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July 06, 2009

The Natural Organization - The Metaphor in Reality - Chris Corrigan on PEI

Chris spent the week with us on PEI. On a walk the other day we were struck by the contrast between an old meadow and a plowed field. All that he and I have been thinking about Natural Organization revealed itself. 5 minutes of pure insight.


June 27, 2009

The Impact of Domestication on Dogs and Man

If you ask why I keep banging on about why it may be good to find a way home to being more self reliant, here is a view of the power of domestication on both animals and us.

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Sitting Bull - A Natural and Wild Leader
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Grey Wolf - Natural Wild Leader - Look at Sitting Bull's eyes and at the Eyes of the Wolf
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WSC New Modern Leader
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German Shepherd - New  Modern Dog - Both Churchill and the Shepherd still have the remnants of the natural and the wild in them. In a tough corner, you would want both by your side.
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Post Modern - Totally domesticated Dog - All wildness has been bred out. Rely on the power of manipulation and on being liked.
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What next? This? Totally helpless - totally self absorbed - a complete drain
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June 23, 2009

Natural Organization - My Talk at reboot9

I gave this talk 2 years ago. It is 34 minutes long. It is the essence of what I think will prove to be our new reality.

Natural Organization - Fire Brigade - A Modern Example

Is there a modern example of the Natural Organization hiding in plain site? Yes there is. It is how fire fighters organize.

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Years ago I won in a raffle dinner for 4 at Fire Station Number 1 in Toronto with the crew and the Deputy Chief. As I heard the chief speak, I knew that all my ideas about how an organization should be organized were wrong.

I was an investment banker then. We knew all about motivating performance - it was all about pay! We knew all about leadership, they all went to graduate school. We knew all about teams - they were held together by money.

Here is what the Toronto fire department believe about who they are:

Teamwork is everything. Whether it is sharing routine tasks at the fire station or providing fire fighting services at an emergency scene. Firefighters depend on each other to successfully perform their duties.

As team members, Firefighter live and work together in close quarters throughout a shift. Living at the fire station means that all team members are responsible for station housekeeping....

Firefighting is not a 9-5 job. It is a 24 hours a day, seven days a week public service

Here is their credo

Courage to move forward. Compassion in everything we do. Service without boundaries

Like the sail Royal Navy or the Legion, every firefighter joins at the bottom.

They live together while on duty and this is their tent

Firehouse

The road to command can only be taken as a consequence of selection and experience.

Pumper

After 8 years, a firefighter can elect to  shift to the command track. He or she can now take the Captain's exams. Often friends who elect to stay firefighters will act as coaches. If you pass - like the Lieutenant's exam in the age of sail - you are on the ladder but as also in the Navy or the Legion (The Optio) you have to  wait for an opening and the confidence of the senior command. As with both the Navy and the Legion - there can be no hiding. You have it or you don't and all know.

As a captain you command a truck. After a period of years as a successful Captain, you can take your chief's exam. Again, some Captains choose not to. There is no dishonor in not going up.

if you pass your chief's exams you again wait  for a place and for the confidence of the Senior chiefs. Then you command a station - there is a hierarchy here too just as in the Legion or the Navy.

Head office is administrative. Firefighters use doctrine - a set of drills and practices evolved over time as the best thing to do - to guide them in action. This is how many stations can come together in a major fire and all know what to do. This is how a firefighter from another country can be seconded and fit in.

In a fire, you have to know that you can rely on your mates. This is why you live together on duty. You don't just hang out, you live together. Meals are cooked, the place is cleaned. The Firehouse is the Legionary Tent. It is a social pressure cooker where Trust is built from Intimacy. Where you know all of your buddy's life. Where there are no secrets. Where life and work become one. 

Nothing could be further from how we live and work in conventional workplaces.

I think that this is the cause of stress for the integration of women into the force. Let's look at this a bit more deeply because it is at the heart of the matter.

Natural Organizations are first and foremost SOCIAL. They do work but the SOCIAL comes first. In a Natural Organization, the glue is Trust and Love. Good Natural organizations, like the USMC, have highly developed processes for bringing about Trust and Love. The Firehouse is a Trusted Space where Intimacy is encouraged. Why? Because you have to know that the person next to you will go the the very end to look after you and he needs to know that you will too.

So in conditions where Intimacy is at the core, if you mix men and women together all sorts of problems can arise. 

The real challenge for women in the force is not if they can carry a heavy load or a 240 pound colleague out of a building. It is not that they do not have the firefighting skills. It is if the men and women are intimate what are the social stresses that arise - you think of what they might be and while you are thinking think of the spouses - stresses that might fracture the cohesion that is essential.

What is the answer? I don't know. But acknowledging the real issue might e a good place to start.

Training is largely practical. Again in a fire there is no time to think. You have to make the best call instantly - only masses of experience can give you that edge.

Nothing must get in the way of the team. So pay is all linked to personal expertise and to time.

All the social/work numbers are well within the Magic Numbers. if very large numbers are required, they are created by scaling the magic number units - the number of bells = the scale.

Overall the pay is not that high. Yet the brigade has no trouble in recruiting. It is not pay that brings people in or keeps them. It is the experience of being with people that you love and doing great work that is difficult and dangerous.

As I sat at dinner with the firemen that night there was something else I noted.

The men had a kind of glow to them. My daughter and my niece picked up immediately how attractive these men were. It was not their looks, it was something in them. My young son James, could not get enough of them either. He found their quiet authority and confidence compelling.

These men were true warriors. United in a bond of trust and love doing dangerous work for their community. It doesn't get much better

Natural Organization - Valdis Krebs - Galileo for our time?

I think when the history books are written that one of  the Galileo's of our time - a person who used scientific tools to see a new reality that changes our paradigm - will be Valdis Krebs. While commentators such as myself speculate, Valdis proves the theory with evidence.

This is what the new organization looks like:

Online_community

Here Valdis uses a real community - (OCL) - on the outside a loose group of "lurkers". In the Green group - groups of loosely connected sub groups - In the Centre - the Core - a densely connected group that acts like a Sun. It has both mass that acts as a social gravity attracting inwards. It also acts as the sun in that this group also shines energy out that reaches to the far edges of the outer group.

Here is Valdis' view of the core or as I call it the "Sun".

Online_community_core

Here is another view of what the "Sun" can do - it is an adoption force. Once the Sun is powerful enough, it can shift the paradigm. This may be how people get a disease like flu, adopt a new fashion. Or adopt social media and then a new view of how the world really works - that we are not part of a machine but part of an interconnected universe!

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(Source Harold Jarche)

So the implications are clear for me anyway.

Adopting Social Media has nothing to do with the tools. After all the tools are cheap and easy to use. It is all about rewiring the habits and the mindset of people.

If you wish to have your organization adopt this new mindset and hence also its tool kit of social media. You are going to have to create a "Sun" - a densely connected but small group that are committed to the bigger idea that is the energy behind the Sun.

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The numbers required for the core are modest. A core of 8 will get you an inner ring of 4,000. A core of 34 will get you an inner ring of 1,300,000. 89 will get you 62,000,000.

The leverage that is possible is incredible when compared to the traditional organization. This is where the costs fall away and the impact goes up.

I will talk more about this and offer you a number of real examples.

But here is the key insight. The Big idea cannot be about the internal needs of the organization. It can't be about your sales, your profits etc. It cannot be about YOU. For the Sun to access the full energy of people and to spread out to the edge, it must be about US. It must be about the larger group that includes everyone who will be in the community.

More later.

June 14, 2009

Natural Organization - Interlude - What is wrong with University - It's Unnatural

Michael Wesch and his students tell us

Natural Organization - Interlude - How to get started - Slow Money

In order to preserve and restore local food systems and local economies; in order to reconnect food producers and consumers and reconnect investors to that in which they are investing and to the places in which they live; in order to promote the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration; we do hereby affirm the following Principles. 

I. We must bring money back down to earth. 

II. We must bring our money home.  We must put money back into local economies and carbon back into the soil.  

III. We must invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. 

IV. We must invest as if carrying capacity, diversity and non-violence mattered; as if aquifers mattered; as if childhood nutrition and food deserts and obesity side-by-side with hunger all mattered.

V. There is such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, finance that is too complex.  Therefore, we must slow our money down -- not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.  

VI.  Organic seed companies, organic farmers, manufacturers of organic agricultural inputs, slow food restauranteurs, niche organic brands, local food processors, neighborhood retailers, CSAs, farmers markets, urban gardens, edible schoolyards -- without them, there can be no durable economic health or quality of life, no durable food safety or food security.

VII.  We must build the nurture capital industry.

VIII. We must give investors and philanthropists the tools they need to facilitate dramatic increases in support for small food enterprises -- Slow Munis, new philanthropic charters that steer foundation assets in support of mission, funds dedicated to CSAs and organic farmland, and collaborative structures for local investors.  

IX.  There is something beautiful about a diversified organic farm.  There is something beautiful about a CSA.   There is something beautiful about Terra Madre.  There is nothing beautiful about bovine growth hormone or Red Dye #4 or high fructose corn syrup.  We must invest as if beauty mattered.

X.  We must dare to imagine that after the Age of Industrial Finance and Industrial Agriculture comes the Age of Earthworm Economics.  Let us recognize the words of one of its first proponents, who said: "I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out." 
  
XI. We must ask:  

--What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?

--What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?

--What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now? 

XII.   We need slow money. . .quickly.

 

June 13, 2009

Natural Organization - Interlude - How to get started - Grow your own food

June 12, 2009

Natural Organization - Interlude - Find yourself somebody to Groom

Dr Robert Sapolsky interviewed by Linkedin on how to manage your stress

Natural Organization - Interlude - Steven Pressfield on Tribes

I and many think that Steven Pressfield is the best writer of historical fiction in the last century. It's his ability to get into the mind and worldview of people in the past that is his strength. A recent book of his, the Afghan Campaign, tells of Alexander's tough time in Afghanistan 300BC! It is a retelling of our current experience.

Since writing this book, he has devoted more and more time to the question of how and why the Afghans have beaten the pants off the best western militaries for the last 2,000 years. Of course at the time of Alexander, Islam was hundreds of years into the future. So the answer cannot be an aspect of Islam.

His thesis is that the core strength of Afghanistan is its core organization - The Tribe.

The Tribe being of course the essence of the Natural Human Organization - the social unit that took man from the trees to the plains, conquered large predators, survived the Ice Age, and established our place in the world.

Of course, we are so prejudiced that we know almost nothing about real tribes, how they see the world and themselves. And so we are ill equipped as Citizens of Nation States with our own unconsciously held beliefs about what is real, to understand them and cope with them.

So Pressfield has begun a 5 part video series - each part is only 5 minutes long - that is I think the most accessible starting point for gaining this understanding.

It is helping me understand what we are truly up against. And even more importantly, as the Nation State withers away, offers an insight into the nature of the Natural Organization - which is of course tribal - and what are the elements that are returning in our midst.

As the Nation State hollows out, we are seeing Tribes grow in our midst. Gangs are Tribes, Mexico is increasingly run by Gangs. Basques are Tribes. French Canadians are a tribe.

No one has to design them. They were largely eliminared in nations states - Scotland etc - but are on their way back.

Best we understand them