CONVERSATIONS
Contents
Federation through Conversations
Conversations that make a difference
Don't be deceived by this seemingly innocent word, "conversations". The conversations that will now extend and continue our initiative are where the real action begins, and the real fun.
If you consider, as we do, the news about Donald Trump or about some terrorist to be nothing really new, then you might be thirsting for some real and good news. And anyhow – why give those people the publicity and the attention they don't deserve? Why use the media to spread their messages? The conversations we are talking about are designed to not only provide good news, but also to create them. And also and most importantly, they will also engage you and all of us in the creation of good news, so we'll no longer be passive observers of the decay of our society, but participants in co-creating a living and evolving one.
This new kind of news that will emerge in the new commons will not be a single bit boring; on the contrary! Just think, for example, of this as news – that there's been this huge and exotic invisible animal, universally present in our lecture halls, media news and conversations. Present yet unseen in our university labs and auditoriums; implicit in both our concern about the "global issues" and our lack of concern; present as hole and an empty slot in our media reports and in our coffee house conversations, where this sensationally spectacular creature was so consistently ignored!
Every era has its challenges and its opportunities, which are often seen only from a historical distance. The 19th century changed beyond recognition our industry, our family, and our values. The 20th century accelerated those changes, and with them also the growth of our important variables. The 20th century created also the knowledge by which the nature of our new situation could be understood and handled in a new way. But we remained caught up in the paradigm that the 19th century left us in, tangled up in its subtle power relationships and institutionalized practices, unable to see beyond. Recall once again the image of Galilei in prison. Today no Inquisition, no imprisonment and even no censorship is required. As Italo Calvino observed decades ago, while it was still only the pages of printed text that competed for our attention – the jungleness of our information will do just as well. And probably better.
When in Federation through Images we talked about the mirror existing at every university, we may have made it seem like an entrance to something – to an academic underground perhaps, or to an underworld. You may now perceive the mirror as an exit – from an academic and more generally creative reality where our creativity is confined to updating an outdated paradigm, to an incomparably freer yet more responsible and responsive one – where we are empowered to perceive and change this paradigm. Where we are helping our society and culture evolve in a new way, and in a new direction.
This new good news will bring to the forefront entirely new heroes. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, whose talents brought him from a village in the Pyrenees to the forefront of French intelligentsia. Bourdieu became a leading sociologist by understanding, in a new way, how the society functions and evolves. And how this evolution is shaped by the subtle power relationships that are woven into our communication. Buddhadasa, Thailand's enlightened monk and scholar, will help us understand that at the core of the teachings of the Buddha – and of all world religions as well – is a deep insight about ourselves, from which an entirely different way of evolving culturally and socially – liberated from those power relationships – naturally follows. Bourdieu's "theory of practice" will then help us see how and why the institutionalized religion grew to be an instrument of that very renegade power, instead of liberating us from it. And how our other institutions suffered from that same tendency, including our academic institutions notwithstanding. We will then more easily appreciate Erich Jantsch's efforts to bring our work on contemporary issues beyond fixing problems within the narrow limits of our present-day institutions, and institutionalized routines and values. And to bring the university institution to adapt to and assume the leadership role in this transition. We will then also understand and appreciate the value of Douglas Engelbart's work on showing us how to use "digital technology" to develop "a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms" – which will vastly enhance this evolution. And why Jantsch and Engelbart – and so incredibly many other 20th century giants – remained ignored.
The nature of our conversations
The first thing that must be understood is that when we say "conversations", we don't mean "only talking". On the contrary! Here the medium truly is the message. By developing these conversations, we want to develop a way for us to put the themes that matter into the focus of our shared attention. We want to engage our collective knowledge and ingenuity to bear upon understanding, and handling, those issues. And above all – we want to create a manner of conversing, and sharing, and co-creating that brings us the people into the drivers seat – and our society's 'vehicles' once again into a safe and governable condition.
This does not mean that our conversations will be technical. That we'll be talking about the systems science, or about the CO2 quotas. On the contrary! These themes may come, but later. The conversations not only be about sensations, they will in the truest sense be sensations. By keeping them transparent and public, they will be a living and evolving record of the birth pains of a new culture; they will mirror the spectacle of the obstructions and the resistances; they will be a reality show through which a new societal reality is forged.
Another thing that must be said is that this in the truest sense re-evolution will be nonviolent not only in action, but also in its manner of speaking. The technical word is dialog. The dialog is to the emerging paradigm as the debate is to the old one. The dialog too might have an icon giant, physicist David Bohm.
While the choice of themes for our dialogs is of course virtually endless, we have three concrete themes in mind to get us started.
The Paradigm Strategy dialog
The Paradigm Strategy poster
This prototype has been designed for a specific audience – the RSD6 conference of of the Systemic Design Research Network in 2017 in Oslo. The members of this community are mostly academic researchers who are already focusing their energies on characteristic contemporary issues; and who have already recognized the systemic approach as an essential component, and are applying it in their work. Can we still tell these people something that might be new and relevant? Could we perhaps even surprise them? And most importantly – can we add a capability, a course of action, to their already so well-developed repertoire, and help make it more impactful?
A strategy
Among a number of messages and lines of action that are woven together in The Paradigm Strategy poster, there is of course the main message, which is conveyed by the very title. We wrote in our abstract:
Polyscopy points to the pivotal role of a community-wide gestalt (high-level view of a situation or issue, which points to a way in which it may need to be handled). The motivation is to allow for the kind of difference that is suggested by the comparison of everyone carrying buckets of water from their own basements, with everyone teaming up and building a dam to regulate the flow of the river that is causing the flooding. We offer to the RSD community what we are calling The Paradigm Strategy as a way to make a similar difference in impact, with respect to the common efforts focusing on specific problems or issues. The Paradigm Strategy is to focus our efforts on instigating a sweeping and fundamental cultural and social paradigm change – instead of trying to solve problems, or discuss, understand and resolve issues.
A federation of insights
The poster federates a number of insights and points of evidence to support the above main point. The poster is fairly self-explanatory, and if you explore it you'll might find some food for thought for yourself as well. The insights of giants across fields of interest are combined together into threads, which are then woven together into patterns. There are only two, so let's focus on them for a moment.
If you've skimmed through Federation through Stories, then the Wiener's paradox will be already familiar. The message is that even the most basic insight of the systems movement, and the one most that is most relevant to people – because it shows why all the rest is relevant – has not yet been communicated to the public! But the Wiener's paradox is of course a more general pattern, from which all of our academic and other culturally relevant knowledge work tends to suffer. Insights are reached, but they are not turned into common knowledge! The communication-and-feedback of our society are broken, the insights we produce are not listened to.
So if our society does not have – and does not use – suitable information to navigate through the complexities of modernity, then how in the world do we manage? We must have developed a substitute? And indeed we have! The second pattern, the homo ludens, provides an answer. It is an insight that combines an old book with the same title, but makes its message incomparably more agile and sharper, by combining the insights of Pierre Bourdieu with the ones of Antonio Damasio, and through four similar combinations or threads, and thereby also demonstrating some of the knowledge federation techniques. The message is that – being unable to penetrate through our complex reality, and for other more subtle reasons as well, we have been devolving culturally as homo ludens. The homo ludens is the cultural species that is ignorant of – and generally uninterested in – the questions of meaning and purpose. The homo ludens simply learns its different roles, and importantly his profession, as one would learn the rules of a game; and then plays competitively, to maximize what he perceives as "his own gain".
You might recall now – if you've been looking at Federation through Images – that there is no single "true reality picture" here; everything is just models, angles of looking, points of view. The idea is that a certain way of looking will explain certain things better than another one, which may have of course its own advantages. And so we'll mention one out of many points of view that this poster makes available – that the academic tradition too may be suffering in some degree to this same homo ludens devolution. This little piece of polyscopy-enabled theory would then postulate the existence of a most curious cultural sub-species, called the homo ludens academicus – which according to common logic should not exist at all (isn't enabling our homo sapiens evolution the very purpose of the academic tradition?). But we left the exploration of this interesting possibility, of the real-life existence of the homo ludens academicus sub-species, to some future conversation.
The question that we offered to the Research in Systemic Design community was to look into their, which is of course also our system – the academic discipline, and its standard equipment and procedures including the conferences, presentations, publications and the rest. The Wiener's paradox suggests that our contributions to this system and within this system may have little or no real-world effect; and the poster explains even why. Shall we take this opportunity and examine carefully what is going on? Or shall we be uninterested, and resume our business as usual?
But if the academic publishing is a paradox and hence not a solution – then in what way can we fulfill our all-important role? The poster presents an answer in terms of a single keyword – bootstrapping. If our own system is no longer suitable for the purpose it needs to achieve – then we need to change it! We need to create new ways to collaborate, and communicate, and achieve impact. But isn't that what we've been talking about here all along?
A call to action
The poster then both introduced a call to action – and at the same time facilitates it. We invited the RSD community to co-create the poster together with us. The bootstrapping link in the middle leads to a copy of the poster where suggestions and comments can be made online. In this way the poster becomes an online interaction tool that federates the knowledge of the community – and joins it with the insights of the represented giants, and with our own insights. Our invitation was of course to help co-create both the tool itself and its messages.
Liberation
A dialog for general audiences
TBA
See
On dialogue
TBA