“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the …
Back when I began this blog I called it “Parking Lot” which is a term in the facilitation world used for the list of things that we need to talk about at some point but just can’t get to right now. Now that I’m returning to the blog world I thought I would make a regular list of the things that have been accumulating in my own parking lot. So each time that list reaches ten, I’ll share them here. Here’s the first bunch. My buddy Tenneson Woolf shares a stab at Slice of LIfe writing, which is intriguing. A …
I’m moving these posts to Monday morning and will try to provide a theme each week to connect the five links. Enjoy. Dave Snowden’s 12 Shibboleth’s of Christmas Back in 2015, Dave Snowden took on 12 aspects of organizational and corporate culture that were basically enemies of complexity thinking. The list is still very valuable these days. In each post Dave offers the problem and the way complexity theory helps you do better. Evaluation and complexity – lesson from 5 big evaluations in the UK I’ve recently found the blog of Marcus Jenal, who is yet another guy who is …
Some interesting links that caught my eye this week. Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex? “It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I …
Thinking of resuming a weekly round up of links that have come through my feed in one way or another. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about these links, but I’m sure my readers would be interested in some of them. I’ll post a few each week, on Sunday evening, if that works for you all. Let me know if you’d welcome this as a little repeated pattern. Developing Human Capital: Moving from Extraction to Reciprocity in Our Organizational Relationships Careful about the terms you use and the metaphors that drive our thinking about “resources.” “Environmentalists and systems thinkers underscore …