Laptop repair update

Posted on November 21, 2006 by Dave Pollard

The replacement part for my HP laptop is in, so there will be no post tomorrow. With luck, I’ll be back on Thursday, and things will be back to normal. Keep your fingers crossed! /-/ Dave

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | Comments Off on Laptop repair update

The Four Preconditions for Let-Self-Change

Posted on November 21, 2006 by Dave Pollard

living on the edge 2
It’s going to take a major shift in most people’s worldview — their beliefs, intentions, goals and actions — to steward our crippled civilization to a safe landing, or even just to cope with the world that remains after its collapse. That major shift — a Let-Self-Change by billions of people — has four necessary preconditions:
  1. Awareness and Attention: to how the world really works, and what needs to be done to make it better
  2. Openness: to the possibility of better ways to live and make a living, and the possibility of making major personal changes
  3. Actionable information: about how to Let-Self-Change, what to do, how to do it effectively in collaboration with others, and how to persuade others of the need to Let-Self-Change as well
  4. Time and Energy: to do more than just worry about what’s wrong — to think through what we must do and act responsibly, appropriately and decisively
If you’re not aware or really paying attention, you’ll be able to convince yourself that someone else will solve the problems, or that there’s time to wait and see. If you’re not open, you’ll be able to deny there is any problem, or at least deny that you have any personal responsibility to do something about it. If you’re not informed, you won’t know what to do, or who to most effectively do it with. And if you lack the time and energy, you’ll just make yourself ill with knowledge you’re unable to act upon.

These preconditions are like four sequential locked doors between the corpocratic world most of us live in, many of us uneasily and anxiously, and the Edge, the way out. As long as most of us are caught inside these doors, or between them, the whole world will be caught between the distant promise of saving our society and our world, and its realization.

The inertia of the corpocracy and the lure of corporatism are powerful: The corporatists control the media, and don’t want us to know how things really are. It is not nature’s way, or human nature, to change quickly and dramatically until there is unarguably no alternative. Peer pressure ostracizes those on the Edge from the hapless but comfortable guilty conformity of the civilized corpocracy. Actionable information is hard to come by: it threatens the status quo and is therefore suppressed as subversive. Meaningful, coordinated action requires the development of good working models of better ways to live and make a living, and these are even more threatening to the corpocracy, and obstructed by every means at its disposal.

And, by keeping us busy, exhausted, isolated and discouraged, the corpocracy prevents us from opening the fourth door even when we have made our way through the first three, and hence prevents those on the Edge from developing the momentum we need for world-changing.

How could we make it easier to get through these four doors, for ourselves and for others?
  • We are increasing awareness and attention, through blogs and other alternative media. But rather than giving the legacy media a pass, we should be challenging them, shouting them down, working collaboratively to create and promote powerful, action-oriented alternative media, and undermining and obsolescing the legacy media until they go out of business. To do that, more than anything else, we need to make our message more accessible to the 80% of the world on the other side of the digital divide, who still rely on corporatist newspapers, radio and television stations for their perspective on what’s going on in the world.
  • We need to learn, practice and teach openness, in the way we engage others in conversation, in our school systems, and through millions of Open Space events that invite and empower others. Conversation and collaboration need to replace demonstration and rhetoric as our principal means of opening others to our messages and to the truths that are currently denied and repressed.
  • As Bill Maher says, we need to do the job of the media by making what is important interesting. Even those of us on or near the Edge are hesitant to bring up the need and means for radical social change in ‘pleasant company’, for fear of being depressing, confrontational, or boring. We need, too, to learn and teach each other to eschew information that is not actionable, and to focus our attention on what we, ourselves, can and must do, rather than on rhetoric and what others should be doing.
  • As for getting more time and energy, the only things we can do are (a) staying healthy, physically and emotionally, and (b) valuing our time more highly than the money and material goods that spending it brings us. Only by living more simply can we rediscover how precious time for reflection, activism and joyful activities is. This necessarily has to be the last of the four doors to open, since we will not quit jobs that exhaust, distract and demean us until we become aware, open and informed of the need to do so.
It’s really as simple, and perhaps impossible, as that.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

The Way of Ignorance

Posted on November 20, 2006 by Dave Pollard
Bastish swans
Although I don’t agree with some of his religious views, Wendell Berry is the most eloquent spokesman of this century on two important subjects: The need to rediscover our relationship to land and community, and the importance of humility. I’ve referenced his wonderful essay in Orion on the former subject before. This article is about an essay on the latter subject (not online), entitled The Way of Ignorance, in his recent book of the same name.

The title refers to a line in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, that goes:

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance

The essay is about our arrogant assumption that we know enough, or that, in sufficient time, we will know or can know enough, to save the world from what we have done to it over the past thirty thousand years. In truth, he says, we have no idea, and what’s worse, we’re ignorant of our ignorance, which is what makes us so dangerous. The solution is humility — the way of ignorance.

For readers of How to Save the World who wonder what my essays on Knowledge Management have to do with saving the world, Berry’s essay explains it better than I could. He starts his paper with a ‘taxonomy’ of the types of human ignorance and knowledge. Here is a summary:

Varieties of ignorance:

  • Inherent ignorance — ignorance that stems from the limitations of the human brain
  • Ignorance of history — due to our unawareness of what we have forgotten, and never learned
  • Materialist ignorance — willful refusal to recognize what cannot be empirically proved (narrow-mindedness)
  • Moral ignorance — willful refusal to come to a moral conclusion on the basis it may not be ‘objective’
  • Polymathic ignorance — the false confidence of knowledge of the past and future
  • Self-righteous ignorance — ignorance arising from our failure to know ourselves and our weaknesses
  • Fearful ignorance — stemming from the lack of courage to believe and accept knowledge that is unpopular, unpleasant or tragic
  • Lazy ignorance — stemming from not being willing to make the effort to understand what is complex
  • For-profit and for-power ignorance — deliberate obscuring or withholding of knowledge (e.g. advertising, propaganda)

Varieties of knowledge:

  • Empirical knowledge — that which can be empirically proved to be true or factual
  • Experiential knowledge — that which comes from personal experience
  • Traditional ‘common’ knowledge — the collective experiential knowledge of a community or culture, handed down, by those who have lived in the same place for a long time
  • Religious knowledge — more about that in a future article; Berry says that “those who premise the falsehood of such knowledge [like me] of course don’t have it and their opinion of it is worthless”
  • Instinctive and intuitive knowledge — that which need not be learned, which is known without the need for proof
  • Conscience or moral knowledge — the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate behaviours
  • Inspiration and imagination — knowledge that comes from sources that cannot be empirically located
  • Sympathy and affection — the intimate knowledge of others that comes by relating to and connecting with them
  • Bodily knowledge — the ability to apply skillfully what is conceptually known
  • Counterfeit knowledge — falsehoods that are known to be such but are nonetheless plausible

“Ignorance, arrogance, narrowness of mind, incomplete knowledge and counterfeit knowledge are of concern to us because they are dangerous; when united with great power, they cause great destruction”, Berry says. What he calls ‘corporate minds’ are more prone to such ignorance and arrogance than personal minds because they are so narrow and limited by their lowest common denominator, to strictly empirical knowledge. As such, the corporate mind is “compound and abstract, materialist, reductionist, greedy, and radically utilitarian”. Such a disembodied mind is incapable of complex or generous thought, and incapable of humility.

Science, Berry argues, produces knowledge that, when purchased and applied by the corporate mind, yields at once great technological advances, and global warming, acid rain, Chernobyl, Bhopal and Love Canal. To this list we might add Enron, 9/11, cluster bombs and ‘shock and awe’. As I have argued before, these can all be seen as ‘knowledge failures’.

Now that we’ve let this marvelous, dangerous genie out of the bottle, he asks, What can we do? “I have no large solution to offer”, he says. “Our damages to watersheds and ecosystems will have to be corrected one farm, one forest, one acre at a time. The aftermath of a bombing has to be dealt with one corpse, one wound at a time…If we find the consequences of our arrogant ignorance to be humbling, and we are humbled, then we have the first fact of hope: We can change ourselves. We, each of us severally, can remove our minds from the corporate ignorance and arrogance that is leading the world to destruction.”

He goes on: “If the ability to change oneself is the first act of hope, then the second surely must be an honest assessment of the badness of our situation.” Berry, a man of faith, has great faith that if enough of us pursue these two acts of hope, the world can be saved. For believing this, he is almost apologetic: “I am aware that invoking personal decency, personal humility, as the solution to a vast risk taken on our half by corporate industrialism is not going to suit everybody. Some will find it an insult to their sense of proportion, others to their sense of drama. I am offended by it myself, and I wish I could do better. But having looked about, I have been unable to convince myself that there is a better solution or one that has a better chance of working.”

Both John Gray, whose views are congruent with my own (as I reiterated in my last post), and Wendell Berry tell us that what we must do is Let-Self-Change, and focus our passion and energy at doing what we can at the local community level to make the world better. Neither believes that technology, or some external force, is going to save us. The difference is that Berry has faith in humanity’s ability to act, individually, quickly, dramatically and, most important, knowledgeably, in our collective interest. Gray and I do not. I am tempted to argue, without the benefit of Berry’s ‘religious knowledge’, that true humility might require us to acknowledge that such faith that he has in our wonderful, terrible and muddled species, might be misplaced — perhaps, even, a tiny bit arrogant.

This won’t change our efforts to do what we must, of course. These differences of belief matter only because most of us alive today probably won’t be around long enough to see whose belief was right. Even though ultimately this knowledge, the knowledge of what our planet’s future holds, doesn’t matter, it would be nice to know.

Photo by Kevin at the Bastish blog.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 3 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – November 19, 2006

Posted on November 19, 2006 by Dave Pollard
What I’m thinking about this week:

  • The fact that I haven’t followed up on my previous open threads on October 29 and 22 — getting to the tipping point for bottom-up initiatives, Vail/rhizomes, rail transportation, scenario planning, how to be an effective blog/forum ‘commenter’, and the inherent effectiveness and inefficiency of the long tail.
  • Experience-based decision-making — this is an aspect of knowledge management I’ve just discovered, and which has both great promise and a dark side; more about this as my research allows.
  • The four necessary prerequisites, as I see it, for Let-Self-Change: attention, openness, information and energy; all of them are in short supply, and in my recent zeal about the first three, I’ve been ignoring the fourth.

My computer is still out of order, and I’m pledging that, within the next year, I’m going to move everything from my hard drive to cyberspace, so that I will be able to use any computer anywhere, to do anything I now do on ‘my’ PC. And then ‘my’ PC will become nothing more than a convenient backup storage device.

My health is still fine, despite some recent stresses. In fact I just ran my fastest 5km in thirty years.

So what’s on your mind?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Links for the Week – November 18, 2006

Posted on November 19, 2006 by Dave Pollard
hurricane stan

Civilization’s End: Energy & the Environment:

George Monbiot Summarizes His Own Book: The ten major elements of the radical program of CO2-reducing regulations proposed in his book Heat.

The Folly of Biofuel Production in Struggling Nations: Despite the superficial appeal of producing and exporting biofuels to wealthy nations to reduce balance of payments deficits, the cost of this strategy — reducing the production of domestic foods and hence requiring even more imports of foods from affluent subsidizing nations — far exceeds the benefits. Salon’s HTWW explains the quandary.

More Evidence that Civilization Was a Desperate and Impoverishing Response to Climate Change: Salon’s HTWW reviews an article from the UK’s Nick Brooks: “Civilization: a horrible accident forced upon us by climate change. We can only shudder at the prospects of further accidents, waiting to happen.”

Vancouver Island Despoils Itself Further: As reported by Zane at Lichenology, Vancouver Island is preparing to excavate its already ravaged surface further, to sell six million tons of gravel a year to California.

Grist Tells How to Argue with Global Warming Deniers: I’ve given up arguing with them — a total waste of time and energy. But if you’re inclined to do so, this is a great resource for dealing with skeptics. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

Too Early to Act, Yet Running Out of Time: Inspector Lohmann offers a stunning, lengthy and articulate analysis of our modern predicament as we perch on the edge of apocalypse: “Basically, the world knows that the system cannot (nor should) endure, but word hasn’t spread, and solutions, though floating all around the ether, refuse to meaninfully coalesce given the staggeringly entrenched forces of greed opposed to a revolutionary paradigm shift that offers practical solutions to our dire situation.” He quotes Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

How the World Really Works: Politics & Economics:

The WSJ Gets Religion on the Need to Reduce Economic Inequality: Salon’s HTWW reports that even the right-wing publications now seem to be embarrassed and distressed at the obscene inequality of income and wealth in the US.

In New Orleans, Families Broken by Katrina Spawn New Problems: Natural disasters like Katrina are classic examples of complex phenomena that confound all simple and complicated plans and actions to prevent, predict and resolve them. Now it turns out that families separated and broken by Katrina are becoming dysfunctional and producing new chronic social problems such as violence and crime. Imagine a whole city afflicted with PTSD.

Bush Bullies and Cheats Again on ‘Free’ Trade: It seems Canada’s feckless right-wing minority government will never learn not to trust the Bush administration. After allowing Bush to steal a billion dollars owed us for US violations of NAFTA (and trying to tell us it was a victory that they didn’t steal the other four billion), we’re now knuckling under to a whole barrage of new US import duties (masquerading as anti-terrorism fees) imposed on Canadian products, in violation of both NAFTA and WTO rules. It’s time to scrap NAFTA entirely — a corporatist con from the word go.

…And They Plan to Spy on Canadians Too: Bush wants us to take their stuff duty-free, while they impose duties on our stuff. And now we find out they want us to visit them and spend money, but if we do they plan to ‘profile’ us — all of us — and keep their arbitrary assessments of our activism for 40 years. Maybe it’s time for us to get smart and find friendlier places to visit and vacation. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Self-Experimentation:

Scott Adams Cures Himself: The author or Dilbert used self-experimentation to discover a personal cure for Spasmodic Dysphonia. Thanks to both Michael Wiik and Judith Norton for the link.

Thoughts for the Week:

“If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” — anonymous graffiti in Clerkenwell, London, per an equally anonymous e-mail sent to hundreds of people last month.

In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
by Wendell Berry

I.
The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves,
one of the necessities, so they may speak what is true, and have the patience for beauty: the weighted
grainfield, the shady street, the well-laid stone and the changing tree whose branches spread above.
For want of songs and stories they have dug away the soil, paved over what is left,
set up their perfunctory walls in tribute to no god, for the love of no man or woman,
so that the good that was here cannot be called back except by long waiting, by great
sorrows remembered and to come by invoking the thunderstones of the world, and the vivid air.

II.
The poem is important, as the want of it proves. It is the stewardship
of its own possibility, the past remembering itself in the presence of
the present, the power learned and handed down to see what is present
and what is not: the pavement laid down and walked over regardlessly–by exiles, here
only because they are passing. Oh, remember the oaks that were here, the leaves, purple and brown,
falling, the nuthatches walking headfirst down the trunks, crying “onc! onc!” in the brightness
as they are doing now in the cemetery across the street where the past and the dead
keep each other. To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again
to a livelier, surer measure. It is dangerous to remember the past only
for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Links for the Week – November 18, 2006

This is Our Tomorrow, Today

Posted on November 16, 2006 by Dave Pollard

World Population
This is a grim post. Those easily depressed might want to give it a pass.

By the end of this century, our planet will have, depending on who you believe, and on the impact of any global catastrophes, between nine and fourteen billion people. North America’s population, barring physical and military blockades blocking access by billions of desperate immigrants, will soar to between one and one and a half billion, with all of the increase from today’s levels attributable to immigration. North America’s metropolitan areas will grow rather more slowly than those in struggling nations, but will on average be five times larger than they are now in population, and thanks to urban sprawl, seven to ten times larger in area.

Your reaction is probably to say “it will never happen, it’s inconceivable”. That’s what the planners said in 1980 when these kind of projections were made for Lagos, Nigeria. It was unimaginable that a city that in 1950 contained merely 300 thousand people would grow, in half a century, to become the world’s third largest and still fastest growing city at 15 million people, increasing by a million people per year.

But, as George Packer reports in a stunning report in this week’s New Yorker (not available online) this is precisely what has happened.
loagos packer by samantha appleton
photo from the New Yorker by Samantha Appleton

Lagos is a city that most of its own residents acknowledge to be hell on Earth, but still struggle and scrape through each day with the grim determination to survive and, just maybe, buck all the odds and climb out of destitution. This is a city of staggering inequality and inequity, with a Gini index nearing a ‘perfect’ 1.0 — almost all the wealth is held by a tiny minority of corrupt officials, criminals and mob leaders, and corruption and crime pervades all economic activity. This is a city of horrific and constant violence and the threat of violence — dead and mutilated human bodies are ignored the way we ignore roadkill. This is a city of absolute hierarchy — everyone is in thrall to those (ogas, — literally ‘masters’) one step higher in the pyramid, from whom they get ‘security’ and a chance at the few pitiful jobs, and to whom they pay 90% of what they earn. This pyramid is entirely unofficial, but ironclad — the cost of disregarding it is often your life. The struggle to survive is a 24/7 ordeal, so that, as one of the people in Packer’s report puts it, in Lagos, “if you sit down, you die”.

This is a city that doesn’t have slums, it is a slum, all fifteen million people in every quarter of the city. It is a city where garbage and sewage and toxic waste is everywhere, where clean running water and flush toilets are virtually non-existent. Where disease is everywhere and ever-threatening. Where pollution is so bad that residents’ faces are grey. Where police, authorities and gangs all extort money from anyone who wants anything or dares to enter their turf. Where fuel dumps and waste fuel spills lit afire constantly light up the night and choke the lungs with toxins. Where the only significant change from year to year are the endless streams of new immigrants and the building husks left behind from rampant arson. Where most of the population sleeps outdoors, often surrounded by mosquitos, garbage and sewage. Where gang wars between Moslems and Christians, often precipitated by trivial events, kill thousands.

Packer says “the human misery of Lagos not only overwhelms one’s senses and sympathy but also seem irreversible”. He quotes a city district senior administrator who describes the city as “an impending disaster…a powder keg…it’s just going to boil over” as it grows to 23 million people by 2015, and by another million a year after that.

When Packer asked the editor of the city’s largest newspaper what keeps the people of Lagos going, when they have no homes, no basic government services, no utilities, no jobs, and no order or security, he replies “They never believe there’s no chance”. Religion is big business in Lagos, and the people not only cling to the hope of salvation in the afterlife, they cling to the promise of capitalism and civilization that if they work hard enough they will succeed in pulling themselves out of their desperate situation. Both promises seem leaps of impossible faith, since there is no evidence anywhere to support either of them. This, it seems, is the nature of humanity — no matter how far we fall from the grace of a joyful, easy, natural life, no matter how grim and brutal and full of pain and suffering our lives are, we plug on, never seeing how far we are from where we once were, never giving up, never becoming so full of grief for what we have lost, and forgotten, as to diminish our faith that, despite the fact that what we have been doing has got us into desperate straits, doing a little bit more of it will somehow get us out, lead us to salvation.

We have no choice in this. This is who we are.

I read this report right after re-reading Tom Robbins delightful article In Defiance of Gravity, in which he describes how he overcame near-suicidal depression and weltschmerz and rediscovered crazy wisdom, “the wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything”. I have tried to embrace this wisdom, but it provides no protection against the bleak vision of the future that Packer presents to us.

If we are be joyful in spite of everything we must do it the way John Gray suggests: do nothing more than becoming more our animal selves — reconnecting with the rest of life on Earth and with our primeval senses and instincts, getting outside our heads, coping with contingencies, relearning to play, living in the moment, turning back to real, mortal things, and simply seeing what is. That means giving up trying to save the world, and just working to make things better within our own communities, and creating working models that might be useful for those of our species that survive the fall. To some extent that means we have to “avert our gaze” from the truth of what we have done and what is likely to come. If we are not insane already, staring too long or too closely at that horrific truth will surely plunge us over the edge. And then we won’t be of any use to anyone.

So here’s to seeing the truth and then turning away. We have so much work to do. And so much of life’s joys to experience, while we can.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 11 Comments

Effective Presentations — More Than One Way to Impress an Audience

Posted on November 15, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Jon Stewart Richard AvedonKathy Sierra’s post on how to start a presentation or novel is inspired, but it’s not for everyone. As I mentioned in my last post, people read, listen and pay attention for two reasons: to be informed, or to be entertained. If you can do both, you’re laughing (and more talented than I am). What’s important is that you do at least one of the two: inform, or entertain.

Kathy’s six elements of an entertaining presentation, book, film or story are right on: provoke, empathize, amuse, surprise, suspend, and engage the emotions. This is especially true for fiction, but it also works for non-fiction. The most successful business gurus do more than inform — they rock the room. Love him or hate him, Michael Moore entertains an audience while he informs them. So does Jon Stewart.

But suppose you’re Al Gore rather than Jon Stewart — what do you do? If you’re wise, you do three things:
  • You make it clear that you’re there to inform, rather than entertain. Those seeking entertainment will stay away, instead of falling asleep or walking out.
  • You inform your audience brilliantly.
  • You do some little things that are unambitiously entertaining — include a relevant cartoon or video or a funny story (and rehearse it so it is funny).
From years on the speaker’s circuit, getting slowly better at it (and occasionally hitting a home run) I’ve learned I am not an entertaining speaker, but I can be a competently informative one. So here’s my advice to those who have something important to say, but aren’t the wittiest at saying it. Consider it a sequel to Kathy’s post:
  1. Do your homework. Know your subject extremely well. Rehearse with people who are hard to dazzle with new information, until they’re impressed. 
  2. Pick your venues, know your audience. If the conference is full of bored people who are only there because it’s a company-paid jaunt, pass. No point being knowledgeable if the audience isn’t interested in learning. Talk to them before your presentation to find out what they know and what they care about.
  3. Give ’em lots of new stuff. I always have twice as much new, interesting material as I expect to be able to present. I don’t let on that I have a lot of slides that I can show (I rarely get to all of them). I put most of the best stuff at the beginning, and save the very best to last, skipping stuff in the middle that won’t fit. I move at a fairly fast clip, but if people have questions, I let them come. 
  4. Make sure your information is practical and useful. Some abstract new concept may be interesting to you, and a few in the audience, but most of us are looking for something we can apply in our jobs or our lives. If it’s not obvious, it’s even OK to suggest to people how the information you’re conveying can be used. If there are free downloads or other ‘takeaway’ tools you can point them to that can help them use the information, that’s even better.
  5. No bullet point slides. Interesting, relevant pictures, graphics, screen-shots. Give the audience something to look at, but force them to listen to you at the same time.
  6. Give ’em lots of handouts. Not the entire text of your presentation — other stuff that adds to it. Reading lists. Related articles. Copies of especially good graphics. Hotlinks to sites with further information and tools and demos they can try out on their own time.
  7. Go with the flow. In a small group, if they’re really engaged, my objective is to turn the presentation into a group conversation. After giving them some new/interesting information at the start of the presentation (and handing out a bunch more) I’ll toss out a question and, if there’s a lot of discussion, I’ll just moderate and facilitate, keeping it going as long as there’s energy around it. Sometimes the audience has more to teach each other than I have to offer them. Those who don’t want to participate can read the stuff I’ve handed out. In a larger group, I leave time and room for a couple of interesting diversions (which, if I’ve done my homework, I can usually anticipate and plan for). I ask the audience if they’re interested in the tangents I’ve planned for, and if I get a lot of nods, I’ll go there — it’s a way of making a large audience feel involved in the flow. If I get no response, I’ll stay with the original agenda.
  8. Use multimedia. Relevant visualizations and short video clips that make your point make a nice break from the static. Dave Snowden showed the famous Daniel Simons “basketball” observation skills video last week, and people were talking about it for the rest of the conference. I showed the India traffic video to demonstrate complex adaptive systems.
  9. Speak enthusiastically and passionately. This can be hard if, like me, you don’t sleep well in hotels and on planes and you’re a bit weary when you step up to the podium. Or if you’re not used to speaking and are nervous. But it’s important. If you don’t sound interested or intrigued by your subject, you can’t expect your audience to be.
  10. Tell stories — about how the information you’re giving has been practically applied, or (if you prefer war stories to success stories) how it should have been applied. Stories from your own experience are best, but second-hand stories are OK too.
As Kathy says, you need to get the audience hooked from the beginning, so hit them with something really interesting right from the start. But keep another ‘wow’ for the very end, just before you conclude by reiterating how useful everything you’ve told them could be, if they act on it appropriately.

It’s worked for me, anyway — I’m a clumsy speaker and storyteller, but I get pretty high marks, and repeat invitations, for most of my presentations. I’ve even had a couple of standing O’s. And it only took me 50 years.

Good show, everyone.

Photo of Jon Stewart is by the late Richard Avedon, part of an unfinished collection on campaign 2004.

Posted in Working Smarter | 1 Comment

Ontario Buys Voting Machines for Municipal Elections

Posted on November 15, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Imagine my surprise when I voted last Monday and discovered that I had to insert my ballot in an electronic tabulating machine. If the horrific lessons from the US were not enough, the government of Quebec has banned the use of these machines after last year’s experience, acknowledged by the provincial government as a “fiasco” that produced results that the Chief Electoral Officer admitted did “not offer sufficient guarantees of transparency and security to ensure the integrity of the vote”, seriously eroded voter confidence, took longer and cost 25% more than the paper system (that worked just fine) that it replaced. The long litany of problems with the machines included:
  • Machines misread ballots.
  • A backup plan covering all possible problems was missing.
  • The lack of paper ballots in some municipalities prevented judicial recounts.
  • Only partial testing of the voting machines took place in some instances.
I’m at a loss to understand why so many Ontario municipalities agreed to use these machines, given this experience, and given the fact there was no problem with the existing manual system, which is used (for now at least) in all federal and provincial elections and which produces fast, inexpensive, accurate, verifiable results and is the envy of most of the Western world.

There’s a great Canadian blog covering this issue exclusively. The decision to use these machines in Ontario is made by the municipality — by the local incumbent politicians, not by an independent electoral commission. These are the same municipal politicians whose election campaigns are 90% funded by real estate developers. Yet this was not even mentioned as an election issue. In Caledon, the machine were bought from Dominion Voting Systems, who also runs the website where the official results are displayed. Their website contains no information on who owns them or who their executives are, though they do list the Conservative Party of Canada as a key client.

*Sigh* We take so much for granted. The election turnout in our area was 34%. The media said nothing about electronic voting or the blatant conflict of interest of almost all the incumbents whose campaigns were substantially financed by developers — developers who will soon be applying to these same politicians for zoning variances and other concessions to accelerate endless urban sprawl.

It’s only a democracy when you have a real choice, and the necessary information to exercise it.

Posted in How the World Really Works | Comments Off on Ontario Buys Voting Machines for Municipal Elections

Adding Meaning & Value to Information — Final Presentation

Posted on November 14, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Following is the gist of my recent presentation in San Jose on “Adding Meaning & Value to Information”.

Dave Snowden’s famous comment about knowledge is that “we know more than we can say, and we can say more than we can write down”. In his case it has taken him four years to write the book on complex adaptive systems that he teaches in a three day course, and in neither the book nor the course could he hope to explain more than a fraction of all that he has learned on the subject.

Those of us who manage written information therefore have a great challenge. How can we make what is written down more meaningful, more valuable? How can we make it “make more sense”? Here are ten principal ways to do so (the links in this chart are to illustrations or further discussions of each tool or skill):

Processes that Add Meaning to Information: Valuable ‘End-Products’ of these Processes: Some Tools and Learnable Skills Supporting these Processes:
1. Paying attention; being aware and mindful; not skimming Deeper understanding;
Works of art		 Training: attention skills; Meditation; Presence
2. Interpreting; Reflecting/considering; Drawing on examples from personal experience; Combining/integrating with other personal knowledge Insights

 Training: critical thinking; Desktop search tools (for combining); Consultation & conversation (e.g. book circles)
3. Synthesizing/distilling; Simplifying (without over-simplifying) Synopses Blogs/diaries; Cartoons; Mindmaps/concept maps; FAQs
4. Imagining; Applying Applications (real and potential); Practice Training: imaginative/ creative thinking; Creative writing
5. Modeling; Illustrating; Systems thinking; Mapping Representations & maps; Systems diagrams; Models Visualizations & graphics; Tables: Ecolanguage (animated visualizations); Single frames; Mapping/ systems thinking tools
6. Stories: Reading, hearing, internalizing, narrating, memorizing, retelling stories Memorable lessons/learnings; Vicarious experiences; Context Story templates/ models (myths, fables, storyboards etc.); Stories of all kinds and forms; Training: listening/ storytelling skills
7. Analyzing; Inferring significance & consequences; Deciding on resultant actions Implications; Action plans; Better basis for decisions Analytical report templates (structured thinking etc.)
8. Analogizing; Reorganizing; Restating (“in other words”); Re-enacting/re-framing Metaphors; Analogies; Allegories; Alternative perspectives; Shoe-on-the-other-foot POV Reframing tools (e.g. Lakoff’s work)
9. Recording; Photographing;
Observing first-hand		 Observations; Reviewable detailed recordings & transcripts; Interviews Mindmaps and other recording tools; Cameras & presence tools; Cultural anthropology tools
10. Conversing

 Others’ experiences, interpretations, perspectives & additional information All P2P communication tools (telephone etc.); Conversation tools (talking stick etc.); Directories & people-finders
11. Canvassing; Surveying Collective wisdom Canvassing tools, including wisdom of crowds, electronic markets
12. Collaborating Others’ ideas, perspectives & ideas Wikis, whiteboards, other virtual presence & collaboration tools; Open Space & other collaboration methods

Here’s an example of how these ten ways can be applied to some excellent, but unrefined and under-appreciated information: George Monbiot’s new book on global warming, Heat:

  1. Paying attention: Most of us only absorb a small proportion of what we read or see. Perhaps because we now deal with so much information, of which little is really important, our attention is so divided that we skim, and browse, everything, and therefore run the risk of missing what’s critical. Unless you’re a more skillful reader than I am, you need to read Monbiot’s book twice, carefully, to really appreciate his arguments, and also to appreciate their Achilles’ heel. While the book Presence is a bit new-agey for most businesspeople’s taste, it’s one approach to achieving a deeper understanding of information than most of us are capable of today. 
  2. Interpreting: It was when I started thinking about the leaks in my own house, relating Monbiot’s arguments to my personal situation, that they began to make more sense and take on a greater urgency. In addition, combining the information in Monbiot’s book (with the solutions to global warming) with that in Flannery’s The Weather Makers (about the causes of global warming) made both books more sensible.
  3. Synthesizing: A lot of people learn by distilling information down to its essence. That’s one of the reasons that a site like the hugely popular Peak Oil primer Energy Bulletin picked up my review of Monbiot’s book. Corporate think-tanks are beginning to use cartoonists to capture the key learnings of brainstorming sessions. And blogs are increasingly being used by three corporate constituencies (subject matter experts, newsletter editors and community of practice coordinators), even while most of the business world lags behind in adopting blogs as excellent means of synthesizing and adding context to corporate information.
  4. Imagining: As I read Monbiot’s book, I was constantly imagining (a) what the world would look like if his proposals were implemented, (b) what would need to happen here in Canada for his proposals to be implemented, and (c) what role I could play in getting them implemented. This imagining added greatly to my understanding of the book’s arguments, and the possibilities they present.
  5. Modeling: This visualization from a 1996 paper by Dennis Hartmann captures in one diagram a lot of information about the causes of global warming. Monbiot’s and Flannery’s books would both have been better if such visualizations had been included. While I was reading Heat I made systems thinking diagrams in the inside cover to increase my understanding of the book’s critical arguments. As another example, my appreciation of how societies develop self-managed rule-sets to cope with complex adaptive systems was greatly augmented by watching this video of traffic in uncontrolled intersections in India’s cities, and then reading the rules that make this apparent chaos work so well.
  6. Stories: Monbiot’s book includes many anecdotes, mostly about his own situation, that help add context and immediacy to his arguments, and make them more memorable. Dave Snowden and Steve Denning both have websites with excellent information on how to tell, and appreciate the meaning of, anecdotes and stories.
  7. Analyzing: As I read Heat, I used the Pyramid Principle structured thinking methodology to annotate the key points of the book. My synopsis and review of the book is the result, largely a transcription of my annotations. It’s how I recognize the implications of what I read — in effect, what it means.
  8. Analogizing: Monbiot doesn’t use analogies often, and hs work suffers for it. As I read the book, I was constantly restating what he was saying “in other words”. But I too have a lot to learn about developing and using effective metaphors. Unfortunately, the people I have known who use them the most, use them badly. They need to be developed carefully and thoughtfully, and used sparingly. The world needs more Lakoff, since good analogies start with being able to see things from different perspectives.
  9. Recording: If you’ve ever listened to, or watched, the tape of an event you attended live, you probably realize how much you miss, or get wrong, the first time around. I’ve started using mindmaps to document all my meetings, displaying them on screen at the front of the room so that errors and omissions can be picked up in real time. It’s an amazing, and humbling, experience. Thanks to training from Steelcase, I’ve also learned the valuable skill of cultural anthropology. Not only does this training hone your observation skills — it teaches you what to look for.
  10. Conversing: Since we first appeared on this planet, conversation has been the principal means by which we exchange context-rich information. And because it’s so effective (if time-consuming) it still is. I had a conversation with someone who had borrowed my copy of Heat shortly after I read it, and I think I learned more from that conversation than I did from reading the book. No wonder book circles are so popular.
  11. Canvassing: Prediction markets, which draw on the enlightened self-interest of the many, can glean collective intelligence that cannot be captured any other way. These are now a major focus of the Knowledge Management community, which sees them as one way to tap ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. The key to getting value from this wisdom is asking the right questions (appropriately ‘qualified’ crowds are best at answering closed-ended questions that ask for predictions, factual information, decisions, or root causes) of the right crowd (the largest possible number of objective, independent, basically-informed people, who are motivated to provide the best answer — often because, as employees or customers, they have a stake in the result).
  12. Collaborating: Of all the tools and techniques that can add meaning to information, this is the category that has the most promise and has been the most disappointing. Too many collaboration and ‘virtual presence’ tools are over-engineered, unintuitive, and too complicated to learn, and are therefore under-utilized. Even tools that offer the best features of wikis and other ‘groupware’  (like Jotspot — recently acquired by Google) are cumbersome and intimidating to the majority on the other side of the digital divide. But as they are made simpler and their more sophisticated features are shoved ‘under the hood’ their time will come. In the meantime, as soon as we develop greater skills in inviting and facilitating Open Space events, this methodology promises to help us understand and address complex problems far more effectively than any of the tools in our current toolkit.

Before these tools and techniques can begin to augment and partially supplant face-to-face conversations as a means of adding meaning and value to information, many more people need to become much more adept at using them. In my opinion, the best way organizations can do this is by reintermediating the role of the Information Professional:

  • Getting our librarians, front-line IT people, trainers and other back-office information professionals away from their desks and content management jobs and out in the field learning how front-line people in the organization use information and technology, helping them use it more effectively, and determining what information, in what formats, they find most valuable;
  • Training these IPs to use the tools and techniques listed above, getting them to apply this learning to the information that passes through their hands so that, in the hands of its requesters and ultimate recipients, it becomes much more intelligible, useful and valuable;
  • Enabling the IPs to teach these newly-acquired skills to the people on the front lines, so they too can get more meaning from information and add more value to it as they pass it on in turn; and
  • Involving the IPs in the design and development of new tools and techniques that add meaning and value to information — no one knows more than they do what is most needed.

The great challenge in this task is enlightening management — the majority of executives still seem to see IT as a means to disintermediate information and get rid of the IP role entirely. It has been my experience that no one in the modern organization is as under-utilized and under-appreciated as the information professional. To demonstrate this to senior management, IPs themselves will have to take the initiative, championing small-scale experiments that use some of the above-mentioned tools and techniques, and demonstrating how much value they can add. The peer-to-peer networks of IPs are very strong (perhaps due to the fact that no one else in most organizations knows or cares much about what IPs do), so I’m optimistic that, by working collaboratively, IPs will be very successful introducing such initiatives and experiments, and will ultimately take their rightful place as the highly-valued stewards of the modern organization’s most important and strategic resource — what it knows.

Boy, writing an article like this really makes me appreciate the truth of the statement in its second paragraph above — it takes a lot longer than actually delivering the presentation!

Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

My HP Laptop Will Be In For Repair for 2-3 More Weeks

Posted on November 14, 2006 by Dave Pollard
No I don’t have my HP laptop back yet — it’s going to take another 2-3 weeks to get the part in. So in the meantime I’ll be composing blog posts on another PC and loading them onto my crippled HP to upload them. Expect posting and e-mail response to remain sporadic until early December. This is intolerable! We need to create a domestic manufacturing industry that reintroduces pride and quality of workmanship, even if it means much higher prices. Updates to my HP experience will be posted to the comments thread to this post untilit’s fixed or I give up and buy a Mac. Sheesh!

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 2 Comments