Let's hear it for liberating our minds

We cancelled our cable TV account six months ago.  Suddenly the cable service has reappeared free of charge. 

I wondered about this.  At first I thought that the cable carrier owns a lot of TV channels. Perhaps the cable carrier and its TV media outlets are worried about becoming irrelevant.

Then, today I thought that there cable companies stand to make more money from advertisers when more people look at cable channels and mainstream media instead the internet or Twitter.

We are in a time when so much of what is happening makes little sense when we look at situations superficially, which is all the mainstream news gives us.  People are getting direct information using Twitter, which keeps us more deeply informed and ahead of the news reports.

This way of staying informed continues to develop our minds / discernment / understanding.

Some people seem to think that we need to go beyond the mind - which is true to some extent.  We need linear brain functions for business and science.  But this approach to thinking is heavily over-estimated.  

The Ancient Greeks were right to emphasize logic. But it seems inadequate for tackling the challenges we face today.  Why would we continue to limit our mental functioning to what happens on one side of the brain when so much is at stake?

People in business are now recognizing the importance of insight which requires more than linear thinking.  Insight is powerful simply because it uses more of the brain than traditional logic.

We are realizing just how incompetent we are at tackling everyday challenges when we restrict ourselves to logic.  We are like teenagers becoming aware of our own incompetence for the first time.

We get a lot of symbolic information from dreams. The information is holistic and never literal - which allows us to develop ideas on our own.  So no-one is giving us instructions in dreams - which happens with channeling, or with government policies, for example.

The nature of my dreams changes as my ideas are changing.  Our ideas become more fully integrated and realistic as we mature. 

So let's hear it for liberating our minds.

What is a Community, now and in future?

Have you ever wondered what community is?  Its an interesting topic.

It is a topic that has become increasingly important now that we are running out of resources which sets limits on growth.  The old economic ideas are just falling away.

The first ten minutes of this video challenges the basis of today's economic philosophy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8ZJCtL6bPs

Professor Al Bartlett makes a strong case for the end of capitalism two minutes into this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNN9BvNUsIU&feature=related

A community can be a location such as a neighbourhood.  Members of a community can share a common sense of identity such as coming from Bermuda, or the Caribbean, or the West.

 
A community can also be people linked by-

A common set of practices. See medical associations, acting guilds, or knitters

Or shared interests. See physicists, book clubs

Or similar values and shared intentions. See ecologists; or the Intentional Communities movement – http://www.ic.org/

So identity, practices, interests, values and intentions attract people together. They bring a level of organization to society.

Ultimately life seems to be about coming together to resolve our differences of identity, practices, opinions, values, intentions - and do this in as conscious ways as possible.

Today, with the internet to assist us, life could be about coming together to find mutual fulfillment and strength through collaboration.

I believe the internet is here to help neighbourhood communities advance beyond old ways of doing things.  I believe these communities will continue to reorganize internationally around the internet.

Why do I think this?  The biggest losers in globalization were national governments.  National leaders have given away much of their power to unelected officials within international agencies.  This has been a trend since about 1995.  And this is exactly when the internet started to catch on.

So it's time for change.  Let's use the internet to spread solutions internationally.  And let's organize locally where we can have an immediate effect on how things get done.

Embrace a Social Ecology. Go beyond Dogma

The industrial activity of North America and Europe relocated overseas .  And national governments allowed this to happen mostly during in the late-1990`s.  This is how capitalism was able to take advantage of lower wages and lower environmental standards in other countries.  


Business has mostly served the financial, production, promotional and distribution needs of industry.  Following that relocation of factories overseas we saw the contraction of businesses at home.  


It’s time we accepted this, learned to proceed accordingly, and adapt.  


But how do we adapt?  It's certainly not by using the same level, or the same complexity of thought that produced factories, businesses as we've known them to date.

Within government and business we relied heavily on a level of thinking that could solve isolated problems.  This is the relatively simple level of linear thinking that has allowed the ‘dogma’ of project management to continue unquestioned.  If there were a powerful priesthood that upheld this dogma of project management, which I don't think there is, it would never disclose to you the basis of project management which is process philosophy.  People would question the main pillars of process philosophy and thus bring an end to the priesthood's power.  


Process philosophy is the thinking behind project management and therefore the unquestioned basis of how things get done in Western business, government, and much of science.  I have studied process philosophy intensely for several years at the same time as studying Eastern philosophies about the workings of reality.  And process philosophy pales in comparison.


A project management approach requires that we keep life away from everything we do.  (Think of analyzing the workings of 'a small piece of life' in a test-tube.)  A project manager has the ridiculous job of pushing life aside  constantly in order to clear the path so that the preconceived results or goals proceed in an uninterrupted manner to the planned outcome.  


Unless life is maintained outside the project and outside closed doors where all the real planning of outcomes gets done things quickly get too complicated for linear thinking.  (Think of Western society where $1-billion is spent on troops to keep life outside the perimeter fence of a G-20 summit.)  


To adapt we need to move to the next level of thinking in terms of complexity However to enter today’s emerging creative economy we acknowledge that nothing is isolated and that everything exists in mutual relationship and interdependence.  (Think of fluid groups of people being gassed and beaten outside the perimeter fence of a G-20 summit and formal proceedings in a hotel complex inside the fence.  Many outside the fence have sufficient complexity of thought to allow for life, grasp some of the wisdom of our ecology, and usher in some of the social adaptations we need at this time.)

Society is an ecology that meets the need for interdependent levels of products and services within that society.  We are learning how to better meet these needs simultaneously through coordination of projects.  

We can think of projects as arranged in a large array consisting of six-stages.  Levels within the array are a rational approach to face our challenges.  Position each project in a level from 1 to 6 depending on the need it meets:

1. social, 
2. cultural, 
3. educational, 

4. for business, 
5. for communication, or 
6. for overall coordination. 

It's good to notice how each stage builds on the prior stage.  Think about it.  We don't have a culture without a society; we don't have a culture to share through education without a society and a culture; we don't have a business sector to get things done without education, a culture, and society; and so on.  

The progression of these stages show a marked increase in complexity.  A system of coordination requires a more complex way of thinking and doing than communication, or business.

We need a culture that goes beyond project management to allow for life.    We need education that shares process philosophy on which Western society is based, and philosophies on which Eastern societies are based.  We need to examine them, come up with rational alternatives and test their effectiveness as social adaptations.  Without a rational approach for all to examine and discuss we are stuck with something like the unexamined 'truths' a priesthood would hold in place.

It simply was not possible to handle coordination of arrays of interdependent projects before the Internet.  On-line tools provide international society with organizational support for coordination services to emerge as the next, great source of value, and therefore the next, great economy.  

Lonely at the Top - Powerful at the Bottom

The previous post was about how the Internet supports us in directing our own fulfillment with greater immediacy.  This is happening because of greater self-awareness, and the Internet bringing more people together.  This is happening at the same time that lone leadership has entered into voluntary decline.


Lone leadership is in decline.  But that does not mean our impulses to command and control others has declined in the least.


To compensate for ineffective leadership, as a society we’ve entered into an elder-ful era.  The idea of the role of elder is from indigenous cultures to distinguish anyone who voluntarily dedicates his or her life to taking care of the greater good.  These days, I’ve noticed elders 18-years of age or younger. Look at what happened to Craig Kielburger when he was 12-year old in April 1995! http://www.freethechildren.com/aboutus/history/

I have experienced aspects of the Occupy movement taking responsibility for the greater good.  This is happening with varying degrees of self-awareness.  Some of us have noted our urge to shadow-box, to thrash and strike out at aspects of life we despise.  We don`t admit that whatever we’re fighting set up camp inside us long ago.


It’s on the record that the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring were spurred on in part because of  tools for organizing made readily available on the Internet.  We conduct the details of coordination for mutual fulfillment using both on-line tools, and those potential little-spies-in-your-pocket, we lovingly call cellphones.


Thank you social media.  And thank you open source software.


Coordination for mutual fulfillment tends to be carried out locally, in and among neighbourhoods.  Public spaces are where you’ll find those soul pools and nutrient rich spawning grounds where the elders swim.  Neighbourhoods are now vessels where projects wriggle and interweave, where adaptations arise from the cross-fertilization among notions. Social adaptations hatch in local places.  These are challenged, chased around, and later dismissed before becoming strong enough to find their way into the mainstream.


There’s no way of knowing what comes next from the shallow waters where social adaptations emerge.  Some new ways of doing things have inherent capacities to grow and plunge straight down because they are designed to trawl through the depths of our collected realities.  These surpass the role of lone leadership.  Drawing on what is deep within us has always been the role of muse.

Contribute within TODAY`s Economy

In the USA, Obama's annual State of The Nation address continued the illusion that life in ‘developed nations’ is all about manufacturing.  

At least citizens of the US get a regular pep talk.  In Canada we have no idea where we are heading, either as an economy, or as a society.  You'd think that somebody in government would do something to rectify that.   

When you walk up to the door into a public washroom you notice that someone has been thoughtful enough put a little phrase or graphic on the door.  It’s something that everyone knows indicates a public washroom.  The reason it’s placed there is to indicate what to expect next.  

There needed to be something placed on the door to the future, decades ago.  The word for that little phrase or graphic that everyone understands is a sign.  

We achieve new kinds of society.  It's something we all agree to strive towards.  Together we put our life blood into making it happen.  All we need is a little sign.

Many of us distrust, or simply don’t know what kind of society we’re supposed to be moving towards let alone know what we`re contributing towards achieving.  The last time we heard a politician describe a vision of where we are going as a society was during the 1970’s when John F Kennedy told us we were going to the moon. 

As it turns out it was not a vision for society but a message to calm the military-industrial complexes of the US and USSR.  Kennedy was thoughtful enough to place a sign on the door to the future to indicate what the military and war industries of the two superpowers could expect next.  

Talk about the moon was a sign to indicate to the military-industrial complexes that they had a future in a world that was relatively peaceful.


Maybe that's why people are looking for signs of the times.  The sign we need is TODAY when we look around us.

Maybe that's why people talk about signs of the times.

Environments that are Conducive for Innovation

Here are some quotes from this really great article that I think indicate ways of moving forward.  To innovate and accelerate positive change in neighbourhoods, any movement may need a strong internet-based component.  The conversations we have need to expand internationally to as big a network as possible.Please circulate a link to this post to whomever may be interested.I look forward to your comments.

New York Times, Sunday Review.

The author of the forthcoming book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” By SUSAN CAIN

Published: January 13, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=3&hp&pagewanted=all

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.”

Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. “The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question,” Mr. Osborn wrote. “One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.”

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

MY point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust and friendship.

And I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.

But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

 - END -


I think its fair to add that much of the innovation in terms of bringing compassion and environmental thinking to society is coming from movements.  


We need to bear in mind that movements:

• Never consisted of collaborations among Picassos and Buddhas. 
• Require input from everyone - doers, thinkers, feelers, inspirers, facilitators.
• Require collaborations among people of all generations.
• Encourage peer-learning for skills development, empowerment and leadership.

Andrew.

Coordination by Neighbourhood

Pulling away from the details of daily news reports may be a challenge.  But without standing back, we won't recognize the evolution within social and economic development that is occurring as a backdrop to the news stories.  Social and economic evolution is being created by millions of people.

Einstein pulled away from the details of nationalism.  He pointed out how nationalism was a childhood illness of humanity, much like measles.

More of us are having to find ways to prosper, or survive, with less reliance on buying new goods and services.  This is leading to evolutionary change.

As we become more efficient and learn to do more with less we will find that coordination between individuals, families, and neighbourhoods, becomes more important.  Coordination is the next big economic need that we have to find ways to fulfill.

Coordination cannot be imposed internationally, from the top-down, and remain efficient at the same time.  One government structure overseeing the world would be unbelievably out of touch with people's everyday needs.  It would be incredibly inefficient.

International coordination is better achieved amongst individuals in neighbourhoods, rather than in centralized ways.  The alternative to increased centralization is doing things in distributed ways across networks.  

International coordination is beginning to happen over aspects of the Internet that will become like a nerve system for international society.  

Using this blog we will continue to share in this new found social maturity.  We can discuss what we / you, anticipate will be subsequent stages of society, so that we all benefit.  My bet is that this will involve integrating ourselves, and all the resources around us in our neighbourhoods, into a more realistic social perspective.  I think we will find much more realistic perspectives on organizing ourselves as an international society by looking at how nature organizes things.