A simple experiment

One of the things that I currently do is host a workshop for professors from the university here where I am living. I have described my own intent in these workshops which have now been going on for about one year, in a variety of ways. In the last workshop we were exploring an anecdotal and topical case study about open source education. The issue is nuanced and contentious. There several kinds of systemic 'traps' involved. I have asked the members of the workshop to do the following in order to explore the question:

• Watch this video, without reading any comments or getting any surrounding information about it:
• Self observe while you are watching. Take notes actually or mentally if you can.
• Take a break and reflect.
• Google the 'author' of the video and read about him or watch other YouTube material from him. There are numerous short videos.
• Watch yourself during this process. Take notes if possible.
• Be prepared to discuss what happened in that process.

For those of you reading this not in the workshop, many of the participants are engineers, mathematicians and scientists of various sorts. They are all faculty members at a well known university, some tenured, some not, some department heads currently or in the past, etc. Think of the colloquial expression "rocket scientist" and you will get the picture, though I think there is only one literal rocket scientist in the workshop this quarter. I have several things written that I might post later, and I thought I might take a moment and reflect on the nature of this workshop now. There have been three for faculty and one for students and faculty over the past year. The faculty workshops have been on:

• Change and Impermanence
• Leadership and Leadership Models
• Teaming and Collaboration

I am considering holding one on "Facilitation" next quarter if there is interest and it seems right to do. The student workshop was on research methods and was an exploration of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person research. If I were to say for myself what the faculty workshops have been about I would name them something more like:

• The structure of thought and self observation
• The nature of framing and 'mental models' with respect to agency and action
• Pattern recognition and the dynamics of patterns and patterning

Emergence and Emegency

What is the difference between "emergence" and "emergency?" How do we distinguish such a difference and what effect does such a distinction have on our state and action?

The word itself is interesting. The base form is "merge" and has the sense of 'diving or sinking in.' In Sanskrit to 'dive under.' For something to 'emerge' is for it to arise out of the condition of being immersed in this way; it comes to the surface from having been under the surface. The connotation is that what emerges is not known prior to it's arising. It may be the case that what emerges was already existing, as a prior state or condition.

From this we also get the sense of 'emergency', which means something like 'an unexpected occurrence, requiring immediate attention.'

Perhaps we could consider emergence first. This seems a really amazing notion to me. For emergence to occur, immersion is required. Immersion in what? What sort of immersion? Immerse. Emerge. It is my feeling that when we loosely talk about emergence we often mean something more like an accidental or random course of events. Perhaps this is one of the things leading to emergence becoming emergency? We have a feeling that emergence means, left to itself, something will happen. Events occur and we may re-contextualize them in some way and call that emergence. We delete the process, disciplines, structures and act of immersion. This means that in order to consider 'emergence' we must first consider what it means to 'merge' or 'immersion.'

Living Lab

I wrote this about two years ago. Some of you will be familiar with it. If reading this you have interest, ideas, suggestions, corrections, etc. please let me know. The basic way of working described below is based on a process used by Gurdjieff. The ideas are as usual an amalgam. The illustration is of course Banksy.

Context & Summary
The overall context of this work is the question of a harmonized, resilient way for all of humanity to live. This can be considered as a question of harmonization of the biosphere and anthroposphere (the whole of human acting, living and relating on the planet), locally expressed in each of our lives. It can also be considered as Gregory Bateson's question, “Is consciousness a sufficient feedback system for evolution?” Much of our work and work with others over the past decades has been inside of the question of self aware human systems. This idea for a Living Laboratory is an expression of that question, now considering what is needed for participation in the anthroposphere itself as a self aware system. This sort of experiment serves as the basis for fundamental change, having to do with both cessation of habits and patterns of the current global enactment and creating a meaningful context for emergence.

Cabbage Panic

I have mentioned that I am participating in a local 'food group.' The intent of this group is to answer an Insane Question created by the structural nature of this moment: How can we eat the food that grows immediately where we live? Where I am currently living we are blessed with an abundance of food. It seems to be a water subsidy, but even this is not currently as extreme as many places on the planet. There is a great amount of unharvested, uneaten food growing all around us. There are also people in this exact same area who have no food or are malnourished. We are considering that together.

In that spirit I proposed a "Cabbage Day" during which people would come together and make sauerkraut, kimchee to celebrate the abundance of the crop. It is cabbage season. Many people are of course already doing this. My intent has to do with the 'container' as much as with the cabbage. I am also interested in this as a cyclic event with various crops in season.

At present if pressed, I would say that 'cabbage day' is not likely to happen. I am suspending this opinion, since I am by no means the most reliable source for such a determination. I have some idea what it would take to 'make' it happen. I have successfully managed quite a few projects of much greater scale and complexity. If the project were simply X number of jars of processed cabbage, I am clear how that could happen, for instance. This is not the primary project for me, but rather a by-product of the primary project. The primary project, for me, has to do with social fabric and self-organization. Even from this point of view, I have a clear idea of what 'needs' to happen from within a certain model of things. I wish to tell a story about some of that.

conversations and invitations

I have been asking people here, where I am living, what they might like to talk about together. Something that is not apparent from the writing here is that the things I am writing about are part of a situated conversation taking place with the people here and elsewhere. We are talking together about these things, though the writing of it this way can make it seem otherwise. We are are practicing these things together in a loose way. Other things come up in the process of that and I write about those things, when I am able, based on that conversation and practice, over time. I have the gently held intention to post a couple of times a week, 10 a month or something of the sort. That may or may not happen.

Meeting

One of the things about which I feel I should be very clear is that I have no idea what to do about some anything. None. Zero. I would be hard pressed to recommend that someone read the things I am trying to write in any case, but particularly if you are imagining finding some direct idea about what to do... I am sure those of you who know me are not surprised about this. I do not mean to be arrogant by imagining that someone is reading some thing I have written imagining an answer or something. I am just not really intending to write anything useful. I am not intending to write anything that is likely to be even remotely recognizable as a solution to some problem. It is not that I would not like to do those things. I just don't think such utility itself would be at all useful, even if successfully written. I feel it might be important not to confuse this with a kind of adolescent rebellion against utility as such. Well, I am glad I cleared that up.

I am collaborating with university faculty to ask several questions together with them. Some of them have noticed that something about their dynamic together seems or feels inconsistent with the type of collaboration they might want to have in order to ask and act on these questions together. They decide to meet to talk about it. This particular meeting is just a very few people, but it is more or less impossible to get together. This is mysterious. It is not impossible to do other things. In fact we are all doing many things, which on the surface looks like the reason why we cannot meet, to talk about why we cannot meet.

One of the strange things about pattern recognition is that it is often the case that the investigation of some particular 'pattern' or habit, stimulates that very habit, in the moment of inquiry. It may not appear to be so, and is not always so by any means, but it happens frequently enough to be worth remark.

Start

Start.
You have nothing to gain,
and everything to lose.

Excerpt from "An Apology to Future Generations"

This is an excerpt from something I am working on. When you read it I feel certain you will understand why I am unlikely to finish it, but it is interesting in some ways. It has particular set of assumptions that I will not go into. I will say that the future generation imagined is 10,000 years in the future. Some of the time frames need to be cleared up a bit, but the structure should be apparent from this little piece. It is in an unedited form, perhaps even more raw than most of what I post here. I have thought of using it as a loose basis for a web-petition of some sort.

Service & Re-creation

The subject of re-creation has come up several times in the past week.  Perhaps the simplest form of re-creation is a kind of pain management process.  In this process one addresses some symptomatic condition, such as a headache, by 're-creating' the symptom.  Typically the presenting symptoms will dissolve.  This is not a panacea of some sort.  It is at one level a simple, practice-able, learnable technique.  As is often the case with such techné, we can miss the greater implications of the thing 'working' at all.  30% effectiveness of placebos seems like this to me.  

I will describe the technique briefly, though living in the land of California as I currently do, I have not usually been the one bringing this up.  It is a fairly socialized practice here it seems.  (It will perhaps be wise to refrain from further comment on that.)  

The very first piece of process is an examination of whether or not I am willing to have the symptoms go away.  I have a headache, it would seem like the answer to that question of my willingness is self evident.  Not always.  Perhaps I am getting something out of the headache in a way that its disappearance would be worse than its presence, should it disappear.  It is important to note that this about my willingness, not my insistence, or even expectation.  In the case of a headache this may not seem so critical, but begin to imagine that the process described can be applied to *any* symptomatic phenomena.  The ecology of my relationship to the presence of the symptoms becomes very important.  Let me give you a specific example.

How to get to Carnegie Hall...

I have now written several things on the 'oracle' and on 'mental models' which all seem so bad that I don't know what to do with them. I am going to assay another on the Tarot and the I Ching, but I wanted to say what I feel hampers those other pieces first, and that will require a small piece itself. When I begin to write them I notice a tendency in myself to try to explain where my feelings about the topic come from. I make some attempt to situate the subject within a larger systemic framework. The difficulty in both cases is one of recursion. Both topics themselves are specific sorts of frameworks and a means for understanding such frameworks. In talking about them it can seem necessary to me to lay out the specifics of that, which turns out to be very difficult and hard to read. This is difficult not because it can't be done, but rather because it simply takes pages and pages before I feel I can even get to the subject. I realize I will have to go back and re-work this as well, but I plan to post it as it is and ask your patience and tolerance... I pretend to feel better about this knowing that if you are reading any of this that it is by your choice you are doing so... and I will hold you to that. This is rambling, mostly incoherent, deeply flawed and perhaps not so useful in any real way, but I assure you it is much better than the 5 or 6 other things I have been trying to write.

In the case of the 'oracle' it seems necessary to me to create a kind of taxonomy of ways of relating to and making meaning out of the oracular endeavor. In order to do that it seems necessary to dive into developmental models of the self. In order to do that it seems necessary to explore a diverse set of teachings and frames that are esoteric to say the least. I do not assume that people are familiar with such teachings and frames, though I have no real evidence for such an assumption. I do not assume that I necessarily understand such frames. So in addition to the recursive challenge, which leaves me even less intelligible than usual, there is also the question of 'authorization.' I do not have any authorization whatsoever and do not feel particularly self authorized. I do not even want to be authorized. This makes it difficult to author something. I find that for myself I am far more interested in a kind of self-verification that serves as a basis for self-authorization. In that process it seems necessary to me to actively move in one's own life from the conceptual to the lived. This is a process of bringing something that might be a concept or interesting idea into the domain of something that is lived in one's life, as a practice, at the very least.

What we are considering is how exactly something moves from an interesting idea to an actual practice or something that can be considered a realized or lived aspect of one's life.

Thoughts on Innovation

This is the rough draft of a paper on innovation that my friend Linda and I are pretending to write. We feel that the direction is sufficiently indicated to receive our expected rejection based on an abstract of this. I have considered including Tarot or I Ching references just to insure this result, but Linda assures me that such radical action is not necessary and that we will already freak out the readers.

"Your proposal is innovative. Unfortunately, we will not be able to use it because we have never tried something like that before." - Cartoon by A. Bacall

My early forays into consulting were mostly in the area of innovation and I helped create 'innovation' centers and such things at places like BMW. The pharma case obliquely referenced is my own experience. The Toyota dilemma referenced is fairly well known and socialized. Apologies for the roughness of the text. I have not included the referenced model images, but you can simply google those references and get pages and pages of model images... you know... in your free time. "Oh look! It's a systems thinking iceberg model. Shhh... let's watch it and see what it does." I find this is much cheaper than going to the movies. We will likely create a model with a kind of hierarchy of capability building and practice... apparently for our own amusement since this is unlikely to interest any of our intended audiences, I am told. If you are interested in how this develops please let us know.

On the use of pattern interruption and self observation in human systems innovation.

This paper is about a basic disposition for innovation, rather than concerning itself with 'this or that' innovation. We are considering the differences between mechanistic, prescriptive approaches and emergent, intentional approaches to the question of innovation. The basic implication is that innovation, in this emergent, intentional sense, is founded upon an identity shift in the innovators themselves, individually and collectively. This means the innovator experiences a shift in their primary 'way of being' with respect to some condition or system in which they are participating. This shift in 'way of being; provides the basis for a innovative thought and action. In the absence of this, much innovation is more a sort of adaptation where the transformative qualities are limited by the circumstances to which we are adapting. Such adaptation is necessary and useful. It is our aim to begin to distinguish between such associative activities and more generative activities. It is important to us in this to recognize that the popularized distinction between invention and innovation is a useful one; where invention is the discovery of some particular model, idea, apparatus, etc. and innovation is the socialization of that in the context of some practical service or market. This implies that in addition to the fundamental shift necessary in the innovator that all innovation is also a collaborative act.

The Failure of Microfinance

The failure of microfinance in India has been much in the news of late. I am hoping to do a bit more of a case study consideration of this over time. I really do not understand enough to say much yet, but I am fascinated. I have been immersed in (obsessed with) music over the past several days and my thoughts are even messier than usual. I am just going to associatively skim the surface of this for now.

I am sure most of you know what microfinance is and probably know much more about it than I do, in many cases. For those of who do not, here is a rough picture, distorted by my own prejudices and ignorance.

Dr. Mohamed Yunus was teaching economics at a university in Bangladesh. Every day he would walk home through a village. He began to notice that what was happening in the village did not seem to match what he was teaching at the university. I feel this is important. Many of us might feel or see something about the immediate conflict that arises when 'parts' of our world come together. How do we deal with that moment of arising conflict? Consider your own strategies in the matter. Each moment of our lives is a potential moment of such reflection. Each moment. We have fragmented and continue to fragment ourselves and the world. We treat such fragmentation as our given condition. Initially moments of conflict arise when our strategy of fragmentation fails in some moment. How are we in those moments?

The Bank

To readers of this who know me, which means both of you, none of the following should come as much of a surprise. I am devolving to the point of telling you what I did today. Perhaps I should switch to tweets? (I painted the flowers on me iPad.)

I went to the bank and I wanted to say a couple of things about what that was like. Perhaps it is important to know that I am a bit over sensitized to such things at the moment. I have a corporate client, who shall remain nameless, for whom I have done a couple of days of work over the past year. They have just instituted an SAP system. Such systems are typically instituted in the name of cost savings and efficiency. It has now taken them over six months to pay me for the work I did. I wrote them a longish case study and deconstruction of my experience with an extrapolation to process safety and corporate culture. I have not received a response. I do not imagine more work forthcoming. When I look at the ROI for the work, I have now invested as much of my time in the process of getting paid as I did in doing the work itself. Of course this has been mirrored in their organization as well. For me it is simply karma for all the suffering I have caused being so dysfunctional about invoicing and paper work in general. Though writing is not modern, paperwork is almost certainly a fairly recent 'innovation' in its current form. Can you even imagine life or who you might be without it? I will not share the case study with you and you can thank me for that later. Instead I will share with you the case of my going to the bank, and you can berate me for that at your leisure.

Shoes & Non-Action

I am fond of teaching stories from various traditions. I was reminded today of an Islamic story, Sufi I think, in which there is a debate taking place outside of a Mosque. One member of the community has gone into pray laying down his shoes outside. Another has removed his shoes and taken them with him. The debate is about which of these behaviors is correct. The man leaving his shoes contends that it would be an act of violence to assume that someone would steal his shoes. The one taking his shoes with him contends that it would be an act of violence to leave his shoes as a temptation for others. This debate goes on for some time involving various others who have presumably enacted one or the other of the models. After this has been taking place for some time an old man points out that while the debate has been taking place that another, older man, who in fact has no shoes at all has gone to pray and left without any remark or notice.

The first part of the story is self evident to me and a dilemma, upon the horns of which much socio-political philosophy and practice seem to be hung. It is a fundamental difference in the metaphor of the two men. The third point is a bit mysterious and interesting, to me. Perhaps you have your own interpretation? I myself most like an interpretation in which the old man is pointing out that the social debate is about shoe leavers and takers and not about god. It is a moral debate within the context of a social morality. The shoe takers and leavers could be praying, for instance, rather than drawing attention to themselves and their claim about the righteousness of their own behavior. One could also interpret it as a teaching on being possessed by one's possessions, itself a fascinating phenomena to observe.

The social undertaking involves the artifices of duality. I wish to be seen. Perhaps, I wish to be unseen, because it has some other value to me. Maybe I like to be seen in my complaint about being unseen, for instance.

Romance

(The following is a romanticized journal entry. It started as a journal entry and got acquired by the blog, a phenomena of some concern, for me. Of course it changed in the process, but it still retains the flavor of many of my journal entries. Honestly I cannot imagine what it would be like to always suffer this acquisition in the way I imagine a real writer or artist might. I am only a pretend writer and artist at best, the pretense of my artistry being my most artistic endeavor... And you can see how that is. Music has never had this quality for me, which no doubt explains how I have managed to attain such an exquisite degree of mediocrity as a musician. Here is my impersonation of my journal entry. I did the drawing such as it is.

I seem to have misplaced my ground of being this morning. If you see it, perhaps you could feed it and send it home? Such imagined loss is not important in and of itself I suppose, but that sentiment itself is a quality of such a misplacement. I struggle to determine what is important. In that struggle it is likely that I might manufacture some importance or other. Something might even take on the status of a necessity or crisis. Or perhaps I will resort to the habitual. I am not anywhere. I am consensually in some particular place, but I could be anywhere, the distinction between this place and that place becoming arbitrary. This day and the next have some agreed upon name and sequence, but this has no particular meaning to me unless I consider something that I imagine I must do within that arbitrary structure of agreement. Perhaps I consider something or someone that I imagine to be missing and so locate myself. I have some desire by which I see myself. I see myself in the production of my suffering. I understand the apparent luxury of my condition. From that point of view the hermit or sadhu lives the most luxurious of lives. I am incapable of such luxury. I cannot afford such luxury.

Client Assumptions

This is a list of assumptions I have used when working with clients. I have not updated in a couple of years and have been using it for about ten years. I would probably make some changes at this point and may do that here over time.

Service Models

This is an excerpt from an ill-conceived book I wrote a couple of years ago. I will post it here with some other excerpts (over time) in this ill-conceived attempt at blogging. The following essay only covers part of a spectrum that can be understood with reference to the Meadows' hierarchy of interventions, or the way in which I use Aristotle's causality as the basis for relational domains. I will post on those at a later date so the spectrum, as I imagine it, might be more transparent. I feel the essay is fairly well self contained, though some of my views have developed a bit since I first wrote it.

Allies

To operate, the armed forces need allies as consultants and assistants to the leadership.
Everyone looks up to those who are thoughtful and have unusual strategies beyond the ordinary ken, who are widely learned and have broad vision, and who have many skills and great talents. Such people can be made top allies.
Those who are fierce, swift, firm, and sharp are heroes of an age. Such people can be made second-ranked allies.
Those who talk a lot but not always to the point, who are slight in ability, with little that is extraordinary, are people with ordinary capabilities. They can be brought along as the lower class of allies.
(The Way of the General, Zhuge Liang, trans. Thomas Cleary)

The Need for a Mandate
It is important to be clear about what your mandate is as a change agent within the anthroposphere (the domain of human responsibility). You must be clear what you are serving into existence, particularly if you want to work with the leaders and leadership dynamics of these massive transnational corporations and global institutions. Whether such leaders are consciously aware of and taking responsibility for it or not, the decisions they make and the very way they relate to one another and their organizations day-to-day, even in small decisions and comments, have an effect at the planetary level. Imagine you are working with a senior executive team from one of the top ten organizations on the planet. Consider the scale of that. As a whole that organization will have one of the largest economies on the planet. The decisions they make effect the environment, entire societies, the whole network of human beings associated and interdependent with the organism of the corporation as a whole. These decisions are based on their individual and collective way of being in any moment. You will need a mandate of sufficient scale, depth and clarity to interact with this in a meaningful way. This could take many different forms, but it is required.

Consider the following business model for consulting in general. These are simply models and so grossly oversimplified, the reality of practice being somewhat more complex, but I hope they are a useful point of departure. Though we are talking specifically about a service model for work and partnership with leaders and decision makers in large global institutions, many aspects of this inquiry can be meaningfully generalized to other contexts. Imagine two basic types of consulting relationships: the epistemological and the ontological.

Psychic Overhead

I use a term to describe a particular phenomena of modern life: psychic overhead. Let me give you an example. I walk into the pharmacy intent on purchasing some simple, needed item such as toothpaste. For now we will not go into the psychic overhead of the selection process or the fact that I am in a pharmacy in the first place. I have made my selection. I go to the cash register.

While making my purchase I am asked, "Do you have a 'pharmacy' card? You will save 10% on this purchase and all future purchases".

It is already too late once this has happened. Now I must consider, 'What does that mean to me? What exchange is actually involved?,' and so on. Perhaps you will say that I do not need to consider these things at all. I might suggest watching yourself closely next time some like event occurs in your own life in order to determine that. So I, for my part at least, take some moment of consideration.

The Familiar

"A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it." -Kafka

It is morning, with all its familiarity and all its promise. Upon waking, perhaps I know or begin to know the details of my day even in the first moments of its unfolding. Perhaps I have some planned itinerary. It is a familiar, planned routine. Walking out of my room or house I feel that I know what I will encounter so thoroughly that I eliminate any possibility of encountering the unexpected. Or in the moment of the unexpected I may feel stressed, specifically because things are not going according to my imagined plan. My utility relies on the lack of the unexpected. My ability to function is based upon things going according to plan. Of course things never go according to plan, but I insist. I blur the details of what is such that it fits my plan. I usefully pretend that the sphere and infinitely-sided polygon are isomorphic. I assert this consistently and energetically, a calculus of deletion. I apply such calculated manipulation, anxiety and concern to what occur for me as deviations. They are accounted for even in their hyperbolic change. I suppress the undiscovered. I eliminate the liminal and interstitial. I suppress the possibility of the emergent in myself and seek to do so in what human being and life I may happen to encounter. What is just around that corner I have turned so many times? I already know this so thoroughly that I prevent the possibility of discovery that even one step in any direction allows.

"I had to restrain myself from putting my arm around his shoulders and kissing him on the eyes as a reward for having absolutely no use for me." – Kafka

Mindmapping (1/8/11)

Greetings and Happy Solar (Gregorian) New Year.
Please find included:
A few links for mindmaps

A list of suggested supplies to bring with you (in orange)

A bit of suggested homework (in blue)

Cobbled together with some of my rambling thoughts on mindmapping. Please feel free to ignore any or all of it... or if you only wish to read a bit of it perhaps look at the links, the supplies and the suggested homework. I will also likely cross post this on the blog I am developing with some images of mindmaps. There is likely to be something there on 'creative tension' in the next few days. I Felt Hat

I thought I might send a couple of things to the people who have expressed interest in the mindmapping on Jan 8th (11am, The Sanitarium). First, if you have not ever done any mind mapping maybe you could take a couple of moments and look at these links.

You Tube Instructions

Images

The wiki on mind maps

Overall, mindmapping is creative process that can allow you to engage with a variety of things in a creative, playful way. It is also a way of relating to a complex information set as a system. For instance, we might typically make lists of the things we want to accomplish or manifest in life. These lists tend to lead to a linear process in which one set of activities might even compete with another. The mindmap can allow you to look across all these and find points of integration and 'leverage' that might otherwise not be apparent. A point of leverage is someplace where you might be able to work on one aspect of a project and have a beneficial effect on many other areas. The map becomes a reflective surface for one's life or endeavor.

Happy in SLO

My friend Cate Trujillo always has these interesting creative projects she is doing. I wrote this for her "Happy in SLO" project.

Happiness is neither a made nor unmade condition, though it seems so. It is possible to make suffering and to place things in the way of our happiness. It is possible to experience pleasurable stimuli we confuse with happiness, a deadening substitute that callouses the heart. Happiness can seem closer to the surface here, in the location of this location, than in many of the places I have lived, and I have lived in many places. Such a comparative act of narrative is not useful in the domain of happiness. The felt heartbreak of our impermanence sloughs away the callouses on the heart in an instant. This sundering of what we have through artifice avoided is always present in any local moment, here no less or more. In that moment the happiness in which we are simply participants is revealed. These hills that surround and hold the particular moment of the town remind us of our natural condition in their embrace. In any direction, we can see the outlines of this bowl, in which our lives unfold. We feel that unfolding in the natural, cyclic changes adorning the apparent permanence of surrounding hills. Like happiness this can only be witnessed. I particularly like the winter when, occluded, the hills could be the feet of some soaring, implied, mountain. There is an immediate doorway to an unexplored horizon. The town itself becomes intimate; embraced. All becomes green in just a few days it seems. This way of being held seems to me a mixed blessing, giving both a natural relaxation to life and a shadowed xenophobia that can come with being cradled so. Time can slow, stretching out to some fullness of being. People walk, rather than rush, to some appointed moment. There is a localized and immediate sense of fabric and exchange. There is the sense that something beautiful can emerge in the liminal spaces of some us, together. This is brought into relief by the shadowed reflection of fear and isolation that has us wish to remove park benches and decide that sweeping events of this moment on the planet are not occurring because the weather stations within hailing distance have not reported, cannot report, them to us. Our happiness wears the leering mask of acquisitive complacence, a rictus grin of 'us and them.' We grasp and cling to the imagined moment of an artificially produced security; an impoverished and fearful substitute for actual happiness. We feel the immediacy of dependency and its imagined necessities at the expense of greater connectedness in the world. In the moment of this intimacy we recoil from the volatility, upheaval and intricacy of a larger complexity. We are afraid and in the doings of our fear actively forget the immediacy of our happiness. The stars of Antarctic night are overwhelming, self obliterating. Should I look away? A cloistered immediacy steals away the natural morphology of happiness always arising and so present here. I myself live in a very small world here and the outer smallness of this place reflects that back to me, amplifying and refracting the state of immediacy and intimacy. In the stillness of that it becomes possible to feel the sweep of this moment on the planet, if we are willing. So felt, that wave of moment is not some comparative, analytic act to be placed in the ledger of such moments and then used in the heartless calculation of happiness as a fetish. Happiness is not particulate and cannot be counted. The artificial duality of 'here and there,' some imagined 'us and them' mists the moment of our already present happiness and we seek consolation in stimulus and consumption. "If only... then I would be happy" rides the soul, an unwanted passenger of habituation. Happiness is never the minimization of suffering to be found in some exercised efficiency. Happiness is only ever a discovery of what already is. It is revealed in the contemplative and ecstatic, both of which call forth an already present wholeness and coherence, both of which draw us through and outside of ourselves into the land that actually is. In the breaths between our busy-ness this bubbles up, unless we habitually and actively prevent it. The social contract of our scarcity and fear encounter the abundance always issuing forth from our impermanence. Here, in the place of this place, it seems closer to the surface, a less distanced remembering of what is already known, and can only ever be known now, when we are turned to it in the wholeness of our hearts.

roger burton, SLO 2010

Socrates and Necessity

This is an excerpt from MIT open source copy of Plato's “Republic.” Apologies on the formating. It follows on from my posts on necessity, but is also interesting as an example of a different sort of dialogue. I picked this because it represents a key moment in this dialogue for me. Socrates has just distinguished that the subject of the inquiry is 'justice' and they have moved to begin defining a state. In this passage Socrates describes his ideal state. Glaucon then asks about 'luxury' and the entire thing changes. It is a shift in contextual necessity from 'food' to 'luxury.' The implications and change in the dialogue are evident and immediate. This is echoed in the Cave analogy and again in the myth that concludes the “Republic.” This is also one of the places where people feel Socrates is making an argument for 'expertise' or 'division of labor.' One could also meaningfully interpret these statements as about 'social fabric.' It is interesting to consider that as an ethicist (rather than an economist) Adam Smith expressed concern about the destructive effects of division of labor on the workers themselves and society at large. He stipulated that the society would need to invest heavily and broadly in education to balance this. That idea was in turn interpreted as the need for 'factory schools' as appeared in the northern part of the US at the beginning of the industrial era. The factory school does not address the need for dimensionality. There is a very good RSA video about this latter question of education: RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

The Republic, Book II

Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Of course, he replied.
Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.

The Unsent

This is an 'unsent' letter. The 'not sending' of it is a result of engaging in the simple reflective process below. The unspoken question of the 'process' is the basis for such a conscious choice to 'engage' or 'by-pass' in particular moment of the arising motive to speak, act, etc. For me this is an occasion to reflect on the context of service, or the attended to commitment, of that moment. What is my 'mandate' to speak or act in such a moment. Often it is a moment of some felt conflict, or the arising 'need' to do something. This may seem tedious, but we are enacting some form of this much of the time. I was introduced to this simple process by my dear friend Robert Hanig. I have made explicit the distinction between 'internal' and 'collective', but it is not necessary.
I engage in a very simple process, It can be depicted like this:

Even as I write this I am deciding about the first level of engagement, and am not yet clear. It occurs to me that whatever I write is going to possibly occur as offensive to some people. I therefore have to make a determination about whether I am sufficiently committed to deal with that and to do so in a spirit of inquiry and learning, as opposed to one of advocating some form of 'rightness'. In my model, this has to do with the context of service or mandate for my speaking and action in any moment. In the Bohmian model this has to do with distinguishing where I might advocate for something as 'necessary' and developing a kind of conscious responsibility about my disposition with regard to that. One result of such a Bohmian act is the possibility of suspending what occurs for me as 'necessary' in that (any) moment and trusting something about the collective nature of emergence as we inquire together. In short, I am writing this, but have not determined that it is appropriate to send. If I do send it I hope you can read it as coming from a committed partner. Should you be generous enough to read what I have written, I certainly understand the commitment required for that reading.

Dialogue & Necessity

I was imagining that I might write an entry about blogging itself, but I found myself writing about dialogue instead. In doing so I have used some terms like systems thinking, emergence, etc. without really defining them. I hope you are not overly bothered by this. I feel certain that I will come back to ask more about those things.

Is necessity the mother of invention? This is a pretty deeply held cultural icon. If it is, what are the implications of this?

In the Bohmian sense of dialogue it is usually the case that first dialogue is about the nature of dialogue itself. There are several aspects to this, it seems to me. One of the primary dimensions is the consideration together and for oneself about the 'purpose' of dialogue, and of any particular dialogue. In a certain sense, for me, dialogue is not a 'functional' undertaking in the modern sense. It is not intended as a means by which operational decisions are taken, though that is not excluded in the broadest sense. One way to consider this is that the moment of dialogue is not about some other moment. It is about that particular moment and these particular people in that moment, exactly as we are.

This is frustrating to many people when they feel a need to get something done. It may be one of the things that Bohm is pointing to when he talks about the nature of necessity, it seems to me. There are some aspects to this that are not immediately apparent and can be hard to unpack. The inquiry into some felt necessity in itself is not a proscription against action. It is an inquiry. Typically when we consider action, particularly action where we feel there is some urgent problem that must be solved, we do not engage in an inquiry beyond the functional means of accomplishing that action. We can even be frustrated or angered when asked to do so. It may seem to us in the moment that such an inquiry reduces our effectiveness. So why would we inquire into some necessity of this or that moment or context?

Aristotle's Causality

This is an acquisition of Aristotle's Causality that I use in my work. I frequently combine this with Donella Meadow's hierarchy of systemic interventions, which I will post my understanding of later. I do not go into the differences between 'potential' and 'actual' here. That distinction is useful in understanding the appearance of change, but creates a very complex matrix. This is just meant to be a useful sort of rubric for beginning the consideration about one's own model of causality. I hope you find it entertaining at least.

Rembrandt

Causality (Aristotle)

Ask yourself, how do things happen? If I am imagining something coming about, or someone “getting something done,” how do I think this works? These are questions about agency and causality and are related to any theory of change we may have. So how do you think things are caused? Most people involved in commerce and business, or living in the current modern paradigm would answer the question about causality by talking about cause and effect. This probably seems so obvious to you that it may not be a meaningful statement. “Of course if we speak of causality and how things come about we are speaking of ‘cause and effect’.” This way of thinking about causality is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we don’t typically notice that it is a way of thinking about causality and change, rather than a description causality or change itself. Essentially we have a belief that something happens because we do something, or because some observable causal action takes place that creates some observable, measurable effect. If we think about causing something, we are usually thinking about if x, then y. We are thinking about only the active means as causal in the matter. This type of if x, then y causality was called by Aristotle, efficient cause. It represents the means by which something is brought about through action.

For the ancient Greeks there were four distinct types of cause. We have collapsed this set of distinctions down into one. This 'reductionism' is consistent with the kind of objective materialism of today and efficient cause can initially seem the cause most closely related to and appropriate to a subject-object orientation in the world, the purpose of which is the manipulation of objects. For something to be at the effect of something else usually implies some degree of objectification. Consider being at the effect of your circumstances. This can seem a situation in which you have lost control. Now consider causing something to happen in this sense of taking specific action that produce some desired effect that you relate to as an outcome, or contributor to an outcome. What do you notice about this?

Notes on the Industrial Era

The following is from an open letter that I wrote to Humberto Maturana a couple of years ago. Some of my views have developed and changed since that time, but the letter still captures a lot of the basic things I am thinking about.

Heinrich Kley

Excerpted from an open letter to Humberto Maturana:

Several years ago he (Adi Da) wrote a couple of ‘public’ books about this moment in human history and happening (“Not-Two Is Peace” and “Reality-Humanity”). In these essays he suggests several things about living together on the planet in this emergent moment. He defines the ‘anthroposphere’ as the right domain of human responsibility. He suggests that all systems are self-balancing and self rightening and that the current institutions of humanity are preventing this self-balancing nature of systems. This seems to imply, as you have also said, a particular relationship between the anthroposphere and biosphere. One of the things I conclude from this is that the natural systems of the biosphere will continue to work to self-balance and that this activity will even escalate in a way commensurate with the degree of institutionalized prevention from human institution and activity. We are likely to experience this as increased volatility and escalating crisis, with decreasing delay loops. This seems to me good news and bad news. On the one had it means escalating series of crises, even to the extent of tearing the social fabrics of the anthroposphere. On the other hand the decrease in delay loops and increased ‘self-evident’ quality of the crises as such, may make evident to a critical mass of the human population the systemic nature of all this.

I no longer work with corporations much because the heart of the conversation and action in my own life has to do with considering the implications of the industrial era and the anthropocenic era, and I have found that this is increasingly difficult to do in organizations that are themselves self-identifying with the industrial era. (This difficulty is no doubt intimately linked to my own lack of mastery and particular approach to such questions as I am sure will be amply demonstrated by this writing.) I feel that the industrial era is over and that the institutions and epistemologies of this era are collapsing rapidly. My understanding of the anthropocenic is that humanity as a whole is acting (unconsciously) at the same scale as the systems of the biosphere and indeed, at the same scale as the biosphere itself. This brings up the question of systemic resilience. I have been talking with major corporations about this for about ten years and the conversation has gotten very explicit in the past several years. Recently I have been discussing several things with organizations and individuals willing to talk together:

The industrial era is over.

The industrial era can be understood as:

The Burning Building

I sometimes have the great privilege of working with youth leaders around the world. Prior to the COP15 Climate talks many of them were feeling disillusioned so I wrote this piece for them. I myself am not sure what to make of the Cancun talks. I frankly do not understand how the talks could both produce aid for adaptation of island nations and still not produce a meaningful result in terms of mitigation, before mitigation becomes militarized. Transcripts of the Copenhagen and Cancun talks reveal that leaders from the island nations have a very distinctive voice, which has apparently been heard, but only responded to in the most myopic fashion. My Chinese colleagues edited this and used it in a Chinese publication. Their version was better, but I cannot find it. In general, I am going to spend some time posting things I have already written while I create new posts.

J.M.W. Turner

The Burning Building

Among world leaders there is no longer an actual debate about climate change. It is clear that the CO2 molecule traps heat. It is clear that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than at anytime in the past 50,000 years and the gross amount and rate of emissions are both growing. World leaders also recognize that we, humankind, are, if not the cause, at least a major contributor to this condition.

This is all well known and socialized. None of this is actually a debate among leaders. World leaders are now in a negotiation about it. In that negotiation it is strategic to assume certain positions, some of which are even counter to factual conditions. This is true for many corporate leaders in multi-nationals as well. They know we need to do something about climate change, but strategically, cannot say so publicly. Or conversely, they say something about this publicly and strategically, but are not engaged in really meaningful activity about it.

Consider the nature of the negotiation. It is simple. Who will bear the cost of the changes we must make? Who will own and reap the benefits of the solutions we must create? If this seems crazy to you, you are not crazy. Imagine it this way. There is a diverse set of people in a burning building. They all know the building is burning, but it seems to be burning slowly. They can see the smoke. Occasionally a wall collapses on some of the people, but they are not yet be consumed by the flame itself in any way they collectively notice. In some parts of the house people are more vulnerable and effected than others. I am sure the analogy is clear.

transition and transgression

In great part I have started this blog based on having posted the following text elsewhere. My kind friends kindly suggested that I might wish to start my own blog... The reasons for their kind suggestions are probably self evident to any reader.

Please consider all of the following remarks, and all my remarks in general 'qualified' in a wide variety of ways, including the implicitly read 'in my model' embedded within each sentence. Also, I consider this an asynchronous blog and therefore assume that anyone reading this has chosen to do so and could certainly cease, or abstain from doing so at any moment.

I have several working assumptions about change and the supposed process of change. At least it seems so to me today.

• Change is already always occurring, except with reference to the whole itself, in or as a function of which some change can be considered to be occurring.


• There is an 'absolute' version of such a whole, but it is not sensible in a 'normal' way and cannot be constructed from what seem to be its parts, because such a whole does not actually have parts, per se. Such a whole can perhaps be intuited.


• We actively define, construct, and enact conditional 'wholes' that are not naturally given, but are part of the larger whole (or we participate in such)


• Such an enactment gives us the impression of change as something that happens with respect to something that is not changing, but this is a false impression, in most cases


• Our thoughts, actions, behaviors, emotions are a result of participation in the definition, construction and enactment of these apparent (not actual) points of stability (paradigms, mental models, social constructs, habits, patterns and the sources of patterns- patterns patterning)


• Sadly this may mean that change is also not occurring, except as a function of our own construction and enactment - this possibility may have many interesting consequences in terms of managing what we experience as conditional change. It also means that in a functional sense that seeing our part in this construction and the act of pattern recognition become important.