Learning from the metaphors of living systems
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 12/03/10 at 08:03:24 amPhil Cubeta poses a set of very good questions about the language we use to think about organizational worlds. He challenges us to see the living systems view with these questions:
Questions
- When we adopt the language of social enterprise, or social investing, or a social capital markets do we embrace metaphors more sterile than those of the fox, loam, carrion, the crop, and the harvest?
- What is lost when our master metaphors are commercial?
- Can we engineer solutions to our ills, or can we only be cured?
- Might the cure be organic, from within, from sources that lie deep in literary and philosophical traditions, rather than those, or along with those, from business? For, of course, farming too is a challenging business.
- Is it the MBA, the prophet, the poet, or the farmer from whom you draw most hope?
- The MBA, the prophet, poet, or farmer - who best feeds your moral imagination?
And for inspiration he uses Wendel Berry’s beautiful poem The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
From the feed
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 12/03/10 at 08:03:23 amChewing on these:
- Performing the world is a conference in New York this fall.
- Teaching social media to environmental activists.
- Lianne Raymond gives the gift of words for International Women’s Day.
- Rob Paterson on new careers in sustainability.
- Andre Hardin posts an outstanding video of a Rube Goldberg machine from the band OK Go.
- Jordon Cooper with a nice find: a video about the photographer BlueJake of New York City.
Strategy, simplified
Posted by Chris Corrigan - 11/03/10 at 08:03:08 amJack Ricchiuto on simplifying strategy:
Every organization, and community, I work with on strategy is very relieved when I liberate them from the inane practice of traditional academic language in the process. I refuse to allow them to waste valuable time debating over the distinctions of: goal, objective, strategy, tactic, and night maneuvers. (I throw in the military reference to “night maneuvers” to inject humor into what is usually a very humorless and uninspired process - and it works.)
What do we do instead? We replace these never-agreed-upon jargon with complex words like: where, why, how, and what.
To be strategic, which is to in plain English is to say, proactive, is to talk about 4 things:
- Where do we want to be in 20 years?
- Why does that matter to us?
- How do we want to get there in the next 2 years? and
- What would be wise for us to do in the next 2 quarters (and weeks) to get there?
These simple and powerful questions give people a remarkable kind of alignment, velocity, and traction they are not used to in the process. What can I say? It works.
via jack/zen … zenext » Blog Archive » Strategy, simplified.
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.
