Harold Jarche

a global human sensemaking platform

by

The thinking that got us into this mess will not get us out of it. If we are to create a new economic order it has to move beyond civil society, governments, and markets. A quid pro quo between private firms and public authorities will only reinforce the status quo.

“A new economic order requires an explicit quid pro quo between private firms and public authorities. To prosper, firms need a reliable and skilled workforce, good infrastructure, an ecosystem of suppliers and collaborators, easy access to technology, and a sound regime of contracts and property rights. Most of these are provided through public and collective action, which is the government’s side of the bargain.

Governments, in turn, need firms to internalize the various externalities their labor, investment, and innovation decisions produce for their communities and societies. And firms must live up to their side of the bargain – not as a matter of corporate social responsibility, but as part of an explicit regulatory and governance framework.” —Project Syndicate 2020-06-11

Read more

evidence and perspective

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

PatrickTanguay — “School pre-covid: Teach them all exactly the same thing, sitting in rows. Prepare them for cubicle + factory work. Post-covid: Sit them at the kitchen table, on the couch, let them learn what they can amidst overworked anxious people, doing Zoom calls. Prepare them for gig work.”

@ChrisCorrigan — “RSS is sweet because is delivers news without triggering chemicals. It works at the pace of ‘newspaper on the doorstep’ compared to the stream of social media.”

@JasonHickel — “Capitalism structurally compels us to work and produce beyond society’s actual needs. And the more we produce, the more we have to consume, to mop up overproduction. Consumption becomes a structural imperative — a form of labour in itself. The consumer is not sovereign, but serf.”

Read more

apprendre dans un monde complexe et chaotique

by

Traduit par Christian Renard

This is a translation of learning in complexity & chaos

La plupart de nos structures de travail sont aujourd’hui conçues pour faire face à des situations compliquées, telles que la construction d’un bâtiment, le lancement d’une campagne ou la conception d’un équipement. Mais, aujourd’hui, nous devons faire face à des problèmes complexes qui ne peuvent pas être résolus de manière standardisée — inégalités, réfugiés, populisme, racisme. Chaque fois que quelqu’un est impliqué dans le contexte mondial de changement climatique, la situation est probablement complexe.

Dans les situations complexes, on s’appuie moins sur des plans et des analyses détaillés et davantage sur une expérimentation continue, associée à une observation et à un suivi attentifs. Nous allons désormais devoir apprendre constamment dans la complexité.

Read more

our wake-up call

by

On 6 June 1944 the First Canadian Army landed at Normandy. It had never been tested in battle as a formation. The complications of drills in England had been replaced by the complexity of war and the chaos of battle. By the end of August, two brigade commanders and five commanding officers had been removed as they were deemed unsuitable.

“[In Normandy] There still remained, however, that proportion of officers who were not fully competent for their appointments, and whose inadequacy appeared in action and sometimes had serious consequences.” —Breakout at Falaise

How many organizational leaders today are in the same situation as those inadequate officers in the Canadian Army — unfit for the post-invasion reality?

Read more

strong ideas, loosely held

by

Blogging is one way I make sense of the world. I have now written over 3,300 posts on various topics. My ways of seeing the world have changed over the years and blogging has helped to keep my thoughts in a state of perpetual beta — strong ideas, loosely held, in order to deal with constant change while still getting things done. Today we are in great need of sensemaking between citizens as we deal with the complexities of a pandemic, an economic recession, and increasing violence in many parts of the world.

Relatedness

One effect of the network era, and its pervasive digital connections, is that networks are replacing or subverting more traditional hierarchies of our institutions and markets. Three aspects of this effect are — 1) access to almost unlimited information, 2) the ability for almost anyone to self-publish, and 3) limitless opportunities for “ridiculously easy group-forming” as Seb Paquet described the effects of social media.

The desire to relate is what drives people to support global social movements on one hand, and to take shelter in tribal identity politics on the other. In politics, social media extend participation but also make information manipulation by small motivated groups much easier. Understanding this deep desire to relate to others should be foremost in mind in understanding human dynamics.

We will not have organizational transformation, or political reformation, without people feeling like they belong. To counter Tribal populism, we also need to appeal to emotions and our feelings of relatedness. The same goes for education and learning.

Read more

art, reality, and truth

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, via @AnthonyMartinFaria

@dsearls — “Future epitaph: ‘I used to be talent. Now I’m just content’.”

@MelissaPierce — “This quote from the movie ‘The Two Popes’ is pretty much everything: ‘Truth may be vital, but without love, it is unbearable.’ Would that I take this gem to heart for even a third of my interactions.”

@malia_adil — “These days on Social Media, everybody is engaged either hosting, boasting, or posting. Wonder, who is listening?”

@JasonFried — “Remember, remote work is not office work remotely. It’s a different way to work. Mostly asynchronous, long stretches of uninterrupted time, fewer meetings (meetings are a last resort), and fewer hours with more impact per hour.”

Read more

prebunking the conspiracy theorists

by

In confronting the post-truth machines I looked at different types of fake news and what could be done to counter them —  Propaganda, Disinformation, Clickbait, and Conspiracy Theories. I mentioned that the researcher danah boyd defines agnotology as — “the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance”. Today, as ever, many forces are at play promoting agnotology — from governments, to corporations, to social movements. This ignorance in our society can easily lead to conspiracy theories.

In the conspiracy theory handbook (March 2020) the authors from several universities explain in detail what conspiracy theory is and what can be done about it. It’s a short read read and a handy reference. The prime differentiation is between actual conspiracy (e.g. VW diesel emission tests) and imagined conspiracy (e.g. JFK assassination). One comes with a perspective of healthy skepticism while the other from one of overriding suspicion. The authors say that conspiracy theories are popular because they address feelings of powerlessness, provide a way to explain unlikely events, help cope with threats, and dispute mainstream politics which can help make some minority movements feel special.

Read more

a trusted space for learning

by

In 2006 I proposed that we should develop an educational system  of small schools, loosely joined:

  • With access to the Internet a one-room school would have to reach out to the rest of the world and not be wrapped in the confines of the industrial school. Schools would have to seek out partnerships and not be isolated islands.
  • Communities of learning online could be developed to link learners in several schools and even in different countries.
  • No teacher would be able to ‘master’ the subject matter, so teachers would become facilitators of learning, which is what they profess to do anyway .
  • Small schools would be integrated into the community and there would be a sense of ownership by the community, not the education system.
  • Most children would be able to walk to school, therefore eliminating buses, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and encouraging exercise.
  • Children and parents could have more than one school to choose from.
  • Sales of industrial school buildings could be used as financial capital for the transition.

Read more

jupiter aligns with mars

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@qcroll — “The century of the speaker is over: Once, we did everything for the speaker’s convenience, gathering in one place. Now, we do everything for the community, because speakers, sponsors, and the audience trust us to gather the best people.”

@bhargreaves — “Everyone crowing about a permanent remote future where they live in Boise but earn their current NYC/SF salaries is gonna be real pissed when they discover they’ll live in Boise but earn Manila/Bucharest salaries.”

@yaneerbaryam — “Bureaucracies exist in order to say no. They wouldn’t be needed if they said yes. So the people who rise to the top, and the culture, are an automatic ‘We don’t do that’.”

@delphina777 — “propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive — its secondary purpose is to convince — its primary purpose is to exhaust”

Read more

zoom is not the problem — meetings are

by

When all you have is Zoom, every work-from-home office looks like an endless face-to-face video call. I have been working remotely since 2003. Video calls have been a regular part of my work and I have used pretty well every platform available. In the early days my favourite platform was Marratech, until they were bought by Google and some of the technology created Hangouts. But video communication was only part of my work.

Asynchronous communication — threaded discussions, blogs, and wikis — was always part of my work conversations. Writely — which became Google Docs — was a great tool and helped our distributed team, from British Columbia to New Brunswick, write the specifications for the Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal. This was the first time that all the Ministers of Education had agreed to do something together. But CMEC cancelled the project after a vendor was selected. It would be interesting to see how the current pandemic would have been handled by schools, with a national online learning resource already in place and with over 10 years of experience. But I digress. Let’s just say that technology is not usually the issue in the workplace — it’s how the technology is used.

Read more