hold the centre

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A recent conversation on Twitter between Peter Radcliffe and Chris Corrigan highlighted the need for a political centre that does not polarize those on the edges.

“A fundamental Canadian flaw is that the 70% of us who are in the political middle have been raised to be too polite to publicly call the 15% on the extremes bat-shit crazy.

That leaves the center silent, the noise and press extreme, and Canada feeling somewhat divided and broken.” —Peter Radcliffe

To which Chris responded:

“It would help if folks in the middle didn’t vilify those of us towards, but not in, the 15%. Everyone knows those folks are irrelevant, but when we get lumped in with them by the centre 50%, it dilutes policy creativity and the possibility of better solutions.” —Chris Corrigan

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eighteen years of blogging

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Today marks 18 years of blogging here. My first post in 2004 was quite short, just stating what I was interested in discussing on my web log. One year later I wrote about the benefits of blogging:

  • Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
  • The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
  • By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
  • I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals, and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system.
  • Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
  • The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work — two areas of interest for my business.
  • Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
  • Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
  • When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
  • It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant — saving time and potential frustrations.

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perpetual beta — our new normal

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The perpetual beta model describes how knowledge can flow between professional networks, communities of practice, and work teams. It shows that it is necessary to connect all three in order to ensure a diversity of ideas and perspectives — as well as safe places to test these — in order to support increasingly complex collaborative work tasks. An essential component of this is ensuring individuals develop the discipline of personal knowledge mastery.

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super-connectors

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Richard Claydon tells a story about a ‘super-connector’ he once worked with. This person was highly respected by everyone and could get things done across departments, ignoring the official hierarchy.

“In today’s interconnected complexity of work, it is next to impossible to isolate performance to the granular, individualised level of a KPI. Everything happens in dynamic context, impacting and being impacted by stuff that is going on elsewhere. A super-connector navigates this complexity for the benefit of all.

Super-connectors are vital for creative and innovative work. They are the people who take strands of thoughts from multiple domains, synthesise them and turn them into something novel. Without people capable of listening to, comprehending, sharing and combining such thoughts, creativity and innovation hit roadblock after roadblock.” —Are you a super-connector?

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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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