Do you know what is going on in the economy today? Do you think that Mr Geithner or President Obama know? Do you know why health care and education don't seem to work?
As you know, I have been struggling with many others to find a new and sustainable model for Public Media. I certainly don't know, and nor does anyone else right now, exactly what that might be. But I think that after many years of trial and error, we are getting closer here than on the first 3 big ones.
I think that one of the larger problems of our time, is that we we don't even know how to think about many of today's problems. We think that our reason or our effort will be enough to solve them. When in fact, these problems are of a different nature to the ones that we used to have. They are different because, we are so much more interconnected today that there can be no simple cause and effect.
The massive increase in linkages in the world since 1985 will force us to rethink how we think!
The good news is that Dave Snowden has given us a model to help us understand this. Here is a short video that I find very good is helping me "Get it" (Thanks to Shawn Callahan of Anecdote v Ton Zylstra)
In short - some problems are Simple and are subject to simple cause and effect. I do this and that always happens. Some problems are Complicated and I need to know a lot to find the answer, say design a jet engine or put on a TV show, but once I have the body of knowledge again results are going to be there. The laws of Newtonian Physics apply.
The most traditional people in your organization are the "Engineers". IT, HR, Finance, Journalists, Producers, News Room Managers. They have made a significant investment in this body of knowledge that is beyond the ken of the rest of us. They are also usually the people at the top of our institutions. So when confronted by a problem, they will tend to use their knowledge and their way of thinking.
Which is why most institutions are stuck today. The leadership and the most influential people inside them - say Hospital Administrators and Doctors - are so invested in the Complicated that they are stuck.
Dave Snowden and Shawn extend the model of Problems further into realms that are foreign to those that default to the rational and the engineering type of thought.
Our new problems tend to be Complex or Chaotic.
In a Complex Problem, say such as the financial collapse, you can only know the cause after the event. It is only then that you can "See the Pattern". Pattern and Story are the only way that we can comprehend a Complex Problem. To make things more difficult, if you did find the cause, and re ran the event, it would turn out differently. For in Complex situations the causes and the effects interact and you Never get the same answer.
But the Pattern can offer you a bounded set of probabilities. This is more like Quantum Mechanics than Newtonian Physics. History does not repeat but as someone said "It Rhymes". So if you find the Pattern, you have at least found the framework. It is like sailing. The Pattern gives you the chart with the tides, the rocks etc, but every days sailing in that water is different. With a good chart, a navigator can reach port 999 times out of 1,000.
But even now, the Complicated Thinkers Rule and they are struggling to return us to where we were in 2006. They ascribe the causes to things like Greed and regulation and look no deeper. At best they look back to 1929 but they don't look further back for patterns. Patterns that would should the Nature of the mega cycles. So they compound the problem. They are still sailing in a huge storm but with no chart.
I think that there are also Patterns that govern Patterns. We call these Paradigms. They are large Patterns that govern a series of shifting realities. So the Medieval World was very different from our world in its Governing Paradigm/Pattern.
We know that periodically for humans that now and then - this Governing Pattern changes and then all the bets are off. The Risk Management Models fail because all the relationships that were governed by a Pattern collapse.
Most will accept that the Hunter Gatherer world was radically different in all its expectations and relationships than the Medieval world. Most will accept that our world is radically different from the Medieval World. We also might infer that getting from one of this Governing Patterns to the other was messy.
The shift from Medieval to Modern drove 200 years of conflict. Every time a a Medieval or a Modern World touches a Hunter Gatherer World, cultural and literal genocide is the result.
The shift from one Paradigm/Governing Pattern to another is a Chaotic Problem.
The new cannot be known. It can only Emerge via trial and error. The new will be in opposition to the old. The Farmers/Herders in 3,000 BC wiped out the Hunter Gatherers. The Modern World Europeans dominated the World in the last 300 years. But the New will prevail. So how then do we attach ourselves to the New? If we cannot know that it is, how can we get there?
Is it impossible to set a course that will take us "Home"?
No because there is an even larger Pattern that itself Governs the Governing Pattern. In Nature you would expect that for all Natural Systems are Fractal. The Geometry of Chaos theory is Fractal. It is only since about 1985 that the field of Chaos Theory itself emerged. It is only now that we have enough understanding and the tools to use Chaos Theory to help solve the challenges of our time.
Later this week, I will be offering up 15 years of work where I have done my best to discover a way of using the deep patterns of human history to provide us with a Chart for our time. A chart where we can "see" that larger Fractal Pattern for all of Human History. The chart that I think helps me understand where we have come from and where we are going.
It is also a story and it is contained in one page.
