I am most interested in scripts that help connect waves worldwide and world-deep. We map such waves as likely to multiply either goodwill or badwill everywhere they connect. The scripting game is to gravitate goodwill flows. I sometimes ask people to visualise 7 waves (7 does not matter as long as its more than 2; that each wave is uptilting every society's potential to grow; and that we can start to see that globalisation interconnects: all waves, all societies , all cultures, all that we would most humanly value for our children's futures). I have been debating waves for 22 years since co-authoring the first death-of-distance future history on the revolution of networks, which we believe to be the greatest revolution ever to have challenged one generation of humanity everywhere. This book was also the third of the trilogy of preneurial literatures that my father Norman Macrae published in The Economist

Entrepreneurial Revolution - The Economist 1976

We're All Intrapreneurial Now

I am always interested in refocusing the 7 waves I map so that I can learn but loosely speaking the 7 waves I am most trying to navigate and help people open source scripts and co-blog around are:

clean energy, water, air -map; blog resource 1 2 3

education

ridding the world of poverty's systemic apartheids, underclasses, cultural silos

media for people to celebrate reality and the greatest innovations we can nurture

spaces so that every city can connect through some of 30000 collaboration projects

changing over to peoples economics, peoples valuation of large organisation’s trust-flows, transparencies and sustainability - this will also require restoring Hippocratic oaths to professions, or societies preneurially taking back the semi-monopolies that they had been given the privilege to truly and fairly rule -blog resource 1

the wave I don't yet know but which keeping an eye on the 21 global market future exponentials that are most at risk may help us to visualise

A few scripts from are archives are at 1 2

What this weblog intends to do is feature one script per monthly section and see who is able to interconnect what conversations or project or other discoveries around it. Or how to improve it.

the education wave

Happy New Year’s Open Learning to you all and for all our billion+ children & in memory of Peter Drucker’s Knowledge Workers lifelong learning.

Do you know anyone who might like to rehearse this sort of Hemisphere Peer script at Project30000 http://project30000.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_project30000_archive.html
or any other network?

Project30000 bookmark
Hemisphere Peer Circles –why we use this name for our main projects section on Open Learning for all Ages?

Do we learn from each year’s crop of humankind every year that they learn from 10 up? What channels or spaces does the world have for listening to these growing people’s inquiries and imaginations? Contextually: each represents over 2% of action learning power of our species- how wholly do we respect let alone honour these new searching inputs? Will google help or hinder in improving transparency of answers to this question.

Why start from 10? We don’t have to; we could start from first grade of age 7. What we do need to do if we have learnt anything from the knowledge of emotional intelligence is that we ought start from a pre-pubescent age because that is when transparent self-confidence to question most needs planting. And to have rehearsed how each open age’s learning conversations worked so that eg by 10 that peer group is confident the world is listening. An example of such a rehearsal: each one of London’s 400 BeTheChangers of 2004 was given a personalised letter written by 7 year olds raising some questions on the world they would most like to see. The one I got was just as humanly sensible to my mind as any letter on a similar subject I have received from an adult. By all means when you are age 10 or under, facilitation by caring parents or teachers matters. But we do mean of the questions that peer group wants to ask not what some bureaucratic curriculum believes you need to be examined on like a cage of parrots. At least one of the 365 days in a 10 year old’s year could jam together the questions of the world they way we see them.

What would 2005 have learnt before 2005 if hemisphere peer groups had been up and openly networking. Would Queen Elisabeth have spent her Christmas message to the commonwealth asking iof humanity was turning on itself? We suggest that Britain 7/7 and France and Australia and other places where pockets of youth cultures rioted or terrified us would not have been our first warning signals that such nations are not as deeply culturally integrated as they liked to hope. We suspect this would have been clear in how the class of 95s were raising different questions from the class of 90s from the class of 85s in such hemispheres. Now that all these countries citizens from 10 up have online access it’s a tragedy we don’t have hemisphere peer groups more urgently being formed. To put this another way, once co-editors of project30000 have got over the initial shocking of connecting through this weblog, our next shocking conversation is that we hope the second wave of project30000 co-produced between 2010-2015 will make this first weblog look as primitive as the stone age

The Intergenerational Magic of 1 3 5 7 and 21
In demanding that the world knows how it can openly learn from its 10 or 21 year old hemispheres, naturally we want to learn for other time-bands. Let’s credit Bill Gates for focusing us on the 3,5,7 year bands. Bill says that change which happens in 3 years is usually underwhelming compared with forecasts and change that happens in 7 years wholly outside what was expected. This confirms that communal action learning itself is on exponentials, and 5 year bands are as convenient as any one number to remind us of the inflection points. Put another way whilst every 12 year old will correctly tell you they are very different from 10 year olds, the cultural and environmental influence on 10 to 12 year olds can be expected to be similar where that conditioning the boundaries of a third of a generation’s experience 10-16 or 17-23, or
24-
30 can be predicted to be wholly different in some ways. Do our educational dare to iteratively ask which these critical differences are? Is there any possibility that these changes in a networked globe of localities are not going to get greater every 7 year leap into the 21st C.

And now for the not so good news - why Century 21 was our last innings. The vast majority of mathematical or societal system thinkers from Buckminster Fuller on forecast that unless we improve open learning to a higher order of systemic integrity representing all our diversities, then century 21 is humankind’s last one. So if you are 40 plus –and even if you live your life in a boardroom or extracting moonshine from brussel sprouts as a 21st C Gulliver would see in travelling past much EU funding - YOU could be just as interested in enabling 10 year and up hemisphere peers as every other age group.



Cataloguing Signpost –you are here @Project30000
What this section will do is ask where can we map the emergence of any of these learning groups? Please help us to extend this list.

AIESEC is probably the most universal university age peer group – ie roughly 18 to 21. It exists to offer undergraduates cultural exchange learning experiences from one hemisphere to another. Its members say it does this quite well. But where’s the debriefing? Why don’t the world’s journalist cover each year’s peer learning group’s newest observations with the same intense desire top listen as a meeting of G* ministers. Can you explain that to me? I seriously want to know

The Montesorri Tradition asks students to learn from each other’s age groups, the way well harmonised families might. Do journalists fully check in each year with what Montesorri’s newest questions about family systems may be? If you think that’s an over-optimistic question, it interests me that Chief Justices have been doing that annual checking in at Lucknow for 6 years now. I do wonder why the BBC as world’s largest public broadcaster doesn’t even devote one hour a year to what this fascinating peer exchange’s latest action learning debriefs are.

This section waits for your nominations of other spaces or networking channels where hemisphere peer learning happens. We will add in a few scripts on learning networks that a circle of us have been playing with for 33 years now. If some of them provide controversial stimuli that make you stand up and shout before you awake your open learning curiosity, that is the only value they have. As Peter Drucker who died this year a 95 year long lifelong learner was heard to mutter gravely every year: can anyone tell me that the productivity of schooling has truly improved in any of my 95 years on this planet. We need not to blame institutions etc since this is ultimately a job that all people serve for all people if there is to be a 22nd century – at least our mathematical maps of exponentials make this as clear as night follows day

I have tracked scripts on computer learninhg netwoerks since my first job was at the Uk National Development Program for computer assisted learning in 1973 and co-scripted several as part of the first future history on death of distance in 1984

but I would say this 2004 script is the most succinct of modern day ones

http://www.thelearningweb.net/a_intro/page019.html
The world is hurtling through a fundamental turning point in history.
We are living through a revolution that is changing the way we live, communicate, think and prosper.
This revolution will determine how, and if, we and our children work, earn a living and enjoy life to the fullest.
For the first time in history, almost anything is now possible.
Probably not more than one person in five knows how to benefit fully from the hurricane of change - even in developed countries.
Unless we find answers, an elite 20 percent could end up with 60 percent of each nation's income, the poorest fifth with only 2 percent.1 That is a formula for guaranteed poverty, school failure, crime, drugs, despair, violence and social eruption.
We need a parallel revolution in lifelong learning to match the information revolution, and for all to share the fruits of an age of potential plenty.
8. Fortunately, that revolution - a revolution that can help each of us learn anything much faster and better - is also gathering speed. This book tells its story. It also acts as a practical guide to help you take control of your own future.The main elements of the revolution are twofold. They link the modern marvels of brain research with the power of instantly available information and knowledge

There's also more background on why the web can change every learning experience at the blog I help maintain for exploring what curricula and teaching modes we need for 9-13 year olds - my daughter's 9 so this is urgent for me!

Engaging the 7th wave economics

I find this the hardest wave to influence at all but will devote my professional time to that, whereas almsot all work with other waves I do pro bono (apart from out of pocket costs)

Here's an emerging scripts which I am trying out on serious economics networks. To engage I need to find when they are talking about one of the revolutionary family of terms such as singularity 1 2, tipping point, gathering storm, or death of distance which my family (dad then his 30th something year at The Economist as its most prolific editorial writer) coined and nurture since 1984
------------------------------

Even though I hold a postgraduate certificate in mathematical statistics from Cambridge, I am not sure of the logical nuances connecting large scale change visions such as singularity, tipping point etc . However may I point out that I believe that linguistically the economics epicentre of such system * system transformation is Entrepreneurial Revolution. We are scripting 30th birthday party dialogues around this through 2006. My dad, Norman Macrae, surveyed ER 30 years back in The Economist 1976 and also began a preneurial trilogy. Here is a brief map of what economists who connect ER ideas can see. Equally I myself am delighted to work on any contexts or cross-disciplinary and systemic constructs that facilitate working around the same sort of map

Survey 1 ER : the word preneur (French for taking back) goes back to when the French peoples took back land etc from royalty so that the peopes of France could be more productive. The Economist itself was found in the 1840s by what would be today called a social entrepreneur world champion http://clubofoxford.blogspot.com. Those of a preneurial persuasion remind editors of The Economist to this day that: James said that once corn laws and capital punishment had been repealed , the newspaper should be closed! http://ecosaintjames.blogspot.com

Entrepreneurial Revolution looked back at the industrial age to see what organisations had already looked at ways of going beyond people being subservient to machines. My dad’s surveys had discovered Japan in 1962- so clearly some companies like Toyota make factory life more fulfilling than others like GM? Other oddities explored in this survey included how much innovation got blocked by patents; what will industries or nations do when they need to criss-cross each other’s boundaries but are 100% defending their own territories and able to collaborate.

Survey 2 called “We’re All Intrapreneurial Now” celebrated the fact that around this time in advanced nations the majority of the economy had changed to service with a big question: What revolution to the system of organisational valuation and governance is needed for people to be invested in more than machines. Intangibles savvy leaders and goverance systems know there is a golden triangle of service economics but only if a corporation is prepared to sustain the highest trust-flows through a generation of service work. Companies like South West Airlines have tacitly used this sustainability investment dynamic to return 100 fold to shareholders over a generation but only because they multiplied far more value than that across the societies they became most interdependent with

In 1984, we came to the book which started the future history genre of exploring worldwide networking crises of human fulfilment. This book completed the Preneurial trilogy advancing constructs now termed social or sustainability entrepreneurs and was co-authored by me because my first job in the 1970s had been in The Uk’s National Development program for computer assisted learning networks. Our 2024 report (republished depending on language translations as 2025 or 2026 reports) timelined how the generation 1984-2024 would face the greatest revolutions humankind has ever been hit by combining economic singularities in the costs of transport and communications. We timelined 7 “Death of Distance” waves – each that will connect all 6 billion beings and the 2 million global villages they network through. Each wave will either sustain growth everyone it goes or compound economic and social destruction. There’s nothing magic about 7 – happy to map more with people. The idea that waves such as these are enveloping us all –eg education, clean energy, cross-cultural embedding so as to ending underclasses and apartheids everywhere on the globe… and are multiple but interconnecting is what you need to start out mapping futures of global and local economics with. The more I look at the 7 waves that our dialogue groups have been monitoring since 1984 the more I personally see similar death of distance patterns as Friedman’s :Flat World http://clubofbethesda.blogspot.com

*Collaboration as a higher order advantage than competition alone

*Competition theory that is incorrect in compound consequences it compounds because of various false assumptions of which the simplest is: no cost of propagating something that the whole world is dying out to be invented, where the actual costs of traditional media are huge

*Reconfirmation of a topic my dad and Peter Drucker used to talk about a lot. There are in what we exponentially compound 2 economics with opposite maths: that of the big gets bigger and the peoples economics which unites all peoples in access and capability of making a difference – for want of a better term I will call that peoples economics. Globalisation’s singularity is which of these 2 economics will connect through all the systems*systems that networks consequentalise. By 2024, we will know and the fate of our children’s generations will be immovable. When Bush’s State of the Union speech declares the 2 new space races of end addiction to petroleum economics and enable our kids to love exploring science as much as sports, those contexts are dead on 2 of our waves. But there may yet be a lot of work to do to ensure the curve each waves propagates uptilt every society’s sustainability instead of downtilting all places, societies and all cultures. What can economists bring to this debate now so that everyone transparently understands the crossroads we fly over through this next decade?

* I am searching for a perfectly simple collaboration game. A worldwide treasure hunt where the winners are the greatest open source collaborators. I suspect the context may revolve round http://www.frappr.com/algaeworld

Discovering a perfect collaboration context -and simple enough debating game around it - is what really seems to matter gravitationally and urgently.
http://cleanestdemocracy.blogspot.com

How Numbers Separated the World In 2 Swift Decades

By an Observer

Part 1 The 1980s

What you need to know first about the 1980s was that the decade started with the world’s largest companies being run as multinationals. They might have had a headquarters in a Western City but largely each country leadership teams were their own governance. Why because at the start of the 1980s the fastest medium to communicate across national offices were telephones or telexes. You just couldn’t compile a quarterly return with the same period’s decisions topped down from global headquarters. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that all three tools were linking every managers desk around the world: the personal computer, the spreadsheet, and telecommunications technology that networked their notations.

There are many subsidiary flows to understanding how a market is developing and whether it is sustaining goodwill or just bubbling up before a crash. These include market research which at the start of the 1980s I helped manage around the world’s biggest new products and the societal reactions to them. By interpreting parallel studies which we also benchmarked in the first database software tools we would advise company leaders when a product just wasn’t culturally fit for a particular society or had some other defect. By the late 1980s such human feedback reconciliations were not deemed necessary. Numbers took over. An example of the impact this had can be told for the company I loved working for most all over the world in the early 1980s. Its commonwealth values were to invest in local people through thick and thin. For example, when American companies were pulling out of an apartheid ridden South Africa, this multinational stayed there putting even more into developing people in minorities within every section of its organisation. By around 1990, all of this corporate identity was being rapidly diluted. Even though everyone of projects in dozens of countries that I hade personally managed had fed back that this company was permitted to introduce new and globalising products, even after various failures that any new innovation programme risks, because the company was loved locally.

Part 2 the 1990s
Through the 1990s people’s trust and ability to develop interconnecting competences were destroyed through every intangible brand , learning, facilitation of knowledge being just three. This was because of mathematical errors that pervade accounting, economics and all the measurement sciences that a company’s top management are advised –and in America’s case of shareholder valuation algorithms often forced by law – to use. Each of these hard disciplines is subject to one general error as well as its own additional vicious assumptions. The general error is that they buy the appearance of precision by separation. Accountants never map a whole view, they prefer to add up as many separate parts and business units as they can get their number crunching on. When you add you assume there is no flow relationship. Moreover, accountants buy precision in 2 more ways that compound most inhuman consequences. They separate the past period they are reporting from the future whereas much of the integrity of peoples goodwill has already been invested in or is being milked. Its future exponential trajectory is measurable now and strategies should be intervening as to what the exponential momentum is spinning but that will never happen when a board is being governed by additive numbers. Even worse in a service or learning economy, accountants require that investments can only be made in machines and tangible lifeless things, never in people or any living system. When you book all people in as costs, hey presto strategies decide its always people that need cutting. Those selling in machines get ever more of a free ride even when the computers fail to do what the people could. Even when the computers steal more and more time of customers and society, one of various costs whose compound impacts are always externalised out of strategies governed by the numbers. At this stage a branch of economics kicks in the final coup de grace for humanity. It assumes that if a new invention is desperately needed around the world, the cost to get that communicated across global markets will be zero. However when markets have become full of defensive competitors, the economics of competition ruling alone are the worst possible maths for sustaining the human race.

If you would like to question this openly with me, please do. I will however assume that you have read the latest unseen wealth reports that suggest well over 90% of how future value compounds is not just blinded from top management and organisational governance but intercepted by what has become the perfect maths for conflicting with such sustainable development every quarter. The exponential results are pretty clear if you look at any top 20 global sectors of human concern to peoples everywhere.

strawman solutions (let's improve through debate) chris wcbn007@easynet.co.uk

1 I would require every professional group that is give n by society a semi-monoploy to rule with numbers, law, or other life-ging or -depleting interventions to re-draft its hippocratic oath; and for there to be ombudswomen in every city where citizens could come and file any complaints. Publishing these testimonies openly on the web and threough citywide braodcast channels would be one of the ombudswoman's tools.

2 I would require that all large organisations introduce a 2nd type of goverance geared round auditing and removing conflicts from the declared purpose. There is a complete and open source maths for doing this as well as raffic light games that citizen groups can play without needing to resort to the more detailed maths of exponentials. These games are quite simple for people to play because tyey are all about trust-flow and detecting any intransparencies - this is an intelligence that people of every race, age and creed I have met at are good at as unlong as their communal saftety is guaranteed. This is where any large city needs its greatest leader to be its most ethical and caring for all peoples. London's ecosaintjames and Delhi's constitutions seem bestforworld benchmarks. They do however rapidly need to liberate the publics broadcast media from pressures that both global commerce and in Britain's case political goverance have ramped up in recent years.

People I have met for coffee at least once and whom have inspired why I believe in scripts

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT - THE DISCIPLINARY MILLENNIUM BUG

I met Michael McMaster circa 1998. We had a long coffee one summers day in a garden hotel just West of London. Michael connected with me while I ran a year long egroup (before automated ones existed) on how practitioners -including R&D directors of major global corporations - grappled with the systemic paradoxes of Organising Creativity. I have come across many leaders of big organsiations in my life and braodly they can be classified into 2 types:
those who talk about innovation and block every possible way people in their company could have time and space to achieve it

those who talk and walk innovation

Michael was one of 2 people who inspired me to explore a subject that seemed to be emerging around Knowledge Management. My father and I love Drucker's constructs and knowledge worker perspectives in particular. As I questioned Knowledge Management it sided with many of the worst bubbling impacts of dotcoms and replacing people by computers. Although it may one day help reconnect hi-trust people relationships with other communications and innovation disciplines that can only work practically if they refuse to be budgeted around silos, most KM is now being budgeted to depress people's abilities to action learn or network. A particularly badwill force in this is the peoples money the European Union have invested in KM 1 2.

To see how folk like Michael had visioned a different sort of KM I reporoduce this meta-script which I found here

Michael D. McMaster, Author and
Managing Director, Knowledge Based Development, Ltd.
Posted: December 12, 1998

Organizational Intelligence
(Adapted from a talk given to The Industrial Society, London, April 1998)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I assume that you all want your organizations to be adaptive, innovative, creative, growing, robust and long-lived. Many of you have a more or less unacknowledged wish that they also be predictable, orderly and under control. The second may be incompatible with the first - at least in the way that you think about it now.

In America there are a number of facilities that do research and manufacturing for nuclear weapons. For a variety of reasons, a large one being that they work with extremely life threatening materials, these facilities are located on huge acreage far from civilization. People who have worked in these facilities are beginning to get sick and die. For fourteen unsuccessful years they have been working toward new practices and new regulations to eliminate this problem.

In Wales there is a similar facility right in a city. Across the street on one side is a school. Across the street on another side is a shopping centre. All around are houses. There are zero incidents of health problems. The Americans, in efforts to clean up their own sites, visited the Wales facility a number of times over these fourteen years - but still no progress was made.

Since I’ve had the opportunity to help change this situation I have some insight into where the differences are. I account for it by saying that there is intelligence operating at the facility in Wales; but not so at the American facilities. The intelligence I'm referring to isn't individual - it is an organizational intelligence.

By intelligence I mean the capacity to sense, make sense and take action, combined with knowledge that is available and ready to use. As human beings we have access to our own intelligence through language, and through this means the ability to increase both knowledge and the capacities of intelligence, and thus an unlimited capacity to expand.

With the term organizational intelligence we name what we want to access at the organizational level - the capacity to sense, make sense, and act in flexible, creative, adaptive ways. Organizational intelligence is the source of our future - and to get it, we need to think differently, manage differently, and organize differently.

Organizational intelligence opens possibilities for:

Non-linear results.
Futures that are not predictable given current understandings.
Results beyond our current capacities, which organizationally are largely linear.
To get our minds and hands around this, we need to understand intelligence as it resides in the organization and not merely in individuals. It is at the level of organization that we have access to the "architecture of intelligence" and "processes of intelligence" and not just its content. We can design for intelligence just as easily as we can seriously inhibit the natural occurrence of intelligence.

Dee Hock, founder of Visa, provides an insightful perspective:

"The organization must be adaptable and responsive to changing conditions, while preserving overall cohesion and unity of purpose. This is the fundamental paradox facing businesses - not to mention living cells, immune systems, ant colonies and the rest of the natural world."

That is, an organization must be intelligent.

Intelligence is a distributed phenomenon. In ant colonies, in society, in individual human beings - and in organizations.

Let's consider an ant colony as an intelligent entity for a moment. It is extremely adaptive and extremely flexible. It senses, makes sense and takes action. It continues to find food and keep the colony and species surviving. Some build incredibly complex housing systems. Where is the knowledge, the intelligence, the capacity to do this? It isn't in some queen, in some ruler, in some central source. If it were, we'd expect to find a few really smart ants!

The intelligence or know-how is built into the structures of relationship and communication of the colony.

This country appears to be intelligent - able to make sense of its world and adapt in ways that keep it prospering. But we can't find any single individual responsible for that nor any truly central source.

London manages to provide food, shelter, services, entertainment, and transportation, without central control. We can't find the intelligence of London and yet it exists and functions very well.

Let's consider human beings. In what sense is intelligence a "distributed phenomenon" here? We tend to think intelligence is in the brain. But it's actually much more distributed than that. We find it in the whole nervous system, the immune system, a whole raft of systems that are integrated and inform the brain as much as the brain informs them. There is no centre here, and there is no linear mechanism that explains what happens.

Even when we look at the brain in detail we find that there isn't a centre there. There isn't even a clear location for each bit of information nor for each function. We find that "information" coming into the system through our senses is scattered throughout the brain. When we see or think something that triggers a memory we think that this memory was stored somewhere as a unit - but we now know it isn’t.

Think of your own organization for a moment. I spoke to an executive of the Royal Mail who was lamenting about the difficulty of making important changes. He was suggesting that people in the organization were not very intelligent. He certainly didn't consider "the organization" to be very intelligent. So I asked him,

"Do you know how to make an organization deliver mail to 20 million people reliably every day? Do you know how to make an organization adapt to changing technology, changing transportation, changing population, and generate phenomenal growth over centuries? Is there anybody - or small group - in the organization that really knows how to make the mail get delivered and to adapt to the constantly changing environment?"

It became apparent as we talked that there isn't anybody that knows how to deliver the mail. But there is an organization that knows how. That's a pretty good display of intelligence in my book.

Your organization is the same. Check your experience:

Do you know, personally, how to do what your organization does. Can you directly make happen what you want to have happen?
How easy are your change initiatives?
What is so difficult about changing an organization?

Consider that the fundamental model of the organization that we are using - the one inherited from generations of executives and the history of the organizations - is flawed. The model of the organization that inherited culture gives us, not only for being a manager but also for being an employee - in fact for most of our life - is based on what we might call an engineering model.

The characteristics of the traditional organizational model are:

Linearity - an understanding of how things work that allows a visual and cognitive grasp based on simple lines of causality.
Reductionism - a way of understanding things which breaks them into separate parts that are easily understandable, so that we can improve them and put them back together for improved performance
Hierarchy - an approach which uses linearity and reductionism to gain understanding and control of larger systems.
Objectivity - an approach to the world that separates our experience from what is so, and generates the belief in "one right way" and some ultimate truth.
Predictability and control - the result of the above applied to machinery (effectively) and human affairs (not so effectively).
These are not the characteristics of intelligence. Intelligence works by different means. The accepted model for intelligence is a "complex adaptive system".

The characteristics of intelligence are:

Non-linearity - state changes, transformations, invention, breakthroughs, and other results which appear like quantum leaps.
Distributed phenomena - where the elements cannot be located specifically yet something emerges - like intelligence, teamwork and rapid response abilities.
Independent agents - individual elements which make their own sense or meaning, and then make their own choices based on their own interests as they understand them.
Emergence - those results which occur without direct, linear action and are unpredictable in detail yet, at least after the fact can be seen as a result of earlier forces combining in new ways
Attractors - those elements or principles around which forces move so that detail cannot be predicted but patterns can be seen.
Patterns - seeing the connections between things and identifying the "attractors" around which these form, giving access to influence without control.
Holistic - taking a view that includes whole systems rather than the parts or even merely the particular focus that is of interest to you.
Socially constructed reality - the realization that through language and practices we create the social world that we live in - and we live almost exclusively in a social world that we have emerged from and co-emerge with.
This strange language, by the way, is being used by CEOs and board members of Koch Industries, VISA, Unilever, Coca-Cola, ROLM, Xerox, Citibank, Levi's and other large organizations, including the US military, as well as by many executives and founders of the younger and faster growing hi-tech companies.

This later model give us better prediction and control for those systems which are dynamic and interactive, particularly those which use language - like human intentions, productive processes, resolution of complex problems, delivering the mail.

The model gives us a tool to engage the total knowledge and intelligence of a community - a community which has an interest in resolving a complex issue - and creates a new, richer shared understanding from which emerges new, more innovative solutions to challenges.

It gave resolution to the American DOE challenge (see below for link) of how to transform inherently dangerous workplaces into safe ones. Application of this model connected the distributed intelligence related to the problem, created a collective intelligence, and generated effective regulation and practices being put into action now. (Hyperlink to DOE story)

Let us look again at what we want - adaptability, innovation, creativity, initiative.

These are emergent phenomena. They arise from a system that may be intentionally created but for which there is no linear or reductionist understanding. These systems are neither mechanistic nor predictable, nor are they random or capricious. They can be designed. To do that you need to give up control as you understand it and employ control appropriate to an intelligent system.

Let's take a non-intelligent instance for understanding this better. Consider a river. If you ever paddle a raft down the Grand Canyon you will notice that you have nothing to say about the way it is going. And very little influence over what it will do to you, where it will take you, or at what speed you will travel. Yet you do have enough influence, enough prediction ability, and enough control. If you try and exercise inappropriate control, it will throw you into a rock or overturn you. If you exercise appropriate control - a small steer here, go with the flow there, paddle a bit another time - you find that it is quite safe, quite predictable, and you are quite in control of all that you need to be in control of on order to realize your intentions.

Or consider the flow of water in a small stream or canal. You can influence what goes into it by a dam. You can influence its broad speed and direction by digging, placing obstacles, or changing the banks. You can predict a great deal about the behavior of the stream and control some major effects. But you can't predict or control even a tiny fraction of the small details of the stream, of the water, of the flow.

With an understanding of the phenomena of a river you focus your energy, attention, and intention at the right level.

Business is a cognitive activity. If we understand the model of distributed intelligence that is a corporation, then we can design both structure and practices to call forth the maximum emergence consistent with sufficiently controllable productive results. Key elements:

Social-language and agents which create a natural tendency for relationship and communication as the basis for alignment and shared commitment (the naturally converging and binding force)
Independent, intelligent agents as a basis for continual development of possibility and responsiveness (the naturally diverging and innovating force).
Attractors and patterns as the basis for making sense and meaning.
Connections as the source of innovation and adaptiveness.
The vehicle for this is dialogue, relationship, and engagement - not formal systems, one way communication, and publication. The outstanding executives that I have met are generally excellent thinkers; but more importantly, they are obsessed with relationship.

Michael D. McMaster
Manageing Director, Knowledge Based Development, Ltd (1998)
Author: The Intelligence Advantage - Organizing for Complexity, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996.
Author: The Praxis Equation - Design Principles for Intelligent Organization, 1997.
Link: The USA DOE Story


Feedback:
From: USDCC2FC@IBMMAIL.COM (John Oleson), Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998
Rick, As usual you have brought forth some keen "intelligence" with the OtherWise article by Michael McMasters. Combined with the DOE Beryllium experience it makes a strong point about the change in a corporate culture through managing the development of corporate intelligence. Here at At Dow Corning it applies to the program to shift the organization to supply chain management with the appropriate level of agility. It seems to be an approach that allows the organization to determine the changes needed and sets them free to do it. Existing culture is the top down guided change with the troops saluting and saying yes sir. One important factor in the DOE experience is the relationship between the people and their functions (bosses). They need to be sure that what ever happens at the sessions their entity will support. The atmosphere must be to get the best total organization solution. Thanks for the intellectual stimulation.
========= Reply =========================
From: "Michael McMaster" mdmcmas@ibm.net Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998
Thanks for the feedback. The DOE will be put into play because we involved all of the decision makers AND representatives of all of those who are to act - all the way down to the shop floor and including the union.

========= Reply =========================
From: tim.cousins@timcousins.com (Timothy Cousins) Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002
Michael. My experience (12 yrs in Australia) is with organisations in crisis after a disaster. (fire. flood etc...)
I have devleoped a managemnet style completly independantly of any theory of "complex adaptive systems" and have recently discovered amazing parallels between my learnt disaster recovery management style and current theories of complex adaptive systems. I have always maintained that Disaster Recovery Plans have NO intelligence - people do, and clearly organisations o as well. Thank you for your insporation in this article. I was stuck on the issue of "how to train for a good adaptive response prior to a disaster. I know that information and the meaning of information is critical - and that is how I apply my levers to alter the course of the recovery process. I now have to take a risk and let the intelligence of the orgnisation develop. my thoughts are still embryonic. Thank you for your thoughts. Cheers
TimC.
www.timcousins.com.au

A thousand coffeetimes with Entrepreneurial Champions & Future History Inquiry Agents
This is how often I must have met my dad and the people he co-mentored and vice versa at The Economist

Peoples Economics
What economics and maps do we need to ensure there are people in the 22nd Century , let alone ones where 2 million global villages thrive in harmonious trades? Forgive me: as of 2006, my navigational ability as a mathematician and intercultural learning network explorer is limited: only to connect your value multiplying competences to maps and games menus and scriptwriters, and other hi-trust gravitational resources

Top left is the trust-flow molecule we all use -as scriptwriters, mapmakers, designers of abundance economics or democracy learning games - to value trust-flow, transparency , sustainability at every level of systemisation - going micro, going macro, going inter including global*local geographically and real*virtual in spending each of our lifetimes, and investing exponentially in our children’s future sustainability. Far right you could start describing how you would value the 10 productivities and demands so that all spin win-win-wins through time. If even one of the ten coordinates powers over the others, it turns trust into distrust, sustainable value multiplication into a final bubble that then bursts over all.

The stakes are redoubled if you believe in the wave theory posited as uniquely hitting this generation by death of distance scriptwriters and their 22 years of collating stories and tracking the evidence of exponential uptilting and downtilting

Bottom left we see some newsy groups in various countries who are exploring the challenges. You need to ask whether they are inviting diverse enough inputs from all peoples and sources, or just separating what they have historically believed in from evolving the higher order future systems we will need if we 6 billion beings are to sustain, and not to be burnt by the top down powers of globalisation failing to listen and integrate what environmental feedback loops most naturally come from local communities up.

Can we be each other's guides through deeper contexts than this first glimpse of 21st Century Mapmaking? chris macrae wcbn007@easynet.co.uk