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Paul Graham has some interesting advice for the young. He talks about how mostly when adults give advice to the young about their future, it is in terms of what their goals are. He argues that instead:
“I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.”
Now those of you that have followed my writing for some time will recognise that I believe that Paul Graham’s advice holds for all of us young and old alike. Of course, we all have goals – I have the goal of finishing this entry – but my sense is that it is wise to keep your goals short-term rather than long-term and to be willing to change them as circumstances change. So my advice would be, look for the promising situation you can engage with now, rather than trying to identify the long-term goal that may never happen.

An excellent piece in the Guardian about Professor Richard James, head of the School of Molecular Medical Sciences at the University of Nottingham. He has spent the past thirty years studying bacteria and what he has to say is alarming:
“… When he hears the mantra that cleaner hospitals will reduce infections, he all but clutches his head in his hands. In his view, no matter how clean our hospitals become, we have almost lost the war. Unless new antibiotics are discovered, he believes, we may have to close all our hospitals in the next five years or so.
‘Between 1940 and 1970 – the golden age of antibiotics – we developed thousands of the drugs,’ he explains. ‘And then we squandered them. We fed antibiotics to chickens and cattle. We handed them out to people with a cold. Each time you try to kill bacteria, you’re forcing them to select for survival. Now we’ve basically bred bugs that flourish in a hospital environment and they’re just waiting to bite. You’ve got sick people in there, people having transplants taking drugs to suppress their immune systems, HIV patients, the elderly and the young. And yet nothing is being done.'”

The problem of the promiscous use of antibiotics has been known about for years, but like so many of the problems that face us now, we seem to respond by a brief period of panic and then the issue fades until it returns with greater force. So, if you’re worried about Bird Flu, read this article and you can have something else to be alarmed about.

I usually find something interesting on Pat Kane’s Play Ethic, but was slightly startled to find an echo of my last post this morning. He writes:
“…Close down the schools (and open up the city)”
As I’ve said before, and no doubt will say again, busy, busy, busy.

One of my favourite sites Edge.org recently asked a set of scientists and thinkers what was their dangerous idea. There are many gems among them, but my favourite is from Roger Schank, whose dangerous idea is that “…school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don’t learn much.”
Instead, he proposes that:
“Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning. The government’s role should be to create places that are attractive to children and would cause them to want to go there.”

Now there’s cheery thought to begin 2006.

My, life partner, Mimi, like many Chileans, is addicted to radio – it’s on all the time in the background. Personally, I like silence, but having the radio on does mean that every so often I encounter something I might not otherwise have come across.
A while ago, I heard some snippets of conversation with a remarkable man, Graham Webb. Graham left school at fifteen with a final report that read, “Graham is lazy, silly, bone idle and apparently content to remain so”. After applying unsuccessfully for sixty two jobs in sales and marketing, he got a job as an apprentice to a local barber. Sometime later he did get sales job and gained the distinction of the man who sold the most rice pudding in the UK. Following that, despite being not very interested in hair, he built up a huge salon, hair care product and training business in the USA.
What came across on the radio was that he seems a thoroughly decent, likeable man, whose success may be an example of practising purposive drift. Though in his case, the sense of purpose must have been very intense, since he had to overcome the difficulties presented by incontinence and misshaped feet, the result of spina bifida that was not diagnosed until he was in his thirties and had already established a successful career.
You can hear Graham in conversation with Libby Purvis and others, here or buy his book about his experiences here .

“The head of the school that ranked top of today’s primary school league tables attributed her success to “ignoring” most of the Government’s flagship literacy and numeracy strategies.
Barbara Jones, head of Combe Church of England Primary School, a tiny village primary near Witney in Oxfordshire, urged teachers to trust their own professional judgement about how best to teach children to read, write and add up. Every 11-year-old at the school was at least three years ahead of their age group in this year’s English, maths and science tests – making it the top ranking primary out of more than 20,000 in England.”

She goes on to say:
“We don’t use the literacy or numeracy strategy as prescriptively as we have been asked to,” she said.
“We use a variety of approaches and that’s where I think the Government has got it wrong in that they advocate one way and then a few years later they suggest another way.
Phonics is not the only answer. There isn’t one ideal way of teaching reading. Children do not all learn in the same way because we are all different. It is a pity that people jump on these bandwagons and quote examples of schools that see their results increase.
You have got to use a bit of common sense. We don’t rush things. If it is going to take a fortnight to do something it is going to take a fortnight. The problem is when you take four days just because the literacy strategy or some other directive says you should. We have never done that. I think what they are doing is eroding teachers’ confidence.
I just feel that sometimes the baby is thrown out with the bath water.”

I have just stumbled across the late Donella Meadows‘s “Dancing With Systems”. My first impressions are that it feels very much in the same stream as the concept of purposive drift .
As she says:
“For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?
Systems thinking leads to another conclusion–however, waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”

She then goes on to give some tips about how to do it:

“The Dance
1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.”
I am certainly going to ponder on what she has to say and you may find it valuable too.

A couple of days ago I linked to a piece by Paul Saffo, who was urging us to learn the art of bricolage. Thinking about it afterwards I was reminded of my friend Karen Mahony and her partner Alex Ukolov, who are masters of bricolage. (See here for examples of their work)
Karen is a truly remarkable person. After working successfully for many years in the corporate zone – BT, Wolff Ollins, her own multi-media consultancies, Mahony Associates and Xymbio – she went to live in Prague and re-invented herself.
I have often urged her to keep a record of her activities, because she is one of the few people who really gets network thinking. The businesses she runs with Alex – Baba Studio, The Magic Realist Press and Baba Store are wonderful examples of 21st Century businesses and if she were ever able to find time to write a book about how they have managed to achieve so much in so little time, it would be a great text for people who would like to build “good” businesses.

Thanks to that great linker Creative Generalist, I rediscovered Dave Pollard‘s “How to save the world”. If ever there is an example of my thesis that it is best to regard some blogs as networks well worth exploring rather than just looking at the latest entry, Dave Pollard’s is one.
What caught my eye, since it is a subject dear to my heart, is a list of “the nine reasons we don’t do what we should”. If like me, you sometimes find yourself trapped in ‘can’t be asked’ mode, this one is well worth a careful read and a long ponder.

In an interesting set of speculations about what lies ahead for us in the years to 2015, Paul Saffo urges us to learn the art of bricolage:
“History reveals that even the most mind-wrenching novelties are comprised in large part of cobbled-together bits of old technology. Invention and innovation are a process of bricolage, and innovators are, above all, clever bricoleurs— dumpster divers pawing through the technological wreckage for shiny bits that can be recombined with new knowledge to create new wonders.