The 'Phoric

8 Chris Corrigan's Phoric - living systems

There are a few people out there that I am in awe of. Chris is one of these few. So it was a treat to have him on the 'Phoric this week

I bang on about the Natural life, but Chris lives it. His 3 choices of film, illustrate so clearly that, we can choose to work with or against the natural flows of nature.

"Gravity my favorite tool" is one of the gems that I got from the first film. How the smallest tools can move the largest things - Twitter????

Another is seeing with my own eyes that all the controls we think are essential, because of course people cant be trusted to do the right thing, are not necessary. As I watched the traffic in video 2, I kept thinking of school.

How often have you been defeated by your goal? Horror, what if you got there - what then? Or worse, become undone by trying to realize perfection. That was some of the lessons in the last film. Oh what fun it is to do something special with other good people - it is the doing that is what I recall not the end - reminds me of great love making.

 

Download phoric8.mp3

7 Dr Vaine's Phoric - How to preserve the hierarchy in modern times

Today, recorded on April 1, we welcome the outstanding practitioner in the field of KM - Dr David Vaine of Apparently KM PLC. Not only are we honored by his presence but we have a new aspect of the show - Video too.

We must warn you though - his choices of clips may not be work safe and his views are challenging to the less experienced.

Here is the link to the podcast

Download phoric7.mp3

Here is the link to the video version

6 Matt's Phoric - Alchemy

What might happen if you let go of control a bit? Matt Moore tells us that Alchemy or even magic may happen.

Matt's 3 clips - show us the effect of letting go of our norms of control of even being "Normal".

I find Bjork the nearest to a truly magical person that I know. How can bouncing skinny Brits make magic? And how about those hands?

By the way watch out for the risk of having a "Commander Data view of people"

Matt reminds us that a virus is very very simple - so a little simple bit of letting go may catch. But he says it all better than I can so let's listen to the oracle himself.

Watch for the "offer"

Here's Phoric 6: Matt Moore

5 Euan's Phoric - The power of the personal

Euan's 3 choices reveal a difference of the new web that in my opinion be its most important value - that it gives each of us the power to offer up ourselves to the wider world. What we find is that when we reveal our selves rather than the person that we think we should be, amazing things come back to us.

Euan Semple is a pioneer blogger and user of social media. He worked for many years at the BBC where he was instrumental in getting social media understood and accepted.

Here's Euan’s ‘phoric

And here's the longer version (25 mins): Euan's 'phoric unplugged

4 Alex's 'Phoric - Happiness

Happiness - Here are Alex Kjerulf's 3 clips.

They show the natural love that we have for each other.

They show how we can pass on love to each other and they show how we can even see death as an opportunity.

We all know about Learned Helplessness - Alex shows us in the podcast that Learned Optimism can also occur. Why I asked are we so attracted to Obama?

If you have time please listen to the extended version of the podcast as Alex goes beyond the clips and takes us to a wonderful place.

Here's Phoric 4 – Alex Kjerulf

(mp3, 11 mins)

And here’s the 20 minute extended version: Phoric 4 – Unplugged version

3 Tom's Phoric - Tom Guarriello - On the YouTube Community

Welcome Tom

Our Guest today is Tom Guarriello who aptly is deeply involved in the YouTube world.  Here are a remarkable trio of clips showing the power of Video as realized by YouTube to build community.  We start with YouTube's senior member who is 80 making his first video - over 2,700,000 views! We see how this novel event is taken up by a star of the YouTube system and then how it builds further.

Tom's selection has been a revelation for Johnnie and I - we had no idea how powerful video can be - Johnnie described the power as being "Human Bandwidth". Tom's selection and Podcast tells me that personal video may become the most powerful influence on the web.

What might this mean I think local TV?

Here's the podcast: 3 Tom Guarriello’s Phoric

Tom expands on his ideas here in an early video of his own: The Power of the Banal!

Thank you Tom for a great show.

2 Rob's Phoric

In my final choice embedding has been disabled - the link is here.

All these clips tell me something about how work is in the Free Agent or Natural world.

Good work often starts by accident as a situation attracts strangers. As in the Magnificent 7, the money is often derisory - what brings the team together is personal attachment and the need to find meaning. Good work also has the power to make good people out of us.

The Barn building scene (watch for Viggo Mortenson in his first role) is for me an example of a much older "Economy" than the one that we live in today. Here the implicit payment is that every member of the community can expect help, if they in turn offer help. Is this not Open Source? See also how everyone is a participant - especially the children. As with the 7, differences are resolved by people here who do good work with each other.

Finally, the clip form the 13th Warrior, reminds me that we all die "Paupers". The only riches that extend after death are our name. To have a name, we have to have had a life so that there are worthy stories to be told about us.

Here's our second podcast

1 Johnnie's Phoric

The Phoric* is an idea Rob Paterson and I have hatched.  We plan to do a series of podcast interviews with people who interest us.  We'll ask each of them to choose three video clips (YouTubes or whatever) that in some way excite and please them, and tell us what they mean to them.

So we thought we'd start with each other's selection, and then take it from there.

Here's our first podcast

And here are the three clips that I chose, all of them from Monty Python... I'd love to run a management course based around lessons from Monty Python.  Python captures the absurd in how we humans organise ourselves.  The first clip, from Life of Brian, mocks those conversations about the importance of action which remain mired in abstraction and inaction.   

In the second, we see Michael Palin as an apparently archetypal army seargent-major, proposing some meaningless "marching hup and down the square" to some squaddies. For me, this is about us not really wanting to do many of the things we pretend to.

Finally, I choose the "follow the gourd" scene, also from Life of Brian. This captures how easy it is to mistakenly read deep significance into accidental events and how we create leaders in our imaginations, where in reality there is only chaos.

*The idea for 'phoric is as in metaphoric, and euphoric... or maybe another phoric you might think of.