Economy here. But there is no reason you can’t make enough, easily, with minimal risk, to let you keep doing what you love, what you’re uniquely good at doing,with people you love, and make the world a better place in the process.

That’s all I’ve got so far. Additions welcome. Let’s co-develop this thing.
Posted in Working Smarter | 10 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – March 25, 2007

Posted on March 25, 2007 by Dave Pollard
dilbert 2
What I’m planning on writing about soon:

  • Finding & Working With Others: Instead of working alone, connecting and collaborating with others, on our own terms, in our own context, developing our own plan of action. A billion diverse people doing our own thing but in sync, in community. Some early thoughts on this, sure to stir up controversy:
    • The mechanism for finding others won’t be a website, database or other online technology.
    • The mechanism for finding others cannot be one of agency, because person-to-person connection agencies are fatally flawed by their intrinsic conflict of interest.
  • The Fourth Turning: The coming dark and turbulent era. (I gave away my copy of the book, so this one will have to wait until I pick up a new copy).
  • The ‘M’ word.
  • Squatter Communities (in struggling nations, which now contain as many as 1.5 billion people) as Model Intentional Communities.
  • New Developments in Innovation: Disrupting the disrupters; Next-gen biomimicry; New fields of peer-to-peer technology. 
  • Knowledge Management: Common-denominator low-hanging fruit.

What I’m thinking about:

We live in a world of specialization and communication. So why are there so few excellent craftspeople, and so few excellent conversationalists?Bad practice?

What do you think?

Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams. He and I will both be in Denver presenting at SLA 2007, June 3-6. Oh, Al Gore will be there too.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Saturday Links of the Week – March 24, 2007

Posted on March 24, 2007 by Dave Pollard
beauty strip steve gormanWhat’s Wrong with Environmentalism: Curtis White starts off a two-part article in Orion with a brilliant and moving explanation of why we environmentalists are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Excerpt:

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 ’Äúthe visible God’Äù: 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’Äôve 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 ’Äúgive back’Äù 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’Äôre willing to be generous in order to ’Äúsave the world’Äù but not before we’Äôve 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.

Read the whole article, and stay tuned for Part Two. And in the meantime, the NYT tells the story of a couple of writers in NYC trying hard to be really green (thanks to Melisa Christensen for the link).

“We’re Sitting On a Powderkeg Here”: George Packer’s astonishing article from the New Yorker about the horror of modern Lagos (my review here) is finally available online — on a Nigerian discussion forum.

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil: The combination of the collapse of the USSR and the US embargo left Cuba in a crisis, bereft of the essentials that had made its economy work, with starvation omnipresent. A new film shows how the Cuban people clawed their way back through The Power of Community, and in so doing developed a model for survival that may be valuable to us when we all face the End of Oil. Thanks to Don Hayward of the Green Party for the link.

Peak Oil Movement Speaks to Big Oil: Randy Udall‘s and Richard Heinberg‘s respectful, credible and expansive comments to the National Petroleum Council on Peak Oil. Excerpt from the former:

Humans have always sought perpetual motion, and for a moment, the petroleum industry has given it to us. The problem is that you have 300 million Americans who take $2.50 gasoline for granted in a country whose architecture, land use patterns, agriculture, prosperity, and cast of mind have been have been built around cheap oil. These oil tribe people, and their political leaders, don’t care about peak oil, they care only about price. Meanwhile, the Chinese are where we were in 1910, with car sales doubling every three years.

Thought for the Week:

To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity.
— Ivan Illich  (cited at altruism.org)

Photo: A ‘beauty strip’ at the edge of a devastated clearcut forest, used to hide the destruction from the view of canoeists and (when usedalongside highways) drivers; photo by Steve Gorman for Orion.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments