Much of our discourse about the New Enterprise seems to use the premise that our traditional business organizations will be transformed. I am beginning to doubt that. But I think that there is a new Enterprise but that it will look more like that I propose in this post.
All the news about employment remains bad. Will the jobs ever come back? I don't think so. Business as we know it makes less and less and in reality offers fewer roles and jobs that have any meaning or that can pay todays bills. Business as we know it has no capacity to offer most people what they need.
I think that the real new economy is going to emerge out of desperation and out of this failure.
Here are some trends that we should watch out for. They are all linked into the great Trinity of real needs - Food - Shelter and Surplus
Hyper Local Food - If you have no money, food becomes very important. The Food Bank model takes us no where - it relies on charity - offers shit food and does not add any impetus to the lack of work or role. People are doing better than this by making the growing of food the centre piece. Here is an example. We see already in the worst hit cities like Detroit, that people are starting to grow their own food amidst the ruins of the city. And its not just that food is grown but that real community is created. People who grow food together and then share it return to the society of our hunter gatherer past. They become Tribes. With this Trust comes the potential to do more.
Cheap Land and Real Estate - As many areas become blighted, the land and the space becomes very cheap. Offering the opportunity to get the second part of the trinity. In the old model, people would have to pay others to make shelter or working space. But if enough Trust is created by say starting with co growing and sharing food, then "Barn Building" is possible. The "Tribes can help the members have shelter or work space. The capital that is required is less financial capital but social capital.
Surplus - But we still all need money or some way of exchanging value outside the Tribe. This is where the social web comes in. There can be a surplus of food that can be sold locally. Inner Detroit is a food desert. There are only corner stores. This is true for many urban areas. The food operation can scale and can also network with others offering in the end large scale. 1,000 mini farms in a large city can produce a very large amount of food collectively. Enough to feed most people. A real surplus is possible. Those who start to grow food to feed themselves will make a good living feeding other. With this surplus and with their social capital all sorts of new ventures then becomes possible. For the capital costs of business in this context are very low. Anything will soon be able to be made locally with very little capital. This trend is most visible in the media now. Did you know that True Grit was edited by the Coen brothers on Final Cut Pro,? The technology is here right now that can empower a small hyper local group to go even into manufacturing. Here I see the idea like Fab Labs coming into prominence. For about $25,000 a community can equip itself to make almost anything. As with a network of tiny farms, a network of tiny shops can build on a large scale. This was how in fact Germany kept its war production growing throughout WWII. To avoid bombing, all aircraft production was dispersed into small shops and the parts were assembled at the bases!
Again as with food - the social web connects all of this. Producers to Buyers - Suppliers to producers - Producers to Producers. In a network the nodes are small, but the network and so the output and the opportunity can be vast. In the old, we all depend on the MAN. In the network we are all the man. No one is going to move your urban farm to Iowa or your Fab Lab to China.
Food is the starting point I think. We all need it and if we go down this road we re-invent society. Food offers us the core of what we need and growing it and sharing it creates a real tribe. For a food model like this brings us all back together where as the old model splits us all up.
So with this wealth model come also wealth distribution. A new better form of capitalism. Capitalism 2.0?
He is trying to ski by thinking. He is thinking so hard that he cannot "hear" the hill or his body. He is thinking so much that he might miss a fallen skier or a tree - for he is thinking so hard that he cannot see. His fear also causes him to miss the key risk and control factor. Fearing falling or going too fast, he leans back instead of down the hill.
He is thinking so much that he cannot have a conversation with his own body or with the world that surrounds him.
He is thinking so much that he gets exhausted very quickly because he is fighting himself, the hill and the universe. And just thinking so hard uses up so much energy.
He is not having a "Deep Conversation". He is relying on his rational mind to guide him in a novel and complex situation. This is what most of us do at work and in our personal lives.
The most important conversation that we need to have is within ourselves. This is the core lesson of having Deeper Conversation. That to have a deeper conversation with others and with the univers, we must be able to have such a conversation inside us. This is the topic of this our last of 4 parts of my 4 part series that synthesizes a longer series of talks I have had with the brilliant Johnnie Moore. (Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3)
It's the classic psych drama. We have got so used to giving our rational mind primacy that we allow it to fill our consciousness with its chatter and worries. Mothers worry about what the book says about their kids. Managers seek control. You wake up in the middle of the night consumed by a fear and if you can surpress it, find another one right behind it. At school this part of our mind is the only part that counts.
Yes the new skier has to "know" the theory of skiing - well maybe not... Adults have a huge problem learning to ski - I did at 40 - but kids know no theory. Their rational mind has not yet taken over. No one told them the theory of walking or language, they just got on with it and did what FELT right.
Kids use their full range of channels. They listen to their body and they feel their way into novelty. They learn to walk and to talk and to stand upright. They learn so much before they go to school!
But we adults, who know better because we have been to school, wait to be told by a higher authority. In this universe, all the other parts of our mind are closed down and the Ego is given precedence.
So how do we get the rest of our mind back. How do we tune into all the channels in our body so that we can feel the hill or our way though a novel and a complex situation? For as all adult ski learners know, we have had this ability whacked out of us at school and at work.
Johnnie reminded me that it's all about habits. We have lost the habits that help us access this power to use our whole mind, so it helps to set up new habits to bring the whole mind back and to put the Ego into his place - a minor character!
Sit as often as you can in a circle. This brings the field into its best quality. Access the Field.
Before you get down to business check in as to how you all are. This might be how you feel - what you are feeling about the task at hand in your body. This type of sharing brings up the common humanity of you all. The leader may be feeling anxious in her stomach about the result. Hearing this, we can all relax more. Any good consultant has such a go around at the beginning of a meeting so that the Field can be awaked. I know to many this may sound very new age - but my question to you is do you want to ski like me or like my son?
Surely no one wants to ski like me? That is what is at stake here. Real results - getting all the wisdom from all the minds into play and in getting more cohesion in the team are what is at stake here.
Beware of "Action" as a demanded result.
You know what has happened here don't you? Trying too hard leads to a failure and then to bad feelings and then a habit of trying too hard and so on. The point of good sex is not the erection but the communication and the shared love. Bringing your rational mind into the bedroom is a disaster. So it is in meetings.
The key result is to have the team both together and open. Then the "Whole Mind of the Team is brought into play. THEN you can start to see your way through the paradoxes that make up any complex situation.
Let me give you 2 examples - one a corporate one that Johhnie and I worked on with NPR and 300 stations and the other a new problem that confronts me and all of us in middle age.
This was the complex problem that we used to have a Deeper Conversation inside NPR where all the senior management, the board and over 200 staff participated along with the leadership of 300 stations. At the outset NO ONE could know the answer. That is the definition of a Complex problem - the answer cannot be predicted rationally it can only emerge as a result of lots of trial and error. What we did was to set up many many meetings where the groups "Played" with this problem - we in effect set up a process of iteration that could enable answers over time to emerge.
The challenge was this - We assumed, now rightly, that in 2009, the web would be ubiquitous. NPR and the Stations were then in 2005 at a high point with their listeners on terrestrial radio but at ground zero with the web. How were they going to grow the web side and not lose the listeners? How was NPR to do this and not lose the stations? What were the stations going to do? For one thing was clear, and that was by 2009, the world would be very different.
To set up the larger field where all could participate - we used "Play". I have found that if you think of complex problems that might involve you losing your current power in role, the job of protecting your status quo is paramount. This is why when we ask the Usual Suspects to think of the future of their field, say health, they act to preserve the status quo. They cannot go beyond this. A rational role based discusion about novelty has to fail. For our ego will force us to lean back and try and protect what we know and our current power.
So we made this exploration into a game. I won't go into the details but to say that to wrestle with complex problems demands that you give up your role. Back to kids again - they learn all the vital lessons of life via play.
The results come through emergence which comes from trial and error. In complex situations you CANNOT know the answer up front. It is impossible. Remembering this is very helpful. No senior NPOR person presumed to know. All were equals in ignorance. This opened up the field. At the end of each session, each group had to put on a play - they had to express what they thought the future would be - and you know they were right - they found it.
Does this work? Each of the many independent sessions came to this conclusion - that the power of choice of what to listen too had to shift to the listener. Now we all know this right? No we only know this as lip service. You have to have wrestled with this and seen the alternatives and felt that this is true to accept it. We all "Know" that we have to lean DOWN the hill to get control - BUT this is not what we do as learners for though we know it to be true - we CAN"T do it - it is too scary and too counter our old reality.
Does this work? Well what media organization is best equipped for dealing with he online world right now? I would say NPR. So what was the result of our work with NPR? It was not the plan that came out of the process. It was that 300 people in NPR had wrestled with the problem and had felt their way into the future, so that when a new leader arrived with the mandate and the attitude to go for it, there was a mass aha! Not the normal resistance that you get when a big change is dropped in the organization from on high.
Meetings that start with a demand for action and results - are often code for a desire to lean up the hill. Let's stay in the rut where I can control what is going on because I feel safe there. When you demand results or action - what do you mean? Most of the time it means a focus on the minutiae - like the skier focusing on thinking his way into the turn - forcing himself to turn rather that letting the hill and his body do it all for him. When we work on the surface we force the whole team into this posture. It is our fear that keeps us from skiing. It is the fear that stops many still in radio and the media from allowing the gravity of the Hill of the New Web to help them get a new control.
The ongoing result that all teams need in complex times is to be so comfortable with each other that they play intuitively like a basketball team on fire. Look at this player - he is not thinking - he KNOWS where the pass will go. We have to really know each other. We have to bring our Whole Mind into play.
If you work on the key result being a well functioning team, THEY will do the heavy work. The real ACTION is to get the team using all their whole mind as individuals and as a team. Like a good skier, there is no time to "Think" on the court. You have to be able to sense what is going on.
So let's extend this a bit and look at an issue that affects us all - our health. My task - to find a question that engages anyone. From a personal point of view.
Here is one for me and for you that I hope illustrates this principle. I am looking at the health costs for PEI. An important question but very abstract and with many people with hard views. So how to use a question to break the logjam? This is my starting question that only invites each of us as people into the realm of the question. I start as Johnnie suggest with a question that gets us to react by feeling it out.
See the red line. That is how men on PEI age and deteriorate. The average age of death is 75. But by 65 the average man is in such bad health as to be helpless and dependent. From this stage more than half his lifetime cost to the health system will be spent. These are real data points.
Now see the black line. This is my goal for my own life. Aging as we know it is not natural. The black line is the natural aging process. In nature aging hits a threshold and then the deterioration stops - if you make 85 and are fit and not demented you will likely stay the same until you die - and that might be 95 - 100 - or 105. You will die - but you wont deteriorate more. There is a ton of evidence and work behind this - just trust on this right now there are books and books to be written and I can only point this out to you in this post.
The research suggests that I and you can push this point of stability back to 55 or 60 - my current age. I can be at choice. I can choose to change nothing and I will get ill and degrade. Or I can choose to change my life and have a good chance that I will die healthy and a contributor. Now I can choose either one - newspapers chose degradation - but it is a choice.
But choosing life is not enough. Knowing where to go is not enough. Like NPR I have to find out how to live differently. I will have to learn how to change the habits of a lifetime. This is hard.
How hard? This involves my giving up modern food. All processed food as a start. All grains and all dairy too. It means that I have instead to eat what people did in our hunter gatherer period. I also have to do many other things to get a better fit with my deep biology. Sleep more. Be outside more. Walk more. Have a mission in life that is bigger than me and so on - I will be posting tons on this later.
So here is the point. I know this. You can know it too. You know that when you ski you must lean down the hill. But knowing and doing are 2 different things. Changing the habits of a lifetime is very very very hard. Doing something that NONE of your peers are doing is as hard. This is the landscape of real change - being out of step with the mainstream - not knowing what to do - being pulled back all the time by your old habits.
Like Beowulf and Grendel - you have to have the energy to kill the old inner you.
But if you have asked the right question, we can wrestle with it. You can feel enough to kill off the old you who will fight to keep you stuck.
Thought is not enough. You must have emotional power that comes from how you feel about a situation. Here is my feeling test about my health that is raised by the Question I posed.
Do I want to become feeble at 65? What will this mean to my family? No I don't want that - I would feel as if I betrayed them because I know what I know now - that had the choice and chose pizza over them
Can I afford to be feeble? I worry about my savings and if I will have enough - can I afford to be feeble? I don't have the money and I doubt the state will have it either - I will be fucked if I stay as I am.
How do I feel now? How do I look? How capable am I now? Would I like to feel, look and be better soon? Of course I want to look and feel beter - I have noticed how weak and inflexible I am and wish I was fitter.
I know I am weak of will and that changing all these things will be hard - so what feedback and what support can I tap into to help me? I know I cannot do this on my own? In the few times I have made other major changes, it was the support I had that made all the difference - I know that I am weak!
Are there good tips that I can use to help me? I need reinforcement to get over the early hump - I know that other people's experience will help me
I have a rational argument but my feeling argument has more power over my behaviour - The Rational is the Volts - the Feeling is the Amps. It's the Feedback that encourages us and shows us the path:
I have lost 15 pounds and most importantly my 6 months pregnant belly is nearly flat - this is very reinforcing
I am never hungry - and the signal that I get when I am full kicks in immediately - that helps me not overeat.
When I fall off the wagon and have bread and cheese I feel like shit - not guilty I l feel bloated and sick
I look forward to my walks with the dogs - I want to do it more than they do now - it helps me think and do better work too
My wife is completely onside and my friends who have not seen me in some time comment on how well I am - important people are encouraging me
So I could not have a plan from the question but the question gets at the heart of the matter FOR ME.
We all have to feel our way into change. The mind is not enough. The body has to power us into the new. We have to be able to hear what our body says. We have to be like kids again and play our way into the future.
So what is the biggest lesson of all?
We come back to Johnnie's key lesson. We have to calm the mind so that we can hear the rest of the conversation in our body. Our mind can show the way but the getting there is all bout the rest of us. This goes for teams too. If we can create enough personal trust we can access the Whole Mind of the group. THEN we can win any game set for us.
Your work and mine is to put him in his place - shut him up - so that we can hear the full you and me.
This is the pathway to our future - we go this way or we go nowhere - and you only have to invest 3 minutes to hear the ultimate in coherence - a masterpiece of compression and story telling - I am aghast at how thoughtful he is.
What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?
Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.
So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?
Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.
So how might this work and so how might you do this too?
Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:
The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help
But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.
She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.
As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.
Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.
Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.
The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.
How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Bruno told me. I had the same experience.
Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.
Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”
What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.
This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.
Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military. ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way. The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.
The Gift?
Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!
He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”
In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!
Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”
For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.
How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”
So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?
Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.
So what now?
I think that the next stage would be this:
At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
At the moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot
As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.
Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.
At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.
What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.
At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.
But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.
Does "Evil" exist? Debatable. But for sure, "Evil Behaviour" exists. And what could be more Evil than manipulating people's fears?
There is a lot of that going around now - and regretfully the mainstream media helps these people have power to build a platform based on these fears.
They do this in the name of a good idea 'Balance". But how do you balance truth and lies? "Truth or Lies? That is a bit strong Rob?" Well.... The proof is in the pudding. What do many people believe to be true today and how did this happen? Do they believe the truth or lies?
Many Americans (and politicians who the polls) don’t want a mosque at Manhattan’s Ground Zero.
An increasing percent believe the President is a Muslim.
Most Americans approve of Arizona’s new law allowing police to stop anyone who looks Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship.
Most would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally.
Where is all this coming from?
It’s called fear. When people are deeply anxious about holding on to their homes, their jobs, and their savings, they look for someone to blame. And all too often they find it in “the other” – in people who look or act differently, who come from foreign lands, who have what seem to be strange religions, who cross our borders illegally.
Americans who feel economically insecure may even become paranoid, believing, say, that the President of the United States is secretly one of “them.”
Economic fear is the handmaiden of intolerance. It’s used by demagogues who redirect the fear and anger toward people and groups who aren’t really to blame but are easy scapegoats.
The mainstream media is being manipulated by these people in the name of "Balance". The outcome is that Ignorance is winning over Truth. I am seeing that the best of intentions are creating the worst of outcomes.
The lies and the fallacies are winning. The "Simple" is crushing the "complex". There is no room for the Complex in Mainstream Media - so the "Simple" and Wrong gets the play.
Why is this happening? Is it just the poor economy? I think it is because the world has become more complex as it has become more connected. Most people can only cope with the simple or the complicated. They have to know the answers. But with Complex situations the answers cannot be known in advance.
Are we then stuck? Stuck in a social world that is complex but in a society that cannot cope with complexity? Is our media simply a product of a simple world that has simple issues?
Many things in the world are changing very rapidly. Heuristics and rules of thumb that used to work – simplifications once true because they were in alignment with the real world – no longer provide a useful function. So people use confirmation bias and other rational fallacies to prop up something – anything – that can explain things in a way that gives them comfort.
A changing world is extremely uncomfortable. Toffler wrote about this in Future Shock, one of the great books of the 70s. This shock, like culture shock, leaves many people disconnected and stressed. So, it is natural for people to seek the comfort of just-so stories that can support their replica of the real world
What seems to be happening, though, is that the media, instead of promoting understanding and stifling ignorance, is actually facilitating it. The MSM just does not want to puncture any bubbles supporting Cargo Cult Worlds.
The MSM is actively working then to prevent us from finding solutions. It does not want to inform people of the underlying principles needed to solve many of our problems.
There actually are people of all political persuasions that want to promote understanding, that value ideas over ideology, that are willing to admit that the world is often more complex than we would like.
But these people seem to have smaller and smaller soapboxes in the public arena. And the MSM does everything it can to make them disappear.
If we hope to overcome our problems we have to work for greater understanding and work to overturn Cargo Cult Worlds. Otherwise, we will see a continuing disconnect from reality with an increasing inability to understand the principles underlying our real world problems
Is the media Evil? No I think they are prisoners of a dangerous idea - that all ideas are worthy and that all points of view demand support.
So what about those that exploit our fears? Are they evil? What motivates them? What is the outcome of their work?
I leave you with the story of their ancestor, Father Coughlin. It was he who worked so hard to incite anti semitism in America in the 1930's that meant that America closed its doors before the holocaust. It was he that used the then new media power of radio to capture a large audience of "believers".
How would we apply the ideals of "Balance" to him? What was the price of him not being called out? Was this America's finest hour? I think most can agree that what he did was evil. So how will history judge us?
So what to do? Our media is not designed to cope with complexity. Nothing makes a complex situation worse than by trying to cope with it using the rules for simple.
So the real future, as I see it, for media is not the use of Facebook etc Is not going online etc But is finding out how best to offer up a platform for engaging in complexity. In creating a space where the process that can offer solutions to complex issues, discovery, can take place.
The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:
Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice.
Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply goodpractice.
Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice.
The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision.
Many people are pounding away about the "Traditional Marriage". Their assumption is that such a marriage is part of human nature and all other forms must be unnatural. But is this true really?
For many, "Traditional Marriage" is One Man and One Woman and their job is to have children.
But inferred by this view of Traditional is that such an arrangement is somehow ordained by nature - it is the "normal" and historic way that humans have raised kids and been in relationship with each other.
But our history as a species does not support this view at all.
For millions of years we lived in small groups that were larger and more socially complex that the traditional view.
Here the optimal arrangement for women was to ensure the protection and the feeding of their children by having as many of the males as possible in the group attached to them and the kids. No one could have had an exclusive arrangement with another for in the hunter gatherer tribal society of "NO PROPERTY" no person belonged to another individual.
This was a very pragmatic arrangement. For, if a woman was linked only to one man, she and her children would be very vulnerable. What if he died? Who would feed and look after them? If she had a new man, would he support her children?
It was pragmatic socially as well as functionally. A small social unit like this could not survive sexual jealousy.
It was an arrangement that shaped our biology. Bonobos and humans are the only species where the female is sexually available all the time. They are the only two species where the vagina is designed for face to face mating. Ovulation is hidden. We are designed for social sex not mating sex.
Sex far from splitting the group asunder makes it closer. The design for social sex and not reproductive sex - suggest that sex for humans is a form of "grooming" . Apes with fur groom the fur of the other to improve the cohesion of the group. We, the naked ape, find sex the more powerful way to develop intimacy.
The group was the most important thing - everything was designed to make the group healthy and effective. Sex must have played a large role in this.
This arrangement supported our core economic and survival function - how we got food. Among the apes, only the Bonobo and the human shares food. Human hunters would share all the food with ALL the tribe. There was no smaller group such as a "Traditional" family that had its own food. There was no mom and dad and the kids, there was only the larger group where ALL was shared.
This arrangement extended to child feeding and raising.
All the mothers and in fact all the females looked after and fed ALL the babies. While there was obviously the birth mother who was close - all the women were close. All those who were sexually active also had synchronized cycles. Meaning that there was a lot of milk available all the time. So if a mother died, the baby would be not at risk. All the females from as young as 5 or 6 participated in the raising of all the infants.
Defense was a group activity. All the males participated in the defense of all the children.
Our bodies, our minds and our nature has been shaped by millions of years of living like this.
The Traditional marriage - that itself only is common in certain societies has been around for at most 10,000 years. It is a blip and it is a social product of a new way of feeding our selves. It's a product of agriculture and the great social invention of agriculture, a state.
With agriculture property is invented and who land and the herds were passed down through generations became THE question.
Property is the central idea in the agricultural world. So men owned property and ensured its ownership through time by owning their women. This was the new deal as told in the story of the Fall and the exit from Eden.
The growth of the state is also part of this system. As the state took more and more of the surplus, it could bind people to the state by offering more of the "services" found in the Tribe. Protection, Employment, Money itself, health care, education, pensions. Only in modern times could there be a nuclear family and even more extraordinary a single parent. These groups are too small to survive in a world that is not so organized.
So has this experiment worked well? After all it is a product of our different environment.
The evidence suggests not recently. Not since the end of the larger more tribal extended family.
In a moment of my own unhappiness years ago, I asked Dan Keating what was the track record of dysfunction in families today. He thought it was over 90%! No effective "natural" social arrangement can have this poor an outcome.
What is it about the nuclear family that drives so much dysfunction?
Let's look at some of the common issues.
There is not enough social diversity to raise a healthy minded child. With only one or 2 parents, it is rare to offer a child a really broad and healthy spectrum of experience and security. Worse it is easy to offer them a very controlled or as bad a very lax and unsafe experience. Most of our challenges in later life arise from this too narrow and too weak platform. We were not designed to imprint on such a small group.
The family is no longer an economic unit where all play a role so we lose our sense of meaning. Children have in fact become a drain on the resources of a family. Our natural place where all provide value and hence where all can find meaning has been lost. Instead children are groomed to make their way as separate beings in the larger economy or left to their own devices. In both cases there is a disconnect at the core of the family.
Property is still the basis of marriage and so drives power issues. We think we own each other. We think that the true roles of the other is to make us happy. It has become all about me. Happiness and self fulfillment have replaced the larger goal of continuing the tribe. This is a very fragile basis for a long and fulfilling relationship.
Long term monogamy is as natural as celibacy! It drives urges that are all too human and makes it certain that we are wracked by guilt and by anguish and failure. For in reality being unfaithful is routine but is seen as being the unforgivable sin. But the traditional marriage - being based on property - makes it inevitable that we fail. With this failure comes a terrible cost in "broken homes" and people.
The traditional marriage is not suited to our nature. So what then?
Frankly I don't know. I am as much a product of my upbringing as you. But I do see some signs.
Tribal Marriage was not a free for all - at its heart was the practical way to survive in a world that was dangerous.
The unspoken partner of the Traditional Marriage is the state. It is the state that underwrites a lot of the risk in life. Only in a state could there be a unit as small as Mum dad and the kids. In all places where the state is weak at least the large extended family prevails where all the family look after all the family.
The state and the large institutions that offer us shelter, food, energy and security enable us to limp along in the traditional marriage.
But there are signs that the economic collapse, with our food system depending on cheap oil and climate change that the state may not be there as strongly as we expect.
How will we get by as jobs stay scarce - pensions disappear - food and security become hard to get - as energy becomes very expensive?
We surely have a tried and true social answer. It is at least the extended family. It is at best the Tribe. The tribe being in my mind a unit that is profoundly economic. It exists to provide over generations what all the members need for a good life.
For this to work, we have to return to the ideals of our hunter gatherer ancestors. To raise great kids we ALL have to provide for them. To look after each other as adults and as older people, we ALL have to look after each other. Exclusive bonds make this impossible. How might this work?
I don't know. But I do know this. That such an arrangement is truly natural and that we will feel our way naturally into finding the answers. I think that events will push us here. Families now split up like mine will coalesce.
Several house holds will regroup into a larger whole. Some of the people will not be blood but dear friends. Some how in this mix, the old ways will emerge I think. Not as an act of deliberation or even intent - they just will happen for of course this is all innate.
Many now are wondering what the best response to Peak Oil will be. I am just seeing for the first time that one of the responses will have to be at least the re-establishment of the extended family. And even the Tribe.
For as many of us think more about Peak Oil and the requirement for Local Resiliency, we need to think about the social arrangements in which we will live to cope with a much tougher world and a place where the institutions that we take for granted no longer work.
Many are also wondering about how best to find a "better business model" based on community. Surely the tribe might play a key role here?
Many of the ideas in this post have been taken from a remarkable new book that is part of a larger body of work on the shift from Hunter Gatherer life to Agriculture.
In closing, I see another old story here. Back in the 14th century - one of the worst in human experience where it all seemed to go wrong - people started to look again at the old forgotten texts of the classic world. From this new study of an older world came the Renaissance. The grafting onto the world of the time of the lost wisdom of the Roman and Greek world. What is being done today is the same. People are looking back at our Hunter Gatherer Past that had been dismissed as savage and are finding wisdom that we can use today.
Surely family as a social construct is the most important aspect of their millions of years of hard acquired wisdom?
So finally the traditional marriage is as true to our nature as the idea that the world was made in a week 6,000 years ago.
If we can accept the reasons and the value of our successful ancestors, we might ourselves find more fulfillment and a bastion for the storms to come.
At KETC we will soon launch a project on "Immigration" in America. The deep question that we will be asking in a year of hosting an online space and making a 4 hour documentary is "What is the experience like for all people and where should we go?"
A huge challenge for us then is "Voice". What is our position? For the range of opinion is vast, the emotions are high, many see the issue in terms of good versus evil, few look into any of the pragmatic aspects.
It's a minefield!
Jay Rosen has been digging into the traditional perspective taken by the orthodoxy that journalists have to have:
I called him last week for advice and here is what we came to.
First of all we were clear that Immigration is not a simple or even a complicated issue - issues that are knowable and that can be resolved by applying known rules. It's a Complex Issue: Being Complex means that it can only be known via the process of "Emergence" - lots of trial and error leading to patterns not to single solutions.
On Jay's site I made the point that this felt like a Quantum world where only zones of probability could be determined and where the view of the observer would always affect the observed.
Another reader said that this was "Bullshit" - but while the issue of complexity may not be Quantum it does share the reality that there can be no single right answer.
The other point is that there can never not be bias. We all live in a world of a cultural screen. We all screen in or out what does or does not fit. To believe otherwise is to be naive.
So where pragmatically does that leave us at KETC?
It might be this? (Welcome your views for this is just MY opinion)
For patterns to emerge we must have a "Plurality" of opinions/storis and voices. With such a Plurality we have the chance of creating "Emergence" or stable patterns of norms. A kind of Wisdom of Crowds
To do that then our job is to host safely and in a trusted way as many opinions and stories as possible and to encourage a deep but civic debate - as Jay does on his own site
To do that I think that those if us who are the hosts should also disclose who we are and have a diverse group at KETC doing the hosting - so we too represent a broad view. (Jay discloses here - Jeff Jarvis Discloses here)
Johnnie tells us that the answer is simple but difficult. Difficult because the answer demands that we converse in a different way. Yes the simple idea is that we talk to each other differently. The challenge is that to do this we have to give up some hard wired habits.
What we have to give up is using conversation as a duel or a combat where the dominant player wins and all ideas that don't fit are killed as are of course the divergent thinkers. What we need is a conversation that opens up new ideas and that builds community.
Much change is of the 'Trojan horse' variety. At the top of the organisation a decision is taken to introduce a strategic change programme and consultants or an internal team are commissioned to plan it down to the very last detail. The planned changes are then presented at a grand event (the Trojan Horse) amid much loud music, bright lights and dry ice. More often than not, however, a few weeks later the organisation will have settled back into its usual ways and rejected much of the change. This is usually because the change was too great to be properly understood and owned by the workforce.
trojanmice, on the other hand, are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojanmice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could.
There is an art to spotting a Trojan mouse - you need to develop a critically trained eye. Seeing things differently, and seeing different things, is a powerful experience. And once you do, you can set your trojanmice free to create the results your business needs.
A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?
Is this better?
If so – why?
If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?
So what’s my argument?
Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.
I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.
So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.
I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.
How did this occur?
My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.
How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….
There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!
But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.
Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.
For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.
But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.
Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.
But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.
What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.
As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……
Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian "hacktivists."
Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming.
This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls "resilient communities," which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call "broadband socialism," in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today's libertarian revival endures, it's easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.
We see this individualism in the rise of "freeganism" and in the small but growing handful of "cage-free families" who've abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.
The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.
Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com
As many fuss about the organization of the future - have they thought of this?
On May 6 in Charlottetown, some of us start a nationwide 3 year inquiry into what our work future will be like. When there are so few young - how will work be done? How will our world be? For never in the history of any species will there be so few young. A situation made worse by how badly our society prepares children today.
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
What's wrong with this skier? 
Sit as often as you can in a circle. This brings the field into its best quality. 
You know what has happened here don't you? Trying too hard leads to a failure and then to bad feelings and then a habit of trying too hard and so on. The point of good sex is not the erection but the communication and the shared love. Bringing your rational mind into the bedroom is a disaster. So it is in meetings.
The
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