Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways, The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we …
My friend Bob Stilger writes today from the radiation fields of Fukushima where he has been joining people for the past year in the work of remaking lives after the tsunami and the meltdown. It’s worth heading over to his blog to follow his ongoing discoveries there, but here are some good bits from today’s posting: People are learning how to co-exist, and more, with the radiation. One story I heard was about a town that wanted to have a festival with an outside play area for their children. Playing on the ground has become prohibited. …
Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled. This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization. We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that …
Here is a case of getting seduced by the numbers and sucked into the wrong thinking. This article is looking for interesting ways to measure the growth of the global middle class. It does a generally poor job of it. The whole article is a bit of a dodge. Using made up numbers to render a quantifiable mark for an abstract concept, concluding in a blithe statement about a billion car pile up. But the money quote I think is in the conclusion, about what this materialist and upwardly mobile trend in the world says: The people of this burgeoning …
The Cynefin framework is helpful in making a distinction between the worlds of complicated problems and the worlds of complex ones. One simple distinction between these two worlds is the extent to which they can be known. In a complicated domain, the parameters of the problem can be known and several good practices can be hammered out, with largely knowable results. In the complex domain, the initial conditions are unknown and the results are unknown which is why small experiments designed to tell us more about what is going are very useful for creating emergent practice. Financial markets are famously …