Trusted Space - Research

Eating Well

Michael Pollan is one of the best writers on Food today. Here is the full text of his article in the New York Times that summarizes his advice for how to eat well.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the NYT, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006

Here is a link to Amazon where you can also see a interview with Pollan

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The article is below in the extension

 

How the web will change our world

Big changes in our base technology change every aspect of where we live and how we live. Think how different our world was before steam and then the automobile. Well the Web will make massive changes to every aspect of how and were we live.

Todd Mundt kindly interviewed me about this on Iowa Public TV for this program.

You can find the link to a Real File that has the interview here - it is 33 minutes. Here is how the interview and my responses are structured:

• 00.20 What has been the impact of the new media on my life from a work perspective?
• 2.30 How has time and space collapsed for society as a whole and what does this mean to how we live and work?
• 5.30 How will the old media have to change and what is the meaning of Hosting Space and What is the new value of Trust as the underpinning of relationships and business
• 9.40 Is the key to wider adoption technology or understanding? The issue of mindset. How differently our kids understand what is going on from us
• 11.30 What are the real risks for kids in the online interactive world?
• 13.30 What will the world be like when all our lives are in public - what will it be like to go back to a world of honor and reputation?
• 16.15 Why the future is more known to us that we think? Back to the Future - Going Home - How History moves in loops not a straight line - What does it mean to become human again?
• 18.31 How the web will transform society as steam transformed it 200 years ago - How Community will trump transaction and institution - how business will become once again a series of village markets
• 22.16 What blogging really does - how it acts upon us and helps us become our true selves again and how it attracts people and work to our real self and hence enables us to reject the conformity of institutional life? How it acts as a tool of personal transformation?
• 26.35 Why we have to see the web not as a series of pages visit but as a world to inhabit
• 29.33 How it naturally rearranges us back into tribal units where we are most comfortable and most effective and how this will transform organizations

IT & Social Software - Trends you can Trust - Jevon MacDonald

My partner Jevon MacDonald has produced a three page summary of all you really need to know about IT and Social Software. Here at a glance, (the file is in pdf at the bottom of the post)  you can find the distillation of what is really going on.

• The Death of your IT department - why it is dying and why you will soon hardly need it
  • Software as a service and not a product
  • The Browser as the platform
  • The low cost to no cost IT environment

• Trends in Strategy and Thinking - Cheap and Natural
  
  • Simple free platforms for self expression
  • Emergence Structures rather than Improvised ones
  • Order from Chaos

• Other Trends - Fast and Clear
  
  • Just do it
  • Radical Transaparancy

• Tools - Massive Availability
  • Office and work tools
  • Community forming tools

Download 2-0techreport.pdf

Workplace Health - The Managerial Culture

Moving from Alchemy to Chemistry

Here are a series of articles that explore the important idea that our health and development is affected by our social environment. The prevailing social environment is of course, the Workplace. Just as with parenting, the most damaging types of environment are Authoritarian and Permissive and the ideal is Authoritative.

Here you will find the new emerging science that I think will revolutionize health. For just as 150 years ago poor physical work conditions were the primary drivers for poor health, so today poor cultural work conditions affect millions of people and drive an epidemic of depression, cancer and disease. My belief is that just as a massive program of public health, and not medicine, made a large difference in clearing up the Victorian problems, so our understanding of the managerial relationship as being the key to workplace health will do the same for our own time.

My special thanks to Brian Chambers who funded much of this work in his role in Veterans Affairs in Canada as we did our best to understand stress in the Canadian Forces.

Chapter 1 - The Vice - The Pressure that is bearing down on the workplace

Chapter 2 - The Secret is Found - The Pathway and the Managerial Relationship

Chapter 3 - Discovering the Power of The Facilitator - The Holder of Trusted Space

Chapter 4 - Discovering Col. John Boyd - The Mind as the Battlefield

Chapter 5 - Discovering BP - Giving the People a Voice Inside Trusted Space

Chapter 6 - Summary - Voice, Mind, Culture, Facilitation and of Course Trusted Space

 

I am satisfied that work at CIBC, the US Army and at BP has established that with the right leadership and using the principles of Trusted Space, a conventional organization can make progress.

But the prevailing culture is so strong that when the leadership that intiated this work and protected it was gone, then the work died and the waters closed back over. So we still have a long way to go - but the way is known and the experiments have been large enough and have been replicated. The  Science is proven.

Now the task is the same task as with all breakthroughs - how do we take a novel idea that will be resisted by the status quo and make it commonplace?

Human Development - The Early Years

The Big IdeaThe message of the Early Years is that we are most capable of learning until the age of 6. Underpinning this message is the idea of "plasticity". This is not news. What might become news is if we find out what to do with this knowledge.

For the problem is that we have not known what to do about this knowledge. We have not known how to move from concept to action? Until now.

We believe that the research has now come together to provide us with a clear direction and a clear focus. If we focus on the acquisition of vocab by the age of 2 and its drivers the amount and quality of conversation and the amount and timing of touch we believe that we will have resolved the gigantic complexity of the early years into a field narrow enough yet powerful enough to get movement. This series of articles will explore this proposition and link the separate areas of research into a coherent and self supporting whole.

The trajectory of vocab
Our brains and our world view are open to many choices at birth but by 3 many of the alternatives and the trajectory for our future development is largely set. By the age of 2 the size of our vocabulary will indicate how we will be able to learn all the way through school.

This slide shows us a dramatic picture. Vocab is a powerful and measurable predictive factor. If we measure an infant's ability to understand vocabulary at 2 we can get a strong sense of the development trajectory for life. Much of the research now informs us that by 4 the vocab trajectory is largely set. Infants with a vocab of 150 or less will normally develop on a very shallow trajectory reaching by grade 10 an ability of grade 5. At the other end of the scale, infants with a vocab of 300 words will be on track for an exponential trajectory leading to a vocab of a 2nd year university student in grade 10.

This revelation about the predictive power of vocab attainment raises the issue of the idea of Trajectories and when they are able to be influenced. Chaos theory tells us that "Initial Conditions" are the most powerful element in how systems unfold. It is likely that vocab attainment in the Early Years represents the measure of the Initial Conditions of human development.

The impact of this ideaThis insight has huge implications for how we as a society consider our current investment in the education system that begins age 6

Here are three consecutive links to a series of articles that explore this in depth. Each article is also linked so that, if you choose, you can go deeper into each main idea. My intent is to pull together a wide range of research that has not easily been accessible for the lay person and to combine this insight into the Early Years with a suggestion for how we might use network principles to form an organization that could help us all.

1. The Power of the Vocab Trajectory - the key factor for our children's development

2. The Keys to the Kingdom - things that will help us get there

3. Building the Network - how we could use network principles to build a human organization to support us in this work

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