Category: Uncategorized

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.”

I first saw Ken Robinson at a conference I went to in Berlin a few years ago and was very impressed with him then. I particularly warmed to his thesis that if you analyse it carefully you can see that success in the educational system is defined in terms of producing a university professor.
You can now get a taste of his wit and wisdom from his speech at this years TED here.
I laughed throughout.

“I remember how when I was a young man I was troubled, – as I daresay you have been troubled – by the seemingly contemptible intermittentness or fleetingness of my thinkings. I fancied that real thinkers could go on wrestling with an issue continuously, perhaps for hours on end, without pauses, or switches of attention. They, I supposed, stuck to their intellectual tasks like plough horses moving unremittingly up and down their furrows. Yet there was I, meaning well, but just drifting, flitting, alighting, flapping, sipping, resting and taking wing again – a mere butterfly, instead of a plough horse, Of course, I did not then realise that the task of excogitating something is, like angling, a chain-undertaking, in which a considerable sporadicness or intermittency of the infra-acts of infra-moves is perfectly compatible with the prosecution of the total undertaking being cumulative, progressive and even sometimes successful. The housewife spring-cleaning her house works but with all manner of pauses, interruptions, telephonings, re-reading letters before throwing them away, watering the flowers, chatting to her neighbours, looking out of the windows, and so on. Yet by the end of the day her house has been properly spring-cleaned. The wheat-farmer can take his seaside holiday in February without postponing or diminishing his September harvest.
Puppy-training has to be a sporadic, intermittent and repetitive thing; yet it may result in a well-trained sheep-dog within a few weeks or months. There is a lot of sheer waiting in angling, and in pondering; but the angler and thinker do not have to make excuses for these spells of calculated un-business.”
Gilbert Ryle,”Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts”, 1974 (Unpublished until the Nineties, see the link for the circumstances)

I first came across the reminder that dinosaurs,far from being unsuccessful, had been around for longer than mammals and make our history look pretty puny, in one of the late John Brunner‘s novels. So I was pleased to find this fact used as an example again in number 7 of Jamais Cascio‘s “Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters”:
“7. Dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years. A favourite pundit cliche is the “dinosaurs vs. mammals” comparison, where dinosaurs are big, lumbering and doomed, while mammals are small, clever and poised for success. In reality, dinosaurs ruled the world for much, much longer than have mammals, and even managed to survive a planetary disaster by evolving into birds. When a futurist uses the dinosaurs/mammals cliche, that’s your sign to investigate why the “dinosaur” company/ organization/ institution may have far greater resources and flexibility than you’re being led to believe.”
On a shorter time span, I wrote a piece at the time of the Tsunami at the end of 2004, with what may also be another reminder of our relative frailty and could be a useful corrective to the arrogance we display about how we live today:
“What we often forget is that our taken for granted world is an experiment that has been running for much less time than the Norse Colonies in Greenland. No doubt for much of the time the Norse thought things were going pretty well for them and ignored the signals that things might not be as they seem.”

Paul Miller, co-editor of Demos‘s “Network Logic”, has this advice for young people thinking of starting a business:
“If you’re a young entrepreneur trying to emulate the current generation of internet success stories, you’re going to try and think of business ideas that are like Google or eBay, that tap the value of networks of active participants for the simple reason that those are the most likely business to thrive in a network age. At the moment, we just don’t have that culture of understanding network business in the UK.”

One of my daily rituals is to visit Abe Burmeister’s site Abstract Dynamics. His usually thought provoking posts are fairly infrequent, but he does do a good link. (One reason for his infrequent posts may be that he does lots of other things including writing a book, under his other name,William Abraham Blaze, “Nomadic Economics” – which you can look at free here and then go and buy here)
One of his recent links that caught my attention was to an article by Richard Farson “Management by Design”. In his conclusion he remarks:
“Design has many definitions, but if design is the creation of form, then it surely applies directly to leadership and management. Everything we see and hear and do has form. By its form, everything sends a metamessage. Therefore, everything is amenable to design. If we are going to seriously and systematically incorporate the approaches of social design into management, we have much to learn, and much to invent. But we can do this with the comfort of knowing that we are embracing the perspectives and approaches of an ancient, distinguished and thriving discipline, with greater relevance for the 21st century than ever before.”

I point to this article for two reasons. The first is that it deserves to be read and ponder upon. The second is that it gives me an excuse to point to some of my earlier posts that relate to aspects of what he is talking about and contain links that amplify some of his points:
“The Designer as a Good Host”
“Integrative thinking”
“The Manager as a Designer”
“Nobody smokes in church”
“The Design of Possibilities”
“Second thoughts”