Imagine, Possible, Test, Prove

Questions

I was trying to understand a paper by a friend who does evolutionary algorithms. I approached it several times and finally it was clear enough in me to spark a new awareness about the world. It was one of those moments where I saw so much more clearly how the very things in front of me relate to each other. Was this already obvious to all of you?

Prove it.

So a map of information in my head shifted. Are evolutionary algorithms within the domain of science or math? It uses both. Lots of science uses math, of course. But what I didn’t feel clear about was that math has different criteria than science. Math is deductive. Math is axiomatic. It is a field built of arguments on what is self evident, becoming ever more abstract, perhaps, but always building on what can be logically proven from what is self-evident. Math is a field for what is absolutely proven. And thus the old doesn’t get tossed out when a new piece of math becomes accepted. It is accrued and should continue to be logically coherent. Math is evolutionary by accrual.

Test it.

Science is not. I am not saying science is not logically coherent exactly. Oh wait, yes, I am. We can see that in how the explanations that we currently accept about large scale objects (astronomy) are not consistent with the explanations on the small scale (particle physics). Science is about developing explanations of the world that can be tested. Science is inductive. And current science theories are accepted under the condition that, when another theory gets presented that applies in more cases and especially in more edge cases, then the new explanation should be adopted as a more thorough and useful one. So science will replace old explanations with new – more nuanced – explanations.

These explanations are called theories. And they are built of hypothesis that are then tested using specific criteria determined by the field and traditions of science. Science is itself evolutionary by repair or replacement, not just accrual.

Sums

So Math is the realm of what is proven. And Science is the realm of what is tested. I was deliberating on that distinction, which started to seem obvious to me – as if I had known it since I was a child. Somehow as an adult, the information seemed like a revelation.

Great, but I want to know how this is useful.

For example, if we are discussing climate change, and you want to have the conversation from the criteria of math, then I need to make some computations that can be derived from self-evident axioms. And once those are known, then they are true. Period. Not up for debate, really. The proof is there or not there. But if we are discussing climate change, and I want to have the conversation from the criteria of science, then you need to form a hypothesis about some observable phenomenon, and then we can test it. The more times I can test it and get the same result, the more my explanation will be taken seriously. Right now climate deniers are denigrating climate science by saying that it fails to meet the criteria of Math – proven. And the scientists are at a loss, because of course man made climate science is a theory – a story we are testing out that isn’t proven or even provable. It is “just a theory” like gravity is “just a theory” too.

Possibilities

I was contemplating all this when I picked up “Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology by Žižek to read on the plane to Paris. As one does, of course. Žižek is perfect plane reading (not). Watch his videos instead. I like his RSA Animate as a gateway to his work. In any case, he is ranting about philosophy and critical theory, and he says philosophy is about the possible. Again, click. Here I am a philosophy major, and I had not thought of philosophy being about how we explore what might be possible. But now it makes sense to me.

So then I started to imagine that Logic might exist on a plane or dimension between Math and Philosophy. And that Epistemology – the study of what can be known and how we know – might exist on the plane between science and philosophy. A foam of fields started to emerge in my head, all bubbly.

And I wondered what might be missing.

Imagine

Art is the realm of what we can imagine. It doesn’t have to be proven or tested or even be considered as possible. It orients toward imagination. The Art world is having a large conversation about imagination across cultures and time periods.

Imagined, Possible, Tested, and Proven

Imagined, Possible, Tested, and Proven

 

Jay Standish has developed an alternate visual at open door.

Now what?

Chewing on all this and not seeing where to bring it up at the Climate Science event Transformations, where I was speaking in Europe, I continued to mull it over. After several conversations with people in San Francisco (Keki Burjorjee – the Evolutionary Algorithms person, John Hagel, and several others) I am sharing it with you here. What I gathered from those additional conversations is how to apply this understanding.

1. What conversation are you having? If you are struggling to make progress on a conversation, ask which domain each person is coming to the conversation from. See the climate science example above.

2. What narrative do you want to be creating? Is your narrative about tests, provability, possibility, or imagination?

3. What is the dominant narrative or where do you put yourself on the various planes? For example, I primarily come from a mix of philosophy and science. I like to consider what is possible and then I like to test it. I am only interested in the possible that can then be tried out. It is a bit like a personality quiz.

 

Multi-dimensional Constructions

For simplicity’s sake, we often pretend we live in a one or two or maybe three dimensional world. By which I mean, for example, in the world of “identity” I am a white woman from the middle class. Those are two “planes” of the conceptual realm. The first thing we need to correct is that these categories have some clear boundaries (are points) rather than being spectrums (a line of even a plane) where very little lives in the “ideal position” really.

The next thing we can do is layer them, especially when we talk about power. I have a sex, gender, and sexuality… I have a color, I have a financial upbringing and current financial status, I have an education, I have a professional background. I am a point where all these instances intersect across many planes.

 

Source: bustler.net via Jean on Pinterest

 

I have particular empowering and disempowering experiences… I have a degree of many different kinds of intelligences and physical abilities/inabilities. I have an age. I have a religious upbringing (or not, really, in my case) and a spiritual practice that is current. I can go on and on! All of these layers/planes of dimensionality, connect me to communities, some of them make me more central in those networks and some of them push me to the edges. Some of them conflict with each other, shoving me away from those communities.

The conceptual world is not flatland. The world of identity is not a flatland (despite how social networks used to try to singularize identity). Live in the rich multi-dimensionality of being human – of your existence and awareness. I try to… it is an ongoing practice in a flatland world.

 

———

This was originally posted to Facebook and then modified and posted here. On Facebook, the following comments were particularly delightful to me:

Alexander Laszlo

and if you are not a being at all (or only in the expository fixedness of our linguistic forms), but rather a continual emergence? More like an aroma, shifting, flowing, emerging – more becoming than being. Then the dimensionality of which you write ebbs and flows through multiple domains in which we find the confluence of others. And it is these others which, in the final appreciation, form and flavor our sense of self.

Charles Hope

Luck and success hide in the cracks between, in the contradictions, in the rounding errors glossed over and stubbornly ignored by the pragmatic grown ups.

John Manoochehri

This makes a certain kind of sense, but leads to, as a lot of emancipatory philosophy, a world of texturelessness and unmanageable complexity. There are countless dimensions, you rightly describe, to being and experience. But which are the most important? And how do navigate without those kinds of obvious signals? I can’t spend all my life interpreting each moment’s dimensionalisation, can I?If my child is hungry, and I am focussed on another dimension of their life, their capacity for artistic creativity “hey, don’t cry about food, let’s do one of those great paintings you do! come on!”, or I am not sure which of their dimension to relate to “ok, I know they are hungry, but what about their art – or their capacity for body movement, or what about nature, maybe we should learn about gravity, or or or …” – I am obviously failing them.So, multidimensionality is good. It is also a dangerous abstraction.

The problem with a lot of equalising, emancipatory thought is that it dismisses all hierarchisation, priority setting, difference, as necessarily normativising, power-brokering, wrong.

Bad move. We must learn to tame benign hiearchies, differences. Otherwise, we drown in righteous speculations and make judgements based on post-modern whim or worse.

Jean Russell 

John Manoochehri, I think you are right to be concerned about being lost in noticing the dimensionality. I think of it more as a perspective tool. For example, am I feeling locked out of things because I am a woman? If so, what other dimension do I have more power to achieve my goal? Maybe I have social power at a different level? Maybe I have intelligence of a certain kind. If you feel blocked in motion because of one dimension, look at the other dimensions within you. That is not to promise a just world to those who are resourceful – it isn’t just and won’t become so. It is that there are many hierarchies, and we navigate their power, in part by being at different points on different planes. All in fluid flow. #gratitude
I don’t want to get to to tied to the instance of identity – as my point is that conceptual fields that relate to things like geographical landscape, limit our ability to grasp the full dimensionality of them. This dimensionality may explain to some people how my brain has learned how to think about things (twisting planes and intersections acting as an axis point to pivot).

Ruined: The Crush of Enlightenment

The more I learn about systems, the more I feel I am ruined now. Like any good enlightenment, once it happens, you can’t ever quite go back to thinking the way you did before. I can’t go back to thinking the world has single/independent problems or single solutions. I can’t believe in single causes. And when I look for what led to events that are transpiring, I can’t blame a single source. Instead, I am always looking for the complex interweaving of causality. David Harvey’s fantastic “Crisis of Capitalism” shows the causes of economic collapse from 6 different explanatory perspectives:

  • Human Frailty
  • Institutional Failures
  • Obsessed with a False Theory
  • Cultural Origins
  • Failure of Policy
  • Systemic Risk

And, I look at this list Harvey has, and I realize, yep, I have, at one time or another, played a sort of blame game with each of them. However, now that I think in multiple perspectives about interlocking complex adaptive systems that operate beyond simple linear singular causality…I am no longer able to come up with simple easy answers like: Vote! March! Go around! or Change policy! I guess I do still have a fondness for “Avoid toxic ossified institutions” and “Beware of Systemic Risk.”

The trouble with ideas that enlighten us is that we can’t go back. We might want to. It might be an easier life back there. The answers appeared more obvious (because the perspective dictated them).

I once had a contract cancel – basically, simplistically – they said something to the effect of: you are a breakthrough person and we already decided on breaking down right now, so we brought in someone who does that. And you see this all the time – we look for what we already think the answer is and we seek reinforcement of our belief. And usually we don’t have to go far to get it (that old lure of homophily) I call this mirror-thinking. We go looking in mirrors to see our existing beliefs are true, and sure enough they give us our beliefs right back to us.

The more you think in multiple perspectives, the harder this sort of mirror-thinking becomes. I return regularly to Donella Meadows’ work on Intervening in a System. It stands as a reminder not to get trapped in solving system issues from a single perspective.

However, I warn you. Should you pursue the path of seeing through multiple perspectives a world of interlocked complex adaptive systems… you can’t go back. You can never go back to that serenity of simplicity in problems/solutions/interventions or views.

As you begin to step into the various positions and stories people occupy, you may fill with compassion, seeing each operate under their beliefs with positive intentions. There is something incredibly uplifting recognizing that all people operate from a love for someone or of something. It is love behind everything, even war and violence. And there is something incredibly depressing recognizing that this is what we get as a result despite all that love. Try not to get lost. I have gotten lost in compassion or in understanding one element in the overall system.

Because to really perceive what is happening requires a deep both and. Both the details and the context. These details and those details. This context and the context of that context. Don’t get dizzy. It is easy to get dizzy zooming from perspective to context to culture to cultural context and then back into another perspective. Take something for the SEE sickness. Ginger is good.

Brain science is revealing that Westerners are very focal-point centered. We Westerners want an object in the middle of our pictures. People from other cultures value context. Think, for example, of the elaborate etiquette systems of China, India, and Japan, where behaviors are dictated by context and even the slightest contextual clues provide information for effectively navigating culture. Students from countries like China will focus their eyes on the context even more than the object in the center of a picture. Learn to do both. Flip back and forth in rapid succession from one to other until you can hold both at the same time. Learn to soften the edges of your eyes and see from your periphery. (I learned how to do this over the summer while I was in Australia – mind-blowing!)

Once you learn to see from all these perspectives, you can never fully occupy any of the places as if you were unaware there were others. You are stuck always transcending any given place/space. And while experiencing the rush of the enlightenment to perceive – deeply perceive – what is happening and why and where to make a leveraged action for yourself or those you love – you are also crushed out of who you thought you were and into someone else altogether. Your very being begins to exist in all these perspectives more and more of the time. Your very being becomes distributed experiencing the world from different perspectives nearly simultaneously. This can be disturbing, and no, you probably don’t need to see a doctor. You are already ruined now. 🙂

Don’t lose yourself to existential bedazzlement. Stay on, stay steady. Grow your multiple perspective skills. Grow your ability to hold both the particulars from different perspectives as well as their context simultaneously. Because, while you can never go back, it is also the most amazing awe-inspiring view I have ever imagined. Crushing or not, like all tremendous experiences they hold the space where anxiety meets wonder in an exquisite dance of perception.

**warning: using multiple perspectives may harm or damage feelings of self-righteousness. Side effect can be greater levels of creativity and innovation.

Facets and Heterogeneity

Evangeline

Do we wear many masks? Or just one? Are they really masks? Or can we perceive them as facets of a multi-dimensional self?

Masks has a connotation of being false. Thus it is hard to pair a mask with authenticity. I have been using the words – facet or aspect. And I tie it to a metaphor of a gem – we are one crystal with many facets. Each facet faces a different tribe. A few people close to the edges of these facets may see a more than one of our facets and connections to more than one of our tribes. Some of us are pretty translucent gems, while others prefer to be – or need to be – opaque.

This is deeply tied into a model of a human we use when designing social software. When we presume that a human is an integrated whole who shows all people the same depth and dimensions of our being, we create too superficial of a tool. And we end up with several dilemmas.*

  1. Show the whole self and bombard people with TMI (and later get held accountable for your intimacy).
  2. Show only one dimension of the self (and get accused of not being authentic or of not being a part of one of your tribes)
  3. Create multiple identities (and then try to keep track of them and which facet you display in each… and later get pushed out by “real names” social software.)

quartz crystal

We are too often seen as a single facet (race, religion, work, location, affiliation, purpose, etc.) when we are many. Social Network Analysis, of which I am an avid fan and advocate, still usually only maps for one dimension of the self. Imagine the real social network map – the layers and layers of connections and the participation in the many tribes we belong to and participate in. This map may be so full of links and nodes as to be unread-able at anything but perhaps the most local scale. (and of course overwhelming if we move the static map into active motion of real-time interactions) (Let’s not even begin to talk about degree of association/depth of connection which adds another layer/filter to what we share and who we share it with.)

20110825-NodeXL-Twitter-ASA2011 Graph

Network maps have yet to really reveal this inter-lacing because they draw links, usually, on one facet or connection type. But, in practice, most tribes are deeply interlaced. (Cults try to diminish this interlacing – by reducing other tribal affiliation and thus increasing dependency on the cult.) For example, I may live in a blue state, but I have relatives that are red voters, which keeps me informed of other positions besides the blue I seem embedded in. This is the counter argument to homophily and the risk of sameness that some are recently arguing the internet encourages (you filter for that which you are already a part of and thus only reinforce your beliefs).

Our resilience rests in our heterogeneity which brings us the diversity of viewpoints we need for a better, more complete view of our world. We build relationships by focusing on a sameness, however that need not obscure how we may be different. For example, Alexis and Xavier connect because they both believe in building better local economies. Alexis has a background in marketing. Xavier has experience developing collaborative conversations. Together Alexis and Xavier create an event for local businesses and potential entrepreneurs to meet and discuss with local government figures how to support developing local economies. As Valdis Krebs says: “connect on your sameness and benefit from your differences.”

* To keep things light, I only mention the design of social software, however, we also limit people in our in person social interactions by presuming an integrated human as if they only have one persona in their minds. Voice dialogue offers a powerful process for letting us open to the multiplicity of voices we have within us and act with greater awareness of the dynamics between those inner facets of the self.

A Thrivable World Emerges

Thrivable from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

Gratitude to Symbionomics and Alan Rosenblith for content and production.

Why the optimism?

In the face of all the catastrophe thinking and story-telling, why the optimism of thrivability?

This optimism is not blind idealism or the search for some dreamy utopia. A thrivable world will exist (and has existed) in a strange balance and tension where there is more health and generativity than illness and destruction. That does not mean there is not destruction. Old orders must fall, become the compost of new life, and cycle through. Ideas get refined and transcended. A thrivable world is not static. It is not the end of suffering or the birth of a hedonistic paradise. Instead, think of a garden or better yet a meadow.

So, let’s be pragmatic. What is the basis for being optimistic about thriving given stories of catastrophe and crisis. I will merely mention these – you can find more easily by digging deeper on any of it. This is the big picture overview. Also, it is not comprehensive. I offer here only a half dozen examples of why optimism is warranted.

  • communication – never before has communication been so possible – over distances, between languages, across cultures, etc. Information can flow. There is talk of a global brain (although at times that brain may seem primitive and dumbly focused on sex, superficiality, or bad news). It still remains – never before have we had such access to each other. (nods to Deanna Zandt)
  • cognitive surplus – never before have so many had so much liesure time. Not saying we are effective with it, but the possibility of people contributing their time, wisdom, and resources has never been greater. (nods to Clay Shirky)

Yeah, you heard those before….but it is working? What about people who are dying!

  • hearts break as we read of children dying, but what is the trajectory? UNICEF says:
  1. “Research and experience show that six million of the almost 11 million children who die each year could be saved by low-tech, evidence-based, cost-effective measures such as vaccines, antibiotics, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices.”
  2. “While global immunization rates have risen from less than 20 per cent in the 1970s to about 74 per cent in 2002, millions of children must still be reached.”
  3. “In its sixty years of existence, UNICEF has seen a fifty per cent reduction in under-five mortality between 1960 and 2002.”
  • Peace on the rise. I know it seems like the opposite. But let’s look at some charts to see what the numbers tell.
    via systemicpeace.org

    via systemicpeace.org

    We can see from figure 8 that the conflicts that do exist produce more refugees and exist in poorer states and thus require more humanitarian relief. However, note, “The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, had an equally dramatic effect on the general level of armed conflict in the global system.” A couple key points:

  1. “Separate research indicates that the increasing level of societal war results from the protractedness of societal wars during this period and not from a substantial increase in the numbers of new wars.”
  2. “At the peak in 1992, nearly thirty percent of the countries in the world were experiencing some form of major political violence. This percentage of the world’s independent states (with total population greater than 500,000 in 2008) has dropped by nearly one-half since the peak, registering at slightly more than 15% with major episodes of political violence in 2008.”
  3. “There has been substantial improvement in general resilience in the global system since 1995.”
  4. “Global gains are observed for seven of the eight fragility indicators; only “economic legitimacy” shows no improvement, indicating that there has been no substantive shift away from primary commodities production toward manufactured goods in the world’s more fragile states.”

There are a few counter-trends to be wary of (see end of page)

Okay, so kids are more likely to live (but we can keep improving that) and there is a downward trend in warfare/armed conflict. We can communicate better and have more time to make the world better (or be entertained or both). But what about the environment?

Let’s try wikipedia this time:

In 1999, the United States EPA replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and Ozone standards.

The effects of these laws have been very positive. In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions:[48]

  • carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons
  • nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons
  • sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons
  • particulate emissions fell by 80%
  • lead emissions fell by more than 98%

Please don’t take this to mean that we are done. We are not. AND, when was the last time you heard that we had made progress?

So we have been making some progress, and actually there are some positive trends. Now let’s add in a few juicy additions:

  • Purposeful or meaningful life pursuits are on the rise, in fact there is a convergence. Millenials – in general – prefer purposeful work and play, GenX is interested too, and the Boomers who made money so they could have a meaningful life later – well, that later is arriving. What happens when you have multiple-generations with a growing interest in living on purpose, with intention, and therefore being conscious about doing more good in the world?
  • Social entrepreneurship (probably in part as a result of the previous) is on the rise – a very hot trend with many subsets and variations in making money by or for doing good. Let’s call corporate social responsibility one of those variations.
  • A paradigm shift in leadership and collaboration is underway. Beginning a few decades ago with the birth of servant leadership, and reinforced by books like “Outliers” (which shows the supporting factors that go into supposedly independent genius)… now we have open source, crowdsourcing, and so much more. How we think about working together is changing. And that change makes more successful collaboration possible.
  • Green technology. Some of us find it so incredibly sexy. And sometimes it really is. Sometimes it is wishful thinking or innovation many years from implementation. However, I can count 4 wind farms on my 120 mile journey to see my family. I sense some potential black swan like shifts if some clean green energy or technology comes to market… whether that algae that eats pollution or cars run on the biofuel made by your food waste… I have hope that something out of the bright green movement is going to come to fruition in a way that changes the world dramatically.
  • I’ll close my brief list with metrics… we have been improving our metrics (and our intelligence in how those metrics can be used to tell different stories). The better our metrics – and the better we are at realizing what to measure, the tighter and more useful our feedback loops become. From using social network analysis to map out which congresspeople are being lobbied by what organizations (and who is paying them)… to stats on child mortality, the environment, and energy consumption and creation – we know more about our world than ever before. And that empowers us to do more about it.

These are just a few of the things that make me optimistic in the face of catastrophe stories. What are yours?

On twitter–

@jhagel: More cause for optimism – we are having fewer children and living much longer – great visualization of global trends http://bit.ly/c93ven

Collaboration Mixing Board

This morning I read a RT from @jhagel:

Open source trumps crowdsource – by @cdgramshttp://bit.ly/bIn1at

And an idea that has been bubbling in the back of my head came to the surface begging to be set free. Collaboration and Cooperation are complex processes. Setting up them as rivals diminishes the value each provide us. One is not better than another as much as one may be more or less appropriate for a particular issue. And there are a bunch of knobs and dials to adjust based on what we have to put into the system and what we would like to have as output.

My initial “Mixing Board” points to several of these knobs and dials and some of the measures we might watch. I hope you will consider these and contribute to a revised version that holds greater rigor and collective wisdom. 🙂 Collaborate with me!

CollaborationSThis is the basic mixer. We have 3 areas: the Dials – things that feel measurable and adjustable, the Knobs – things that feel like a spectrum, and the Lights – things that we can sense but probably not directly adjust.

The Dials:

  • # of contributors (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • # of beneficiaries (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • degree of facilitation/quality control (none, light-handed, moderated, tight, regulated)
    1. none – for example – the ability to co-create the internet approaches NO facilitation and NO quality control.
    2. light-handed – co-creating youtube is light-handed (as is most major social media space) with very simple rules.. and very little quality control
    3. moderated – wikipedia has a process for including content, a system for elevating reputation, and a fairly advanced peer produced quality control system and standards
    4. tight – most blogs (from harvard business blogs to Daily Kos) where several people have permission to add posts (the comment option might be handled lightly to not at all however) and the quality control is high (even if the quality is not high – the control of it is)
    5. regulated – let’s talk wall street stats or sports numbers collecting on websites – there is regulation about the information to control the quality and the facilitation is more in the realm of bureaucracy
  • feedback loops – do stakeholders/creators have ways of getting feedback on the collaborations? For example, couchsurfing ratings. I presume that collaborations in which people know they are successful via tight feedback loops encourage more collaboration. This is simply my assumption. 🙂

Then we have The Knobs or Spectrums:

  • cooperation – from collective to collaborative (to what degree are people creating/generating through interaction with each other? Is it the number who show up or the output of their engagement with each other? CarrotMobs are about the number (collective) and team sports are about the combined output and interaction (collaborative).
  • granularity – from single output to many outputs that can be added together. A single output could be a logo design or a designed t-shirt… where an additive output is something like Linux – composed of hundreds or even thousands of pieces where individual authorship of the granule still allows for collective production of a larger work.
  • governance – from benevolent dictator to consensus, who manages the collaboration? An individual, a leadership circle, a revolving/evolving group, or full consensus of all involved, etc.
  • field – from commons to market – what does the output create in total? Does it create a market for individuals to succeed (or fail) within or a commons for all to share?

Finally we have The Lights – given the settings of the Knobs and Dials, what can we sense?

  • emergent – does the collaboration create the conditions for emergence? To what degree?
  • creative – does the collaboration enable creative effort or stifle it?
  • quality – does the collaboration produce high quality results/outputs? (by whose definition?)
  • resourceful – does it optimally engage the resources of those collaborating?
  • beneficial – does it create benefits? (one could ask for who?)
  • speed – how long does the collaboration take?
  • adaptable – how able is the collaboration to make adjustments in response to the environtment
  • scalable – can the collaboration expand? to what degree? (not that scaling is always ideal! it isn’t!)

Rogue Waves

I saw an article on rogue waves not too long ago. And it really inspired me visually to think about how we compound upon each other.
Wikipedia describes rogue waves:

Rogue waves (also known as freak waves, monster waves, killer waves, and extreme waves) are relatively large and spontaneous ocean surface waves that are a threat even to large ships and ocean liners.[1] In oceanography, they are more precisely defined as waves whose height is more than twice the significant wave height (SWH), which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record. Therefore rogue waves are not necessarily the biggest waves found at sea; they are, rather, surprisingly large waves for a given sea state.

We have some rogue waves amplifying trends. As Taleb says, we live ever more in a land of extremistan (Black Swan).

The Draupner wave, a single giant wave measured on New Years Day 1995, finally confirmed the existence of freak waves, which had previously been considered near-mythical (from Wikipedia)

The Draupner wave, a single giant wave measured on New Year's Day 1995, finally confirmed the existence of freak waves, which had previously been considered near-mythical (from Wikipedia)

Let me explain a bit more about Rogue Waves before saying why I appreciate the metaphor so much.

In this LiveScience article, Choi describes the formation of rogue waves:

Normally a large wave breaks up into smaller and smaller waves over time, until the viscosity of a fluid damps out these small waves. Now the scientists demonstrate the opposite can happen in fluids — tiny waves can concentrate together to become abnormally large waves “that emerge surprisingly quickly,” McClintock told LiveScience.

Tiny waves, you and me, can concentrate, resulting in an unexpected giant wave. This is more than you and I adding up. This is a shocking single large event. This is not really a tipping point, where the system reaches some threshold and changes state.

What I appreciate about this as a metaphor is the thought of the consolidation of forces. It helps us grasp at something that I feel is crashing in on us. A wave in one system is coming together with a wave in another overlapping system, compounded by another wave in another related system resulting in a freak wave. Will these waves be forces of good? Will there be waves of destruction that compound too? I think yes to both.

The wave of climate change meets the waves of peak oil and financial crisis and consumerism. Boom. The wave of awakening-to-purpose compounds with social enterprise and social entrepreneurship, microfinance, spend-down philanthropy, and healthcare innovations. These are choppy waters. How these waves will interact is anyone’s guess. Which will amplify another? Which will deflect or reduce another? Will there be smooth waters ahead? Do we return to regular waves and patterns? Do we get a rogue wave? And does that change us?

Collaborative Organization

For now, see the image…I had a delightful insight this morning…and I will get around to explaining it. This is the placeholder for now. 🙂

Collaborative Network image

It might be no surprise that organizations can collaborate this way. Many already do. However, what I see collective intelligence efforts doing creates the hub and spoke network shape. Being intentional about creating collaborative organization at face to face events and collaborations seems valuable to me. Furthermore, processes like Open Space, to a great degree, enable this form of collaborative organization. However, until we deeply celebrate the roll of butterflies and bees….we aren’t truly capturing the intelligence between sessions in a powerful, useful way.

More to come…

Motivating Participation

Recently I was asked how to increase attendance at a gathering. I came up with a few simple questions to consider. Look at three perspectives.

1. The participants–who are they? There may be several audiences, and for each one, figure out what they want to get or are getting from the gathering.

2. Your perspective–why are you inviting them? What do you want to get from their attendance and participation? List separately for each audience group.

3. Observer perspective–what will the outcome of the gathering be? What will the world be able to see, touch, taste, smell, or feel because of the participation?

Now, what do you do with that? Use #1 to develop your strategy of attraction of participants. Use #2 to identify the proportional blend you want to have of different audience groups. Do you need idea generators? Processors to move ideas along? Finishers to put ideas into action? And #3 is useful for attracting funding and sponsorship.

Incentives, and this is just a starter list, might be:
# association (other people to connect with–especially face to face if they know each other virtually)
# reputation (most active in the field or other recognition of effort is honored)
# growth (learn something)
# inspiration (this is usually why a well-regarded speaker works)
# challenge (opportunity to collaborate on something vital)
# recognition (building their own visibility–like getting acknowledged for doing a cool video etc)
# play (to laugh and be creative)
# delight (good food, good sensate experience)
# narrative (fits into their story of who they are and why they do what they do)
# contribution (opportunity to give to the group)
# influence (able to change others or environment)
# stuff (things people can take with them and help develop branding and identity)

I strongly encourage visual mapping to show the relationships between people and between motivations/incentives and people.

Once you are clear about who to invite and why (for them, for you, and for others), then develop your message to each audience considering the benefit they receive for attending and participating. Then, also, consider what that benefit gets for them. Does it save them time or money? Does it develop their reputation or acknowledge them? Consider Maslow’s hierarchy. What core need is met?

There is much more depth to this than I can address in a single blog post, but this gets us off to a good start. What would you add to the incentives? Are there other valuable perspectives to consider? Is there a good way to create a matrix for organizing the information? What visual techniques would reveal the most useful information?