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Elephants.jpeg

Presentation slide pointing to our goal.

Glimpses of an emerging paradigm

The paradigm as elephant

Although we shall not talk about him directly, the elephant you see in the above ideogram is the main hero of our stories. It is a glimpse of him that we want to give by talking about all those people and events. This visual metaphor represents the whole big thing, the entire large Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we can have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And that's what we are about to do.

The visionaries as giants

Visionaries are the people with an uncommon ability. It has been said that a visionary is a person who looks at the same things all of us look at, and sees something entirely different. What we here call giants are the people with a proven record of connecting the dots. And so what we are doing here is the obvious strategy, the one that Newton too pointed at – we listen to the giants and connect their dots, to see further.

Connecting the dots to see the elephant

In a moment we shall see once again just how much our way of looking at things has become updating an old paradigm. Whatever fails to fit in – we just ignore it or throw it away! That's the danger we want to avoid here. By connecting the dots, we want to point to a whole new paradigm to put together

There's no danger of going out on a wild goose chase. Remember – everything here is a prototype. Our goal is a good conversation, where we'll correct our mistakes and create a vision we all share, and we can all rely on. And most importantly – create a flexible and reliable WAY and HABIT to recreate our visions or paradigms.

We shall not attempt here to show the whole big thing, but only some characteristic parts. All we want is to materialize enough of the invisible elephant so that you may begin to discern its contours. Then you can have immense fun continuing to connect the dots on your own, or even better – together with us, in a conversation!

A pragmatic view of knowledge federation

What we are above all interested here is knowledge federation / systemic innovation; remember – we are carefully making a case for a new way of being creative, of thinking and working, academically and otherwise. In Federation through Images we talked about the fundamental or philosophical underpinnings of this direction. Here we'll be looking at it from the point of view of societal needs, and the capabilities of new information technology. We'll be looking at a new direction in innovation. To that end, we'll be focusing on the visions of two giants mostly – Douglas Engelbart as the icon of knowledge federation, and Erich Jantsch as the icon of systemic innovation. But we'll also put on the map the work and ideas of some 'neighboring' giants, the ones on whose shoulders Engelbart and Jantsch were standing.


The nature of our stories

How to lift up an idea of a giant

How to lift up an idea of a giant from undeserved anonymity? We tell vignettes – engaging, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories, to distill the core ideas of the most daring thinkers from the vocabulary of their field, and to give them the power of impact. We sometimes also join the vignettes together into threads, and threads into patterns and patterns into a gestalt – an overarching view of our situation, which shows how the situation may (need to) be handled – just as we did with ideograms.

Our stories illustrate a larger point

But there is also something else in play here, quite essential. A story can be a parable. Through the concrete, the abstract and the general are revealed. So just as the case was with our ideograms, our vignettes too can be worth one thousand words. They too can condense and vividly display a wealth of insight. Bring to mind again the iconic image of Galilei in house prison, whispering eppur si muove. The story we are about to tell might suggest that also in our own time similar situations and dynamics are at play.


The incredible history of Doug

How the Silicon Valley failed to hear its giant in residence

Before we go into the details of this story, take a moment to see how it works as a parable. The story is about how the Silicon Valley failed to understand and even hear its giant or genius in residence, even after having recognized him as such! This makes the story emblematic: The Silicon Valley is the world's hottest innovation hub. Are those people there smart? Exceptionally so, there can be no doubt about that! So this story will both serve to point to a new direction, that is, to the elephant – which is what Doug was trying to do to the Valley (just look at his photo and you'll see that). The fact that the Valley ignored him will serve as a warning to the rest of us – and an invitation to look deeper into this matter

Engelbart's epiphany

Having decided, as a novice engineer in December of 1950, to direct his career so as to maximize its benefits to the mankind, Douglas Engelbart thought intensely for three months about the best way to do that. Then he had an epiphany.

On a convention of computer professionals in 1968 Engelbart and his SRI-based lab demonstrated the computer technology we are using today – computers linked together into a network, people interacting with computers via video terminals and a mouse and windows – and through them with one another.

In the 1990s it was finally understood (or in any case some people understood) that it was not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who invented the technology, or even the XEROS PARC, from where they took it. Engelbart received all imaginable honors that an inventor can have. Yet he made it clear, and everyone around him knew, that he felt celebrated for a wrong reason. And that the gist of his vision had not yet been understood, or put to use. "Engelbart's unfinished revolution" was coined as the theme for the 1998 Stanford University celebration of his Demo. And it stuck.

The man whose ideas created "the revolution in the Valley" passed away in 2013 – feeling he had failed.

What Engelbart saw

What was it that Engelbart saw in his vision, and pursued so passionately throughout his long career? What was it that people around him could not see? We'll answer by zooming in on one of the many events where Engelbart was celebrated, and when his vision was in the spotlight – a videotaped panel that was organized for him at Google in 2007. This will give us an opportunity to explain his vision – if not in his own words, then at least with his own Powerpoint slides. Here is how his presentation was intended to begin.

Doug-4.jpg

The title and the first three slides of Engelbart's call to action panel at Google in 2007.

Around the time of the event where the slides were shown it became clear that Engelbart's long career was coming to an end. The title "A Call to Action!" he choose for this event was obviously intended make it clear that what he wanted to give to Google, and to the world, was a direction and a call to pursue it.

The first slide points out that a large and as yet unfulfilled opportunity is immanent in digital technology. To realize it, we need to change our way of thinking.

The second slide was meant to explain the nature of this different thinking, and why we now need it. This slide points to a direction. Doug talks about a 'vehicle' we are riding in. You'll notice that part of the message here is the same as in our Modernity ideogram, which we discussed at length in Federation through Images. But there's also more here; Doug's talks about inadequate "steering and braking controls".

The third slide was there to point to a way to pursue this direction. It's what Doug's call to action was about. It was also setting the stage for explaining his own contributions, the ideas and technologies he produced as steps or building blocks in the pursuit of this direction. This slide sets the stage or the context for understanding meaning, purpose and value of all the pieces he produced, which is what the rest of the presentation was about.

But let's not rush with those details. Let's first make sure we've understood the second slide. That we've connected enough of the dots around it so that the meaning and the value of the direction Doug was pointing to is completely clear.

What makes this incredible

The Incredible History of Doug will continue after a brief detour, where we'll connect his vision with the visions of other giants, and properly set the stage for understanding the direction he was pointing to. Remember – we want to materialize just enough of the elephant for the things to begin to truly make sense. So let's just conclude here by turning what's been told so far about Engelbart properly into a vignette. You might still be wandering what's so surprising about it, where is "incredible" part.

For half a century, the Silicon's Valley giant in residence was trying to show the elephant to some of the smartest and most innovative people on our planet. What he ended up with, however, was just a little mouse in his hand (that is, to his credit)! If you'll now google Doug's 2007 presentation at Google, you'll find a Youtube video where he is introduced as "the inventor of the computer mouse". His call to action was not even mentioned. And the first four slides which we've just seen (which were meant to provide the context for understanding his vision and his technical inventions) were not even shown!

So many regions and economies have attempted to transplant the innovation and the entrepreneurship and the culture of the Silicon Valley to their own soil, often without success. What The Incredible History of Doug shows is that a much larger achievement than that is indeed possible – which the Silicon Valley failed to achieve, owing to the idiosyncrasies of its culture.

But isn't this just another point of evidence, among so many in history, that shows how the paradigm shifts are so stunningly large and so fascinatingly surprising as opportunities!


Democracy 2.0

What is worse than a dictatorship

We are back to Engelbart's second slide. The headlights and the steering and braking controls he's talking about there are really what we the people use to steer our way into the future – for which "democracy" might be just as appropriate framing as any other word.

In the old ( and still so stubbornly dominant) traditional order of things, democracy is the assembly of things we associate with that word: free elections, free press... As long as we have that, it is assumed, we have democracy. We the people are in control. The nightmare scenario in this order of things is a dictatorship, where a dictator has taken from the people those affordances of control and tokens of freedom.

But what Doug was pointing to is another, much worse nightmare scenario – where nobody has control! Where the "vehicle" in which we are riding into the future lacks the structure (or metaphorically suitable "headlights" and "steering and braking") that would make it controllable. A dictator may come to his senses. His more reasonable son may succeed him. But if the system as a whole is not controllable by design – then we really have a problem!

The science behind democracy

But what minimal structure may our society need to have, or any other of our systems, to be on a safe and stable course or (as we now like to phrase this issue) "sustainable"? (Yes, we could have said also "the science behind sustainability" – but "cybernetics" as a word makes it directly the scientific study of control and controlability, which is what democracy is about.) A scientific reader may have noticed that Doug's seemingly innocent metaphor in Slide 2 has a technical-scientific interpretation. In cybernetics, which is a scientific study of (the relationship between information and) control, "feedback" and "control" are household terms. Just as the bus must have functioning headlights and steering and breaking controls, so must any system have suitable feedback (information inflow, and use) and control (a way to apply the incoming information to correct its course, or more generally behavior) – if it is to be able to steer a viable course, or be "sustainable".

Norbert Wiener might be a suitable iconic giant to represent (the vision that inspired) cybernetics for us. He was recognized as a potential giant already as a child. So he studied mathematics, zoology and philosophy, and finally got his doctorate in mathematical logic from Harvard – when he was only 17! Then he went on to do seminal work in a number of fields – one of which was cybernetics.

We'll represent Wiener here with the final chapter of his seminal 1948 Cybernetics, titled "Information, Language and Society'." We'll briefly – as briefly as we are able without spoiling the story – highlight two pints from this chapter, two dots to connect, in two brief sections. Here's the first one.

Our communication is broken

Wiener cites Vannevar Bush, who was his MIT colleague and two times his boss, to make this point. And since Bush also inspired Engelbart, and since he's a suitable icon giant for this most central point, it's time that we introduce him here properly with a very brief story and a photo. <p>Vannevar Bush was the giant who most vividly and from an authoritative position pointed to the urgent need for (what we are calling) knowledge federation – already in 1945!

A pre-WW2 pioneer of computing machinery, and professor and dean at the MIT, During the war Bush served as the leader of the entire US scientific effort – supervising about 6000 leading scientists, and assuring that the Free World is a step ahead in developing all imaginable weaponry including The Bomb. And so in 1945, the war just barely being finished, Bush wrote an article titled "As We May Think", where the tone is "OK, we've won the great war. But one other problem still remains to which we scientists now need to give the highest priority – and that is to recreate what we do with knowledge after it's been published". He urged the scientists to focus on developing suitable technology and processes.

Engelbart heard him. He read Bush's article in 1947, as a young army recruit, in a Red Cross library in the Philippines, and it helped him 'see the light' a couple of years later. But Bush's article inspired in part also another development – and that's what we'll turn to next.

The market is not the solution

There is an obvious alternative to all this – the market! The belief that we don't really need headlights, that we don't really need knowledge federation and systemic innovation – that all we need to do is worry about "our own" interests, and "the invisible hand' of the market will take care of all the rest. Wiener's second insight is that there is no "invisible hand" to be relied on; that we must do the work ourselves. He makes an interesting transition between the first insight and this second one by pointing to at least a couple of giants whose essential message was ignored – where the message is what we have as the title. One of them was John von Neumann, whose seminal contributions include the design of the first digital computer – and (with Morgenstern) the game theory, which is what Wiener was talking about.

There's of course more to this than meets the eye. We are talking about paradigms, and they have deep roots! So listen for a moment to Wiener's language. What he's suggesting is that deep and power-related prejudices are at play (recall Galilei...):

There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market, the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end of a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor, and has thus earned the great reward with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory.

The "homeostatic process" here is quite precisely the function that is implemented by 'the headlights'. It's been defined as "feedback mechanism inducing measures to keep a system continuing".

Wiener continues by connecting the dots – theoretical findings in game theory, and his own field observations, how the world functions. Most interesting, but we won't follow him there.

Let us just note in passing that this whole thing, Wiener's argument in his final chapter, is for a development closely similar (and yet different, we shall see how) to knowledge federation / systemic innovation – that is, for cybernetics. For if we cannot trust the market, then what can we trust? We need suitable information to show us how to evolve and steer our systems, and our society or democracy at large. We can develop that information through a scientific study of natural and man-made systems, and abstracting from them to create general insights and rules. That's of course what cybernetics is about.


Thinking 2.0

The system

As Doug said – it's just to change our way of thinking!

System.jpeg

System ideogram

We gave our design team what might be the challenge of our time – to make this design object palpable and clear to people. The above System ideogram is what they came up with.

We let this ideogram stand for this key challenge – to help people see themselves as parts of larger systems. To see how much those systems influence our lives. And to perceive those systems as our, that is human creations – and see that we can also re-create them!

Changing scales

Polyscopy as a methodology in knowledge creation and use has an interesting counterpart in systemic innovation as we are presenting it here. Yes, we have been focused so much on the details, that we completely neglected the big picture. But information – and also innovation, of course – exist on all levels of detail! Should we not make sure that the big picture is properly in place, that we have the right direction, or that the large system is properly functioning, before we start worrying about the details?

The next industrial revolution?

So forget for a moment all that has been said here. This is not about the global issues, or about information technology. We are talking about something far larger and more fundamental. Think about "the systems in which we live and work", as Bela H. Banathy framed them. Imagine them as gigantic machines, which we are of course part of. Their function is to take our daily work as input, and produce socially useful output. Do they? How well are they constructed? Are they wasting our daily work, or even worse – are they using it against our best interests?


Innovation 2.0

The science behind innovation

What might be the new innovation – that the Silicon Valley failed to hear? How can we synergize innovation with a direction – what must we do to REALLY have a sustainable direction? Of course this too is "science behind sustainability" – but we are aiming at systemic innovation, so let's stay with innovation

It stands to reason that the contemporary issues show that we've been misusing or misdirecting our rapidly growing capability to innovate (create, induce change). And that if we directed this capability more suitably, we could not only solve our problems, but also draw dramatically higher benefits from innovation. And that the key to this change might be the creation and use of suitable information, which would orient our creative action. But what might this information – and this new creative action – be like? Erich Jantsch called it "rational creative action". The slogan is most beautiful – "obviously, there are all kinds of ways to be creative; but if we want our creative action to be rational – well, then here are the guidelines to be followed.

Having received his doctorate in astrophysics at the tender age of 22, from the University of Vienna, Erich Jantsch realized that it is here on Earth that his attention is needed. And so he was soon researching (for OECD in Paris), on what you might readily identify as the theme of "Engelbart's unfinished revolution" – the ways in which technology is being developed and used, in the context of the goal of steering a viable course into the future.

Considering the importance of this theme, we'll briefly, oh – just as briefly as we are able – point to four of Jantsch's insights. And for the first, we'll take just another very very brief detour – hope you can forgive us, but it's the 50th anniversary not only of Doug's demo, but also of The Club of Rome this year. So as we did before, the first insight comes with another giant.

We must find a way to change course

INSIGHT 1: "It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course", Aurelio Peccei (the co-founder, firs president and the motor power behind The Club of Rome) wrote in 1980 based on this think tank's first decade of research. It did not take Jantsch very long to understand that the capability to change course depended on our society's (or more generally our systems') capability to re-create its feedback and control (or more generally – themselves). But what should the new feedback-and-control be like?

PECCEI INTRO

Planning as feedback, systemic innovation as control

INSIGHT 2: Feedback-and-control must look into the future and redesign (if needed) the system itself (structure, policy, values).

Following the CoR meeting in Rome, Jantsch gathered some of the creative leaders in the systems community to draft a solution. They called it "planning" – but this planning had nothing to do with the kind of planning they did in the former Soviet Union. As a first step, we copy and paste this description from a 2013 article.

Rational creative action begins with forecasting, which explores different future scenario; it ends with an action selected to enhance the likelihood of the desired scenarios. A key role (a ‘differ- ence that makes a difference’) is played by an unorthodox approach to planning, drafted in “Bel- lagio Declaration on Planning” (Jantsch et al., 1969):

[T]he pursuance of orthodox planning is quite insufficient, in that it seldom does more than touch a system through changes of the variables. Planning must be concerned with the structural design of the system itself and involved in the formation of policy.”

Policies, which are the objective of planning (as the authors of the Bellagio Declaration envi- sioned it) specify both the institutional changes and the norms and value changes that might be necessary to make our goal-oriented action in a true sense rational and creative (Jantsch, 1970):

Policies are the first expressions and guiding images of normative thinking and action. In other words, they are the spiritual agents of change—change not only in the ways and means by which bureaucracies and technocracies operate, but change in the very institu- tions and norms which form their homes and castles.”

</p>

The emerging role of the university

INSIGHT 3: The university as institution must take the leadership role in giving our society the capability to recreate itself (its systems). To be able to fulfill this role, the university itself will need to update its system.

Next Jantsch pondered the key question: “Who (i.e. what institution) might spearhead rational creative action in real-world systemic practice?” We conclude together with him that the univer- sity will need to play this key role; and that university will need to change to adapt to this role:

[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society’s capacity for continuous self-renewal. It may have to become a political institution, interacting with government and industry in the planning and design- ing of society’s systems, and controlling the outcomes of the introduction of technology into those systems. This new leadership role of the university should provide an inte- grated approach to world systems, particularly the ‘joint systems’ of society and technol- ogy.”
In 1969 Jantsch spent a semester at the MIT, where he was talking to the administration and the faculty at the MIT. He believed that the “structural changes” could naturally begin there, and where the above excerpt was written as part of his report and proposal.

Evolution as strategy

INSIGHT 3: The core of our strategy must be to "design for evolution" – make our systems capable of evolving in a good way, self-organizing, directing their evolution...

A BIT ABOUT THIS.


Wiener's paradox

Academic publishing had no effect

Ronald Reagan is not presented here as one of the giants, but as a person who none the less can open up our eyes to the nature of our situation, and of the emerging paradigm, perhaps even a lot better than the words of the more visionary people may. In the 1980 – when Erich Jantsch passed away at the tender age of 51 (an obituary mentioned malnutrition as a possible cause...), having just issued two books about the "evolutionary paradigm" in science and in our understanding and handling of systems, Ronald Reagan became the 40th U.S. president on a clear agenda: We can only trust the market! The moment we begin to interfere with its perfect mechanisms, we are asking for trouble.

The point here is not whether he was right or wrong, but the lack of knowledge federation. The words of our giants just simply had no effect on how the votes were cast – and how the world ended up being steered!

What we have is a paradox

"As long as a problem is treated as a paradox, it can never be resolved,...". What we have is not a problem, it's a paradox! To see that, notice that Norbert Wiener etc.

In 2015 we presented an abstract and talk titled "Wiener's paradox – we can resolve it together" to the 59th conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. The point was.

The solution is bootstrapping

The alternative – we must BE the systems! Engelbart - bootstrapping. Jantsch - action! Our design epistemology...

Doug's last wish...


Engelbart's vision and legacy

The new-paradigm counterpart to the printing press

We now have the necessary context to explain Engelbart's vision and call to action – as rendered in the third slide of his intended presentation at Google in 2007. To set the stage, or gestalt, think about the role the printing press played at the point of its arrival. Gutenberg's invention is sometimes pointed at as the major factor that – by making knowledge sharing incomparably more efficient – led to the Enlightenment. If we now ask you to name a contemporary counterpart, you will might be tempted to right away say "that's easy – it's the Internet". But there is a catch (recall Doug's first slide) – we also need to change our way of thinking!

What Engelbart saw

If we now – in the context of what's been told – identify the creation of new 'headlights' (knowledge-work system that can inform us the people properly, and allow us to create and use knowledge in a radically better way), then we are ready for Doug's insight.

THE THIRD SLIDE. POINTS. .... ALL HIS CONTRIBUTIONS MUST BE UNDERSTOOD AS PIECES IN A PUZZLE – technologies ... systemic building blocks...

IT can play THE enabler role in the above process! The point is precisely that something MUCH much... bigger and more beautiful can be made possible with the help of "digital technology" – than what the printing press made possible. BUT the technology is not enough - WE ALSO HAVE TO CHANGE OUR WAY OF THINKING!!!

The second slide explains what exactly the new thinking might be. Yes, as we said, the slide points to all that's just been said, in no ambiguous terms. But there is also a word for this way of thinking – and the word is "systemic".

The third slide then is his, and our, main point. Why is systemic thinking necessary if the digital technology should give us the benefits that it has in store for us?

The slide has three points, explaining his "dream". The first says that "digital technology could greatly augment the human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems". So imagine once again Doug as an idealistic novice engineer, barely 25 years old, thinking about how best to contribute to the world. He has realized that the humanity has problems it doesn't know how to solve, whose "complexity times urgency" factor is growing at an accelerated speed or "exponentially".

The second point links the familiar digital computer infrastructure – the machine, the high-speed network, the interactive interface – with "super new nervous system". We'll come back to that. For now just notice that the "super new nervous system" is precisely what we now do have.

The third point begins again with the word "dream", suggesting that what follows truly remained just a dream. So what was the unfulfilled part of his dream? 'That people could seriously appreciate the potential of harnessing that technological and social nervous system to improve the collective IQ of our various organizations." To Doug "the collective IQ" meant the collective capability to deal with "complexity times urgency".

To see his really central point, imagine the humanity as a large organism. It has lately grown extremely ("exponentially") fast in both size and power. It has also lately gotten a whole new nervous system. The future of this organism, Doug suggested, will crucially depend on his ability to learn to coordinate the actions of his various organs by taking advantage of this nervous system. To see what's missing, imagine the organism going toward a wall. Imagine that the eyes of the organism see that, but are trying to communicate it to the brain by writing academic articles in some specialized academic field of interest.

Doug's big point

The point here, the really big and central one, is that to take advantage of the "technological and social nervous system", the "cells" in that system (namely we, the people) need to specialize and divide our knowledge-work labor in entirely different ways than what was possible without the "nervous system".

However big a disruption it was, the printing press could only vastly speed up the copying of manuscripts, which the monks in the monasteries were already doing.

To understand still more closely what's missing, think of all the cells in the gigantic organism trying to communicate with one another by merely using the "super new nervous system" to merely broadcast messages. When the new technology is applied in that way, the result is, of course what we've been talking all along – the information glut. And ultimately confusion and chaos!

The incredible part

You might what's so incredible in this history of Doug? We didn't really tell you that yet. So here it is.

To see it, think about a brilliant mind saying, in all clarity, "this is what the humanity must do to solve its problems and evolve further!" Imagine him using his best efforts to first of all become able to do that, and then actually producing the enabling technology. Imagine us the people using this technology to only speed up immensely what we were already doing. Think about the Silicon Valley failing to understand, or even hear, its genius in residence – even after having recognized him as that! Think that to really understand Doug's various technical contributions, one really must see them in the context of his larger vision. Imagine that the first four slides, which define this vision, were not even shown at the 2007 presentation at Google! If you Google it, you will find that Doug is introduced as "the inventor of the computer mouse". And that there is no mention, really, of any sort of call to action!

Engelbart's contributions

Must be understood in the light of the above – ALL that he did were building blocks in society's new 'nervous system'. Both the technology he created – especially the principles behind the technology (the mouse and the chorded keyset, and especially the Open Hyperdocument System and all the rest) AND the higher-level ideas such as the DKR, the ABC levels, the NIC etc.).

Bootstrapping

<p>If we may re-issue Doug's call to action, what would it be?

Doug was very clear about that. He called it "bootstrapping". There's just about one way to break the spell of the paradox – and that is to BEGIN self-organization, in a way that can scale.

It was clear to Doug that this was the key...


The future has already begun!

Be the systems you want to see in the world

Fortunately, our story has a happy ending. (...)

Less than two weeks after Douglas Engelbart passed away – on July 2, 2013 – his dream was coming true in an academic community. AND the place could not be more potentially impactful than it was! As the President of the ISSS, on the yearly conference of this largest organization of systems scientists, which was taking place in Haiphong, Vietnam, Alexander Laszlo initiated a self-organization toward collective intelligence.

He really had two pivotal ideas. One was to make the community intelligent. The other one was to make an intelligent system for coordinating change initiatives around the globe. (An extension of).

Alexander was practically born into this way of thinking and working. His father...

We came to build a bridge

We came to Haiphong with the story about Jantsch and Engelbart; and with the proposal "We are here to build a bridge"...

And indeed – the bridge has been built! The two initiatives have federated their activities most beautifully!

Prototypes include LaSI SIG & PHD program, the SIL... And The Lighthouse project, among others.

The meaning of The Lighthouse (although it belongs really to prototypes, and to Applications): It breaks the spell of the Wiener's paradox. It creates a lighthouse, for the systems community, to attract stray ships to their harbor. It employs strategic - political thinking, systemic self-organization in a research community, and contemporary communication design, to create impactful messages about a single issue, and placing them into the orbit: CAN WE TRUST "THE MARKET"? or do we need systemic understanding and innovation and design?


See

Evangelizing systemic innovation.

The emerging societal paradigm is often seen as a result of some specific change, for example to "the spiritual outlook on life", or to "systemic thinking". A down-on-earth, life-changing insight can, however, more easily be reached by observing the stupendous inadequacy of our various institutions and other systems, and understanding it as a consequence of our present values and way of looking at the world. The "evangelizing prototypes" are real-life histories and sometimes fictional stories, whose purpose is to bring this large insight or gestalt across. They point to uncommonly large possibilities for improving our condition by improving the systems. A good place to begin may be the blog post Ode to Self-Organization – Part One, which is a finctional story about how we got sustainable. What started the process was a scientist observing that even though we have all those incredible time-saving and labor-saving gadgets – we seem to be more busy than the people ever were! What happened with all that time we saved? (What do you think...?) Toward a Scientific Understanding and Treatment of Problems is an argument for the systemic approach that uses the metaphor of scientific medicine (which cures the unpleasant symptoms by relying on its understanding of the underlying anatomy and physiology) to point to an analogous approach to our societal ills. The Systemic Innovation Positively recording of a half-hour lecture points to some larger-than-life benefits that may result. The already mentioned introductory part (and Vision Quest) of The Game-Changing Game is a different summary of those benefits. The blog post Information Age Coming of Age is the history of the creation and presentation (at the Bay Area Future Salon) of The Game-Changing Game, which involves Doug Engelbart, Bill and Roberta English and some other key people from the Engelbart's intimate community.

Evangelizing knowledge federation.

The wastefulness and mis-evolution of our financial system is of course notorious. Yet perhaps even more spectacular examples of mis-evolution, and far more readily accessible possibilities for contribution through improvement, may be found in our own system – knowledge-work in general, and academic research, communication and education in particular. (One might say that the bankers are doing a good job making money for the people who have money...) That is what these evangelizing prototypes for knowledge federation are intended to show. On several occasions we began by asking the audience to imagine meeting a fairy and being approached by (the academic variant of) the usual question "Make a wish – for the largest contribution to human knowledge you may be able to imagine!" What would you wish for? We then asked the audience to think about the global knowledge work as a mechanism or algorithm; and to imagine what sort of contribution to knowledge a significant improvement to this algorithm would be. We then re-told the story about the post-war sociology, as told by Pierre Bourdieu, to show that even enormously large, orders-of-magnitude improvements are possible! Hear the beginning of our 2009 evangelizing talk at the Trinity College, Dublin, or read (a milder version) at the beginning of this article.

Knowledge Work Has a Flat Tire is a springboard story we told was the beginning of one of our two 2011 Knowledge Federation introductory talks to Stanford University, Silicon Valley and the world of innovation (see the blog post Knowledge Federation – an Enabler of Systemic Innovation, and the article linked therein). Eight Vignettes to Evangelize a Paradigm is a collection of such stories.

The incredible history of Doug continues

Bring to mind again the image of Galilei in house prison... It is most fascinating to observe how even most useful and natural ideas, when they challenge the prevailing paradigm, are ignored or resisted by even the best among us. The Google doc Completing Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, is our recent proposal to some of the leaders of Stanford University and Google (who knew us and about us from before). Part of the story is about how Doug Engelbart's larger-than-life message, and "call to action" were outright ignored at the presentation of Doug at Google in 2007. And if you can read it between the lines, you'll in it yet another interesting story – showing the inability of the current leaders to allocate the time and attention needed for understanding the emerging paradigm; and pointing to a large opportunity for new, more courageous and more visionary leaders to take the lead.

Unraveling the mystery

... the theory that explains the data... how we've been evolving culturally ... as homo ludens, as turf animals... see it also in this way... huge paradox - homo ludens academicus...

HEY but this is really the whole point!!!

When the above stories are heard and digested, not only the story of Engelbart must seem incredible, but really the entire big thing: How can it be possible that we the people (and so clever people none the less – The Valley!) have ignored insights whose importance literally cannot be overstated? What is really going on? Perhaps there is something we need to understand about ourselves, something very basic, that we haven't seen before? It turns out – and isn't this what the large paradigm changes really are about – that the heart of the matter will be in an entirely different perception of the human condition, with entirely new issues... That is what The Paradigm Strategy poster aims to model, as one of our prototypes. Here is where the vignette are woven together into all those higher-level constructs: threads, patterns, and ultimately to a gestalt, showing what is to be done. The giants here are mostly from the humanities, linguistics, cognitive science – Bauman, Bourdieu, Chomsky, Damasio, Nietzsche... We'll say more about the substance of this conversation piece in Federation through Conversations. For now you may explore The Paradigm Strategy poster on your own.