unintended consequences

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“Welcome to Magic School. Here is your schedule.”
“Thanks! But…”
“Yes?”
“This is just ‘Ethics’ and ‘Human rights’ and things like that.”
“Correct, that’s the first year curriculum.”
“Do we have to learn all this?”
“Of course! What do you think this is, software engineering?”
—@MicroSFF

—

  • Some unintended consequences of automobiles are pollution, gridlock, and manslaughter.
  • An unintended consequence of using cement as our primary building material is large CO2 emissions.
  • An unintended consequence of Facebook is false narratives.
  • An unintended consequence of consumer social media platforms is a surveillance economy.
  • An unintended consequence of a digitally mediated society is constant outrage.
  • An unintended consequence of online services like Über is “low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people“.

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applied imagination

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

@RitaJKing — “I advocate for calling AI applied imagination instead of artificial intelligence. We need to start thinking.”

@LynnBoyden — “Why is there no place in any car for me to put my purse?”

@WhiteOwl — “We think we design jobs for organisations but really we design organisations for jobs.”

@MayaDrøschler — “I heard two scientists on the radio discussing men’s and women’s shame. Men’s shame is about being weak, women’s shame is about not being likable. Men must be strong and protective to escape their shame, women must be nice and popular. Both men & women reinforce this structure.”

@rhappe — “Why do we need arts, writing, & history education? Because it requires making decisions in ambiguity. Where do I focus? What do I leave out? When am I done? This is a critical skill in a world of information abundance, it requires practice, & it is the only way to make progress.”

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learning as disservice

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It is time to revive an insightful comment by a friend and inspiration, David Jonassen — as his Wikipedia entry says, Dave wrote about “learning with media, not from it”.

“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” —David Jonassen

Knowledge is personal. Knowledge is human. Knowledge cannot be managed.

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we don’t need another hero

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People in leadership positions are very busy — too busy it seems.

“CEOs attend an endless stream of meetings, each of which can be totally different from the one before and the one that follows. Their sheer number and variety is a defining feature of the top job. On average, the leaders in our study had 37 meetings of assorted lengths in any given week and spent 72% of their total work time in meetings.” —HBR 2018-07

But being busy makes them feel important — perhaps even heroic.

“Many of us can get caught up acting like heroes, not from power drives, but from our good intentions and desires to help. Are you acting as a hero? Here’s how to know. You’re acting as a hero when you believe that if you just work harder, you’ll fix things; that if you just get smarter or learn a new technique, you’ll be able to solve problems for others. You’re acting as a hero if you take on more and more projects and causes and have less time for relationships. You’re playing the hero if you believe that you can save the situation, the person, the world.” —Margaret Wheatley

As Margaret Wheatley states, “Heroic leadership rests on the illusion that someone can be in control.” But we don’t need heroes, we need learners.

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toward a network society

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Our current triform society is based on families/communities, a public sector, and a private market sector. But this form, dominated by Markets is unable to deal with the complexities we face globally — climate change, pollution, populism/fanaticism, nuclear war, etc. A quadriform society would be primarily guided by the Network form of organizing. We are making some advances in that area but we still have challenges getting beyond nation states and financial markets.

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we all need an inner circle

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Work has always been about who you know, more than what you know. That’s why the rich and powerful send their children to elite schools. It’s not about the education but rather the connections. We still fool ourselves that a capitalist economy is a meritocracy — which any marginalized group can attest is false. However, the emerging network era and its democratization of media is giving voice to more of these groups.

I have advocated for retrieving gender balance in our organizations as the controlled linearity of the written and printed word — patriarchal in their essence — will be obsolesced by the connected, electric medium. This connected world requires each of us to develop broad and diverse social networks in addition to trusted communities of practice. Today, this is even more important for women than men, though I think it will be essential for all genders in the near future. Social networks are our professional safety nets.

Professor Brian Uzzi studied hundreds of MBA graduates and noted significant differences in the social networks of men and women. While social networks are important to both, successful women also had an ‘inner circle’ of trusted female advisors. Networks and communities are not the same. Communities are the connectors between diverse networks and work teams. They are essential. We all need an inner circle.

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methods for mastery

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I recently came across two methods to implement aspects of personal knowledge mastery. The first, by Angelika Mittelmann, uses my Seek > Sense > Share framework to create a ‘fitness circuit’ which includes warm-up, starting, and sustaining exercises. These are quite detailed but are good for people looking for inspiration to start the PKM discipline. Mittelman concludes, and I agree, “As every person is different, there is no standardized PKM.”

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“the only way to make sense out of change”

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

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” —Alan Watts

“Respect and deference are two different things, sir, too often mistaken for each other.” —Maxine Peake as Martha Costello QC, Barrister in Silk via @tantramar

“Sorry to break it to you but arguments and facts don’t change people’s minds. It’s been proven neurologically that only relational warmth, not a war of words, can light up our neocortex awakening us to something new.” —@danwhitejr

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what it’s all about

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Three things are essential for meaningful work in the network era — diversity, learning, and trust.

Diversity

While there is much talk about information overload, it has never been easier for us to find diverse opinions, experiences, and perspectives. To make sense of any complex matter we cannot rely on a single source. As with the blind men and the elephant, each of us can only see a part of the whole. It’s not just gender balance that we need to cultivate in our social networks but overall intellectual diversity.

“All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts.” —Esko Kilpi

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the universal mother

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Umair Haque has written what some might consider a controversial article on why AOC [US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] short-circuits the conservative mind and why the universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father.

“The universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father. Think about it. Reflect on it. Remember it. Treat the bizarre and weird contradictions of post-modern gender theory with the skepticism they deserve — my gender is the most important thing in the world, but yours doesn’t matter at all!! Understand it’s just conservatism and patriarchy in disguise, all too often, all over again — a kind of weak liberation to be sexually desired, to be virgins and whores, but not really existentially valued, as mother-creators, spring-bringers, winter-melters.” —Umair Haque 2019-01-16

For hundreds, even thousands, of years women have been excluded from power and AOC is taking the public podium back. She understands the new medium. I think AOC is a sign of the times and that we will see many more mother figures coming forward in the emerging network era. The reactionaries may currently dominate the public discourse, but over time they will lose.

“Why do our societies feel so out of control? So imbalanced? Like they’re collapsing and crumbling before our very eyes? The reason is very simple, in one way. Too many authoritarian fathers — not enough universal mothers. Societies like American and Britain have long histories of empire building, which reflect cultures of authoritarian fatherhood. It’s no surprise that as the world became a little more powerful, and they became a little less powerful — they retreated into a desperate search for authoritarian fathers. Reagan … Bush … Trump. But Theresa May is Britain’s authoritarian father — not its mother — sternly commanding it, threatening it with terrible punishment, cracking the whip over it.” —Umair Haque 2019-01-16

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