by Joe McKendrick
October 8, 2009 at 11:59 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Even executives with the world’s largest corporations can learn a lot by engaging in social networks.
Vince Thompson, a smart commentator who interviews smart people, recently spoke with Dave Knox, corporate marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy at P&G. P&G is way ahead of the curve with social media implementations, and Knox explains how it has enriched and empowered him (and thus P&G) in his own job.
Knox brands himself as a “technopologist, which he defines as a hybrid of marketer, technologist, and social anthropologist. “You might not be a ‘coder,’ but you know your way around the language and culture of tech. You understand things like API and Open Source or why Facebook Connect working with Open ID is a big deal. .. you can then look at that technology and understand the impact it will have on society and culture.”
Social media is significantly changing the role of marketing, Knox says. The convergence of technology, marketing and social interaction is becoming more important every day, “but at the same time, it is a new skill set for many marketers to learn.” Only 10 years ago, the marketing toolkit for a brand manager was limited to four choices (TV, print, out of home and radio). “But today, new technology is emerging every day, offering new ways to serve and engage people more effectively. At work we aim to use these new digital tools to continue to be a leader and innovator in marketing and digital business.”
While Knox is immersed within one of the world’s largest companies, he finds that social media is a valuable tool for bringing in outside points of view as well.
“When working for a big corporation, you have an amazing amount of resources at your fingertips. And you are surrounded by incredibly smart people,” he points out. “But most of these people have a similar background to you and are trained to approach problems in the same way. My blog [hardknoxlife.com] has helped me by giving me access to people with different backgrounds and views on the business world. It is a way to connect with these people outside of my day to day work and really get a set of different viewpoints on what is going on with marketing.”
Knox says by staying active in social media through his blog and Twitter, he has been able to do his job better. “My external network has emerged as my business filter, allowing me to sort through the noise and keep on top of what is really important. While it might save time in the short-term to slow down in social media, I think it would hurt me in the long term in terms of personal growth and knowledge.”
Knox sees three major changes on the horizon for marketing:
- Mobile technologies: “I don’t think we have even started to scratch the service on that one.”
- Consumer co-creation/crowdsourcing: “A real change is under foot when a couple of guys in Muncie, Indiana can produce a TV spot for Doritos that is rated tops in the Super Bowl.”
- Smarter advertising: ” For the past 50 years, marketers were able to interrupt entertainment (ie TV shows) with advertising. But in a world where consumers don’t have to put up with the interruption any longer, brands are going to have to start thinking different about content and entertainment.”
by Hylton Jolliffe
October 6, 2009 at 1:55 pm · Filed under
Webinars
On September 29, the FASTforward blog hosted a stellar conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.
The discussion, which was moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy and Innovation, explored how the U.S. government, as well as individual states and municipalities, are employing new tools and processes, as well as addressing cultural issues, to affect change and drive adoption.
We’ve compiled highlights of their conversation into a handy little ebook, available here. You can also access the recording of the discussion here.
And lastly, the audience for this webinar was particularly engaged, tossing out lots of great questions we promised to post as an attachment to this highlights piece when it came out. As regular readers of FASTforward, you likely have responses and perspectives on some of these – feel free to take them up in the comments.
Q: Do you see the direct interaction of citizenry with government circumventing the representative process and shifting more control to the Federal government instead of the states?
Q: How do the non-technical participate in a social media government?
Q: The CIA’s Intellipedia wiki speaks to the issue of transparency within an agency.
Q: We see technology being used in government to offer services, etc. How does local government use this technology to educate its citizenry and encourage civic engagement? Any suggestions or examples?
Q: Will we be making the census data available at no cost in raw form as well?
Q: How does this conversation apply to PACER Court records, which are ideally suited to being made publicly accessible? They are organized, and have no copyright, but for administrative reasons, there are onerous fees to get these documents. There are public projects to make these available, but sadly, the bureaucracy has actually worked to slow these.
Comment: With regard to open government and transparency, it would be useful to communicate to the public (in an easy way, like a graphic) the impact of new state and federal policies, such as the proposed Renewable Electric Standard and the Cap and Trade Program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Too often, the viability or impact is not communicated or lost in a sea of text.
Q: How will the collaboration work for those parts of our country that do not have high speed internet connections in their homes? Will these people be ignored because they cannot readily interact with government?
Q: How does citizen participation solve the extreme polarization evidenced by Fox News/MSNBC? The trend of polarization is getting worse. Does Gov 2.0 make that worse or solve it?
Q: Online collaboration is deeply inviting to manipulation by ideologues. Anyone who has argued politics online knows this very well. So what will the administration’s general policies be to ensure that the processes remain fair across partisan lines?
Q: Where would you see differences in Gov 2.0 use internationally (especially USA / Germany)?
Q: How will people collaborate in specific policy issues when they actually disagree concerning the main points involved in that discussion? Does collaboration in policy-making process work only in consensual issues?
Q: With regard to public participation, I’d like to know what the next milestones are (as we’re going into 2010).
Q: It would seem that government communication and political communication are in conflict here because the elaborate use of data and openness is in opposition to the level of openness preferred by politicians to be able to implement policies. Is this true?
Q: Do you believe than an agency has to be more transparent, collaborative and participative internally in order to be so externally?
Q: Don’t these ideas require government personnel to be open to input and to change their policies and behaviors?
Q: What can an agency administrator do to begin to implement the President’s policy with regard to transparency? What support will the administration provide to such an administrator?
Q: Do you think the NYT article “Athens on the Net” got it wrong by talking of just two views of Gov 2.0: one an Athenian-style direct democracy, where “our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years” and the other a false illusion of equality that can be hijacked by well organized groups?
Q: Can either of the presenters speak to what we can learn from other countries on collaborative government?
Q: What are the types and sources of resistance to greater collaboration in governance?
Q: Do interactive methods of obtaining public comment result in different comments being collected? For example, do respondents comment on each other’s feedback, resulting in more synthesized and thought through comments overall?
Q: Can the States work with the federal government to assist in the culture change that Deputy CTO Noveck referred to?
Q: Do you envision a day when multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available/created with the public to deal with on-going complex public policy issues – such as water management?
Q: What is being discussed assumes a “public” that wants to and is willing to spend time making their contributions in this collaboration. What if there is a large portion of the population who just want to live their lives and not spend time helping in a collaborative democracy? Isn’t this still just a government of the few who care enough to participate – just using social media tools?
Q: Will individual government employees be more accountable with this additional transparency? How will government employees have an appropriate expectation of privacy?
Q: What do you think of a benchmark session in New York with all Open Data Initiatives from other countries like UK, and France?
Q: There seem to be both organizational and local levels for affecting change: The plain language movement was something that seemed to be adopted across agencies, at a higher level, through legislation. We’ve also heard about smaller DIY (or DIO) initiatives like everyblock.com where citizens are taking government data and building a service around it. Do you see these smaller local initiatives as the primary path for improving interaction and service models system wide, or is it a combination?
Q: Citizens send in comments to go that may not be machine readable – is there a budget to fix that?
Q: Will the implementation of Gov 2.0 require legal reform?
Q: During the 1990’s “reinventing government” effort, the White House DID see “e-gov” as including citizens in the decision-making process. How much do the panelists really know about that effort (e.g., lessons learned)?
COMMENT: Aneesh Chopra just answered the question about whether the White House will develop their own “Open Govt. Plan”. (Basically, he said “no”).
Q: The CTO says that the soon-to-be-released “Open Government Directive” will require each federal agency to develop its own “Open Government Plan”. Will the Executive Office of the President (EOP) be EXEMPT from that requirement?
Q: Given the polarization of hot-button issues and the danger of poorly interpreted data (such as climate data) do you think that a consensus mechanism (such as what occurs in wikipedia) is viable?
Q: Data interpretation is a science/art with the potential for misinterpretation; what measures do you envision to keep misinterpretation from occurring from citizen-open-source apps?
Q: Organizing data, AKA knowledge management, is essential to good access, and currently many federal sites are very poorly organized. What types of effectiveness measures do you see implementing to increase usability?
Q: How can we be sure that the underserved, who likely have no access to a computer, are not left out of the new collaborative model?
Q: How do elected officials feel about how this more dispersed approach might diminish or conflict with old-fashioned representative government?
Q: Can the spread of technology create an externality? For instance, how, with widespread and quick-spread nformation can misinformation be corralled or contained?
Q: In regard to the point about engaging employees as we have the public in this discussion, how is whistleblower protection being weighed in post-OGD discussion and analysis? It received the greatest amount of public support (many comments from federal employees directly) in stage three of the OGD, and is fundamental to transparency in any government agency.
Q: What is “WIKI Government”?
Q: Is the CTO office looking to make data natively available on agency websites through the web using Semantic Web of Linked Open Data rather than through data warehouses?
by Rob Paterson
October 6, 2009 at 11:11 am · Filed under
Emergent
Once before, at a time of great change – the Ending of the Ice Age – Mankind used Emergence to not only come through but to take a new place on the planet. Don’t we face the same kind of challenge today? Is not Emergence our best chance?
We have so little time that if we are to face our challenges directly and use Emergence as a process, that we have to know what to do. We have to know the science and hence the predictable rules?
Because we know the rules for electromagnetism, we can use them to change our world. My bet is that we we know the rules for how best to use the social energy of people, amplified by social media, we may change the world even more than when we first amplified our group potential when we acquired complex language.
Then we created consciousness.
We were able to discuss novelty into being – the very essence of Emergence. And for most of this time, all of this happened like this – face to face in small groups.
What might happen, if we can expand our circle from face to face to a global conversation but with the same intimacy? If the result 60,000 years ago was so momentous then – what might be our destiny now?
With our place in the world in such jeopardy, global warming, resource shortages, peak oil, political logjams – we don’t seem to be making any progress with our current way of “seeing” and “acting”. I wonder if our only hope to “see” our place more clearly and to “discover” solution that will work is to press for a larger process of Emergence. If we could harness a global conversation, what might be the result.
In parts 1 and parts 2 – I have done my best to offer a directional approach to this voyage of discovery.
Now we come to the hard part. What are the rules. For if social energy is as real as electro-magnetism, it will have rules.
That once we know them, we can make a break from mere speculation, techno babble and kumbya and design in the full power of social media to make this great link up that it offers. Then we can get to work.
In the prior posts, I have talked about the utility of this way of seeing the preconditions for human emergence.
We need a Container – the Circle of Concern. We need inside this a boiling mass of many connected points – the Circle of Influence.
We need to know what are the rules to produce the best container and the best circle of influence within it.
The Rules for the Container – What makes containers more powerful than others?
The container is a force multiplier. Like a boiler – the more pressure the more force and hence work. The ideal container is then an energetic multiplier that brings into play the full energy of human beings. All of them and every part of them. It creates complete alignment and hence the full energetic force becomes available. So what does our observation tell us about when is their an event that brings all of people and all people together as one? Usually it is when we are at war – in a war of survival – like WWII.
Observation reminds us that Tribal Survival is the ultimate Circle of Concern.
So what in the modern era is Tribal? I don’t think that it is a group of sports fans. They are bonded by a conformity and by identifying with what others do. In a way sports fans may be people who would like more of a cause but have no other choice in the drab world we live in. It’s not the work force of a traditional organization. There is not enough equality in the rewards or risks. Also there is too much conformity demanded in most traditional organizations.
For we can also see that conformity is death to emergence. It was the added diversity that made up the gains in the last months of the Netflix prize. Really new ideas are by nature disruptive. Too much conformity hates disruption.
It can’t just be the folks on the web we feel most comfort with as well – for the same reasons of diversity. The Echo Chamber is where we get stuck in a repeating loop. We know that most disruptive ideas are mergers of other views and ideas.
A real tribe is much more complex and diverse. Diversity is the critical ingredient. So the challenge is how do you get people who are so different to work with each other?
Shared risk seems to be one way.
Designing social groups so that the risk is real and shared is how many older societies enabled this diversity to have its full power. You can see it in the Shield Wall or the Phalanx. All male citizens were in them. All ranks of society, all professions, all sets of personal values, all shapes and sizes. They were united by a shared danger. They relied on each other to get through this. And behind them stood their wives, their children. Behind them stood their culture and their identity as a group. All were at risk. All had to be contributors.
If you wish to feel this energy – here is a link to the defining moment of the South, as Lew Armistead gives the orders for his Brigade to begin Pickett’s charge. They fight not for slavery but for all they have. For “Virginia” known as “Our country”. In the scene preceding he shows the British officer the diverse nature of the men there that day – from aristocrat to farm boy – all points of view – all sorts – united as brothers “All Virginia is here” Armistead says.
I think that such a mix – diverse – contributing/participative – high stakes for all – makes the most powerful containers for human emergence. Don’t we live at a time now when this is again true? For if we don’t do the right thing, is not all at risk?
Tribal Issues defined like this make the best containers – the more that the threat is immediate, widespread and dangerous, the more power it has to produce the preconditions for emergence. The more that people can see that they can and should act themselves, the more that this energy is maximized.
The more the issue is truly life or death for the Tribe – the more contextual and rooted in the soul of the people – the more that the solutions are participative the more powerful the container.
We don’t have to go to war to find this energy. What about people living in Detroit now? What about California? I am seeing that there is a group of people, with their backs to the wall, who have stopped looking “out there” for help. Who will not run. Who are going to create something themselves. They are banding together into a circle of concern that is “Their Country”.
I was in a meeting last week with some people who were telling of colleagues who were tired of the low risk route. “I want to die on a hill” said one. I don’t think he really wanted to die – but he did want to be connected with people in that way. Don’t most of us long for this kind of commitment. With it, trust is so high that emergence is possible.
Trust – real trust – comes from shared risk and shred experience in risk. With very high trust comes openness and with enough mass and enough openness comes emergence.
In summary here appear to be the rules for the optimal “Container” or “Circle of Concern”
- Tribal survival – where all are at risk and all can be rewarded – this then goes on to allow
- High levels of Trust – this goes on to allow
- Maximum Diversity – this then sets the conditions for
- Emergence
So now what might be the rules for the Circle of Influence?
The Rules for the Circle of Influence – What makes influence more powerful?
We know what the Circle of Influence has to look like – It has to look like this.
For emergence occurs in scale free networks and this is what they look like. So we have a check point – if your Circle of Influence does not look like this – it is not optimal.
Note that they have hubs of major concentration of “influence” (All these great slides come from Ricard V Sole’s – ICREA-Complex Systems Lab, UPF, Barcelona & Santa Fe Institute, USA talk at ECCS at Jerusalem Sept 2008). So we can expect our human energy networks to have this pattern.
The Circle of Influence is not an undifferentiated mass of people and connections. It will be made up of fractal clumps of “cells” that will lean towards being optimal in influential power. So it will not be about having 5,000 Twitter Followers but it will be about what is the ideal number to have to maximize influence.
Not this- You and masses of “friends”
But this – You and a a few close friends connected to other close friends in a huge scale free network
Another view of Scale Free – Thanks to Valdis Krebs
So the pattern is clear. It is lots of small networks hyper linked to others. We also know from the brain that the more links the better. Linking is good. More is better. Best is the most possible.
But what about the detail – how big are these cells and what are they like inside?
The answer to how big is not very big. We know how big is ideal and we know why as well. All these little sub-networks are ideally bounded by the Magic Numbers of Fibonacci. Here is the most complete review of this new science of the nature of ideal human connections that I have been able to assemble
Here is Chris Allen’s research into group satisfaction:
Here is his observation about Guild sizes in WOW
We know what groups work best and under what circumstances. 8 is the ideal group where we find the tightest connection in the largest group. 144 is the maximum – likely that the power of the connection is much weaker at 144. Where is the most leverage? Likely at 34. This may be where the connection is tightest versus the reach. 2 – 3 – 5 may be too tight and too close?
Across all militaries the ideal unit sizes are:
- 8 – Squad/Section
- 35 – Platoon
- 150 – Company
There are thousands of years of experimentation involved in these numbers. They are not made up they have emerged!
So these numbers seem very small to all those that have 15,000 Twitter followers and think that they are connected. How do such small groups have the power to have massive influence?
I think the key rule here is “Influence”. Not Malcolm Gladwell’s idea of a few people who have a lot more influence that the rest of us – though I still know there to be merit in that.
I think that we come back to Trust again. If you are a real friend of mine and you ask me to look at something or to do some thing, it is a good bet that I will say yes. The rule then is to find the sweet spot between reach – total numbers – and influence – how much we trust each other.
Even small groups have a lot of total influence. H\here is an example of the reach if we assume that each of our “friends” has 4 friends
2 – 16
3 – 82
5 – 625
8 – 4,096
13 – 28,561
34 – 1,336,336
55 – 9,150, 625
89 – 62, 742,241
144 – 429, 981, 696
With 34 I can reach 1.3 million with a lot of power of influence. With 144 I can reach 429 million but I have doubts about the power of the influence.
Even with 8 I can reach 4,000 and be assured that I will have a lot of influence.
With a scale free network, it may be better to think small but to work to ensure that we have the best connections.
So here we come to the biggest challenge – Emergence demands diversity as well as connections. We can only trust people like us. If all our “friends” are in the echo chamber, we lose the chance. How do we make connections to other cells out there who are not like us? Even harder, how do we make Trusted connections to people not like us?
For true diversity is not about race or color but about values. Way out geeks or creative people don’t care much for money or efficiency. Hey many don’t even know what day it is. Those who need to win look at nurturers with contempt. Those who care about how things work and about people are mystified by people who don’t.
This is I think the most challenging part of the “Rules” and fortunately, my pal Stuart Baker may have found the answer here as well.
If we have a true survival situation, then we tend to get alignment. But what about a less do or die situation? Also even in a do or die situation how do we reduce the friction of the essential diversity.
Our bodies are very diverse and full of many separate and even opposing processes and entities. But there is a design that regulates the system to trend to homeostasis. Not a God – not a parent – not a CEO – but a simple regulating process that BALANCES the system.
In genetics, P53 is the “governor” of the system – it is the mechanism where the system defaults to homeostasis – it “moderates” or “facilitates” the interactions.
We have to find the “Governor” that will enable the different parts of the human soup get comfortable getting connected. Stuart Baker starts with an extremely simple model of what the gross differences are in the human mindset that makes up the full diverse human experience. It looks like this:
Humans can be grouped into 3 realms of mindset. Of course this is a very simple view but this is how science works we have to start here with simple. I will confine myself to the positive – there are shadow sides to these archetypes as well.
Pioneers – a few of us love ideas more than anything – no guesses as to who I am. We live in our heads. We would rather work for free if it meant that we could do more thinking and exploring. Organizations find us hard to “manage” – we tend to be quite fragile emotionally. We tend not to think enough about how people feel. We are intellectual – in that our minds are where we spend most of our best time. We look to the new. Creating the new is our most important thing. We hate the mundane routines of life. Often found in academia.
Nurturers – there are lots of us here – my wife is one thank goodness for me. We look out for others as a priority. We defend the hearth – many soldiers are here! We do for others – this is not just emoting. We are pragmatic in our care. We want to help people become all they can be. (The dark side is that we want to make people dependent on us)We are relational – in that we spend most of our energy on relationships. We are traditionally conservative. The new scares us. Protecting is the most important thing. Often found in government.
Providers – We bring home the bacon. We are very action orientated. We take care of business. We tend not to be very empathic. We tend to be transactional. We find most thinkers too airy fairy and we find many nurturers too whiny. We are active – we need to WIN. We don’t think much about the future and we need to get our information in simple chunks that we can act on right away. We spend most of our time competing. Winning is the most important thing. Often found in business.
Do you see yourself here? You can also see why it is so hard to get out of the Echo Chamber. What Pioneer feels good with the typical no sayer of the Nurturing type or the trivial mindless focus on winning today of the Provider? You can see my bais but please insert your own back – that is my point – this is a hard mix to bring together.
This is why survival is one of the ways of doing that.
But what about day to day life? How can we bridge and balance these opposing groups?
Here is Stuart’s huge insight. That this pattern is of course Fractal.
Inside each of us is a fractal of the whole. Like atom forming into molecules, we can see the linking and the bridging points.
In the Pioneer realm there are Pioneers whose tendency is either to Nurture or Provide. In the Nurturer and Provider realms there are those who tend to the other realms.
So then there is one more step to optimize the balance in this system.
This is a model of a client of mine – the PEI BioAlliance. A Cluster/Emergence Making Network of “cells” with a Circle of Concern of using research into how nature works to improve the economy and society that is PEI.
What we discovered was that we had to add the equivalent of P53 to the mix. The BioAlliance Inc – that lives in the Nurturer Realm – is a small 3 person organization that “facilitates the balance of the system. It Holds the Space. Its director is not the CEO – he is the Facilitator. He is responsible for maintaining trusted links and for creating the habit of trust based on the continual experience of its value in the day to day interactions of the group.
If you wish to know more here is a link to the story of the early trials and failures and the ultimate success of this venture.
In the centre is a board made up of all the parts and all the realms. Here issues of trust are worked out and here is where the larger value of the whole is often realized.
So ideally a p53 – a system facilitator ideally should be designed into a network that seeks emergence. This is what allows the most important aspect of all – there must be the full diversity of being human in play for the best emergent results. All 3 realms must be aligned.
Here is how Dr Chet Richards – John Boyd’s St Paul illustrates the challenge.
We have to use facilitation to get heree:
Whew! This is a long post and I have only really scratched the surface. So let’s close now with a summary.
- The optimal Circle of Concern will be about Tribal Survival – all must be in the zone of risk and reward
- The Circle of Influence – has to be a scale free network – no other design replicates nature’s precondition
- The Circle of Influence ideal cell size is small and relies on the links to scale – there is a design of reach and pull to optimize here – it will be found in the Fibonacci sequence
- The Circle of Influence must be diverse – we have to get out of the echo chamber – ideally all three realms must be balanced and included – this is very hard to do
- To get the best alignment/balance – we need a balancing agent/facilitating agent/p53 – this lives in the Nurturing Realm and must be very small – it is an agent not a CEO
- The live blood of an optimized system is Trust
I am going to take a break and then talk more about how this might be put in place. I will use 2 case studies and Stuart and Rory Francis and I are starting to make some short films about this too.
by Rob Paterson
October 2, 2009 at 9:16 am · Filed under
Emergence
First of all – if the concept of Emergence is new for you – that extremely complex outcomes such as life itself, flocking by birds or winning the Netflix Prize – are not the product of a God, a Plan, a CEO but emerge from a Container (An optimal environment for that growth) and a simple Set of Rules – then here is a great short video from Nova that in 4 minutes will give you a sound introduction.
In my first post in this series I proposed that if we use the ideas of Emergence we might find the larger opportunity in Social Software – that it may help us solve many of our intractable problems.
That Social Software – if used properly – might have the same explosive impact on human society and our connection to the rest of the planet that the acquisition of complex language did 60,000 years ago.
If you are still with me – let’s remind ourselves of what drives emergence generally and then see if we can find the model for humans and then how Social Media may fit. What would using Social Software “Properly” mean?
To have Emergence you need 3 elements:
- You need some kind of “Container” - An Environment that is optimal for the Emergence in question. This can be physical such as the ideal environment for an Acorn to reach its potential as a tree Or it can be physical and energetic such as the physical and the social environment needed for a baby to be set on her way to reach her potential.
- You need a lot of “Optimal Contact Points“ – Emergence is all about patterns. To have patterns you need many points of connection. Computers are not able to become conscious because they don’t have enough synaptic connections. They have a few hundred – the human brain has billions. A Human with too small a social world cannot reach her potential. 3 birds cannot make a flock. A few breezes don’t make a hurricane. A few stars do not make a galaxy. No flow in water and you cannot have a vortex. When man had no complex language, he could not communicate widely enough to make much technical progress. He could not create patterns. A father might show his son how to carve a hand ax but an emergent breakthrough like a throwing stick or a bow and arrow would be beyond them. For without complex language enabling abstractions and enabling a large circle of participants the creation of patterns – abstract thinking and design cannot happen. For then, if it could not be seen and copied it could not happen
- You need a few rules that both shape the pattern and also keep it coherent. As we learn more about complexity, we are astounded by how few the rules are and how often they are so simple. With computers it is easy to model bird flocking now. But, to get the pattern, we also need the process of iteration and we need a computer to do the math. But to model, we need to know the rules. Nature always has rules. Nature’s rules always have a mathematical base. We now know the rules of Electro Magnetism. There will be rules for Social Energy as well. They will be few. They will be fractal. They will need to be iterated. This is not Kumbya – there will be a science here.
So can we posit what the essence of these 3 requirements may be to offer us a chance of seeing the true workings and the real potential for Social Software? I think we can. In this remaining part of this post, I will point directionally to where I see the answers. In the next post I am going to speculate about the details.
So stripped back to the essentials I think that we can see the Container and the Connections in the following single picture. This model is from BreakOuttheBox
I see this as a “Sun”. I think that the “Container” is the Circle of Concern. Inside the Container is the “Mass” the boiling energy of the interactions of people that are connected around the Circle of Concern or as I think it is better put – The Intent. Not its mission – its Intent – it should move naturally and energetically to the Intent.
So what then is the energy that shines out of the container and grips the hearts and minds of the people?
There is surely a gradient here. Cubs fans are energized by their team. Employees of a well know brand enjoy being connected to it. But would they die for it?
Many parents will die for their kids. Men in combat will die for their small circle of mates.
So if this is the gradient, is there a sweet spot?
I think that there must be. I suspect that most of us want more than to work for shareholder value or for the abstraction of a bureaucracy. We long for a real cause. I suspect that many of us are sports fans because we long to belong to a cause that is larger than ourselves but cannot find it in our day to day life.
Does our past and our nature offer us a clue for the rule here?
In tribal times there was no separation between work and life and play. There was no separation between family and work. There was no separation between the people involved and the collective reward.
But today we are so splintered. Only parts of us parent, partner, work, play. Our energy is fragmented.
My bet is that the ideal is to re-align most of us back as a whole. For example, in the really depressed cities in America such as Cleveland or Detroit, all could get together to “Re-invent” their city to provide all with a livelihood and a future.
The answer to the ideal Intent or Circle of Concern is that it will include most of our total needs and our identity. It will help us align our energy more fully.
A great sun has also to have Mass. So what might this be in human and social terms? What is the Circle of Influence?
We can see this in two simple examples. A single mum or a single acorn has a very slim chance. They don’t have enough mass. A Tribal Family and an Oak Forest do have the optimal mass. They offer a very good chance of continuing life and expanding complexity – emergence.
But while the container has to have some scale and mass, in human terms, the scale has to be made up in fractal segments that are still small enough to keep the human connections viable. Healthy cities are really collections of villages or neighborhoods. Prison and large high schools are not healthy because they don’t have human scale subsets. Most traditional organizations are not healthy because they are not made up of tribes and or neighborhoods. Departments are not tribes!
Also there must be diversity. An oak forest is made up of many living things – it is the opposite of a monoculture. In Permaculture, no plant is planted on its own. They are planted in “Guilds” – natural diverse groupings that support each other in complex ways – adding nutrients – keeping predators away etc. Permaculture is an intentional way of replicating the optimal design of nature.
So following this rule, a modern family – 2 parents or less and children is not diverse enough to offer the kids a broad enough world view. School is often a monoculture as are most workplaces. Diversity in not about race or disability etc. We have got distracted by our post modern view of the world. Human diversity is about world view and POV. Are you out going or shy? Are you a natural Early Adopter or maybe even a Laggard? Are you an ideas person or a pragmatist? Are you a warrior of a nurturer? This is our true diversity. A healthy group contains all of these types.
For Emergence depends on the synthesis of difference. As we all know, connecting a lot of this kind of difference productively is a major major challenge. I will have a lot to say about how we might do this in the next post for this is an area where we need more than good intentions. We need good process.
So the Mass part of the human ideal container needs an ideal scale for humans and it needs the maximum world view diversity.
Bottom line – the ideal Container has an Intent that can fulfill most of what we need to make us whole as a person. The ideal Mass inside the Container is a network of fractal units of people that are very diverse but united by the Intent and are highly connected. Like a brain!
In the last post in this series, I will share with you work that helps us know what the rules are for the ideal human fractal components will be and also how to make connections that work across the barriers of human diversity.
What is the ideal scale of influence? What will naturally help say the warrior, the geek and the nurturer connect productively?
Part 3 – The Rules and the Emerging Science
