Author: Richard

A few nights ago I received an encouraging e-mail from David Zinger saying that he had enjoyed reading my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”. He went on to say that it reminded him of two sources, Phil Simmons who wrote “Learning to Fall” before he died and H. B. Gelatt’s “Positive Uncertainty”. I intended to follow up on the “Positive Uncertainty” lead because it does seem to have very strong links with my thinking about Purposive Drift. But what really struck me was the Phil Simmons piece, which, perhaps in deeper way, links with my concerns. What he has to say about “mystery” resonates very strongly with my sense of Purposive Drift:
“…I’m writing, I suppose, to say that life is not a problem to be solved. What do I mean by that? Surely life presents us with problems. When I have a toothache, I try to think rationally about its causes. I consider possible remedies, their costs and consequences. I might consult an expert, in this case a dentist, who is skilled in solving this particular sort of problem. And thus we get through much of life. As a culture we have accomplished a great deal by seeing life as a set of problems to be solved. We have invented new medicines, we have traveled to the moon, developed the computer on which I am writing this essay. We learned our method from the Greeks. From childhood on we are taught to be little Aristotles. We observe the world, we break down what we see into its component parts. We perceive problems and set about solving them, laying out our solutions in ordered sequences like the instructions for assembling a child’s bicycle. We have gotten so good at this method that we apply it to everything, and so we have magazine articles telling us the six ways to find a mate, the eight ways to bring greater joy into your life, the ten elements of a successful family, the twelve steps toward spiritual enlightenment. We choose to see life as a technical matter.
And here is where we go wrong. For at its deepest levels life is not a problem, but a mystery. The distinction, which I borrow from the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, is fundamental: problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not. Personally, I wish I could have learned this lesson more easily—without, perhaps, having to give up my tennis game. But each of us finds his or her own way to mystery. At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all our efforts to see it as a “problem” are futile. Each of us is brought to the cliff’s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion, or leap forward into mystery. And what does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence, that we fully, consciously, hand ourselves over. That is all, and that is everything. We can participate in mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling, and the hardest.”
Curiously, this reminded me of another passage that made a deep impression on me many, many years ago. It is from Melvin Konner’s “The Tangled Wing”, which has recently been re-published and is well worth reading for his subtle and humane discussion of the “biological constraints on the human spirit”:
“It seems to me that we are losing the sense of wonder, the hallmark of our species and the central feature of the human spirit. Perhaps this is due to the depredations of science and technology against the arts and the humanities, but I doubt it—although this is certainly something to be concerned about. I suspect it is simply that the human spirit is insufficiently developed at this moment in evolution, much like the wing of archaeopteryx. Whether we can free it for further development will depend, I think, on the full reinstatement of the sense of wonder. It must be reinstated in relation not only to the natural world but to the human world as well. At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bio-electricity; the human will as will, and not just as a surge of hormones; the human heart not just as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding. We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities—they are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of. But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed fragments but as wholes made real by our contemplation of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes.”
And finally, from Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”
It seems to me that if we are to lead full lives as human beings a sense of mystery, wonder and even the mystical are an important part of that life. This does not mean positing supernatural entities, indeed I would go further and say that positing supernatural entities diminishes our sense of of mystery, wonder and the mystical and somehow makes them too mundane and in a curious way touches on the blasphemous.

I read Bob Sutton‘s blog on a regular basis. Today I discovered that he shares my enthusiasm for Kurt Vonnegut. In a recent post he talks about how he wrote to an anonymous address at The New Yorker to ask Vonnegut if he could use one of his poems,”Joe Heller” in his book,”The No Asshole Rule”. To his pleasure and surprise he received a delightful post card,designed by Vonnegut, giving him permission to use the poem,”however you please without compensation or further notice to me”.
In the poem Vonnegut tells of how he went to a party given by a billionaire with Joseph Heller.
“I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
A while back I posted a longish quote from Gregory Bateson on a similar theme. I’ll repeat the beginning of the quote here:
“… Desired substances, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense “good” for the organism – items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth – are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.”
Vonnegut and Bateson, two very different, but both wise men, giving us something to ponder on when the itch of “more” is troubling us.

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece where I argued that the most significant thing about Apple’s iPhone was it multi-touch interface, which I suggested was a step towards engaging our whole body in our interactions with digital devices.
I found another take on this is issue of putting our bodies into our interactions with computers in a piece by Steven Johnson about his experience of playing Nintendo Wii Sports Tennis:
“… What strikes you immediately playing Wii Sports — and particularly Tennis — is this feeling of fluidity, the feeling that subtle, organic shifts in your body’s motion will lead to different results onscreen. My wife has a crosscourt slam she hits at the net that for the life of me I haven’t been able to figure out; I have a topspin return of soft serves that I’ve half-perfected that’s unhittable. We both got to those techniques through our own athletic experimentation with various gestures, and I’m not sure I could even fully explain what I’m doing with my killer topspin shot. In a traditional game, I’d know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that’s ultimately what’s so amazing about the device. Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules — as well as the imagery — of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we’d ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.”
Things are beginning to get interesting again.

In a recent article Kurt Vonnegut talks about asking his son what life was all about. His pediatrician son, Mark replied, “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
Which seems like a pretty good answer to me.

I recently sent my friend Nick Routledge an e-mail where I talked about my new obsession with time and the difference between Kronos – clock time and Kairos – the right time.
In his reply he sent me his account of building a sundial, which I thought gave another take on Kronos. So I asked him if it was OK to reproduce it here, which in his inimitable way he kindly agreed. Here it is:
“This past summer I was asked to build a sundial at the annual didgeridu gathering I go to, way out in the woods. The experience was a great example of learning things by doing. First, I noticed that the sun moves around the sundial (in the n. hemisphere?) clockwise. Which suggests why clocks go clockwise and not anticlockwise, does it not? And as the sundial took on a presence at the gathering, so my understanding of the nature of time evolved. I found myself designing the sundial by marking the point at which we turned the top of each hour (gotta have some connection with the traditional otherwise too weird for people), though I used symbolic geometrical symbolism to mark the hours – rather than labelling them as 1, 2, 3 etc. Toward the end of the design day (Friday) I found myself becoming less invested in placing the marker stone exactly where the pointer landed on the hour. In other words, I began to loosen our collective perception of time. I began to see how abstract are our notions of it. Not just see, the way one does when one reads books about it, but actually _see_, living there on the ground and in the gathering. An absolutely fascinating initiation. The sundial becoming organic and time following.
We painted rocks with the names of the workshops on them, to be placed on the ground in the sundial. When I asked others to place the rocks, almost no one placed them where they were ‘meant’ to go. Workshop slated for 2.00 p.m. : rock placed at 2.10, etc. Our organically morphing sundial took on a whole new level of organicity – never mind the fact that the alignment of the planets, hence calendar, had shifted overnight with the passage of the seasons. Really tweaked with my fundamental understanding of how we perceive time. A feeling of great relief. I’ve read extensively around the topic, but the experience of the sundial was very, very different. The way native experience rather than ‘pondering it’ always is.”
Thanks Nick.

It seems a long time since August when I first sent my proposal to ChangeThis for my manifesto “Purposive Drift: making it up as you go along”. So thanks to all those who voted for my proposal, thanks to Gill for letting me know it was up, thanks to Sally Haldorson of 800-CEO-READ for a great editing job, and finally thanks to Karen for a nice, appreciative e-mail that arrived within hours of the manifesto going up.
If you want a look you can get to the manifesto HERE!

I don’t know about you, but I found 2006 to be a pretty fallow year. It wasn’t a particularly bad year, though there were plenty of frustrations. The problem for me was that little seemed to move and a lot of exits signs flashed with no clear way out. But alongside the frustrations and the sense of stasis, I suspect that I will look back at 2006 as time when a lot of seeds were planted that will take time to reach fruition.
My metaphor for the year was my discovery in early December of the word ‘kairos’and my quest to find how it might relate to purposive drift. It began with a link from Pat Kane’s del.icio.us list on his Play Journal blog to an article by Edwin Bendyk. In it Bendyk describes how attitudes to work and time in Poland had changed dramatically over the last ten years, with those in work now working some of the longest hours in Europe.
What caught my imagination was the distinction he made, late in his article, between Chronos (or Kronos) – clock time – and Kairos – “Kairos is the time of the archer who releases an arrow that travels through the space of eternity, creating an event.”
Now I suspect I must have come across this distinction before without fully registering it. Anyway, there was enough of a prompt in his brief discussion of this idea to set me off looking for a fuller explanation of the concept of Kairos. What followed was a pretty dreary trawl through the web finding and discarding what seemed like a mountain of uninspiring references, with odd one or two seeming nearly there, but not what I was looking for.
This journey that seemed to be getting nowhere carried on over several days. Not full time, of course, because I had other stuff to be getting on with, but long enough to begin to think I was on a fruitless quest. I had nearly reached the point of giving up, when I came across this:
“…The Greeks had two words for time. One, kronos, refers to the quantitative aspect of time; to time as continuous and thus as measurable. That is the aspect of time with which we are most familiar – in our contemporary world we think of time as clock time and calendar time. History (at least according to the modernist world-view) unfolds in kronos time.
The other word for time, kairos, refers to time’s discontinuous, qualitative aspect; to time as differing in kind from one moment to the next. In kairos time there are kinds of time that are apples and others that are oranges. There is a time when the rain will fall from a cloud, a time to attack the enemy in a battle, a time to negotiate a truce, a point in time that is qualitatively different from the time in kronos just before. (In modern Greek kairos is translated as ‘‘opportunity.’’) When the book of Ecclesiastes was translated into Greek from the Hebrew Bible, kairos was the word used for time in the passage that became the text of a popular song in the 1960s: ‘‘A time to plant, a time to reap, a time to laugh, a time to cry . . .’’ (adapted from Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8).
Kairos is the time of tactical appropriateness, of shifting priorities and objects of attention from one qualitativel differing moment to the next. This is time as humanly experienced; ‘‘in the fulness of time,’’ the emergent ‘‘not quite yet,’’ the ‘‘now’’ that once arrived feels right. It is a brief strip of right time, marked at its beginning and end by turning points. It is not simply a particular duration in clock time. Yet every kairos strip of time has a location in kronos time.”
This passage is from the opening chapter of Frederick Erickson’s “Talk and Social Theory” my book of 2006 and probably of 2007 too. It is hard to describe the sense of pleasure, relief and excitement and above all the sense of rightness of hitting this after wading through so much unpromising material.
My initial enthusiasm was at finding this key to using the concept of kairos to think with – a concept that makes articulate the underlying, but previously unarticulated basis of purposive drift. But more than that Erikson’s book is filled with ideas and insights about how we interact with each other and our world – a book I know I will return to many times to prompt trails of fresh thoughts. (It’s also a good example of how putting up free material on the web can pay off – I bought the book and have been busily recommending to friends ever since.)
I draw a few disorganised thoughts from this experience. The first is that the process of finding a glimmer of an idea, wading through a long, seeming unpromising period of feeling as if I was getting nowhere and then hitting that moment of rightness is the dark side of purposive drift – the bit I have drawn least attention to. Living a life of purposive drift does mean experiencing periods of time where nothing much seems to be happening. The difficulty with this is that it is often hard to tell whether actually nothing much is really happening or whether there is a whole lot going on, but you just can’t see it.
By one of those convenient coincidences, John Naughton recently posted a quote from Don DeLillo, which tied in with one of the things I had been pondering about the relationship between kairos and purposive drift. The question I was pursuing was how do we know when we are wasting time? As DeLillo says:
“One’s personality and vision are shaped by other writers, by movies, by paintings, by music. But the work itself, you know — sentence by sentence, page by page — it’s much too intimate, much too private, to come from anywhere but deep inside the writer himself. It comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out of the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and, in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming. It’s too deep to be attributed to clear sources.”
What DeLillo is talking about here is the “wasting time” that could be confused with procrastination, maybe sometimes is procrastination. How do you tell when you are allowing what I call your back brain to be getting on with stuff or simply putting off doing something you should be getting on with?
There is another kind of wasting time, which is the time spent when you are waiting for the right moment to do something. The moment when the elements in a situation you are trying change come together in a configuration that will enable an intervention to have a desired effect. This is almost the opposite of the letting your back brain get on with stuff, where you are having to turn off attention. Here paying attention is your key activity, but again it can seem as if you are doing nothing. And, once more, how do you tell whether your attentive waiting is purposeful or just putting off something you should do?
But perhaps one of the activities where it is the hardest to know whether you are wasting time is when you are on a quest like my search for kairos. Had I stopped before I found Erikson’s chapter, I might well have concluded that I had been wasting my time. The difficulty here is that the thrill of the chase can blind you to the fact that the quest might be misguided, a happy, busy way of filling time that takes you nowhere.
I am still thinking my way through all this, but my intuition is that the notion of Kronos has become so embedded in our being that we have lost much of our sense of Kairos. My feeling is that if we were to cultivate our sense of Kairos, we would suffer less from from wondering whether we were wasting time or not. Clearly something I will be returning to many times in the future.

The Apple (i)phone been presented as a very sexy gadget, but I suspect its real significance lies beneath the flash in its multi-touch interface. Like many people, I assumed that this was based on the work of Jeff Han and his team at New York University’s Courant Institute, which he demonstrated at a recent TED conference. However, a bit of digging around suggests that the basis of this UI is much more solid and based on work that has already resulted in real products (iGesture and Touchstream), much loved by their users.
The seeds of these products began their life in a PhD thesis by Wayne Westerman, at the University of Delaware, supervised by Professor John Elias. They then went on to found Fingerworks, which, while the purchase is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery, was later bought by Apple.
The significance of their work is summed up in this extract from a press release in September 2002:
“Elias said the communication power of their system is “thousands of times greater” than that of a mouse, which uses just a single moving point as the main input. Using this new technology, two human hands provide 10 points of contact, with a wide range of motion for each, thus providing thousands of different patterns, each of which can mean something different to the computer.
While much about the computer has changed over the last three decades greater power, faster speeds, more memory what has not changed is the user interface.
“For what it was invented for, the mouse does a good job,” Elias said. “People accept the mouse and the mechanical keyboard because that’s the way it is. But there are limitations in terms of information flow. There is so much power in the computer, and so much power in the human, but the present situation results in a communications bottleneck between the two.”
Elias and Westerman have a better idea. “I believe we are on the verge of changing the way people interact with computers,” Elias said. “Imagine trying to communicate with another human being using just a mouse and a keyboard. It works, but it is slow and tedious.”
Elias said he could envision in the next 10 years “a very complex gestural language between man and machine.””
This would seem to answer a complaint about current computer technology raised by Brian Eno in interview in Wired twelve years ago:
“What is pissing me off about this thing? What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you?”
If Apple pushes forward with this technology, as I think they must, we may see their phone as being even more significant than the Mac in changing the way we interact with computers. Just as the Mac, regard by many when it was introduced as just a toy, brought the insights of the team at Xerox Parc to the mass market, the iphone, or whatever it will be called, will shift in perception from being just a sexy, desirable gadget to being seen as the forbear of a range of devices that engage much of our body and more of our mind.

Nabeel Hamdi’s code of conduct for professional planners, looks like pretty good advice for all of us:
“work backwards, move forwards; start where you can”
“recognise your own ignorance”
“never say ‘can’t'”
“be reflective”
“embrace serendipity”
“challenge consensus”
“look for multipliers”
“feel good about yourself”
So maybe we should all buy his book, “Small Change: The Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities” to show our support.(UK here, USA here)
(Too often I leave out the convoluted chain of links that lead to one of my posts. Since this chain is a bit simpler and contains two of my best sources of links and ideas, I thought I’d better try. It began with a link on Abe Burmeister’s excellent abstractdynamics to a thoughtful article by John Thackara on on his blog, where I was intrigued by a bit about Nabeel Hamdi, who I googled and found the bit that ended up here in a review of Hamdi’s book by Nick Falk on the Resurgence site, from which I took the quote.)

Back in 1995 Nick Routledge (Nick then, Nick nowish) invited me to contribute to his site World3. So I sent him a longish piece, “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now?”. In the short accompanying bio I described myself, in part as a joke, as presentologist. So I got a little frisson of pleasure,when delving into the writings of Russell Ackoff, to find a paper that begins:
“I am not the right person to have been assigned the topic, “Thinking about the Future.” I am a presentologist, not a futurologist.
So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell. Unless we correct some of the world’s current systemic deficiencies now, the future is condemned to be as disappointing as the present.
My preoccupation is with where we would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as constantly to reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to large extent, the future is created by what we do now. Now is the only time in which we can act.”