by Rob Paterson
February 28, 2011 at 3:51 pm
· Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Paradigm
Of course everybody gets 2.0 now don’t they. After all even the Oscars were designed for Social Media. Large organizations are piling in.
But is this true? Certainly everyone is on board with the tools now. God I recall Jevon and I talking to CIBC 6 years ago and they thought we were martians. Now everyone is on Facebook!
But how many people “get” what is underpinning these tools? Not many and I have little hope for many too.
Why?
Because underneath all the hype, most of us see the world the same way as before. We see what we see with our eyes. Just like most people saw the world 500 years ago. Then, if you used your eyes, the world seemed flat. This perception allowed to you to do a lot of useful things. You also saw that the sun came up every morning and circled the Earth. This did not ruin your day and was also a useful observation. That is of course unless you wanted to sail a long distance. Or calculate a trajectory or build a complex building or in fact do almost anything that we take for granted in the modern world. Imagine Watt explaining the steam engine to the Vatican? Imagine trying to build a suspension bridge? Imagine anyone doing chemistry – see where I am going.
But we are not so stupid today are we? We don’t rely only on our eyes to tell us about reality?
Well here is your test. Can you see that all these things are in fact a fractal scaling of the same thing?
Can you see that what appears on the surface to your eyes as being unique, different and discrete are in reality the same and that all co-evolve and affect each other? Do you see them therefore as all obeying the same rules, the rules of networks? Can you see how with this perspective everything becomes actually quite simple to understand? All we need to know is how nature governs networks.
Or do you see them all as Objects that are are different – that interact only directly as objects do? That are therefore so complex that we can only know tiny bits of them. So medicine and science are all about the bits and the direct interactions. That we inhabit a Newtonian world where the geometry of nature’s interactions do not apply?
For is this not the prevailing paradigm?
This is why people seek to have masses of followers – this is a Newtonian idea about mass and gravity. It has nothing to do with co-evolution and true influence.
This is why it’s still ALL ABOUT ME! So long as I am OK it’s OK!
This is why medicine makes no sense and each week a new contradictory idea is floated. This is why science is lost in minutiae. This is why our organizations are so toxic. We have designed them to be Newtonian but we are fractal co-evolving networks. This why our mass education system is such a mess. This is why even how we fight our wars means that we have to lose them. This is why we think that there is a conflict between the planet and our economy.
We have been captured by a simple and wrong idea of us all being objects that bounce off each other like tennis balls whereas we are really magnetized iron filings.
No amount of Facebook Strategies will help you if you don’t get this.
The world is not flat and you and I are not an object.
If you want to know more about this new paradigm of reality – I have the great honor to introduce you to the work of Alexei Kurakin – a genius – a Galileo of our time.
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Hi Rob,
thanks for introducing me to the work of Alexei Kurakin. Incredibly insightful stuff…
We don’t rely only on our eyes to tell us about reality?
I am presently musing over the cognition process in regard to complexity and your post perfectly fits in what I am beginning to figure out. The problem is not how we see the world, since nobody can seriously ignore the falling pieces of what was once a flourishing economical and political system. What we see is what is happening, but transforming environmental signals into perception involves confronting these signals to the representation of the world we have mentally built over time, and tweaking these signals to “fit” this representation. Reality is only in the mind of the beholder…
Our education conditions this mental model; you know how broken is the educational model in our occidental economies. Our work experience conditions this mental model; you know how hierarchical, rigid and non adaptive our organizations are. Without the help of a proper education, people won’t be able to build a better representation than the old in/out, on/off one most are still stuck in. Perception is what you were teached to think it is… For the record, even the flat vs round world is a more complex story than we are used to think 
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RobMarch 1st, 2011 at 4:33 am |
Thierry I really like your contrast between “Process” and “Pattern” – that feels like a clear distinction of perspective between the 2 paradigms.
Kurakin makes Pattern central. For is not Pattern the essence of Fractal? So if yoy can see the Pattern, you can see the order in a mountain range. If you cannot, then it looks random.
Let’s extend this – if we look at the revolutions in North Africa, we can see chaos or we can see the Pattern of Revolt. The Pattern does not mean that we can know what will happen tomorrow but it does mean we can see the “Field” of tendencies – we can make sense of what we see because we have a context.
You have really added a big piece to this.
Thanks Rob, I didn’t intended to bring attention onto my piece 
You just tweeted that patterns bring order into chaos. Well, I am not at all comfortable with the “chaos” part in the cynefin model. Chaos and self-organization are in fact the two sides of the same coin (did you say paradox? ) if we just assume one thing: our organizations and states are no more closed systems.
We can then better figure things out from the complex systems theory: disorder (entropy, not chaos) raises over time, patterns emerge which set up the base for a new unstable equilibrium. The one thing we have to get rid of is causality, a Newtonian legacy. Have a look on this insightful paper about Sunny Auyang’s work (specifically point 3).
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RobMarch 1st, 2011 at 5:33 am |
I agree with you – Chaos has surely been established to have great order – I use the term in that context and not Dave Snowden’s
Yes Causality is the wrong turn – Wondering again 1.0 is Newton sees everything as an Object and so subject to Newtonian physics. But really we are all open systems and the “Object” that we see you and me – the cow – the mountain – the tree – is a convenient approximation – did not Plato talk of the idea of “Horse” the essence of Horse that is surely the pattern?
Looking at 3 – this helps in the conflict in diet. The Calories in = work has to balance – depends on the 2nd Law but the Field of our metabolism is not that simple – much more systems friction going on
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