Losing sight of being human
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 08/03/10 at 09:03:45 pmA nice indictment - chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov on the submission of creativity to the dull incrementalisim of logic models:
With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.
This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.
via The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books.
Open Space, Alaska Style
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 05/03/10 at 03:03:37 pm
From the feed
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 05/03/10 at 08:03:20 amBack to the weekly collection of interesting finds:
- Rob Paterson fins cool stuff on the new shape of non profit boards.
- Viv McWaters on how she decides to say yes to a job.
- Rolling Stone on Wall Street’s trickery.
- Harper’s on the junior hockey life in Flin Flon, late 1990s. No gold medal glamour there.
- New York Times on the sound of a close finish at the Olympics
- You Tube: a stunning clip of a high tension power line worker. Stunning
Things are different in Alaska
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 03/03/10 at 11:03:34 pmOn the stepe of the Chugach Mountains north of Anchorage.
I’m still trying to figure out Alaska. When i was here in 2002 I was up in Fairbanks, working largely with non-Native people doing peacemaking work in the school system. Fairbanks struck me as an interesting place, one in which you defintely had to have a deep intention to live in. I enjoyed the people and the land - which is incredible - and I liked the feel of the town, which in all of its glory and ugliness, felt like northern towns everywhere.
Anchorage is a different beast. There is very little beauty in it. It’s a pretty utilitarian place, especially once you leave the small core of downtown, which is actually full of little treasures like restaurants Orso and Ginger. Other than some ice sculptures and snow sculptures in a cool town square, it is mostly a city designed to huddle against the elements and get you from one place to another on four or more wheels. What pieces of interesteing difference there are - the Namaste Shangri-la curry house for example, or Ray’s Vietnamese - lie hidden away in cold suburban plazas surrounded by divided roads, equipment dealerships and super stores. There is community here for sure, and its a darn interesting one, but the physical look of the city leaves much to be desired.
But the land around here, the Chugak Mountains rising up behind us and the moose languidly traipsing across the frozen golf course in front of us, the majestic mud flats of Cook Inlet…all of that is very magical, very wild, very much a landscape that does not tolerate mindless interaction. It is important not to make mistakes here or do things that are out of alignment with what the land wants.
That is an art of course, and that is what we are learning here nrunning an Art of Hosting with 25 emerging Native leaers from all over the state, from the Arctic north slope, to the remote west coast on the Bering Strait, to the storm battered Aluetian Islands in the south, the rainsforests and glaciers of the south east panhandle and the little towns and villages on the braided rivers and folded mountains of the interior. The multiplicity of landscape here is reflected in the people, in the cultures that are in this room, in the questions that are among us and the gifts we are uncovering.
And I’m learning something about the state of Native life in Alaska too. Since 1971 when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement was reached, people have lived not so much as citizens of a community or members of a nation of Tribe, but as shareholders of a corporation. And as shareholders, the wealth of the land is reflected in the economic activity that is generated on that land. This has resulted in a number of swirling dynamics including accelerated prosperity of some Native communities while at the same time, degradation of the land and subsistence lifestyles are changing, and traditional cultural values meet wealth and the easy money of corporate dividends, with the dividends winning out. One of our participants is active in the middle of a massive project between local communities and the proponent of a gold/copper.molybdenum mine called the Pebble Prospect that would combine an open pit and a shaft system in the lake country above Bristol Bay, which is home to one of the most prolific and diverse wild salmon runs left on the planet. People are largely lined up against the proposal which stands to affect the salmon and the water and land to the worse, and already jewlers from the UK, the USA and Europe are pledging not to use gold from that mine, but it is not so easy to be black and white when you are a local person whose communities could benefit for a long time from the wealth created from a mine like that. Being shareholders of corporations brings people into a very different relationship with their land. Better vs. worse, good vs. bad, becomes a slippery polarity. Even when it seems obvious what to do.
I have long been suspicious of the benefits of easy and steady money schemes in Native communities like casinos and, here in Alaska, the corporate structure. There is no denying that they provide money and resources to people who would otherwise be victims and marginal to the massive development taking place around them, but at what price? When your citizenship becomes tied to a dividend paying share, what is the incentive to work for democratic participation? In Alaska the power lies with structures that pay the people. Even the state government does it, with benefits paid to Alaska citizens from the royalties from oil and gas and mineral development. How does a government compete with a corporation when both take on the characteristics of each other? What does it mean to be a citizen? Who guards the culture? Who guards the past and the connection to the land? Does it even matter anymore? To the young emerging leaders I am working with, and to their families and children, it matters a lot.
Big questions alive in this big country. Taking my cue from Africa, where truth is not scarificed at the alter of a happy ending, I notice that finding the truth in all of this is that perhaps what Native people are trying to here is find the best bad ending to deal with, and as the long term evolves, sustain what is needed so that when it all goes away, there is still abundance left.
Open Space - The Power of Self-Organization
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 01/03/10 at 11:03:59 pmJutta Weimar’s New Video: “Open Space - The Power of Self-Organization”.
Outwitted
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 27/02/10 at 09:02:14 amA short poem from Edwin Markham, called “Outwitted”:
He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
Hat tip to my friend Janie Leask in Alaska, who posted this on her facebook wall.
What Do We Measure and Why?
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 26/02/10 at 02:02:29 pmMeg Wheatley on great questions to ask as we think about measurement, especially in complex living systems (like human communities):
Who gets to create the measures? Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work. Any group can benefit from others’ experience and from experts, but the final measures need to be their creation. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know a great deal about what is significant to measure.
How will we measure our measures? How can we keep measures useful and current? What will indicate that they are now obsolete? How will we keep abreast of changes in context that warrant new measures? Who will look for the unintended consequences that accompany any process and feed that information back to us?
Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid? Are they open enough? Do they invite in newness and surprise? Do they encourage people to look in new places, or to see with new eyes?
Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to develop, to grow into the purpose of this organization? Will this particular information help individuals, teams, and the entire organization grow in the right direction? Will this information help us to deepen and expand the meaning of our work?
What measures will inform us about critical capacities: commitment, learning, teamwork, quality and innovation? How will we measure these essential behaviors without destroying them through the assessment process? Do these measures honor and support the relationships and meaning-rich environments that give rise to these behaviors?
These are great questions to consider at the Show Me The Change conference in Melbourne as we dive into questions on the implications for complexity on the measurements used to evaluate change in living and complex systems.
Mastering invitation
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 26/02/10 at 02:02:26 pmIn May I am co-hosting a conference in Australia with Geoff Brown, Viv McWaters, Anne Pattillo and Johnnie Moore on evaluating behaviour change in sustainability initiatives. Sounds dry eh?
Well I invite you to visit Geoff’s blog to view the invitation and the slideshow he has put together that provides some context for the gathering and adopts the playful and exploratory tone of the conference we are designing: Show Me The Change is “coming ‘atcha live” | Yes and Space.
Working with Geoff is great because he has a terrific facility with all kinds of social media, including a mastery of powerpoint that shoud be a required skill for anyone entering the working world. Taken together with the conference website, he is spearheading a great invitation process tat communicates the intention of the gathering and sets the tone for participation. Just seeing how we have put together the invitation process and what it looks like should be an inspiration to others, taking us beyond the Save The Date notices, emailed brochures and static conference websites that are little more than a notice board posting in cyberspace.
Working on this conference is expanding my edges around invitation and harvesting, and I’m having fun playing into what we are doing.
Why Olympians matter
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 25/02/10 at 01:02:15 pmClara Hughes, one of Canada’s all time great athletes, wrapped up her competitive career yesterday with a bronze metal in speed skating. In her press conference she had this to announce:
The international media and Olympic visitors noticed the Downtown Eastside.
So did the five-time Olympian who carried Canada’s flag in the opening ceremony.
Winnipeg’s Clara Hughes won bronze in 5,000-metre speedskating on Wednesday at the Richmond Olympic Oval and donated her $10,000 bonus to the Take A Hike Foundation. The charity runs outdoor recreation programs for inner-city youths.
“I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Downtown Eastside in my little car. I will never forget seeing people suffer so much,” Hughes said in a Canadian Olympic Committee news conference.
“People were just shells of themselves and I couldn’t believe the situation, this reality, exists in Canada. It was surreal, I felt like I was in a movie set.”
Hughes said she can leave Vancouver knowing that she “didn’t just come here and skate in circles.”
I am in Seattle today with a friend of mine, Bob Stilger, and he shared a great reflection with me. He said he was amazed that the Vancouver games have not made a secret of homelessness and poverty in the Downtown Eastside, and he was impressed that the media had covered the story of Canada’s pooerest postal code and that people were out there protesting and telling their stories. He was inspired to tell that story as a way of encouraging others to take advantage of major events and festivals to talk about what is really going on. High marks to Vancouver for not burying the issue, he said.
Back during the Summer Olympics of 2004 I made a passionate argument for why we should spend public money supporting Olympic athletes. The essence of that argument was that the discipline and practice of transforming oneself towards excellence builds a remarkable capacity to see that possibility in others. Today, Clara Hughes confirmed my hunch, and in so doing challenged all of us not to skate in circles about poverty and homelessness.
After the games are over, there will be deep cuts to services and staff who work with the most vulnerable people in our society. Will you rest on your laurels or take Clara Hughes example to heart and put your money where your mouth is? If you are looking for ways to contribute time and expertise and money to good efforts in the downtown eastside, let me know. If you are interested in the issue of violence against Aboriginal women, there is an Open Space coming up in teh spring that will address that issue and we are looking for wanyone who wants to help to come out and be a part of making new solutions in a world of diminishing resources.
Way to go Clara!
Patterns of leading in networks
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 25/02/10 at 12:02:03 pmFrom a recent Art of Hosting in Sweden comes a learning from some young leaders thinking about how to lead in networks:
1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.
2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?
3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)
4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts
5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.
6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.
7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.
via How to lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona | Monkey Business.