Harold Jarche

we need less professing and more doing

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I mentioned in decision-making and trustworthiness that the roles of Professors, Stewards, and Experts are not as trusted as Doers, Connectors, and Catalysts. The role of Professor is ranked as the least trusted. During this pandemic the mainstream media, public health agencies, and governments have predominantly used the least trusted roles — Professors & Experts — to get their message across. No wonder we are seeing cities in Canada occupied by dissidents and our international border crossings blocked.

These people — who come from a variety of backgrounds and are not singularly aligned — agree on one thing. They do not trust the government. They do not trust the experts who have told them that vaccines are safe and effective. They trust the government so little that they want to unilaterally eject the elected governing party and its leader, the current Prime Minister.

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getting to a new normal

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The global pandemic has been a wake up call and an opportunity. It has shocked our market economy and society. Over the past two decades we have seen many experiments and movements toward a more equitable, sustainable way of living on this planet. We have made the rules for how we are governed and how the economy works. We can change them. We cannot change how the planet’s environment works. We cannot change the laws of physics. We cannot change how the SARS CoV-2 virus acts, as much as we would like to.

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the retrieval quadrant

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“The medium is the message.” —Marshall McLuhan

In 1988 Marshall and Eric McLuhan published The Laws of Media. These tetradic laws state that every new medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word) has four effects — Extend, Obsolesce, Retrieve, Reverse. This is how Derrick de Kerckhove explained the media tetrad when he was Director of the McLuhan Program.

  1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)

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light a flamethrower

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.” —@TerryandRob

“To think critically is always to be hostile — thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.” —Hannah Arendt

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” —Marie Curie

“The knowledge you take for granted could be life-changing for someone else. You owe it to the world to hit ‘publish’.” —@JustinSaaS

“One of my most important learnings as a facilitator has been that, to move forward together, agreement isn’t required as often or on as many matters as most people think.” —Adam Kahane

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sparking curiosity

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“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” —Ellen Parr

The primary work skills of the past century can be summed up as — compliance, perseverance, diligence, and intelligence. These skills were needed for routine work and standardized jobs. Historically we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is a decreasing requirement for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

While the industrial economy was based on finite resources, a creative economy is not. There is no limit to human creativity. We have to make a new social contract — not based on jobs — but enabling a learner’s mindset for life.

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the balance between emotion and logic in the digital age

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The recent research report — the rise and fall of rationality in language — shows a significant shift to emotion in the published public discourse  during the 1980s, after 130 years of predominately logic and reason.

After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.—PNAS 2021-12-21

This trend accelerated again in 2007 according to the researchers. They go on to observe that social media may have played a role in this shift.

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the power of social learning

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On 26 January I will be presenting on — The Power of Social Learning: Building Knowledge, Community, and Trust — hosted by Valamis LXP. Several questions have already been submitted by some of the over 150 participants registered so far and I will not have time to address most of these. Instead, I will try to answer these here — by topic — though they mostly do not directly reflect the content of the presentation. Some of these questions would require much more contextual understanding to give an adequate response and others could make for a month-long consulting assignment.

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sensemaking through irony

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How can we thrive in a broken system? This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges many of us face today, whether it be where we work, the institutions we deal with, or the governance systems that control us. Geoff Marlowe explains that how we perceive the situation and what type of humour we use, are critical in getting to a point where we may be able to take constructive action. Neither apathy nor cynicism will get us there, only irony might.

Ironic humour is often misunderstood and maligned by the positionally powerful because it challenges the deference they can assume is their due …

Which raises the question that if irony is so vital in maintaining a positive state in the face of an aspiration / actuality gap, why not just focus on humour?

That’s because without honesty and humility, any humour intended as ironic runs a real risk of sliding into sarcasm – literally “tearing off the flesh” of others.

Humour deployed as a form of violence isn’t going to contribute to the collective sense making, decision making & action taking that’s vital in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. —Thriving in a broken system

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learning from the influenza pandemic

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In July 2018, one hundred years after the influenza pandemic began, Extra Credits started a 6 part animated series to explain what happened. Little did they know what would happen 18 months later. The series is great for all ages and does simplify many aspects of a complex situation but I think they have done a good job. This series seen in light of the current pandemic shows how human behaviour, power elites, and vested interests have not changed in the past century. We have a better understanding of the science than we did in 1918 and our tools are much more sophisticated but we are acting pretty well the same as they did then.

Episode One covers the initial cases discovered in the USA and Canada and how these were covered up by authorities. Remember, there was a global war still going on.

Episode Two examines what happened in the trench fighting in Europe and how it was only when the disease hit neutral Spain, which did not censor the press, that it became known as the Spanish Flu. If you want to give it a geographical name, the North American Flu would be more accurate, even though it may have originated in China.

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value network analysis masterclass

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Value Network — “A web of relationships that generates economic or social value through complex dynamic exchanges of both tangible and intangible benefits.” —Verna Allee

I participated in my first value network analysis (VNA) workshop in 2007. My impression at the time was that humans work in complex environments and we are by our very nature unpredictable. The result of a VNA allows us to ask better questions but it doesn’t give specific answers (it’s not a tool for bean counters). I felt that VNA was an excellent change management tool. I could see the use of VNA and the resulting concept maps enabling better communication within organizations, with clients, with funders, and throughout communities. These perceptions have not changed

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