Purposive Drift

For much of my life I have liked to think of myself as a Shockwave Rider, surfing the waves of change, exhilarated by the ride. Though my reality has been generally very different and not nearly so boldly confident. (If I remember correctly John Brunner’s central character in the novel of that name got pretty weary with dealing with change himself at various points in the book.)
I have often contrasted what I portray as a very positive image of the Shockwave Rider with another Brunner quote, “It is one thing to talk glibly about the determinism of history but quite another thing altogether to find oneself caught up in historical forces like dead leaf on the gale.”. That dead leaf seems pretty familiar too and is, perhaps, a more accurate description of my trajectory over the years.
So in this period of turbulence and uncertainty, lets have a little sympathy for the dead leaves among us and hope that at least some of us can be blown into more congenial places.

Floundering around in a smoke-free daze, I realise that stopping smoking is a massive system intervention. For those of you who have never smoked and just imagine it to be a self indulgent addiction, the best analogy I can think of for what it is like to stop is is when you lose internet connectivity for some time or when your computer collapses. It is that sense of interruption to normal functioning. That “I’ll check it on google, oh no I can’t.” That sense of the balance of your world being disturbed. That feeling of not quite knowing how to proceed now the prop of that technology is no longer there to augment your functioning.
There is also something quite appalling about this kind of being lost and the busy attempts to divert oneself from the feelings that accompany it and the the wishing away of time in a kind of mindless yearning, which is a kind of blasphemy.
I was reminded of this everyday kind of blasphemy, reading Bryan Appleyard’s review of Lewis Wolpert’s “How We Live and Why We Die: the Secret Lives of Cells” in the New Statesman today. This was the key paragraph:

“Wolpert also goes into the many ways in which this machinery can go wrong. This makes life seem even more miraculous. Not only are cells improbably complex, they are also fragile and subject to catastrophic failure. Our existence depends on the ability of trillions of molecules to line themselves up in perfect order following billions of instructions, any one of which can be wrong or misread; and our ability to ponder that fact is dependent on a few custard-like pounds, lodged in an all-too-feeble dome of bone. Being alive and aware is, indeed, a miracle, whatever meaning you attach to that word.”
Reading that passage reminded me of watching a video of a lecture by Woldpert describing our development from a single cell some weeks ago. Now I find something about Woldpert very unsympathetic, so it wasn’t his charisma that awoke a profound sense of wonder and mystery in me. It was just the facts he presented that, in Appleyard’s words, revealed the sense of, “Being alive and aware is, indeed, a miracle, whatever meaning you attach to that word.”
I had a similar feeling reading Jonah Lehrer’s account of the role of dopamine in some of our most important, but non-conscious learning in his book “The Decisive Moment”.
These glimpses of wonder and mystery are something that should be central to our sense of well being, but too often get lost lost in the busy nothingness that can fill our days. This seems to be something I need to remind myself of, because it is something I too easily forget. Looking for another quote in a similar vein I found a piece I wrote a little over two years ago, “Mystery, Wonder and the Mystical”, where I concluded:
“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.”
The current economic and financial turmoil inevitably leads to a sense of anxiety as well as an opportunity to rethink. It’s a bit like giving up smoking or losing internet connectivity – a system disruption. Disruptive states are probably not the best places to be to cultivate a sense of wonder and mystery. But if we are to stumble through our individual and collective concerns and anxieties I think we do to find a way of doing so. As I have written before :
“One of the the things that make it so hard to see what is going on now is that we are living through two crises. The first is the chickens coming home to roost of a thirty year old experiment in implementing somewhat naive free market phantasies. The second is the flock of giant canaries that are telling us that our two hundred year old experiment in carbon fuelled industrialisation may be drawing to an uncomfortable close. The paradox is that maybe the solution to the short term crisis lies in setting out to solve the long term one.”
And, as Chris Corrigan writes in a long and thoughtful piece:
“Reverence has been a capacity of human life that has kept us accountable to each other and to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of us have shed that reverence and have dulled our sense to the awe that is inspired by a deep connection to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Reverence is our operating system, and connection is our practice.”
So, let’s make reverence our operating system, cultivate a sense of wonder and mystery, celebrate the everyday miracle of being alive and find the sources of our well-being through purposive drift.

Jonah Lehrer, the author of my current favourite book, “The Decisive Moment” (“How We Decide” in the USA), also has an excellent blog, “The Frontal Cortext”. In a recent post on business books he concludes with a point that regular readers of Purposive Drift will recognise as theme dear to my heart:
“The larger point, of course, is that humans are terrible at acknowledging the (omni)presence of contingency and chance. We like explanations that cut across situations and aren’t subject to randomness, and so we psychoanalyze personalities and come up with elaborate theories of personality. Alas, these explanations often get the causality of behavior exactly backwards – who we are and what we’re like often depends on where we are and what we are doing. I’ve always loved this short quote from Richard Rorty: ‘Freedom is the recognition of contingency.'”

Nearly three weeks ago I decided to try an experiment. I stopped smoking. So far this has largely been a negative experience. When I say a negative experience I mean that it feels as if my primary activity during this time has been not smoking. Now this is bizarre. How can not doing something be an activity? Perhaps it is more accurate to say that being conscious of not smoking has been the primary focus of my attention over the past couple of weeks. But even that is not quite true. What has been going on is my awareness that the variety of discomforts and disabilities i have been experiencing could have been fixed or dealt with by lighting up again and the fact that I haven’t.
The curious thing is that the not smoking bit has been easy. I just haven’t. What has been more surprising to me is how hard it is to function effectively without smoking. So here I am adrift in a smoke-free zone, lost in a space I don’t understand and don’t much like. Let’s hope normal service will be returned soon.

“Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.
Yeah. Imagine that.”
(Maybe it’s because I’m a sunny, little optimist, but I love that quote from Christopher Locke from the Cluetrain Manifesto so much that I wanted it to stand on it’s own. But I must point you to the link I got it from, which is a must read piece by Manisha Verma, “On The Evolution Of Open Source” on 3Quarks. I’ve read through it quickly twice already and must do so more carefully again. I suggest you do too.)

One of the the things that make it so hard to see what is going on now is that we are living through two crises. The first is the chickens coming home to roost of a thirty year old experiment in implementing somewhat naive free market phantasies. The second is the flock of giant canaries that are telling us that our two hundred year old experiment in carbon fuelled industrialisation may be drawing to an uncomfortable close. The paradox is that maybe the solution to the short term crisis lies in setting out to solve the long term one.

Yet again, Simon Caulkin gets it bang on. Commenting on the Stafford Hospital case, where the Health Commission found that Stafford Hospital’s senior management’s success in meeting their targets which gained them Foundation status was to the detriment of patient care and may have led to the deaths of 400 people between 2005 and 2008, he concludes:
“The current target-, computer- and inspection-dominated regime for public services is inflexible, wasteful and harmful. But don’t take my word for it: in the current issue of Academy of Management Perspectives, a heavyweight US journal, four professors charge that the benefits of goal-setting (ie targets) are greatly oversold and the side-effects equally underestimated. Goal-setting gone wild, say the professors, contributed both to Enron and the present sub-prime disasters. Instead of being dispensed over the counter, targets should be treated “as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision”.
They even propose a health warning: “Goals may cause systematic problems in organisations due to narrowed focus, increased risk-taking, unethical behaviour, inhibited learning, decreased co-operation, and decreased intrinsic motivation.” As a glance at Stafford hospital would tell them, that’s not the half of it.”

The words “reflection” and “reflective practitioner” get tossed around like confetti these days and mostly with about the same substance. So it is a real pleasure to come across someone, who while he may not use those words, really understands the concept.
I have know Ian Worley for a number of years now and as well as being a king of the BBQ I have always found that our conversations about both the craft and the business of design have shown him to be a real reflective practitioner with fresh and original insights into both. So keep an eye on his blog. I suspect that he wont post that often, but when he does it will be well worth setting some time aside to read and to reflect on his thinking.
Here is a taster from the end of his first long entry:
“But at the end of the day…creativity is about our relationship with the world…and we engage the world through a the reciprocal process of making (or asserting things into the world) and seeing how the world responds (assessing) and then thinking about a way to improve or tune the response to what we want as a result. This is the essential feedback loop between thinking and making…and it is the basis for all thought and creativity…and ultimately the underpinning of craft (or quality). Without making there can be no thinking…and without thinking there can be no making.
And yet, people often stop themselves from engaging in this most essential process because they are afraid of the uncertainty of it…they do not know what to make or think about. But a painting is not thought through before it is painted…a painting is thought through AS it is painted. And it begins with a mark…any mark. The same is true with writing or music or any other type of creative activity. One cannot wait to begin only when one knows what one is doing. One has to simply start…somewhere…and respond. Each action leads to the next…and as the work progresses…it begins to define what it needs to be as much as what it is because you come to know more about what you are trying to achieve by doing it. This is not to say that you cannot begin with an idea…but rather to say that the idea of a starting point should not be confused with the ending. Begin at the beginning…but let the end unfold through the feedback of making and thinking.”

Today I went back and had a look at something I wrote at the height of the dot.com boom. While some of the quotes I used look a little creaky, the central argument seems just as relevant today as it did then. Take a look here and let me know what you think. Here’s a chunk as a sample:
5 Capabilities
Creativity is often described as a problem-solving activity. The problem with problem-solving is that it focuses on what is rather than what could be. If we want to do things differently rather than better we have to learn to search for the capabilities in any situation. Instead of identifying problems we will have to open ourselves to potentials. Instead of a world of fixed unchanging categories we will have to learn to see the world as more fluid, more open to change, and, ultimately, more mysterious. The trick we have to learn is to balance our habits, our experience, with the fresh and the new. We have to find ways of making the familiar strange to us. We have to tune in to the mysteriousness of the everyday. It is here that play and playful activities assume their role. Play releases us from a hardening of the categories. Play is the tool that allows us to see the capabilities concealed in the familiar.
“The great landscape gardener, Lancelot Brown, when confronted with a client’s estate, did not say “what is your problem?”, he asked “what are the capabilities of this piece of land?”. Optimism, generality, and scope flowed where otherwise all would have been pessimism, specificity, and narrowness. That is what is wrong with conventional wisdom: not enough Capability Browns and too many Problematic Tom, Dicks and Harrys.”
Michael Thompson “Rubbish Theory: The creation and destruction of value, Oxford University Press, 1979: pp51
“To think of design as ‘problem-solving’ is to use a rather dead metaphor for a lively process and to forget that design is not so much a matter of adjusting the status quo as of realising new possibilities and discovering our reactions to them.”
J.Christopher Jones, ” Design Methods: seeds of human futures”, 1980 edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1980, ppxxiii

By a bitter irony it is beginning to look as if one of the most effective means of dealing with global warming lies in an agricultural technology invented and practised by people, who were effectively wiped out by the unintended consequences of the European intrusions into the “New World” several hundred years ago.
Without going into its origins James Lovelock makes the case for this technology in an interview in the New Scientist:
“So are we doomed?
There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.
Would it make enough of a difference?
Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it.”
If you are interested in the scientific background to Lovelock’s argument, a good starting point is the web pages of the Terra Preta de Indio – Biochar Soil Management project at Cornell University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.
For a good overview, Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent for the FT, has an excellent review of the field and also makes the important point that:
“Even if biochar does not fulfil all of the potential claimed for it, it could still make an important contribution. Al Gore, the former US vice-president and environmental campaigner, likes to point out that the search for a “silver bullet” to solve the problem of climate change has been a distraction. Instead, he argues, though there may be no silver bullet, “there is silver buckshot”. Only by bringing many different methods of cutting emissions or absorbing carbon to bear can we reduce atmospheric levels of carbon to within the limits of safety. And of those possible methods, few are as simple and cheap as biochar. Johannes Lehmann of Cornell makes the point that “biochar sequestration does not require a fundamental scientific advance and the underlying production technology is robust and simple, making it appropriate for many regions of the world”.”
But where things get more interesting, complicated and very controversial is when we look at the history of the technology of bio-char. Depending on which view you take this raises very important questions about our relationship to nature and the world and our relationships with each other and the unintended consequences of those relationships.
But let’s start simply with the opening paragraphs of a summary of a BBC TV programme that first sparked my interest in bio-char or as it is called in South America, Terra Preta de Indio.
“In 1542, the Spanish Conquistador, Francisco de Orellana ventured along the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon Basin’s great rivers. Hunting a hidden city of gold, his expedition found a network of farms, villages and even huge walled cities. At least that is what he told an eager audience on his return to Spain.
The prospect of gold drew others to explore the region, but none could find the people of whom the first Conquistadors had spoken. The missionaries who followed a century later reported finding just isolated tribes of hunter-gatherers. Orellana’s story seemed to be no more than a fanciful myth.”
Now several centuries later, as Charles C. Mann reports, support for Orellana’s account comes from:
“…a small but growing number of researchers believe that the Beni once housed what Clark L. Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, calls “some of the densest populations and the most elaborate cultures in the Amazon”—cultures fully as sophisticated as the better known, though radically different, cultures of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas. Although these still unnamed peoples abandoned their earthworks between 1400 and 1700 C.E., Erickson says, they permanently transformed regional ecosystems, creating “a richly patterned and humanized landscape” that is “one of the most remarkable human achievements on the continent.” To this day, according to William Balée, an anthropologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, the lush tropical forests interspersed with the savanna are in considerable measure anthropogenic, or created by human beings—a notion with dramatic implications for conservation.”
Interesting though the possibility of a lost Amazonian civilisation and the implications of its approach to land magnet may be there is a wider story of the peoples of the Americas and the civilisations they may have created that we need to pay attention to. The gifts from the Americas to the human world have been immense and sparked interactions for both good and ill that still resonate today.
In a long article by in The Atlantic that is worth setting aside some time to read and ponder, Charles C. Mann points to the work of Alfred Crosby, which reminds us that:
“… Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.
Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.
Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed agriculture there, too. “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Crosby says. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” Maize conquered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.”
It is important to remember that these gifts from the Americas were not simply stuff lying around, they were cultivated and thus like Terra Preta de Indio the products of technologies. And technologies are made by people. And if some of the archaeologists, anthropologists and historians cited by Charles Mann are right there were lots of people in the Americas before the Europeans arrived. lots and lots of people, 95% of whom were wiped out by the diseases the Europeans and their animals brought with them.
Now all this is very controversial stuff and Mann quite fairly highlights the opposition to this view, but let’s just suppose their right – what does this do to our story?
Well for a start, it turns part of the picture that many of us hold of our history on its head. The picture I have had is of the Americas as wilderness with a few people, with the exceptions of the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs, living lightly off the land.
But Mann is saying there is another, radically different picture building up:
“Problem is, this new generation of anthropologists and archaeologists is saying that as a matter of cold, hard fact the Americas in 1491 were not a wilderness. They were a huge, special garden, planned and maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies. Environmentalists tend not to like this line of argument, because to them it implies that there is no preferred “natural” state—so let the bulldozers rip. And to be fair a lot of anti-green commentators have drawn just this implication. Personally, though, I believe both sides are wrong. Knowing more about what the Indians accomplished suggests that human beings can have a large, long-lasting impact on the landscape without wrecking everything. To me, at least, that seems an incredibly hopeful notion to carry along into tomorrow.”
I find it hopeful too. These days it has become fashionable to see our impact on the world as largely destructive. The story of Terra Preta de Indio suggests a more complex and complicated view. Yes, we can be both deliberately and unwittingly destructive as a species, but also we can be creative and nurturing, actively making a world in which we can flourish and thrive. Sunny, little optimist that I am, I will take a small bet on our ability to muddle through and find the silver buckshot that will ensure a convivial world for our great, great, great grandchildren and beyond. And, just maybe, that world will look a little like the New World of “a huge, special garden, planned and maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies” we Europeans may have inadvertently destroyed. A vision that some, like my friend Nick Routledge are already working to achieve.