We all know that smoking is not good for us. It is a lifestyle choice. And it is hard to give up once you are addicted. But more and more have given up. Look at how deaths have fallen in the UK as a result of more and more people giving up smoking and then think about what you eat or how active you are. (Link here)
It is hard to change your diet and life. But once people knew what smoking would do to them, many did make these changes.
Over the past 20 years Britain has seen the biggest decreases in the world in national rates of death before age 70 from lung cancer and breast cancer (which are both down by half) and cancer in general (which is down by almost one third). Still, however, two-thirds of the risk remains, and Oxford scientists are well placed to help the current revolution in the multi-disciplinary effort that is cancer research to yield new causes and new cures.
My book You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is a practical guide to what you can do in terms of Diet, your body and your social world to improve your health. It has the information that you need and a guide for how to take each step to live differently.
If we live like this, we can expect to be active and healthy for most of our lives. If not.....
Now we ALL KNOW this about smoking. Soon we will all know this about diet, activity and our social world. Armed with this, you will be in charge of your health. You will be well and FREE.
Our children's health is in our hands as parents. It's tough to hear this. But it's the truth.
"We are raising our children in a world that is vastly different than it was 40 or 50 years ago," says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. "Childhood obesity is a disease of the environment. It's a natural consequence of normal kids with normal genes being raised in unhealthy, abnormal environments."
Here is the summary of a great article on this in Scientific American. The full article is here.
"This is a lot more complicated than ‘eat less, exercise more,'" Freedhoff says. "If weight management or childhood obesity prevention and treatment were intuitive, we'd have a lot of skinny kids running around." Freedhoff himself is developing a program for families that focuses on "redrafting" kids' and families' environments, starting with more home cooking.
"Every parent would die for their child, but most won't cook for their children on a consistent basis with whole ingredients," he says.
"What I'm amazed by is the constant use of fast food to pacify children and reward children—there is no event too small for candy or fast food."
There are many places communities could start: making school lunches healthier, ditching vending machines and access to fast food inside schools, not celebrating sports wins at fast food joints, and ending the use of candy or fast food as rewards, such as "pizza days" and other unhealthy food-themed school events, to name a few.
"People don't appreciate that parents are around children a minority of their days," he says, so it really will take a village to turn back the clock in terms of kids' environments. "If we had a time machine, it would be the world's best weight-loss program," Freedhoff says. "It's the world that has changed, not people."
I may be able to help you a bit. My new book "You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy" is a comprehensive manual for what what is really going on and what each of can do to take charge of our heralth - AND of our children's.
About 45 percent of the nation’s unemployed are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to a recent report from Demos, a public policy organization. In addition to the more than 5.6 million young people who don’t have a job, there are about 4.7 million young employees who are underemployed or working in jobs for which they’re overqualified, the report found.
Unfortunately, it seems we have a long way to go before youth employment reaches levels anyone would dare describe as normal. Demos found that U.S. employers need to add some 4.1 million more jobs before young adults will be employed at levels similar to those before the recession. (link)
Some 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, roughly the same percentage as in 2010, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
The study defines low-paying jobs as those with wages at or below what full-time workers must earn to live above the poverty level for a family of four. In 2011, this was $23,005, or $11.06 an hour.
Why is this going on? I think I know the answer but it's not all bad
What can we do? I think I can help you here too. Here are 4 short books that tell you more.
I start with the “Job”. “You Don’t Need a Job” – Link to Store – If we can see the Job for what it is, a construct of a paradigm, then we are no longer trapped. For how we make our living is the starting place for the journey.
The second book in the series is called “You Don’t Need a Banker” - Link to Store- More than any institution today, Banks seem supreme and essential. But I will show you that to get the credit you need to make a living and to have a good life does not mean that you have to depend on banks as we know them today.
You Don’t Need Medicine to Get Healthy - What if our health did not depend on doctors and drugs? This is not a fantasy. This book will explore the new science of Ancestral Health and show you how to take charge of your own health. the link is here.
Lessons from VimyToday nearly all organizational leaders have grown up in world where social networks did not exist. They and their organizations are designed around command and control. They are told that they must use social media and networks. But all they know is how to control. They do not know what to do to change their culture and organization so that they can take advantage of the power of the new.
90 Million Americans are no longer looking for a job
This chart shows labour participation. There is no sign of any change. The job is not coming back.
We are starting to understand why this is not just a "normal" recession. It is structural. A global workforce pushes labour costs down. The shoe maker in Maine competes with the labour pool in China. The lawyer in New York competes with the lawyer in Mumbai. It is also about technology. The lawyer in Mumbai competes with software that offers you and I the simple contract. IBM are developing software that will give you a better diagnosis than your doctor. No one in the job world is safe.
So what to do? My advice is to stop making getting a job or keeping yours the only focus. Don't over invest in getting the credential for the job.
There is another mindset and another world of work out there that is not at risk the way that the job is. It is a world that offers you great freedom and health too.
It is the world of the network and skilled person doing something personal in this network.
It is the first of a series that explores the real new economy that is based on the network. You Don't Need a Banker to Get Credit explores crowd sourcing and the new credit system that relies on your social world too. My latest book, You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy - shows how to take charge of your health. One of the most powerful forces of illness is the loss of control that we get from having a job!
I am just starting on You Don't Need a School to get and Education - I hope you can see the pattern. The network will replace the institution. The job is at the centre of the institution.
My new book - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is now available on Amazon for Kindle. - You can get it here.
70% of chronic illness is driven by how we live: by what we eat, by how we use our bodies and by our social world. In writing this book I have gone to all the experts in all of these fields and I have synthesised their knowledge into one practical manual for living.
We are designed to live out a healthy, active and participatory life. Provided we live close to our own design. In the book I show you why this statement is true.
The book is a personal manual for taking practical charge. You can go as far as you wish but there are simple steps that any of us can start with. I, an old fart, have managed to go a long way and I am sure you can too.
I wanted to show you more though than a diet or an activity plan. I have done my best to bring all the factors for our health into view so that you can see how they all help each other. I have also gone deeply into the science here, so that you can see why this book is not just another self help book.
I wanted to help you take control at a time when medicine has not been successful at preventing you from becoming ill and at a time when the safety net is being reduced as we all age.
I wanted to help us all reduce the immense direct and indirect costs of being ill. In Canada, the average man is disabled by chronic illness by 65 and lives another 10 years. Think of what this means to you as his family? In America health care costs are beyond the reach of any family and a bad diagnosis is often a step to bankruptcy.
Our health is truly in our own hands. When we can accept this, then we change the world that we live in today. This is the greatest step for true freedom that any of us can take today. This is how each of us become the core of any resilient community.
I hope you enjoy the book and I hope that it will help you.
In 1840, as the new industrial cities grew from populations of 50,000 to millions, the result was high death rates. All these people crowded in cities with no water systems and no idea about why bad water made you ill, set up the conditions for Choera and Typhoid. In London, at the time, life expectancy dropped to 22! But once we understood the mechanism for this kind of infection, great public works conquered cholera and made it possible to live in big cities. By 1900, 8 million people lived in London and few if any got cholera.
We are confronted by the same kind of problem today but this time the villain is chronic illness.
Once again, a new part of our culture, industrial food and our work culture, has inadvertently put millions of us at risk. Not from a quick death but from a lingering one.
With chronic illness the issue is not death but long term disability. This is what this looks like today: (source NPR)
Nearly all of these problems are caused by lifestyle.
14 million American are on this chart. In some parts of America, 40% of the adult population are included. In Canada, the average man is disabled by 65 and lives another 10 years. The average woman is disabled by 70 and then also lives another 10 years.
These people cannot work. Many have to be looked after by their adult children. Most have to be looked after by the state. The direct cost is $240 billion. Who can know what the indirect cost may be? (More here from NPR)
Because all of this is caused by lifestyle, medicine cannot help. In most cases medicine makes this all worse. For medicine can only treat the symptoms not the root causes.
For instance, Type 2 Diabetes is caused by our diet. Unless diet is dealt with, there can be no improvement. But your doctor deals with T2D by putting you on insulin. In time, your insulin resistance will break through and you will get even sicker.
On PEI, adults in 2006 with diabetes had to be hospitalized much more often than those without it. 16 times more often for lower limb amputations. 6 times more often with kidney disease. They had 5 times more heart attacks. 4 times more heart failure. 3 times more strokes. They stayed 3 times longer in hospital. Had 2 times more visits to physicians and 2 times more to specialists.
Most diabetics don’t just take one medication, but several. A typical regimen for an adult diabetic after a couple of years of treat- ment and following the dietary advice of the American Diabetes Association includes Metformin, Januvia, and Actos, a triple-drug treatment that costs around $420 per month. Two forms of insulin (slow- and fast-acting), along with two or three oral medications, is not at all uncommon.
None of this medical intervention works to stop the disability! None of this addresses the root cause. Your Doctor is not paid to help you change your life. He is paid to give you a pill or to amputate your leg. Nearly every item on the chart is lifestyle related.
Back Pain is a result of stress caused by lack of control. A pain reliever or back surgery can make no difference. Heart disease is caused by diet and lifestyle. Depression is caused by diet and by mental habits. Anti depressants cannot help over time. Even many cancers have their cause rooted in lifestyle.
What often makes things worse is that, once we take medication for one thing, this drives side effects that open up another pathway of chronic illness. What makes it even worse still is the nature of chronic illness itself. All of them are rooted in one cause, inflammation. So if you have one expression of it, then more will emerge as you get weaker.
The disease spreads and the costs grow exponentially.
Some states already have 40% of adults now disabled. What will happen when this is a national figure? We expect that Type 2 diabetes will be at 30% soon.
And what about you and me? It is one thing to think about this as something that will happen to other people. But it won't. It will be the fate of most people who live the modern life. How will YOU cope when you go down this path? Who will look after you? Will this be your daughter's inheritance? Do you really want to condemn her to this? How will you afford to live like this for a decade or more? Do you have a lot of savings? Most Americans have almost none.
This is why I have written my new book - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy. I hope to publish it in early April. I am in the proof reading phase right now.
It is a practical manual that will help you find the root causes of chronic illness and help you take control so that you can either avoid it or if you have it get better. For there is no pill or treatment for diet, for lack of sleep, for lack of control, for lack of activity. Only we can change these parts of our lives.
We are entering the age of Personal Health. Like media, we will shift the focus away from the institutions to ourselves. Here is Larry Smarr who is on the leading edge of this movement.
Join the health revolution of our time - take back your power and your financial future.
What is our education system for? Many see that its purpose is to get us ready for a job. Many of us have been well served by it.
Now many recognize that it has some problems. Many think that it just needs some fixes to make it work better. Better testing. Better teachers. More private ownership. More online. More MOOC's.
But I ask can it be fixed? Should it be fixed?
I ask myself, why are our institutions so self serving and even corrupt? Why is our political system so inept? Why do we watch reality TV rather than take charge of what is going on ourselves? Why can't we see the predicament that confronts us and act wisely. Why do we retreat into ranting? Why do we take comfort in being consumers? Why do we feel lost without a job? Why are we so helpless and can hardly do anything practical? Why are we so passive?
We seem incapable of confronting and solving our problems. I think that this is because we have made the job the purpose of an education. We created an education system that shapes us culturally to exist in the job world. To work in the job world, you have to fit in. You have to belong. You have to depend on external authority. You have to depend on others for all you need. You cannot rebel.
To fit the world of he job, we have inadvertently domesticated ourselves. We have become pets. We did this the same way we tamed wolves to become dogs. Our school system is how we did this. We used a series of processes in school to condition behaviour.
Belonging - You are put into a narrow age cohort. For 12 years, you are cut off from the adult world and you are segregated into a world of children. In the US the average teen spends only 16 waking hours a week in the company of an adult. Worse, you were further segregated into a tiny world of your own age group. In such a culture, the core value is to fit in. This is the core value of the job world.
Obedience - The curriculum is made up of many separate parts. When all the aspects of the world are separated, you cannot see the patterns and so you become unable to see how the world works. This makes any complex problem impossible to see or to solve. As the world is mainly complex, the world remains a mystery. As a result, you look for the answers from those in authority over you. This keeps you a child. You have been trained to have a boss.
External Locus of Control - A broad symbolic curriculum means that no practical mastery is possible. In such an approach, experience has low value. The symbolic sets of skills are paramount. Making and doing things that we need in later life are not included or valued. So, few have experienced how to care for a child before they hold their own. Few today can cook a meal, make, fix or grow anything. None of us have learned how to work with others. That is called cheating. With no mastery and no real skills, we are truly helpless. Being so helpless, we are the ideal consumer and the powerless worker.
Spiritless - To fit in, you had to deny your experience and your body. So all learning was presented in a symbolic form. So how you really learn, by copying and by trying was excised.Your internal wisdom was cut off. You had your spirit taken away from you and all you can do now is to complain. You pose no threat to the masters. You are truly a child. You are domesticated.
This is what this looks like in one picture. Can this system be reformed? I don’t think so.
We need a new purpose. I think that this new purpose is to grow up.
All our expectations about how we will be looked after by the state and our employers will collapse. All our expectations about cheap food, secure energy, pensions and stable climate will be revealed as dreams. Only an adult culture has any chance of coping with this turbulence ahead.
How will this new system be organized? Just as school system modeled the job world, its target, so our new approach to learning will have to model how we become capable full adults. We know what this is and we see signs of new approaches and organizations emerging that all share this adult model.
This is the non job world. This is how humans have always been before civilization. This is who we really are. This is the social structure that has enabled mankind to deal with all the challenges of millions of years. This structure took us through the ice ages. This structure enabled us to develop all the key foundation technologies that enabled us to survive anything.
This is the structure of the primal tribe and, also in a more modern context, the structure of how pioneers coped with life on the frontier in American in the early 1800's.
Some of us live on this frontier now. It is a time when not much of the new infrastructure is built yet. But it is a place where you can be who you really are. It is also a place where you will have to be able to cooperate with others. It will be a place where you leave the hierarchy of the old world behind.
It is a place of great uncertainty.
So what kind of person prospered in a frontier society? They were men and women who had:
A Sense of Adventure and Hope - They wanted a better life. If not for themselves, then for their kids. They knew that there was no going back home to the old world. They knew that no one could, or would, help from outside. They knew that they would have to do it themselves. They learned that being with others who also dared and shared made the adventure better.
They were going to make their place and their world. They were MAKERS.
A sense of a future - They knew that if they cleared 2 acres this year, that they could clear another 2 the next year and that, by the time their kids were adult, there would be a real farm. They could see the future in the today. They could see in the clearing by the water’s edge, a town. They could see in the oak grove, ships.
They knew that there was going to be no instant success. They had foresight. They moved to the future step by step.
Good Coping skills - Pioneers accepted that there were challenges out there and were not put off by the first problem or failure. They became mentally tough. They could lose a crop and a child and still keep going.
They were resilient. They knew that they could not succeed all the time. They knew that perseverance would get them through.
Technical Skills - They developed deep mastery. They quickly developed technical skills that would help them be as self sufficient as possible. Having mastered some skills, they knew that they could master others. The more real skills a person had, the greater their social standing. Men and woman became famous for being capable.This gave them a natural self confidence.
Mastery. They had real skills learnt, as all real skills are learned, by copying masters, doing and repeating.
Social Skills - It was clear to all, in a pioneer state, that no individual could thrive on their own. Much of the work that had to be done had to involve others. So establishing and maintaining family and community were centrally important building blocks for success. Marriage was not a romance but a means of survival. Community was not a buzz word of the week but a means of survival. The stakes were high.
Community was was life or death. They were interdependent.
Literacy - It was clear to most people then that the more you knew, the better off you were going to be. Literacy was paramount. At the time of the revolution in America, literacy was about 90%. Literacy was rooted in what happened in the home.
Most read by 6 and learned this at home. The home was the primary school. The parents the primary teachers. The Home & the Family was the School.
They were adult - When you look at pictures of pioneers, do you see how they look? At 22 many look 35. It is not only because they have had a hard life, it is because you can see their maturity shine through. By 16 you were a real adult in your spirit. There were no "teens" then. There were only children and adults.
At an early age they had responsibility. By 6 they had real roles. By 12 they were contributors. The Home and the Family was the Workplace.
I think that each of us now have to think about how to become pioneers again.
I see three elements in the new way that is ironically the old way.
A focus on the person - It is so easy when we think of the new to think about what new institution we need. This is the trap. The hard work is to unlearn our conditioning and think of how a system might emerge that will help each person find their way. The job world was all about the mass market. This world will all be about you as an individual.
Experience - Our old pedagogy was instruction. It is hard to lose this idea as it is so hardwired. But instead, we have to return to our natural learning style and that is experience. That is how we learned to talk and walk. We learn by seeing, by copying and by doing.
Development - Our old result is a credential that is used to put us into a slot in the job world. Our new result has to be to reach our full potential as a human. Now this is true life long learning. And being a true adult when we have children is the key to putting our kids on a path so that they too can reach their true potential. The right first 3 years of life sets you up for life.
For only a community of adults can give our young the best start that they need so that they too can find their true potential. It's all connected.
The book will explore these issues. I will go back in time to see how we all learned before the age of the institutions. I will pay particular attention to the family and its role in the early years in setting the trajectory of each of us. I will look at the the new experiments in learning. I will connect all of this to the new world that is here now where most of our young today will never have a “good” job.
I have been posting a lot recently about how networks work. My new book is all about why and how the Network model will take down all those that organize traditionally. So what to do?
You have a traditional organization. Can you change to become a network and so survive the revolution? I think in most cases the answer is no. But with the right leadership - FROM THE TOP - you can do it. This post is about the context of one organization that had had the right leadership and has made this transition.
TV as we know it is the typical traditional organization. You watch what we think is good when we choose and all you do is watch. Appointment media like that is dying. But The Nine Network of Public Media in St Louis is no longer that kind of station. Yes they still do TV but the choice is massive and you can watch it all on your terms and you can also participate. But this is still nothing.
The Nine Network is much more than a TV station that has taken advantage of the digital realm. It is doing more.
First of all it is becoming the local community convenor to deal with important local issues. It started by helping people tell their own stories such as what they did in the war. The breakthrough project was when Nine took on ther Mortgage Crisis at the outset. It called the meeting of all who could help and created the space to help the community help itself. This was so successful that CPB funded a national program where stations, radio and TV, in the worst hit parts of America became the local facilitator of the community. Now Nine is involved in Education and Healthcare. Many other stations see this role as Connector as their future too. Here is Ideastream in Cleveland - another leader.
Secondly it is putting the public into Public TV. It has a school that teaches the public how to tell stories on video.
Thirdly it is connected to the St Louis Public Radio station. St Louis Public Radio. The two stations are physically linked in adajacent buildings and are building a Commons between them to enhance their role as Connectors of the Community.
Fourthly, 9 hosts the local online newspaper - The Beacon - that is full of journalists who could no longer work for a paper!
These local relationships are not one organization but are a real network. They are separate but together. They share resources. They look after each other.
So what was the context for this change? First of all there was the leadership issue. Jack Galamiche at then KETC was a man who saw what had to be done. Tim Eby, who had been chair of NPR, was the new leader at St Louis Public radio. He had sponosored the project that had all the stations in the NPR system look into the digital future. It is my experience that without the right kind of leadership at the top, traditional organizations have no chance.
The second was having the right kind of context. What would success look like? What could be the goal and so what then was the work to get there.
This was the context that we worked from. I think that any traditional organization can look at these slides and find a goal and so a path for themselves - provided that the leader wanted to do this AND could bring their board along too.
You will see that at the heart of this work is a shift in culture. There is no harder work. You will also see how, if you can agree to make this shift, how you then schedule work to help you make the transition. For we cannot change our culture by an act of will. We can only acquire new habits. We have to work our way into the new.
I am getting ready to write the 4th book in my series on the shift from a mass market institutional world to a personal and networked world. The next book will be You Don't Need a School to get an Education.
As in the other books, I will go back and look at how we all did things BEFORE we accepted that only an institution could help us. We forget that we learned to talk, to walk and to do all sorts of things before we went to school. We forget that play is how ALL young animals learn. They look at their elders, copy them and use play and experience. The adults stand back! No helicopter parents in nature.
But that is not what happens now is it?
Here is Peter Gray talking about what our Hunter Gatherer ancestors did instead of programming their kids. This link takes you to an excellent article by Gray on this topic of how HG's parented and what we can learn from them.
In this book she shows us how traditional people raise children. To summarize her findings, she notes that traditional people keep their kids very close physically but they do not put them into the centre of their lives. They show their kids the adult world. In this world the adult is the centre. The child is attached and along for the ride but the hierarchy is clear. Mum's needs and her work comes first. The child witnesses all of this for the child is nearly always present.
Here are her words of advice for Western parents. (More here)
It appears that many parents of toddlers, in their anxiety to be neither negligent nor disrespectful, have gone overboard in what may seem to be the other direction. Like the thankless martyrs of the in-arms stage, they have become centered upon their children instead of being occupied by adult activities that the children can watch, follow, imitate, and assist in as is their natural tendency.
In other words, because a toddler wants to learn what his people do, he expects to be able to center his attention on an adult who is centered on her own business. An adult who stops whatever she is doing and tries to ascertain what her child wants her to do is short-circuiting this expectation. Just as significantly, she appears to the tot not to know how to behave, to be lacking in confidence and, even more alarmingly, looking for guidance from him, a two or three year old who is relying on her to be calm, competent, and sure of herself.
A toddler’s fairly predictable reaction to parental uncertainty is to push his parents even further off-balance, testing for a place where they will stand firm and thus allay his anxiety about who is in charge.
He may continue to draw pictures on the wall after his mother has pleaded with him to desist, in an apologetic voice that lets him know she does not believe he will obey. When she then takes away his markers, all the while showing fear of his wrath, he — as surely as he is a social creature — meets her expectations and flies into a screaming rage.
If misreading his anger, she tries even harder to ascertain what he wants, pleads, explains, and appears ever more desperate to placate him, the child will be impelled to make more outrageous, more unacceptable demands. This he must continue to do until at last she does take over leadership and he can feel that order is restored.
He may still not have a calm, confident, reliable authority figure to learn from, as his mother is now moving from the point of losing her temper to the point at which guilt and doubts about her competence are again rearing their wobbly heads. Nevertheless, he will have the meager reassurance of seeing that when the chips were down, she did relieve him of command and of his panicky feeling that he should somehow know what she should do.
How does this feel to you?
There is of course so much more to her work than this statement. If this intrigues you - please go here.
So, if networks are the future, how do we set them up? We are so used to using engineering that we can default into using engineering rules.
Real networks ALL "Emerge".
This sounds weird but we actually have a lot of experience in how to do this. It's called Gardening! It's also called Parenting. When we apply machine principles to gardening we get monoculture agriculture. When we apply machine principles to parenting, we get badly adjusted children.
When we apply the Rule #4 we get life and the full potential of the network, the garden and our kids.
In this part of my book, You Don't Need a Job, we look at how the rules of Emergence work. They apply of course not only to your work network but also to how you parent. I will show you both.
This is a perennial garden. Once the gardener has set the conditions up correctly, the garden does all the work.
This process is called emergence. It is as different from engineering as dynamite is from the atom bomb. Engineering uses mechanics, emergence uses physics. It is in this process that the quantum improvement in performance between an engineering culture and a network culture will be seen.
The challenge for us today is to find out how to set the conditions for emergence to occur. The answer is to be found in the concept of initial conditions.
All natural things, living or not, develop when they find the ideal starting conditions. Hurricanes don’t happen in January. They happen between June and November when the initial conditions of temperature and water are right. Without these conditions, a hurricane will not develop to its full potential, but with the right conditions it will. It will do this all by itself.
Human social networks are the same they emerge when the optimal conditions for development take place.
We can start to explore this idea best by looking at how our children develop, or do not, to their full potential. If we can understand this, then we can understand how to set up the ideal initial conditions for a human social network. For we know that in nature all development is fractal. What happens at one scale happens at all scales.
This figure shows us what it looks like when a child acquires language. What we see is a pattern that becomes denser and denser as more and more connections are added. Then, at some point, the new system takes off and has a life all of its own. This is emergence. Emergence is how life itself begins. At some point of connection inside an ideal environment, life itself emerges. This insight makes me wonder what will happen after 100 years of humans being connected as we are today? Is this how language itself emerged after millions of years of people sitting around a campfire?
We know now what the optimal initial conditions are for human language and development so we can apply this knowledge to human networks. (A full explanation of this process is here if you wish to explore this.)
To initiate the process of human development, children need to be touched a lot. They need to hear a lot of words. Infants also need to hear these words in the right social and cultural context. The right context is in a firm, safe and loving family culture.
As you will see, initial conditions are also time sensitive. The window for development is largely closed for a child by 3.
This is what success or failure looks like.
We can see two separate trajectories that diverge over time to produce a significant difference. At 2 years of age one child can understand 300 words and the other 150. Not much of a difference. However, look at the trajectory. In the case of the 300 word child, by 15, she will be at 2nd year university level. The 150 word child will be stuck at grade 5.
The difference looks tiny, but that is the key to understanding initial conditions. Tiny differences at the outset extend over time to huge differences. Trajectories have a power of their own.
Willms’ and Hart and Risley’s work shows us that family culture is how initial conditions are set for every human being’s development. The optimal culture sets the maximum amount of trust.
Authoritative – Parents who establish a warm and nurturing relationship with their children, but set firm limits for their behaviour.
Authoritarian – Parents who are highly controlling, requiring their children to meet an absolute set of standards.
Permissive – Parents who are overly nurturing and who provide few standards for behaviour and are extremely tolerant of misbehaviour.
The Willms research informs us that the poorest learning and development outcomes are found in families that have authoritarian and permissive cultures. Most machine organizations have these kinds of cultures too.
I think it follows that human culture is the driver for human social networks, for trust is the critical element.
In summary, human development is tied to initial conditions that promote trust and then exposes the child to the maximum amount of the right patterns. If these conditions are applied in a time sensitive manner, then emergence will take place. If done very well, the trajectory will take the person to her full potential.
What works for you and me as individuals, will work for groups.
For this is how natural systems work. They are fractal, they are the same at all scales. The brain and the universe share the same organizational pattern.
However, that is not all we need to know. If we were planting a perennial garden we would also need to know what kind of mix of plants is best. For we know that, even with the best growing conditions, a garden that reaches its potential must have the kind of reinforcing diversity that will drive good health and resilience.
There must be a healthy iteration between the elements in the mix.
In a later post we will talk about the "protocols" that all networks have in order to connect and have great complexity and so life. The good news is that no real network has more than 4 of these. The complexity comes from their iteration. So they are in fact easier to set up than a traditional organization that depends on thousands of rules.
Projects Powered by Podio I am working with Christ Church Cathedral Choir - Grace Church to set up a Virtual Choir School - The team is all over the world and we use Podio to do our work
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