Really, it’s all about getting outside your comfort zone and “going” places, physically, mentally and emotionally you’re not accustomed to. Only then can we grow. We too often see just the opposite in government and business. It’s easier to surround yourself with people “the same as you.” For then, there’s no fiction … and no growth. Check out a post I wrote on what I see as the the fallacy of diversity in Obama’s inner circle: “Diversity … Obama are you listening?” ~ http://bit.ly/X7SUoE

Again, excellent post Jean!

Federations are different, because they’re redundant systems of individuals that communicate with language, such that if an individual is lost, the system reconfigures to adapt. The result is the Ship of Theseus effect, wherein the components of a system are replaced incrementally, such that the system as a whole retains its identity.

Of course, corporations are comprised of people, and people are comprised of cells. Both can be understood as federations—people join and leave companies just as cells divide and self-destruct. But something is different. People and companies have discrete identities. They have body plans. Organs. And organ failure is almost always fatal.

The contrast of the federation (city, beehive, coral reef) is that it has no concept of gross anatomy. Likewise, the boundary between it and not-it is not so clearly defined. (Of course, people try to impose boundaries on them, but they tend to be tenuous fictions.) The federation’s exponential growth is also space-filling, rather than expansive. It grows richer and more complex, far faster than it gets physically bigger. My hypothesis as to what makes federations immortal is that they take the time dimension into account, existing more as stochastic processes than platonic forms. Rather, the identity of the federation drifts along as time progresses.

What West demonstrated (in spite of his own words at TED) was that what we mean when we say growth is broken. At least in the mainstream. Because we are unequivocally talking about naïve, Cartesian, expansive growth. Growth that can be measured in employee headcounts, income statements and GDP. That is precisely the kind of growth that falls along the sigmoid curve—the kind which will eventually taper off and cease.

Furthermore there are some who suggest that contraction is the antidote, because contraction is the opposite of expansion. Hair-Shirt Green, as Bruce Sterling calls it. To paraphrase: our dead great-grandparents are doing a better job at conserving energy, carbon sequestration and recycling than we are—they’re made of carbon, buried underground in a box, literally being recycled. I agree with him completely. While I believe it important to be conscientious of our consumption, I’m more inclined to save the dead-person behaviour for when I’m dead.

Instead, I prescribe a slight course correction in the concept of growth, from expansive to space-filling, from Descartes to Mandelbrot. Grow indeed—grow wiser, subtler, more elegant. Don’t just grow bigger.