leadership in chaos

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In our wake up call I wrote in mid-2020 that complexity and chaos are the new normal as climate change drives more crises our way — pandemics, refugees, environmental disasters, and the overall degradation of our environment. To prepare for chaos, we need people who can act. Identify these people and give them experiments or skunk-works to play with. We will need leaders who can also deal with complexity. They will have to be constantly experimenting and probing their ecosystems. Organizations who are serious about surviving any ‘post-covid’ normal will have to take a hard look at their leadership and management structures. The time to change is now, not when the next crisis strikes.

By early 2021 I identified our crisis in network leadership and asked how many organizational leaders today are in the same situation as the inadequate officers in the Canadian Army who were unfit for post-invasion reality in June 1944. By the end of August of that year, two brigade commanders and five commanding officers had been removed as they were deemed unsuitable for leadership.

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pause and think

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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.

I don’t like Covid on a plane,
I do not want it in my brain,
I don’t like Covid, breathed in my face,
I wear a mask, from place to place,
I don’t like Covid numbers hid,
I do not want to infect kids,
I don’t like Covid, and I don’t care,
I do not like it anywhere #DrSeuss
—@keetmuise

Becoming a robot, by @VMaryAbraham

“Your employer has a secret fantasy: they wish you were a robot. Why? Because robots are reliable employees. They work without bio breaks and need virtually no downtime. Robots don’t seek opportunities to foster personal relationships with colleagues. Robots don’t call in sick unexpectedly. Robots don’t have childcare emergencies. Robots don’t create HR issues. Robots don’t have emotions or sensitivities or prior experiences or health conditions that need to be accommodated.

Robots are easy.”

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better stories for a better world

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“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following.” —The Atlantic 2022

A decade ago I saw three factors in the production of what is generally called social capital:

  1. Intellectual Capital (ability to collect, retain & share information
  2. Social Capital (ability of people to work together)
  3. Creative Capital (ability to combine diverse ideas)

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community sensemaking

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We had a great conversation today for our monthly Zoom call with the perpetual beta coffee club. We had folks on the call from Japan, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, USA, Canada, and Spain. The diversity of perspectives really adds to our collective understanding, especially since this is a trusted space amongst peers.

A couple of books were recommended in the conversation.

The World of Yesterday

Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy

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finding the wisdom of crowds

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“Opinions have never been formed in a vacuum. They’re infectious, as people copy one another. And when this process is made visible it sets off public opinion trends. As more of the public square has moved online, we’ve seen how these can grow monolithic and bitterly factionalised, stifling potentially important public deliberation: take, for example, the hysteria that shut down public discussion of lockdown trade-offs.” —The wisdom of crowds descends into meme wars

Is the print era irretrievably over and are we seeing the end of objective media, as described in the article above? But did print really give us objectivity? In Europe the printing press enabled individual interpretation of the bible and the Protestant Reformation which to this day keeps forking off new branches like a berserk open source software project. On the other hand, print enabled mass literacy, but also yellow journalism.

The rise of yellow journalism helped to create a climate conducive to the outbreak of international conflict and the expansion of U.S. influence overseas [1866-1898], but it did not by itself cause the war. In spite of Hearst’s often quoted statement—“You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”—other factors played a greater role in leading to the outbreak of war … The dramatic style of yellow journalism contributed to creating public support for the Spanish-American War, a war that would ultimately expand the global reach of the United States. —Office of the Historian archive

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stupidity — the new normal

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Two years ago I wrote about the new normal of work, citing a Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions report that had just been published. The major trends identified in the report included observations such as evidence that in cities more likely to vote for Donald Trump, there were fewer jobs that can be done remotely. Much of the focus was on the impact of working from anywhere and the decline in air travel. Citi’s Chief Learning Officer discussed the company’s investments in learning technologies, collaboration technologies, and improved meeting practices — the latter which I had discussed in bloody meetings.

I concluded that most people would like the option to work from home, most of the time. Many workers have tasted it, and in spite of the challenges of being forced into distributed work — they like it. Now that everyone is familiar with video conferencing we can also see that in many workplaces — zoom is not the problem, meetings are.

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our world view

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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.

Last night at the theater opening of ‘We Are As Gods’, I had occasion to declare:
“Science is the only news. The rest is gossip.”
Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly. —@StewartBrand

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” —Salman Rushdie (1988) The Satanic Verses

“People usually only figure out that things are turning bad when they turn bad for them, and by then it’s too late. The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.” —Attack Surface (2022)

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media drive organization

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It was almost 300 years from Gutenberg’s invention of the European printing press (1450) until the Age of Enlightenment beginning in 1715. If we see digital media — first invented as telegraph transmissions in 1855 — to be the dawn of the electric/network age, then we may have a similarly long period of change and turmoil still ahead of us.

Marshall McLuhan famously said that, “The medium is the message”. Thousands of years ago, the medium of the written word enable rulers to extend their command and control over larger empires and kingdoms. Institutions, like the three religions of Abrahamic tradition, were able to use the written word to get their messages spread across vast regions. As discussed above, the printed word enabled the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Printed works enabled mass literacy and market economies emerged in kingdoms and later dominated nation states. In summary:

  • Writing enabled institutions larger than tribal societies could build.
  • Print enabled markets that could cross oceans and continents.

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top tools 2022

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Every year, Jane Hart asks, “What are the most popular digital tools for learning and why?”. This is the sixteenth year Jane asked this question — and compiled the results into a valuable resource — and this is my eleventh year responding.

My responses have not changed too much from the past few years.

WordPress remains on top as it powers this blog, my online workshops. Also Slack has moved up as it will be the platform for our PBCC community.

I continue to use Feedly and Pinboard as ways to organize my online resources.

Zoom remains important because I have not travelled for business for the past three years and doubt I will again soon, so video conferencing is critical for my learning and work. Zoom still beats the competition in terms of usability.

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