Author: Richard

“In our culture it is often thought that loss of control is bad.
However, there are benefits in the loss of control: and these benefits strengthen our ability to believe in the centrality of our humanity. Some of these benefits are:
The requirement that we take responsibility for our (inter)actions, including our own meanings and their making.
The requirement that we accept that there are possibilities beyond those we can imagine.
Therefore, the requirement that we may be surprised.
And that this surprise may lead to opportunities we did not imagine, enhancing our creativity by increasing the variety available to us. (We borrow from others.)
And the requirement that we keep an open mind.
And the requirement to keep an open eye for whatever opportunities may present themselves.
The requirement that we are generous (in our acceptance of the differences and surprises we receive through conversation in an unmanageable situation).
Therefore the requirement that we do not (unnecessarily) restrict possibilities, do not act as censors.
The requirement that we increase what is possible, and the choices that go with this.
Finally, the requirement that we accept error, and accept its occurrence as inevitable.
These are stated as requirements, but they are also opportunities and they give freedoms.
It is in these requirements that there lies a source for enhancing our creativity.”

From Ranulph Glanville‘s “The Value of being Unmanageable: Variety and Creativity in CyberSpace”

There was a splendidly grown-up article by Matthew Parris in the Times the other day, that should be compulsory reading for all the pundits writing about terrorism. The bit I particularly enjoyed was where he was talking about those “joining up the dots” – a phenomenon that William Gibson described as apophenia:
“Gestalt can border on madness. I distrust people too insistently driven to “join up the dots”. Dots may be just that: dots. They are susceptible to being joined up in very different ways. It is always easy for the dot-joiner to make himself look more perceptive and alert than the naive, doubting fellow who can still see only dots. That is how it must have felt to be a doubter in 1930s Germany, as clever, vigilant men joined up the dots and saw an international Jewish conspiracy. The chaps who, behind the apparent world, can discern the shadowy outline of witches, papists, communists or capitalist plotters will often appear cleverer and more prudent than the chaps who can’t.
I look at Orion and I do not see the Hunter, his belt or his sword. I see a group of unrelated stars. Whether, however, we discern Great Bears, ploughs, crabs, crosses or only chaos, this kind of star-gazing is harmless because we cannot by imagining shapes create the things we have imagined. More dangerous are the constellation-makers among our presidents, prime ministers and newspaper leader writers: it does lie within their power to breathe life into the monsters they think they see. If they keep shouting that we face a clash of civilisations, a war of the worlds, they may drive bigger numbers on both sides into the arms of the smaller numbers who do want to rally volunteers for a battle.”

John Seely Brown tells a nice story about a lesson he learnt when he first joined Xerox. He gives this account of an interview with one their leading trouble-shooting maintenance engineers. It revolves around a discussion of how to identify an intermittent copying problem. The trouble-shooter tells Seely Brown about the laborious, bureaucratic process that Xerox lays down and then goads him into coming up with a better solution. The answer, it turns out, is to look in the nearest waste paper basket. Here is a short extract, but read the whole thing, a lesson worth learning:
“And he said, “You know, John, what do you do if you discover a copy quality problem? You know, you don’t classify it as a copy quality problem. You classify it as a damn, damn bad copy and you throw it away. So why don’t you let the world do a little bit of the work for you. Why don’t you work with the world, and see that there’s a natural way to have the world collect this information for you. Just step back and read the world a little bit.” 
  
Now maybe you can see where I’m heading with you. ‘Read the world a little bit’ is almost a kind of judo, or a better term from the French, bricolage. And so he said, ‘This waste basket was ready at hand. It was already there. It was already full of this stuff. Learn to work with the world, and you’re going to find your life a lot simpler.'”


I’ve just put up a proposal on Change This to write a manifesto supporting the notion of Purposive Drift. I need all the votes I can get, so if you would go to http://www.changethis.com/proposals/737 and click on Vote it would make this purposive drifter very happy.

The Hizb Allah leadership must be rubbing their hands with glee. Like well schooled stooges the Israelis have been suckered in to waging war on Lebanon, egged on by the useful idiots in the US administration and their apologists around the world. Effectively this means that Hizb Allah has already won:
1 They have got Israel to do their dirty work for them by snuffing out the development of the greatest threat to their long term existence, the hospitable, fun-loving, entrepreneurial Lebanon that was emerging after decades of invasion, bloodshed and civil war.
2 In the eyes of those whose hearts and minds must be won if the death cults like Hizb Allah are to wither away, the killing of babies, children and civilians in Lebanon will be seen as justification for the war crimes of indiscriminately bombarding civilians in Israeli cities and thus a legitimate form of resistance.
3 As we have already seen, as the Israelis carry out their ground war in Southern Lebanon they will sustain losses, which will be perceived as losses in Israel, whereas every Hizb Allah fighter who dies becomes another glorious martyr and another reason for others to take up their cause.
4 Whatever the final outcome of this phase, members of Hizb Allah will be able to fade away into the background with their arms intact and will be able to demonstrate from time to time that the primary aim and justification for this war, disarming Hizb Allah has failed. Thus increasing their prestige and influence.
Strange days indeed, when the death cult leaders seem smarter than our own.

Power Law 1: Don’t think “new product” – think social value.
Power Law 2: Think social value before “tech”.
Power Law 3: Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.
Power Law 4: Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.
Power Law 5: Think P2P, not point-to-mass.
Power Law 6: Don’t think faster, think closer.
Power Law 7: Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what’s already out there.
Power Law 8: Connect the big and the small.
Power Law 9: Think whole systems (and new business models, too).
Power Law 10: Think open systems, not closed ones.

“… a superiority of firepower discourages intelligent strategy; to think strategically one has to be able to imagine oneself in one’s opponent’s place, and a habitual sense of superiority precludes this.”
Wise words from John Berger from a short piece in “The Drawbridge”.

“Smokers driving company cars, vans, lorries and enclosed tractors in England could be fined £50 for lighting up at the wheel if the vehicle might be handed over to a colleague from work later in the day, the Department of Health said yesterday.
Under regulations it wants to enforce when smoking is prohibited in all enclosed public places next summer, company vehicles would be treated as workplaces if they could be used by more than one employee. Drivers would not be allowed to smoke at the wheel if there was a risk that colleagues might later inhale their smoke, the draft regulations said.
Employees who get a company car for their sole use will be allowed to smoke while giving a non-smoking colleague a lift to work, because the journey will count as private use. But employees sharing a pool car will not be allowed to light up, even if they are all heavy smokers.”

I recently read an article by Geoff Dyer in the New Statesman where he describes how some years ago he went to Paris for a couple of months to write a novel based on Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night”. (Incidentally one of my favourite novels)
Anyway, he had a thoroughly miserable time and got no where with his novel. Shortly before he was to leave Paris, he made a trip to the scene of the Battle of the Somme, ostensibly to do some research for his failing novel. When he arrived at Thiepval, site of a memorial to the British dead he was so moved that as he said:
“To cut a long story short: I abandoned my Paris novel and ended up writing a book about what the Great War meant to me, to us.”
He concludes by pondering;
“… What would have happened if I hadn’t gone that afternoon? I could, theoretically, have gone another day, and maybe the weather wouldn’t have been perfect, but the question actually misses the point: this wasn’t just a visit, it was a meeting (“only this moment and only me”), a rendezvous. The other possibility – what if I hadn’t gone at all? (not so unlikely; my time in Paris was running out ) – scarcely bears thinking about. I went to the Somme in the midst of a period of complete stagnation and frustration. From that moment on I was revitalised. I had a new interest, a purpose, something to do, something to live for. There was a place for me again.”
After I had finished reading it, I felt this is quite purposive drift, may be I should write something about this here. Imagine my surprise and delight when during some background research I discovered that, to a much greater extent than I had suspected, here was a man who lived purposive drift.
In an article in the Guardian he talks about his life as writer giving as an example a book he wrote about Jazz:
“… I didn’t know much about jazz. Certainly not enough to write a book about it – that, precisely, was the motivation for doing so. I loved jazz but it was infinitely mysterious to me. I wanted to know more – and the best way to find out about anything is to write about it. If I’d known what I needed to know before writing the book I would have had no interest in doing so. Instead of being a journey of discovery, writing the book would have been a tedious clerical task, a transcription of the known.”
and going on to say:
“The jazz book was the beginning of my life as a literary and scholarly gatecrasher, turning up uninvited at an area of expertise, making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two, and then moving on. This, it goes without saying, is no way to make a career (a word which, for anyone seriously committed to a life of writing, should never be spoken, only spat).”
and concluding with the glorious statement:
“… although we live in a time that sets great store by measuring progress (“research” in academic parlance) in precisely demarcated areas of knowledge, real advances are often made by people happy to muddle along within the splendidly vague job description advanced by Susan Sontag, whose “idea of a writer [was] someone interested in ‘everything'”. Why, realistically, would one settle for anything less?”

The other day I posted a link to Ken Robinson’s brilliant talk at TED, about how our schools are educating out the creativity of our children. Today I came across this piece by Maurice Holt on what he calls Slow Schooling. The whole piece is well worth reading. This extract gives a feel of what he is talking about:
“Since education is essentially about equipping our children with the ability to act responsibly in a complex society, the idea of a Slow School follows very readily from the metaphor of Slow. It brings to mind an institution where students have time to discuss, argue, and reflect upon knowledge and ideas, and so come to understand themselves and the culture they will inherit. It would be a school that esteems the professional judgment of teachers, that recognizes the differing interests and talents of its pupils, and works with its community to provide a rich variety of learning experiences.
This is a far cry from schools that measure their success by the ability of students to pass tests and meet numerical targets defined by obscure “standards” – where you get a good grade, as W.E. Deming remarked, “By feeding back to the teacher the same marbles that the teacher gave out to the class.” Ticking boxes on multiple-choice tests has very little to do with education, yet this is the basic driving force behind the No Child Left Behind Act in the United States, and in England as the result of policies established by Conservative governments and reinforced by Mr Blair’s New Labour administrations. Public education in these two democracies has taken as its model not the moral character of slow food but the commercial character of fast food.”