It’s no surprise to me that people are usually afraid of self-organizing behaviour. This video of typical traffic on a street in India shows why self-organization can be scary.
But the other thing to also notice is how well it works. In the comments on the video, someone remarks that 230 people a day die on Indian roads. But in a population of 1 billion people, this has to be close to or lower than the rate in Canada. And considering what this video shows – the near misses and cars driving the worng way and pedestrians weave through traffic, that’s remarkable.
At WorldChanging you will find a link to an amazing site of visualizations of complex networks.
What is especially interesting to me about these maps is how many of them are actually
hierarchical. Many of these maps show complex relationships, but they do so in a flattened way. For example, this diagram (at right) is a radial representation of an organizational map from 1924. On the face of it it looks radically different, but in fact it is a relatively well formed hierarchy with single reporting relationships and only a cursory acknowledgment of horizontal organizational structure in management.
Non-hierarchical, emergent systems are represented well on the site, with this example of a neuron map of a worm brain being really fascinating.
Some of the maps at the site capture complexity in another dimension by creating living maps that change with your focus, like this map of del.icio.us links that you can customize for your own bookmarks.
Finally there are flow chart systems like the ones on world government that seek to understand complex systemic processes
I’m reposting this list holus bolus from Peter Levine’s blog. It’s an excellent summary of what we can expect from volunteer networks, and very top of mind for me at the moment:
1) Volunteers will plan and run meetings and conferences, even doing hard, detailed work on invitation lists, agendas, and menus. But they will not reliably write up the results of meetings for public distribution. After a meeting, writing feels like a chore, and there’s usually no specific deadline. Therefore, many meetings leave no tangible public record.2) Volunteers will write grant proposals, because proposals are plans that determine the work that will actually be done later on. However, they will not do the other work involved required to obtain grants, such as identifying potential funders. If they have their own contacts with foundations, most won’t share them.3) Volunteers will handle pleasant human interactions, but will avoid difficult relationships.
4) Volunteers may provide regular, written information under their own names and control, but few will contribute in a sustained way to collective writing projects. That problem can be overcome with scale but is serious in small networks.
5) Volunteers will generate wonderful ideas but are much less likely to implement them.
Tags: networks, volunteering, learning
Submitted for your consideration, as they used to say on The Twilight Zone…
I am a newcomer to the notion of “morphogenetic fields” – basically fields that contain information whereby social or biological structures take shape (see more at Wikipedia)- but whether they exist or not I’m keenly aware of something like that happening in working with groups.
Yesterday I was working with a small group and we saw something happen that surprised me. The field within which we are working is philanthropy and we are designing a program that will help Aboriginal non-profits develop capacity. This work is supported by foundations and other funding and has a great deal of goodwill associated with it. Our work has taken us into designing a program that is based on sharing, free exchange of materials and learning and funding. Our language is full of the language of gifting, sharing and capacity building.
The participants in our design consultation groups were given an honorarium for being in attendance, and yesterday several of those participants donated their honorarium to one organization that provides meals to homeless folks. The gesture was out of the blue, and had no connection to what we were talking about when the first person volunteered their money. That made me curious about where the volition for doing so had sprung from.
I think that as a facilitator, a lot had to do with how we were shaping space, or shaping the field. The conversations throughout the day were about this very thing, and then to have the behaviour manifest so clearly and so out of the blue made me wonder about the power of shaping space, awakening moments, and working with morphogenetic fields. Several folks have been commenting here recently about this idea of shaping space and awakening moments. Here is a concrete example of how doing so creates emergent phenomena like the sudden donation of $500 to a mobile soup kitchen.
Categories: facilitation, gift, morphogenetic+fields,
Before I took off to the Evolutionary Salon last week I blogged about Sarvodaya.
Today I have been scouring recent postings at the Sarvodaya blog and I find this, from Deepak Chopra’s comments to a Sarvodaya Peace dialogue:
Today we are shifting from the industrial age to the information age. Today wealth and power come from Information Technology. And Information Technology has become very powerful today. In a few years it will become even more powerful. It will be possible for anyone to have this kind of computer in their pocket and interfere with air traffic. It will be possible through handheld implements to make nuclear stations leak and cut off electricity. And when that happens we will make ourselves extinct because we have powerful technology combined with ancient habits.But Dr. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya are giving us a new model and this is saying that we have to move from the age of information to the age of knowledge. And we have to move from the age of knowledge to the age of wisdom. When you saw those slides on the screen, you saw a model that was based on the wisdom of civilization. And this wisdom and this civilization say one thing and one thing only: that the future does not belong to the survival of the fittest, but that it belong to the survival of the wisest. Survival of the wisest will become the new criteria for evolution. It is a new civilization based on wisdom-based consciousness, a wisdom-based economy, and a wisdom-based power structure and leadership, the three pillars that you saw in the slide from Sarvodaya, which are economy, consciousness, and power. This wisdom therefore is the most important thing that we seek in our lives today. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Lord Buddha said that the world is about interdependence; the environment, the forces of nature, and human consciousness are all part of one single reality. And today many scientists are talking about interdependent co-arising. But this interdependent co-arising gives birth to a field of consciousness that should make this change.
What can we do to nurture the evolution of the wisdom-based age? I am most interested in ways of being together in groups, communities, families and other aggregations, but also in what wisdom looks like in the structures that support those groups, structures like money, power, the natural world and information. Those of you that have read along with me for a while will know of my ongoing inquiry into philanthropy, decentralized governance, learning from the natural world and our stories about the natural world, and peer to peer ways of connecting. Where is your edge of inquiry around this question?