Author: Richard

“I am one of those who thinks the creative process is directly related to the amount of time one spends mulling something over. I come back and revisit ideas, data, thoughts, all the time. I think this keeps key semantic networks active and then “bingo” an inconsistency or consistency suddenly presents itself to consciousness and the beginnings of a new idea appear.”
Michael Gazzaniga

“… The ability to pay attention, to focus, to concentrate, to resist distractions, is as essential to the design process as it is to successful life in general. It is the quality of attention that distinguishes design detail, that enables an architect to design a building that belongs where it is. For attention to detail does not mean fussiness, but an appropriate locating of energies.
In the end, it is something very close to grace.”
Ralph Caplan, “Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects”, Fairchild Publications, 2006, pp247
ISBN 1 56367 390 8

The other day I was walking down to the shops, pondering why I had become so optimistic about the future of the human race, when the name “Alvin Toffler” popped into my mind. Now I hadn’t thought about Toffler for a long time – in fact I assumed that he was one of those once fashionable figures who had since disappeared from public consciousness. Doing a little, quick research I found his and his wife and co-author, Heidi’s, website, which showed that they were still producing books, making public appearances and so on.
But, before I began my research I dug out a battered copy of his “Third Wave”, which was first published twenty eight years ago. In some respects it shows its age, but the characteristic that I suspect prompted his name to pop into my head still holds. Maybe it’s because of his Marxist background (long since renounced), but he is very good at capturing the ebb, flow, contradictions and clashes of the human activity that make up and shape our world.
You get some sense of this in a quote I used a couple of times way back when in “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now?” and “Managing Creativity” from his “Previews and Premises”, which was my favourite of his early books, which I found much sharper than some of his other writing because it is in the form of a dialogue between him and the left-leaning South End Press:
“It’s the computer – but it’s not just the computer. It’s the biological revolution – but it’s not just the biological revolution. It’s the shift in energy forms. It’s the new geopolitical balance in the world. It’s the revolt against patriarchy. It’s credit cards plus video games plus stereo plus Walkman units. It’s localism plus globalism. It’s smart typewriters and information workers and electronic banking. It’s the push for decentralization. At one end it’s the space shuttle – at the other the search for individual identity. It’s flex-time and robots and the rising militancy of black and brown and yellow people on the planet. It’s the combined impact of all these forces converging on and shattering our traditional industrial way of life. Above all, it’s the acceleration of change, itself, which marks our moment in history.”
Alvin Toffler, “Previews and Premises”, Pan Books Ltd, 1984 ISBN 0 330 28421 5
Flicking through “The Third Wave” I found a number of prescient passages, but since I hate typing out other people’s text I’ll restrict my quotes to this one, which seems the most pertinent to our situation now:
“The responsibility for change, therefore, lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means fighting off the idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be. It means fighting for freedom of expression – the right of people to voice their ideas, even if heretical.
Above all, it means starting this process of reconstruction now, before the further disintegration of existing political systems sends the forces of tyranny jackbooting through the streets, and makes impossible a peaceful transition to twenty-first century democracy.
If we begin now, we and our children can take part in the exciting reconstitution not merely of our obsolete political structures, but of civilization itself.
Like the generation of the revolutionary dead, we have a destiny to create.”
Alvin Toffler, “The Third Wave”, Pan Books, 1981, pp453, ISBN 0 330 26337 4

“Those of us who aspire to a life of Purposive Drift, try to cultivate habits of mind that allow us, from time to time, to seek experiences that reveal opportunities for well-being that lie outside our immediate context or sit concealed and unnoticed within the pattern of our everyday lives. Habits of mind that encourage us to think of our lives as a series of experiments that provide valuable information about what we like and what we don’t, what we value and what we shun, and what we want and what we don’t. Valuable information that informs how we make it up as we go along and takes account of the richness and variety of the world in which we live.”
I wrote this about eighteen months ago. Things looked very different then. For a start, I had no idea that a year later I would find myself caught up in issues around my health or rather lack of it, which has impacted fairly heavily on the kind of experiments in living I have been able to conduct.
The other stuff, collapsing house prices, threats of recession and so on I had been anticipating – that wasn’t rocket science, busts always follow booms. I had even made plans to insulate my family and myself from some of its effects. Like many such plans the tricky bit is getting the timing and the details of a coming crisis right. Like most people, that’s the bit I invariably get wrong and like many others got wrong this time too.
So whereas at the time I wrote that passage I was anticipating some major shifts in my context and a whole new set of things to explore, instead, eighteen months later I find myself more else in the same place with the central issue being getting by.
But the big surprise for me, which I still find hard to articulate, is the way that I am seeing the waves of bad economic and financial news as being a positive process opening up spaces for new ways to think about and act in the world. Stuff that has been bubbling away under the surface for years if not decades is now seeming ever more relevant. Voices of people, who have been out of the mainstream, such as Russell Ackoff, Jane Jacons, Geoffrey Vickers, Gregory Bateson and Meg Wheatley, indeed all those people from many different fields, who have been thinking in terms of systems and networks.
So here we are in the middle of 2008 and quite unexpectedly I find myself feeling that we are entering one of the most exciting periods in human history, The transition from a civilisation based on selling the family silver – consuming fossil fuels that took ten of thousands of years to form in some thing like two centuries – to a civilisation with some kind of long term future is one that will require all the creativity, imagination and enterprise we can muster. But what an exciting, inspiring project.
Of course, we may have left it too late, but despite all the obstacles, I am still optimistic that we will muddle through.
Which is more or less how I feel about my own future. My nice neat plans may have crumbled and with them the easy solutions have all evaporated. Now it is time for a bit of improvised getting by, bracketing the anxieties that accompany getting by and cultivating a mode of just driftin’ in an alert kind of way, watching out for those unexpected opportunities that a bit of driftin’ invariably reveal.

Wandering over to John Winsor’s blog via metacool, I found this great piece on the value of slowing down. In it he describes how by slowing down in his training his fitness is improving and how the same thing applies in his business activities. Read it here.

Nick Currie’s “Click Opera” is one of my regular reads that I don’t think I’ve mentioned here before. He’s an interesting guy and well worth reading. What really caught my fancy today was a post of his from a couple of days ago where he is talking about one of those below the surface trends that may be very significant. Apparently car ownership in Japan has fallen has fallen dramatically since 1990 – “The decline in sales since 1990 is equivalent to one big car company like Mitsubishi or Honda being wiped out entirely.” Interestingly, this trend is most pronounced among the young. You can read the whole thing here

Just discovered (via Neuroanthropology) a fascinating paper on the so called placebo effect.
Early on the the authors, Daniel E. Moerman, PhD, and Wayne B. Jonas, MD, assert:
“The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that placebos do not cause placebo effects. Placebos are inert and don’t cause anything.”
They then go on to argue, with a number of examples, that it would be more fruitful to look at the so called placebo effect in terms of what a treatment means to patients and how that impacts on their recovery, both positively and negatively – the meaning effect.
And conclude:
“… as we have clarified, routinized, and rationalized our medicine, thereby relying on the salicylates and forgetting about the more meaningful birches, willows, and wintergreen from which they came —in essence, stripping away Plato’s “charms”—we have impoverished the meaning of our medicine to a degree that it simply doesn’t work as well as it might any more. Interesting ideas such as this are impossible to entertain when we discuss placebos; they spring readily to mind when we talk about meaning.”
(Do scroll down and read Dan Moerman’s comments on the Neuroanthropology post – much to reflect on here)

Yesterday I was urging my readers to go to the ChangeThis site to help push Russell Ackoff’s and Daniel Greenberg’s “Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track” up ChangeThis’s most popular lists. There are important ideas in there that deserve a wider currency.
Today I am back on Ackoff. Over the years I have picked up a number of insights and ideas from him, but he was always in my peripheral vision – I had never read any of his books or heard him speak, the bits I had got were from the odd article or paper I picked up from time to time.
Yesterday I spent some delightful time watching a video of a workshop he gave at Chicago-Kent College of Law at the end 2000. If you are interested in trying to understand how the world works and more importantly what to do to change it to make it a little bit better, this is must watch stuff. Apart from rather tedious introductory stuff that goes on too long, once he begins to speak it is is gem after gem. Funny, wise and inspirational, put aside some time, go there and pay attention. I learnt a lot, I expect that you would too.
You can get to it here.

Russell Ackoff has long been one of my favourite management thinkers, so when I saw his name attached to a paper on ChangeThis, “Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track” I instantly downloaded it. I wasn’t disappointed. The analysis he and coauthor, Daniel Greenberg, provide is filled with insights and wisdom. Here is its opening:
“Education should be a lifelong enterprise, a process enhanced by an environment that supports to the greatest extent possible the attempt of people to “find themselves” throughout their lives.
For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists, extinguishing their creativity and instilling values antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. The principal objective of education as currently provided is to ensure the maintenance and preservation of the status quo—to produce members of society who will not want to challenge any fundamental aspects of the way things are. Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching, there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. Being taught is, to a very large extent, boring and much of its content is seen as irrelevant. It is the teacher, not the student, who learns most in a traditional classroom.”
Go to the Changethis site and download it here. After you have read it go back and e-mail copies to your friends. Let’s see if we can drive this one to the top of the ChangeThis’s lists of the most popular.

Today, while looking for something else on a long and circuitous journey through the web, I stumbled across this response by Dan Moerman to a talk by Nicholas Humphrey, “A Self worth having”. The talk and the responses are well worth spending some time to read carefully and to ponder, but it was Moerman’s take that gave me a real liberating buzz. (A reward for a bit of purposive drift?) I quote two key passages here, but do urge you to read the whole thing yourself:
“Consciousness is a gift, and perhaps one from the Devil. It makes no sense. Five thousand other mammals from platypus to dolphin manage without anything remotely like a human system of consciousness, language, meaning, recursion, uncountable sets, aesthetics, etc. Yes, all animals (mammals and planaria) probably have some sense of self (although in some cases, like slime molds, it’s hard to know where it would reside); all sexual animals, at least, communicate at least once in a while (well, oysters do it without much communication that makes any sense to me; so let me change it to “most sexual animals”). Some stuff may mean things to primates; although that obviously depends on the definition of “mean,” something that would be hard to discuss with the wisest chimpanzee (which is, I guess, the point). And, of course, I know lots of human beings who have utterly no sense at all of aesthetics, even if they can “talk,” in some sense of the word.”
And the kicker:
“So, given a) the astonishing persistence of non-individualized life, of life free of human-style consciousness (for tens of thousands of animal species, and hundreds of thousands of plant species), and b) the damage that we consciousness-rich persons have done to the whole ecosystem, to the evolutionary system which has been going on for a billion years (more damaging than a streaking asteroid, than a billion volcanos, than the drifting of continents; or whatever), it seems to me that we have to look at consciousness as not an evolutionary (and specifically adaptive) development (which Nick notes is incredibly hard to account for, in the way that we can account for other adaptations, like sickle cell anemia, or tool making), but an accident, or a gift, or both…”