Difference between pages "STORIES" and "CONVERSATIONS"

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<p>On our main page we suggested that when we liberate our creative work in general, and our knowledge work in particular, from subservience to age-old patterns and routines and outmoded assumptions, and then motivate it and orient it differently, a sweeping Renaissance– like change may be expected to result. We motivated this observation, and our initiative, by three large changes that took place during the past century – of epistemology, of information technology, and of our society's condition and information needs. In Federation through Images we took up the first motive. Here our theme will be the remaining two.</p>
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<p>In Federation through Images we used the image of a bus with candle headlights to make a sweepingly large claim: When innovation (or creative work in general) is "knowledge-based" and so directed as to improve or complete the larger whole in which what is being innovated has a role, then the difference this may make, the benefits that may result to our society, are similar as the benefits of substituting light bulbs for candles may be to the people in that bus. </p>
 
<p>There is, however, an obvious alternative – and that is what is in effect today. Two alternatives, to be exact. In academic research, we insist on using the inherited ways of creating knowledge – even if they might be 'candles'; and in technological innovation we simply aim to maximize profit, and trust that "the invisible hand" of the market will turn that into common good (or that the 'bus' in which we are riding into the future will be safe and sound and secure that we'll continue living in the best of all possible worlds. The real-life stories we are about to tell will help us make a case for a more up-to-date alternative.</p>
 
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  <div class="col-md-3"><h2>The nature of our stories</h2></div>
 
  <div class="col-md-7"><h3>They illustrate a larger point</h3>
 
<p>We choose our stories to serve as parables. In a fractal-like manner, each of them will reflect – from a specific angle, of course – the entire situation our creative work and specifically knowledge work is in. So just as the case was with [[ideograms|<em>ideograms</em>]], stories 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'' into his beard. The stories  we are about to tell will suggest that also in our own time similar situations and dynamics are at play.</p>
 
<h3>They lift up ideas of giants</h3>
 
<p>How to lift up a core insights of a [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] out of undeserved anonymity? We tell [[vignettes|<em>vignettes</em>]] – lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories. They are the kind of stories one might want to tell to an assembly of friends over a glass of vine. Their role is to distill core ideas of daring thinkers from the vocabulary of a discipline, and give them the visibility and appeal they deserve. If you are like us, weary of Donald Trump-style sensations in the media, then you might be glad to find here sensations of a completely new kind – that are in a truest sense good news, and also relevant! And with <em>completely</em> different protagonists! Our sensations will bring to the foreground some of our most innovative and daring thinkers, and make them a subject of conversations. What they'll have to say will give us the power of think new thoughts and handle large and small issues in completely new ways. </p>
 
<p>By joining [[vignettes|<em>vignettes</em>]] together into [[threads|<em>threads</em>]], and [[threads|<em>threads</em>]] into [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]] and [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]] into a [[gestalt|<em>gestalt</em>]] – we can create an overarching view of any situation, and of our historical, global situation at large – and see in a completely new light how those situations may need to be handled. </p>
 
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  <div class="col-md-3"><h2>The incredible history of Doug</h2></div>
 
<div class="col-md-6"><h3>How the Silicon Valley failed to understand its giant in residence</h3>
 
<p>Before we go into the details of this story, let's 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. The paradigm shifts have, on the other hand, always been opportunities for creative new actors, for unconventional and daring thinkers and does, to emerge as new leaders. Could the large paradigm shift we've been talking about indeed be an opportunity for new actors to take the lead – <em>even in</em> technological innovation? </p>
 
<p>Douglas Engelbart, the main protagonist of this story, is not only [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]]'s iconic progenitor or "patron saint"; to quite a few of us he has also been a revered friend. Among us we call him "Doug". So we'll continue this tradition sporadically also on these pages.</p></div>
 
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Doug.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Douglas Engelbart]]</center></small></div>
 
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<div class="col-md-6"><h3>Engelbart too stood on the shoulders of giants</h3>
 
<p>It is in the spirit of [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] to at least mention the [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] on whose shoulders Engelbart was standing. We'll here mention only one, whom we also need to lift up as an icon. [[Vannevar Bush]] was a scientist and a scientific strategist par excellence,  who pointed to the urgent need for (what we are calling) [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] – already in 1945!</p>
 
<p>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.</p>
 
<p>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.</p></div>
 
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Bush.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Vannevar Bush]]</center></small></div>
 
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  <div class="col-md-7"><h3>Engelbart's epiphany</h3>
 
<p>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.</p>
 
<p>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.</p>
 
<p>In the 1990s it was finally understood (or in any case <em>some</em> 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. </p>
 
<p>The man whose ideas made "the revolution in the Valley" possible passed away in 2013 – feeling that he had failed.</p></div>
 
 
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<p>What is it that Engelbart saw? How important is it? Why was he not understood?</p>
 
<p>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.</p>
 
 
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<p>[[File:Doug-4.jpg]]<br><small><center>The title and the first three slides of Engelbart's call to action panel at Google in 2007.</center></small></p>
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<p>[[File:Elephants.jpeg]]<br><small><center>Even if we don't talk of him directly, the elephant in the picture will be the main theme of all our conversations. Our purpose is to ignite the co-creation of the vision of the emerging paradigm by (1) materializing just enough so that some of its characteristic contours can be discerned and (2) orchestrating the activity of connecting the dots further – which is what these conversations are about.</center></small></p>
 
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<p>Around that time it became clear that Engelbart's long career was coming to an end. By choosing title "A Call to Action!", Engelbart obviously intended make it clear that what he wanted to give to Google, and to the world through Google, was a direction and a call to pursue it.</p>
 
<p>The first slide pointed to a large and as yet unfulfilled opportunity that is immanent in digital technology. The digital technology can help make this a better world! But to realize this potential of technology, we need to change our way of thinking.</p>
 
<p>The second slide was meant to explain the nature of this different thinking, and why we needed it. The 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; the vehicle has inadequate "steering and braking controls". We'll come back to that further below.</p>
 
<p>The third slide was there to point to way to remedy this problem. To set the stage for explaining the essence of Doug's vision; for understanding the purpose and the value of his many technical ideas and contributions, which is what the remainder of the slides were about; and ultimately for issuing his call to action.</p>
 
<h3>Innovation must think outside the box</h3>
 
<p>Let's stay a moment with Doug's second slide. The seemingly naive metaphor <em>already</em> points to a paradigm shift in the way we are creative. To see why, just consider how the things are done today: A scientists learns how to do physics, or biology, and does that. A journalist, similarly, learns the trade of media reporting from the past-generation journalists. So there's this candle being reproduced with every generation – even (as the history of Doug will demonstrate) with completely new technology! The the technological innovation comes in with the question: What are the scientists doing? And the journalists? We'll make that much easier for them, and faster! Let's also observe that the evolution of all those systems is competition or market driven: In the sciences it's the academic "publish or perish"; everywhere else it's by catering to "market needs". </p>
 
<p>But in his second slide, Doug was pointing to a radical alternative. There's a general, [[high-level scopes and views|<em>high-level</em>]] principle at play, a rule of thumb. Innovation must first liberate itself from just copying old patterns; from reproducing the candles in new technology. The natural way to do that, the natural alternative to just "plagiarizing the past", is to use suitable information about the purpose, and how this purpose can be better served. We must, in other words, innovate by being mindful of the purpose that what we are creating has in a larger system or systems. We must adapt that thing so that this purpose or purposes are better served – so that <em>the whole thing</em> (or metaphorically the vehicle) can be functional and purposeful. The metaphorical vehicle suggests – and his third slide was there to explain why – this change in the way we are being creative can now literally mean <em>a world of difference</em>!</p>
 
<h3>The 20th century printing press</h3>
 
<p>The printing press is a suitable metaphor for explaining the substance of of Engelbart's vision, and its role in the larger system or systems. Gutenberg's invention is sometimes mentioned as <em>the</em> main factor that led to the Enlightenment – by making knowledge sharing incomparably more efficient. What invention might play a similar role today?</p>
 
<p>"The answer is obvious", we imagine you say, "It's the Web!"  "Of course it's the Web", Engelbart might have answered, as he indeed did in his very first slide. "But we've also got to change our way of thinking." Doug's second slide pointed to <em>systemic</em> thinking as the new thinking that needs to be used. His third slide was there to explain exactly why this new thinking is the key to making good use of information technology. Considering the importance of this matter, you'll grant us the time and the pleasure of taking a closer look into each of its three paragraphs.</p>
 
<p>The first paragraph sets the stage for Doug's core discovery.
 
<blockquote>Many years ago I dreamed that digital technology could greatly augment our collective human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems.</blockquote>
 
Doug's observation posited on his second slide, that our civilization was rushing into the future at an accelerating speed, led him to identify the accelerated or "exponential" growth of a single factor, "complexity times urgency", as a core challenge to be tackled by "augmenting our collective intelligence". </p>
 
<p>The second paragraph frames the core of Engelbart's vision.
 
<blockquote>Computers, high-speed communications, displays, interfaces—as if suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we are getting a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms.</blockquote>
 
"A super new nervous system!" The reference here is to the completely new capability that the new media technology affords us. Doug called it CoDIAK (for Concurrent Development, Integration and Application of Knowledge). The key point is in the word "concurrent". We are linked together in such a way that we can think together and create together – as if we were nerve cells in a single organism. You put something on the Web and <em>instantly</em> anyone in the world can see it! People can be subscribed and be notified. You may have a question – someone else may have an answer... Compare this to the printing press – which could only vastly speed up what the people (the scribes, or the monks in the monasteries) were <em>already</em> doing – copying manuscripts. But the principle of operation remained the same – publishing! But when we are all connected to each other through interactive media technology – <em>completely new</em> processes become possible. And as we shall see – also <em>necessary</em>!</p>
 
<p>To see how this may help us deal with complexity and urgency of problems, imagine your own organism going toward a wall. (You may think this matter is simple – but we know <em>scientifically</em> that there is some quite complex processing of sensory data that leads to this gestalt.) Imagine now that your eyes see that something is wrong, but are trying to communicate it to the brain by publishing research articles in some specialized field of science. Imagine furthermore that the cells in your nervous system have not specialized and organized themselves to make sense of impulses, filter out the less relevant ones... Imagine that everyone in your body is using the nervous system to merely <em>broadcast</em> information! Would you be confused? Well that's exactly the condition in which the development of information technology has brought us to. </p>
 
<p>The third paragraph points to the unfulfilled part, which remained only a dream.
 
<blockquote>I dreamed that people could seriously appreciate the potential of harnessing the technological and social nervous system to improve the collective IQ of our various organizations.</blockquote>
 
Technological <em>and</em> social nervous system. Doug never tired of emphasizing that what the technology does and what the people do must evolve together. And that progress of  the "tools system" has not been paralleled with a similar progress of the "human system".  </p>
 
<h3>The incredible part</h3>
 
<p>There are several points that make this history of Doug in a true sense incredible. The first one is that he had this epiphany already in  1951, when there were only a handful of computers in the world, and (practically) nobody had seen one. Those computers were gigantic monsters made out of old-fashioned radio tubes; and they served exclusively for scientific calculations in large labs such as Los Alamos. At that point Doug saw people linked to computers via interactive video terminals, and through computers to each other, through an interactive network. </p>
 
<p>The other incredible point is that he tried for more than a half-century to explain his insight to the Silicon Valley – and failed!</p>
 
<p>We like to point out that on the many occasions where Engelbart was talking, or being celebrated, there was an 'invisible elephant' in the room (we use this metaphor, of an [[invisible elephant]], to point to the large societal paradigm that is emerging from the fog of our awareness). What Engelbart was pointing toward (just look at the above photo), where he wanted to take us by issuing his "call to action" (as we shall see in more detail below) was a whole new paradigm – first of all in IT innovation, then in creative work, and then in the evolution of our knowledge, and by extension in the evolution of our society at large. What he ended up with was a mere little mouse!</p>
 
<p>If you now google Engelbart's 2007 presentation at Google and watch the recording of the event and its presentation on Youtube, you will see that Doug is introduced as "the inventor of the computer mouse"; that no call to action was mentioned; and that the four slides we showed above – which were (as we shall see below) needed to understand the meaning and the value of his technical contributions, not to speak of those not yet seen and implemented ones – <em>were not even shown</em> on this event!</p>
 
<h3>The larger picture</h3>
 
<p>You may now see some of the reasons why we found this history worth telling. One of them is that it's a true sensation when we properly understand it, and also a most relevant one – because it points to paradigm-related cognitive impediments, which hinder even the smartest and most successful among us to understand or even to <em>hear</em> (for an entire half-century!)  an insight whose nature is to challenge and shift  the prevailing paradigm (think of Galilei in prison).</p>
 
<p>Another reason – why we told this story on multiple occasions, for example as a springboard story at the opening of the Leadership and Systemic Innovation PhD program at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology, which we'll come back to further below. So many economies and regions around the globe tried, and often failed, to transplant the entrepreneurial culture and activity of the Silicon Valley to their own soil. This story shows that something else – something much larger indeed – may be not only possible but also easy; something that the Silicon Valley <em>failed</em> to achieve or even understand – owing to the idiosyncrasies of its culture. </p>
 
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  <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Innovation 2.0</h2></div>
 
  <div class="col-md-7"><h3>Changing our cultural DNA</h3>
 
<p>It is not difficult to see why Engelbart was not understood. His second slide challenges – and changes – <em>the</em> main gene or <em>meme</em> in our cultural DNA. We don't come to a lecture to hear that sort of thing! We are far too busy to ever come back to basics. And somewhere deep within we are aware, we know, that to be successful in the present order of things, we just have to be like that. We have to keep going. So give me some cool technical idea – and I may implement it in the system I am building. But don't tell me that the very <em>direction</em> of technological innovation has to change!</p>
 
<p>But this is exactly why changing the whole thing can be easy – even when changing any of the details that obviously need to change might be difficult or impossible. <em>We don't need to be busy</em>! We might just be spinning the wheels of a dysfunctional social mechanism! We can do infinitely better than that! To begin, we just need to slow down and think a bit.</p>
 
<p>This is also where the [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] comes in handy. We refuse to be caught up in a civilization-wide stampede. We undertake to change the very way in which we communicate. We undertake to empower us to rethink and reconstruct our big pictures. Go back to basics. Recreate the foundations. Reinvent the rules of thumb, the principles that underlie what we do. And before all – we want to give the voice and the visibility  and the power of impact to those people who <em>had</em> something t say – to our [[giants|<em>giants</em>]]! </p>
 
<p>To that end, we now begin to [[knowledge federation|<em>federate</em>]] Doug. We shall now begin to link his insight with the insights of other [[giants|<em>giants</em>]]. We shall see that they too have not been heard (or else Doug would have had a much easier time). By combining their ideas together, we make all of them clearer and stronger and more impactful.</p>
 
<p>Out theme here will be our cultural DNA change, as reflected on Doug's second slide. Is it indeed true that our civilization or Doug's metaphorical vehicle might be on a hazardous course? Is it indeed true that we must see what we do with information as a system within a system, and adjust it to the needs of the larger system? Or not...?</p>
 
 
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<h3>The incredible history of Eric</h3>
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<p>You might consider, just as we do, the news about Donald Trump or some terrorists as nothing really new. Why give those people the attention they don't deserve? Why use the media to spread <em>their</em> messages? If you <em>are</em> entertaining such thoughts, then you might be ready for some really <em>good</em> news!</p>
<p>[[Erich Jantsch]], who will be the main protagonist of the story we are about to tell, may not mean much to people outside of the systems science community or the systems movement. There, to an elect group, he is an icon in a similar way in which Doug is an icon to us in Knowledge Federation. As you shall see his story is so parallel to Doug's, and also so similar that we could have just called it "the incredible history of Eric". Except that Erich Jantsch died too early for us to get to know him personally. We chose the Wiener's paradox as title in order to highlight one of its messages – about the need for a different <em>academic</em> communication, and paradigm, and values and culture...</p>
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<p>Also five centuries ago an abundance of daily spectacles occupied the people's minds. And yet when we look back, what we see is Leonardo, and Copernicus... We see the rebirth of the arts and the emergence of the sciences. We see those large and slow events because they give meaning and relevance to all particular ones. We notice them even from this distance because they were so spectacularly large – and that's also why the people living at that time <em>failed</em> to notice them! But how much more <em>spectacular</em> will it be to witness this sort of development in our own time! </p>
<h3>The science behind innovation</h3>
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<p>Although we don't talk about him directly, the elephant in the above [[ideograms|<em>ideogram</em>]] will be the main theme of all our conversations. It is a glimpse of him that we want to give and have by talking about all those people and things. And when we talk about the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]], you should imagine the exotic large animal appearing in a room full of people – not today, but five centuries ago, when perhaps some of those people had heard of such a creature, but none of them had ever seen one yet. The elephant in the room is a breath-taking sensation! We use this visual metaphor to point to the whole big thing – the Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we will have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And isn't that what we've been doing all along!</p>
<p>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 ended up researching, for the OECD in Paris, the theme that animates our initiative (how our ability to create and induce change can be directed far more purposefully and effectively). Jantsch's specific focuse was on the ways in which technology was being developed and introduced in different countries, the OECD members. Jantsch and the OECD called this issue  "technological planning". Is it only the market? Or is there some way we can more effectively <em>direct</em> the development and use of the rapidly growing muscles of our technology? </p>
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<p>Be mindful of our challenge: A paradigm, a new "order of things", is <em>nothing but</em> an immense rearrangement of relationships. There are just about infinitely many dots to be connected! We can not, and will not, try to connect them all. As the above picture might suggest, our goal is to only connect sufficiently many, so that some characteristic contours of the whole big become discernible. And to make further connection making fun and easy, by providing guidelines, and by turning this work into a social game. Yet in spite of all that, <em>you</em> will have to make most of the connections yourself and in your own mind – and that's inevitable!</p>
<p>So when The Club of Rome (a global think tank, consisting of 100 selected international and interdisciplinary members, organized to do research on the future prospects of mankind, and if the situation demands it also intervene) was about to be initiated, in 1968, it was natural to invite Jantsch to give the opening keynote. </p>
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<h3>Changing the protagonists</h3>
<p>Immediately after the opening of The Club of Rome Jantsch made himself busy crafting solutions. By following him through three steps of this process, we shall be able to identify three core insights, three pieces in our 'elephant puzzle', which we owe to Jantsch.</p>
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<p>By shirting our attention from Trump-style scandals and sensations to the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]], we can also give attention and credit to our [[giants|<em>giants</em>]]. We can begin to truly understand what they were talking about. If earlier we heard them talk about all sorts of different things like "the fan", "the hose" and "the rope", we can now see that they were really talking about the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]]'s ears, trunk and tail. Given the spectacular size and importance of our 'animal', we will then not only appreciate our [[giants|<em>giants</em>]]' insights as a new breed of sensations; we will also appreciate the fact that we've ignored them so long as a new breed of scandals.</p>
<p>But before we do that, let's put on our map a [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] icon on his shoulders Jantsch had the privilege to stand.</p></div>
 
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Jantsch.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Erich Jantsch]]</center></small></div>
 
 
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<p>But first – a couple of [[giants|<em>giants</em>]]. The first is Aurelio Peccei. He'll tell us about the direction.</p>
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<p>"The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. 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 this in 1980, in One Hundred Pages for the Future, based on this global think tank's first decade of research. Regarding the specific way in which the course will need to change, he observed: "The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."</p>
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<p>Peccei was an unordinary man. In 1944, as a member of Italian Resistance, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months without revealing his contacts.  Peccei was also an unordinarily able business leader. While serving as the director of Fiat's operations in Latin America (and securing that the cars were there not only sold but also produced) Peccei established Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the developing countries catch up with the rest. When the Italian technology giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president, and he managed to turn its fortunes around. And yet the question that most occupied Peccei was a much larger one the condition of our civilization as a whole; and what we may need to do to take charge of this condition.</p>
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<p>In 1977, in "The Human Quality", Peccei formulated his answer as follows:
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Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world.
 +
</blockquote></p>
 +
<p>Let us note in passing that the all-important insights that were reached by Peccei and The Club of Rome a half-century ago have not been ignored only by "climate deniers", but also by the activists and believers. Already in 1968, at the point of the Club's inception, its founders decided that they would not focus on individual problems, but on the overall condition or "problematique" from which they all spring – which can of course only have <em>systemic</em> and "outside the box" solutions.</p>
 
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<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Peccei.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Aurelio Peccei]]</center></small></div>
 
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   <div class="col-md-3"><h2></h2></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Democracy 2.0</h3>
+
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Changing the tone</h3>
<p>We begin by taking another look at Doug's second slide, from an angle that will reflect our society's urgent needs, and which is familiar to everyone – democracy. In the old ( and still so stubbornly dominant)  <em>traditional</em> order of things, democracy is the set of processes and institutions that we associate with this word.  As long as we have the constitution and the elections and the press are free, 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.</p>
+
<p>If you hear us knowledge federators sometimes say such off-the-wall Trump-like things as "the climate change is a red herring", we do not mean to belittle the excellent and necessary work of our colleagues. Our point is that the climate, or any other "problem", becomes a red herring when it diverts all our attention from those deeper evolutionary tasks on which our ability to find <em>lasting</em> solutions will now depend.</p>
<p>But what Doug was pointing to is another, much <em>worse</em> nightmare scenario where <em>nobody</em> has control! Where the "vehicle" in which we are riding into the future lacks the <em>structure</em> (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. The generals or the people may make a coup. But if the system as a whole is not controllable <em>by design</em> – then we really have a problem!</p></div>
+
<p>By focusing on the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]], we will work on contemporary issues, both large and small, both global and local, without even mentioning them by name! Instead of struggling to coerce the people and systems who created the problems to create solutions, our strategy is to inform and empower us the people, so that we may co-create solutions – i.e. systems ourselves. Instead of seeing our contemporary condition as a dictate to do what we <em>have to</em> do, we turn it into a mandate to do what we <em>wish to</em> do. What could be a richer source of opportunities for achievement and contribution, than a whole new paradigm that is being born!</p></div>
 
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<div class="col-md-3"><h2>The nature of our conversations</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-6"><h3>The science of control</h3>
+
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>We are not just talking</h3>
<p>A scientific reader may have noticed that Engelbart'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 braking controls, so must <em>any</em> system have suitable feedback (inflow of suitable information), and suitable control (a way to apply the incoming information to correct its course or functioning or behavior) – if it is to be steerable or viable or "sustainable".</p>
+
<p>Don't be deceived by this seemingly innocent word, "conversations". These conversations, with which we want to extend and continue our initiative, are where the real action begins; and the real fun.</p>
<p>Norbert Wiener might be a suitable iconic [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] 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.</p>
+
<p>[[File:Elephant.jpg]]<br><small><center>Our goal is to organize this activity, and foster this collective capability - of federating knowledge or 'connecting the dots' – so that this new guiding vision (the view of the new paradigm, i.e. of the new course of our cultural and systemic evolution) can emerge.</center></small></p>
<p>We'll represent Wiener here with the final chapter of his 1948 book 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. We'll mention two more [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] on whose shoulders he was standing. Here's the first one.</p></div>
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<p> </p>
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Wiener.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Norbert Wiener]]</center></small></div>
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<p>When we say "conversations", we don't mean "only talking". On the contrary! Here truly the medium 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, of our time's important issues. We want to give voice to ideas that matter, and to people who merit our attention. And above all by developing these conversations, we want to <em>create a manner of conversing</em> that works. We want to re-create our public sphere. We want to change our [[collective mind|<em>collective mind</em>]] so that it <em>can</em> think new thoughts! </p>
 +
<p>The guiding vision we are co-creating together will not only change our understanding of our world, but also the way we handle it. We will no longer be struggling to improve our candles; we will be creating light bulbs.</p>
 +
<h3>Conversations merge into one</h3>
 +
<p>This simple strategy, to [[knowledge federation|<em>federate</em>]] a vision, and to self-organize differently, can make <em>any</em> conversation matter. Two people can be conversing across a coffee table; by just recording and sharing what's been said, they can make their conversation be part of this larger one.</p>
 +
<p>What we above all have in mind, however, is to stage public conversations. Conversations that will enrich our large global one with the knowledge and insights of their participants. Conversations that will put important themes into our public sphere. Conversations which, when recorded and shared, will be <em>real</em> reality shows, showing the birth pains of a whole new stage of our evolution.</p></div>
 
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<div class="col-md-6"><h3>The feedback is broken</h3>
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<div class="col-md-6"><h3>Dialogs not discussions</h3>
<p>The first of the Wiener's two key insights we'll point to is that our communication, or our society's "feedback", is dysfunctional and must be rebuilt.</p>
+
<p>This <em>re</em>-evolution will be nonviolent not only in action, but also in its manner of speaking. The technical word is [[dialogs|<em>dialog</em>]]. The [[dialogs|<em>dialog</em>]] is to the emerging [[paradigm|<em>paradigm</em>]] as the debate is to the old one. The [[dialogs|<em>dialog</em>]] too might have an icon [[giants|<em>giant</em>]], physicist [[David Bohm]]. Let's hear what Bohm had to say about this matter.</p>
<p>Wiener cites [[Vannevar Bush]], who was his MIT colleague and twice his boss (first as the MIT dean, and then as the leader of the U.S. WW2 scientific effort), to make this point. And since Bush also inspired Engelbart, and since he's a suitable icon [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] for this most central point, it's time that we introduce him here properly with a brief story and a photo. </p>
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<blockquote>
</div>
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<p>I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.</p>
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<p>Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.</p>
 +
<p>In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.</p>
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</blockquote></div>
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  <div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Bohm.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[David Bohm]]</center></small></div>
 
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   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Paradigm strategy dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>The market won't give us control</h3>
+
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Paradigm strategy</h3>
<p>There is an obvious alternative to all this – the market! The free competition. The belief that we don't really need headlights, that we don't really need [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] and [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] – that all we need to do is worry about "our own" interests, and "the invisible hand" of the market will secure that everything is for the better in the best of all worlds. Wiener's second insight is that there is no "invisible hand" to rely on; that we must do the work we were relegating to it ourselves. Listen for a moment to Wiener's tone. Is it suggesting that some deep and power-related prejudices are at play (recall Galilei...):
+
<p>The paradigm strategy dialogs are tailored for informed professionals (academic researchers, social entrepreneurs...) who have already recognized the characteristic global or contemporary issues as context in which strategies and priorities need to be forged; and who have already adopted systemic thinking as methodological foundation. Can we still say something, or better still – can we <em>engage</em> them in a certain new way – that will make a difference?</p>
 +
<p>Here is how we introduced the [[paradigm strategy|<em>paradigm strategy</em>]] at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design RSD6 conference, in 2017 in Oslo.
 
<blockquote>
 
<blockquote>
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 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 <em>paradigm strategy</em> as a way to make a similar difference in impact, with respect to the common efforts focusing on specific problems or issues. The <em>paradigm strategy</em> 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, within the current paradigm.</blockquote></p>
</blockquote >
+
<p>Another metaphor that may explain this strategy proposal is the one we've used already – the construction of a light bulb, as an alternative to trying to improve the candle.</p>
The "homeostatic process" here is what we've been calling "feedback-and-control". It's been defined as "feedback mechanism inducing measures to keep a system continuing".</p>
+
<p>Our presentation was both a strategy proposal, and an intervention into the RSD6 conference as a system. Our goal was to engage this community of academic change makers to transcend the conventional academic lecture and publication conference format, and to self-organize and collaborate in a new way. Our purpose was to apply everyone's collective intelligence toward co-creating an evolutionary guiding light for everyone else – and hence ignite a wave of change. (Yes, this sentence is a mouthful. But just read on, and its meaning will be clear.)</p>
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<h3>The Paradigm Strategy poster</h3>
 +
<p style="margin-top:0.5cm;">[[File:PSwithFredrik.jpeg]]<br><small><center>Fredrik Eive Refsli, the leader of our communication design team, jubilating the completion of The Paradigm Strategy poster.</center></small></p>
 +
<p></p>
 +
<p>[http://knowledgefederation.net/Misc/ThePSposter.pdf  The Paradigm Strategy poster] is designed as a way to (1) communicate the [[paradigm strategy|<em>paradigm strategy</em>]] and (2) choreograph a small but significant set of first steps toward self-organization and co-creation of knowledge – and hence <em>into</em> the new paradigm.</p>
 +
<p>The left-hand side, with yellow background, represents the current societal paradigm, that is – the current way of evolving culturally, socially and systemically. The techniques for weaving together core ideas of [[giants|<em>giants</em>]], which were outlined in Federation through Images – [[vignettes|<em>vignettes</em>]], [[threads|<em>threads</em>]] and [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]] – are applied to come to the main and central point or [[gestalt|<em>gestalt</em>]] (represented by the circle in the middle), which is the wormhole into the emerging order of things. The right-hand side represents the space where the emerging paradigm is being co-created, by highlighting a small subset of the [[prototypes|<em>prototypes</em>]] that we discussed in Federation through Applications. </p>
 +
<p>In a nutshell, the poster weaves the findings of [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] into two [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]] – the [[Wiener's paradox|<em>Wiener's paradox</em>]] and the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]]. The first one (which we discussed briefly in Federation through Stories) is there to show that academic publishing (specifically in systems research, and then also in general) tends to have no effect on public opinion and policy. The second one, the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]], points to the way in which we've been conducting our lives and careers, and evolving culturally and socially – <em>without</em> suitable information and knowledge. (Technically the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] is a [[patterns|<em>pattern</em>]], so it must be understood as a way of looking at things, not as "the" reality – as we explained in Federation through Images. The purpose of formulating such 'side views' is to be able to look in a new way, and discuss degenerative tendencies, however small or large they might be.) The messages it conveys are central to our story line, and deserve a paragraph of its own.</p>
 +
<h3>The threads</h3>
 +
<p>We implement what [[Vannevar Bush]] asked for in 1945 – we link ideas and people associatively into [[threads|<em>threads</em>]], which roughly correspond to what Bush called "trails". The [[threads|<em>threads</em>]] not only federate ideas (give them strength by linking them together into higher-order units of meaning) – they also add a dramatic effect, by combining the ideas so that they amplify one another. But here we take this process of "upward growth" of knowledge even further, by weaving [[threads|<em>threads</em>]] into [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]], and [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]] into a [[gestalt|<em>gestalt</em>]]. We'll come back to that in a moment.</p>
 +
<p>The poster presents a small selection of four [[threads|<em>threads</em>]], of which we have already seen one, Wiener – Jantsch – Reagan, in Federation through Stories. And we have seen also how this single thread already allows us to see one of the two patterns on the LHS of the poster, the Wiener's paradox. We here show another straight-forward thread, Nietzsche – Ehrlich – Giddens, which will allow us to already see the second pattern, the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]]. And these two patterns will then be all we'll need to reach the pivotal, paradigm-shifting insight. </p>
 +
<p>The thread we want to show you begins with Friedrich Nietzsche looking at modernity from the point of view of digestion:</p>
 +
<blockquote><p>Sensibility immensely more irritable; the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever; cosmopolitanism in food, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to “digest” anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: The historian, critic, analyst, interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents-all science!</p>
 +
<p>Artificial change of one’s nature into a “mirror”; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, “tempest,and the play of waves are encountered.“</p>
 +
<p>Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and weariness.“</p></blockquote>
 +
<p>So take a moment to <em>digest</em> the above excerpt, in the context of its background: What Nietzsche observed, <em>already in 1888</em>, was that an overload of not only information but of impressions of a variety of kinds, is leaving us, modern people, in a state of emotional and cognitive spasm! But let's continue with this thread before we come back to this observation and draw conclusions.</p>
 +
<p>The second protagonist in the thread is Stanford University's famed biologist, environmentalist and "pessimist" [[Paul Ehrlich]]. We'll, however, quote here only one of his personal observations we heard him make – that when he was in the 1950s staying with the Inuits as a young researcher, he noticed that every member of the community was able to understand and handle all the community's tools. A woman would perhaps not handle the hunting knife, but she perfectly understood how it works and was able to use it if needed. Compare this with the complexity of your smart phone; you will  be challenged not only if we asked you to explain how it's all put together – but even if we would ask you to name all the professions and specialties whose knowledge has been combined to compose the little gadget in your pocket. The point here is that – within just a generation or so – the complexity of our world became practically impenetrable.</p>
 +
<p>Add to this the fact – yes, we have to put it into this picture, it's our main theme after all – that we do not at all have the kind of information that would help us penetrate through this complex reality; that we've indeed used the modern information technology to let everyone just broadcast... and hence to <em>vastly</em> increase the overload of impressions... How do we cope? The third hero of our [[threads|<em>thread</em>]], [[Anthony Giddens]],  will help us answer this question. Here is how the famed sociologist formulated the concept "ontological security" in Modernity and Self-Identity:</p>
 +
<blockquote><p>
 +
The threat of personal meaninglessness is ordinarily held at bay because routinised activities, in combination
 +
with basic trust, sustain ontological security. Potentially disturbing existential questions are defused by the controlled nature of day-to-day activities within internally referential systems.</p>
 +
<p>Mastery, in other words, substitutes for morality; to be able to control one’s life circumstances, colonise the future with some degree of success and live within the parameters of internally referential systems can, in many circumstances, allow the social and natural framework of things to seem a secure grounding for life activities.</p>
 +
</blockquote> 
 +
<p>So we can <em>already</em> see the [[patterns|<em>pattern</em>]] which we are calling [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] – where we have given up knowing and understanding; where we simply learn our profession, and our various other roles as well, as one would learn the rules of a game – and we play our career and other 'games' competitively, to increase (what we perceive as) our personal gain. But let's wait with the discussion of this pattern and its consequences until we've seen some of its deeper sides – which we'll turn to next. </p>
 
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  <div class="col-md-6"><h3>Understanding evolution</h3>
<p>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 <em>only</em> trust the market! The moment we begin to interfere with its perfect mechanisms, we are asking for trouble.</p>
+
<p>We are here of course talking about our socio-cultural or 'software' evolution, which has long ago surpassed our biological or 'hardware' evolution in speed and importance. The [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] here is a simplification of the more comprehensive and more precise [[power structures|<em>power structure</em>]] theory  – still good enough to bring the main points across. This here is a sketch of some of the conclusions and consequences, of a deeper analysis where the nature of our socialization is explained by weaving  together some of the core insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Damasio, Zygmunt Bauman and other leading researchers in the humanities. </p>
<p>The point here is not whether he was right or wrong, but the lack of [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]]. The words of our giants just simply had no effect on how the votes were cast – and how the world ended up being steered!</p></div>
+
<p>The scope or way of looking here is look at our socio-cultural evolution in two ways instead of just one – which we delineate by the corresponding two keywords, <em>homo sapiens</em> and <em>homo ludens</em>. Although both are always present in degrees or as tendencies, you may think of the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] as a cultural species, which has (most interestingly) been acquiring supremacy in the recent period. The [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] has successfully adapted to the social condition where the complexity of our world combined with the overload of information and of impressions in general has made our reality impenetrable. The point is that the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]]  is <em>not</em> the <em>homo sapiens</em>; he does not seek knowledge or use knowledge. He ignores the larger purpose of his work, and all other larger purposes. Instead, he simply learns his profession as a social role, as one would learn the rules of a game, and plays competitively. The [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] is guided by what's been called "social intelligence" – he has his antennas tuned to the "interests" of the powerful players around him; and by accommodating them, he acquires his own power position.</p></div>
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Reagan.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Ronald Reagan]]</center></small></div>
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<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Bourdieu.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Pierre Bourdieu]]</center></small></div>
 
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<div class="col-md-7"><h3>What we have is a paradox</h3>
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<p>"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.</p>
+
<p>Some consequences of the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] evolution seem worth highlighting:
<p>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.</p>
+
<ul>
<h3>The solution is bootstrapping</h3>
+
<li>The systems in which we live and work can be arbitrarily misconstrued, wasteful and dysfunctional, without the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] even noticing that.</li>
<p>The alternative – we must BE the systems! Engelbart - bootstrapping. Jantsch - action! Our design epistemology... </p>
+
<li>This theory explains why politicians like Donald Trump may raise to highest positions of influence – the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] perceives them, perhaps rightly, as the kind of people who "get the things done" in our present order (or <em>dis</em>-order) of things.</li>
<p>Doug's last wish...</p></div>  
+
<li>The two evolutionary paradigms are – to use Thomas Kuhn's useful keyword – <em>incommensurable</em> (each has its own epistemology, and sees and organizes the world in its own specific way). The [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] knows <em>from experience</em> that the <em>homo sapiens</em> is on the verge of extinction; and that one has to be the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] if one should be successful. The <em>homo sapiens</em> looks at the data and the trends, and reaches the <em>opposite</em> conclusion – that the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] must morph into the (cultural) <em>homo sapiens</em> if our civilization, and our species, should have a future. </li>
 +
<li>This theory predicts the existence of a most curious cultural <em>sub</em>-species – the <em>homo ludens academicus</em> – which should not at all exist according to conventional logic (isn't the very purpose of the academic institution to guide us along the <em>homo sapiens</em> evolutionary path?).  The existence of this subspecies still needs to be confirmed by field research, of course. If, however, this species is discovered in reality, this would explain the un-academic resistance of the academic people to update their own system, when the available knowledge is calling for such updates. The [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] ignores the larger societal purpose of his institution. He just sticks to the rules – which provide an "objective" and "fair" frame of reference in which his career game is played.</li>
 +
</ul></p>
 +
<h3>The next step</h3>
 +
<p>What is to be done in this sort of situation? The poster indicates that the key step from this paradigm into the next – is in the simple act of [[bootstrapping|<em>bootstrapping</em>]] (we need to re-socialize ourselves, by daring to co-create the systems in which we live and work). A small but significant act of [[bootstrapping|<em>bootstrapping</em>]] is then choreographed by the poster – which provides an invitation to take part in re-creating the poster itself. A virtual space is provided where the poster is the background, and where one can add verbal and visual comments to its various parts.</p>
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<div class="row">
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>The future has already begun</h2></div>
+
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Liberation dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-6"><h3>Be the systems you want to see in the world</h3>
+
  <div class="col-md-6"><h3>Understanding religion</h3>
<p>Fortunately, our story has a happy ending. (...) </p>
+
<p>It would be difficult to find a theme that better represents, both as an example and as a metaphor, the general societal paradigm shift we've been talking about. "Religion" for most people means believing in something – for ex. that Jesus was "the son of God", or that Muhammed was "the last prophet". Science too means believing in something – which again for many people means believing in something opposite from what the religious people believe. So whether one is pro or against religion, this conversation is bound to arouse strong feelings – because it will challenge the beliefs of <em>both</em> traditional camps. The interlude might be as follows: At the dawn of the Enlightenment the people liberated themselves from a stringent religious worldview to became free to "pursue happiness" here and now. But what if in the process we have misunderstood <em>both</em> religion <em>and</em> happiness? What if at the inception of our great religious traditions we will find a <em>phenomenon</em>, we may even call it "a natural law", which brings with it a possibility to create an incomparably better human life, and society.</p></div>
<p>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. </p>
+
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Buddhadasa.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Buddhadasa]]</center></small></div>
 
 
<p>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).</p>
 
<p>Alexander was practically born into this way of thinking and working. His father...</p></div>
 
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Laszlo.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Alexander Laszlo]]</center></small></div>
 
 
</div>
 
</div>
 
<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
 
   <div class="col-md-3"></div>
 
   <div class="col-md-3"></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>We came to build a bridge</h3>
+
  <div class="col-md-7">
<p>We came to Haiphong with the story about Jantsch and Engelbart; and with the proposal "We are here to build a bridge"...</p>
+
<p>The issue here is at the core of the paradigm shift. Sketch: Today our [[religion|<em>religion</em>]] is a combined belief in the naturalness / value of selfishness, which is turned into the best world for all by the survival of the fittest. In this sort of ideology it is difficult to find a place where [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] can truly blossom. And vice versa...</p>
<p>And indeed – the bridge has been built! The two initiatives have federated their activities most beautifully!</p>
+
<h3>A conversation about science</h3>
<p>Prototypes include LaSI SIG & PHD program, the SIL... And The Lighthouse project, among others.</p>
+
<p>The liberation book quotes a whole page-and-a-half from Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" – the excerpt that tells how the 19th century science created a "narrow and rigid frame of concepts" (a way of looking at the world) which marked not only science but also the worldview of the majority of people. And "how lucky we are" that the modern physics disproved this "narrow frame" and the corresponding worldview. This sets the stage for science giving the people back what is due to them – a broader worldview, that will help them rebuild whatever in culture has been damaged. Heisenberg pointed to religion as <em>the</em> prime candidate.</p>
<p>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?</p></div>
+
<p>The "liberation" we are talking about is not only the essence of religion; it is also what may be needed to put science on a new and better track. Buddhadasa talks about "seeing the world as it truly is" as the goal of Buddhism. Athletes work on themselves, on their own material. It appears that the scientists don't need to, that "the scientific method" and being "objective observers" are enough to secure the best results. The nature of human creativity, however, turns out to be something else, not how we see it today (...). The development of creativity, of humans with clear vision, has its dynamic and its "natural laws" that underlie it. Do we know them? Can we harness them?</p></div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
-----
+
----
 
 
YYYYYYY
 
 
 
 
<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Innovation 2.0</h2></div>
+
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Knowledge federation dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>The system</h3>
+
  <div class="col-md-6"><h3>A theme that matters</h3>
<p>As Doug said it's just to change our way of thinking!</p>
+
<p>The theme is about the organization, role, direction... of creative work innovation in the commercial world, research in the academia... And specifically about the organization, purpose and direction of development of knowledge work. </p>
<p>[[File:System.jpeg]]<br><small><center>System ideogram</center></small></p>
+
<p>The rationale is that this – innovation, and knowledge work – is what drives and gives the direction to our society's evolution, or as Engelbart framed it  the "common economic-political vehicle" in which we ride into the future. The crux of our proposal is that we need a public dialog about the direction in which this key system has been evolving, and most importantly about the way it may now <em>need to</em> be evolving – so that our direction, or evolution, may acquire a <em>new</em> direction. This is the new leadership role of the university that Jantsch has been talking about a half-century ago.</p>
<p>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.</p>
+
<p>But we won't be only talking. We strike this conversation by presenting a [[prototypes|<em>prototype</em>]]. This allows us to avoid talking about how to improve the 'candle' – and begin talking about how to create the 'light bulb'. </p>
<p>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 <em>human</em> creations – and see that we can also <em>re</em>-create them!</p>
+
<p>Notice that this public conversation, about the [[prototypes|<em>prototype</em>]] presented on these pages, at the same time completes the [[prototypes|<em>prototype</em>]]. Our proposal is for a knowledge-work system that is capable of self-reflecting and evolving – by engaging everyone's insights, or our 'collective intelligence', to co-create an (as Bela H. Banathy called it) "evolutionary guidance system" that can guide us toward a good, desirable or meaningful future. </p>
<h3>Changing scales</h3>
+
<h3>An academic result of a new kind</h3>
<p>[[polyscopy|<em>Polyscopy</em>]] as a methodology in knowledge creation and use has an interesting counterpart in [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] 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 <em>all</em> 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, <em>before</em> we start worrying about the details?</p>
+
<p>An academic reader may have recognized that our [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] presentation on these pages is in fact a careful presentation of – and a case for – a new [[paradigm|<em>paradigm</em>]] in creative work. On the front page we motivated this proposal by three changes that developed during the past century (in our understanding of epistemology, what knowledge and meaning are all about; in information technology; and in societal needs). We provided  four pages that elaborated the details, where we showed how the [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] prototype
<h3>The next industrial revolution?</h3>
+
<ul>
<p>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 <em>far</em> 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 <em>wasting</em> our daily work, or even worse are they using it <em>against</em> our best interests?</p>
+
<li>provides a new methodological foundation for creating truth and meaning, which allows us to repair the reported fundamental anomalies <em>and</em> align knowledge work with contemporary needs of people and society</li>
</div>
+
<li>provides a platform for taking advantage of contemporary information technology that fixes the core anomaly we have in this domain namely that the information technology we have was <em>created</em> to enable re-configuring of knowledge work that we are calling [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]], and yet we used the technology to merely re-implement the old patterns that emerged based on the printed text (or to use Engelbart's metaphor – he created the technology to give our 'vehicle' a whole new source of illumination, the light bulb – and we used this technology to merely recreate the candles) </li>
 +
<li>provides exactly the kind of information, the "evolutionary guidance" that can help us "change course" – by doing no more than just taking advantage of the knowledge we already own (by fitting the pieces into the new emerging reality, the metaphorical [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]], instead of fitting the pieces in an old and outdated paradigm – and throwing away or ignoring whatever fails to fit in</li>
 +
</ul></p>
 +
<p>Thomas Kuhn pointed to two key characteristics of a new paradigm: It (1) resolves the reported anomalies and (2) opens up a new frontier to research. We have seen in the first two modules, Federation through Images and Federation through Stories, how the new approach to knowledge resolves a variety of anomalies – core research insights that were reported but never really integrated into daily live, or even into academic praxis! We showed how [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] can dissolve those anomalies <em>and</em> provide a vast frontier for new kinds of results, and new kinds of interventions into our academic and social reality (Federation through Applications and Federation through Conversations). </p>
 +
<p>And so we are now able to submit to this conversation our [[paradigm|<em>paradigm</em>]] proposal as a way to enable, or trigger, a sweeping change – by doing no more than what we anyway need to do, namely align knowledge work with the relevant knowledge. Self-reflect and act. Use the academic [[mirror|<em>mirror</em>]] to create an even larger mirror where we the people may see the world we are creating, and ourselves in it – and adapt our way of being in the world accordingly.</p>
 +
<h3>A conversation that matters</h3>
 +
<p>With this we are opening a dialog that truly matters – the one about the role, the organization and the evolution of the university. "[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing society's capability for continuous self-renewal", Erich Jantsch wrote in 1969. And he gave a concrete proposal, how the university needs to be organized to fulfill this role. We now undertake to extend his proposal by an entire paradigm – and to reinvigorate this most timely conversation.</p>
 +
<p>If we understand that we <em>cannot</em> and <em>should not</em> trust "the market" to turn our candles into light bulbs (give us institutions or systems that are capable of using the new technology and the best of our work and intentions toward our true benefit) – then it must strike us as to put it mildly <em>ironic</em> that the only institution that is publicly sponsored to allow people to be freely creative has organized itself according to the survival of the fittest model (which is here called "publish or perish"). And yet whatever has remained of true academic freedom has made this work presented here possible. We now want to offer our [[prototypes|<em>prototype</em>]] and our related experience as an experiment – or as a model 'light bulb' – to ignite the next step of our society's illumination.</p>
 +
<p>Can university reform itself and provide the most needed leadership role? We believe that it can, and that it has to. By creating this conversation that matters, we hope to give a new impetus to this most needed evolutionary direction</p></div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
----
 
 
<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
 
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>See</h2></div>
 
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>See</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Evangelizing systemic innovation.</h3>  
+
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>The dialog</h3>
<p>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|<em>gestalt</em>]] 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 [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/ode-to-self-organization-part-one/ 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...?) [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/toward-a-scientific-understanding-and-treatment-of-problems/ 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 [https://www.dropbox.com/s/2342lis6oqs4gg4/SI%20Positively.m4v?dl=0 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 [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/2574/ The Game-Changing Game] is  a different summary of those benefits. The blog post [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/information-age-coming-of-age/ 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.</p>
+
<p>David Bohm saw the "dialogue" as simply what we must do in order to shift our present paradigm (or put even more simply "what we <em>must</em> do") – see [http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/Chaos-Complexity/dialogue.pdf On dialogue]. Two volumes edited by Banathy and Jenlink deepened and refined our understanding download a copy of one of them [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200025879_Dialogue_as_a_Means_of_Collective_Communication here]. Bohm's dialogue is a slow and completely unguided process. We experimented with turning Bohm's dialog into a 'cyclotron' by increasing vastly its energy – see [https://keypointdialog.wiki.ifi.uio.no/Category:Key_Point_Dialog_Zagreb_2008 the project's web site].</p>
<h3>Evangelizing knowledge federation.</h3>
+
<p>Issue Based Information Systems were conceived in the 1960s by Horst Rittel and others to enable collective understanding of complex or "wicked" issues see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system this Wikipedia page]. Dialog mapping tools such as the IBIS / Compendium, and [https://debategraph.org Debategraph] have been conceived to empower people and communities to tackle "wicked problems" of people to co-create knowledge  – and even to turn the usual debate into a genuine dialog. See [https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Dialogue+Mapping%3A+Building+Shared+Understanding+of+Wicked+Problems-p-9780470017685 Jeff Conklin's Dialog Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems].</p>
<p>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  [http://folk.uio.no/dino/KF/KF.swf evangelizing talk at the Trinity College, Dublin], or read (a milder version) at the beginning of [http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-552/Karabeg-Lachica-KF08.pdf this article].</p>
+
<h3>The Paradigm Strategy</h3>
<p>[[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 [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/knowledge-federation-an-enabler-of-systemic-innovation/ Knowledge Federation – an Enabler of Systemic Innovation], and the article linked therein). [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/eight-vignettes-to-evangelize-a-paradigm/ Eight Vignettes to Evangelize a Paradigm] is a collection of such stories.</p>
+
<p>[http://knowledgefederation.net/Misc/ThePSposter.pdf Poster], [http://www.knowledgefederation.net/Abstracts/ThePS.pdf abstract], [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2017/06/24/the-paradigm-strategy/ blog post]</p>
<h3>The incredible history of Doug continues</h3>
+
<h3>The Liberation</h3>
<p>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 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1isj9-vsEkjikt9wYG9xYhj8az9904CaFl-Ko9qxzjXw/edit?usp=sharing 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.</p>
+
<p>[http://www.knowledgefederation.net/Misc/Liberation.pdf Book introduction]; background in blog posts [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/the-garden-of-liberation/ Garden of Liberation] and [https://polyscopy.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/science-and-religion/ Science and Religion]</p>
<h3>Unraveling the mystery</h3>
 
<p>... 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... </p>
 
<p>HEY but this is really the whole point!!!</p>
 
<p>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 [[vignettes|<em>vignette</em>]] are woven together into all those higher-level constructs: [[threads|<em>threads</em>]], [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]], and ultimately to a [[gestalt|<em>gestalt</em>]], showing what is to be done. The [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] 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 [http://www.knowledgefederation.net/Misc/ThePSposter.pdf The Paradigm Strategy poster] on your own.
 
</p>
 
</div></div>
 
 
 
<!-- PUT IT IN
 
 
 
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. </p>
 
<h3>What makes this incredible</h3>
 
<p>The Incredible History of Doug will continue after a brief detour, where we'll connect his vision with the visions of other [[giants|<em>giants</em>]], and properly set the stage for understanding the direction he was pointing to. Remember – we want to materialize just enough of the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]] for the things to begin to <em>truly</em> make sense. So let's just conclude here by turning what's been told so far about Engelbart properly into a [[vignettes|<em>vignette</em>]]. You might still be wandering what's so surprising about it, where is "incredible" part.</p>
 
<p>For half a century, the Silicon's Valley [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] in residence was trying to show the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]] 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!</p>
 
<p>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 <em>much larger</em> achievement than that <em>is</em> indeed possible – which the Silicon Valley <em>failed</em> to achieve, owing to the idiosyncrasies of its culture.</p>
 
<p>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!
 
 
 
-----
 
<p>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|<em>systemic innovation</em>]], so let's stay with innovation</p>
 
<p>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 <em>benefits</em> 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 <em>rational</em> – well, then here are the guidelines to be followed.</p>
 
 
 
-----
 
OLD BEGINNING
 
 
 
<p>[[File:Elephants.jpeg]]<br><small><center>Presentation slide pointing to our goal.</center></small></p>
 
<p></p>
 
<div class="row">
 
  <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Glimpses of an emerging paradigm</h2></div>
 
  <div class="col-md-7"><h3>Our goal is to see the whole</h3>
 
<p>Although we shall not talk about him directly, the elephant in the above [[ideograms|<em>ideogram</em>]] is the main protagonist 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 Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we will have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And that's what we are about to do.</p>
 
<p>Recall once again Galilei in house prison, the image which we are using here to point to repressed, or not-yet-heard voices of change. Galilei was not tried for his belief in Heliocentricity; that's just a minor technical detail. The big point was that he dared to state in public that when the reason contradicts the scriptures, it is still legitimate to be open to the possibility that the reason might be right. Today there is no Inquisition, and practically no censorship – and yet (as Italo Calvino observed decades ago, when still only the printed text was competing for our attention) the overabundance of our unorgarnized information will do the censoring just as well. And there are also other factors in play, which we will come back to. </p>
 
<h3>What the visionaries see</h3>
 
<p>It has been said that a visionary is a person who looks at the same things all of us look at, and sees something different. What we here call [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] are the people with an uncommon ability. You may call it intuition, or creative imagination. We think of it as <em>soaring intelligence</em>: Where the rest of might be painstakingly trying to fit the pieces together, they appear to somehow <em>see through</em> the pieces, and anticipate how they might fit together in a completely new way.</p>
 
<p>Some difficulties are, however, inherent in this kind of seeing. Even a visionary can see (metaphorically) only a part of the elephant. This is because [[paradigm|<em>paradigm</em>]], or the elephant, is so large and complex that anyone can look at it only from a certain angle, which is defined by his or her field of interest and background. And when a visionary tries to explain what he sees to the rest of us, then there's another problem – even suitable words are lacking. So we may hear him talk about a rope, a fan or a hose – when really what he's talking about is the large animal's tail, or ear, or trunk.</p>
 
<h3>Why visionaries fail to communicate</h3>
 
<p>The reasons are complex, and the phenomenon is fascinating. We shall look into deeper reasons as we go along. But the large and obvious reason is that they are trying to show us the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]], or some of its specific parts. And that our communication, presently, is conceived as fitting things into a (old) paradigm! And so naturally we only hear what fits in, and ignore what doesn't. But (and you will see some quite wonderful examples in a moment) – the real value of the giants' insight is exactly that it <em>changes</em> (improves) the conventional order of things.</p>
 
<p>And so we undertake to enable us to take advantage of the heritage, the jewels we have – by materializing the [[invisible elephant|<em>elephant</em>]] sufficiently so that new things can be understood in its context, and fitted in.</p>
 
<p>You will now easily understand why our primary interest is not to find out what some [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] "really saw" (even he would not be able to tell us that). What we are above all interested in is to use their views as signs on the road, and ultimately find and see 'the elephant'.</p>
 
<h3>The substance of our project</h3>
 
<p></p>
 
<p>[[File:Elephant.jpg]]<br><small><center>Our goal is to organize this activity, and foster this collective capability - of federating knowledge or 'connecting the dots'.</center></small></p>
 
<p></p>
 
<p>Seeing the whole thing is of course fascinating as a spectacle – 'a large exotic animal grazing at our universities, or visiting our lecture halls without being seen'. But the view of it becomes life-changing and essential, when what we are talking about is not really an animal, and not even a finished thing, but something that <em>we</em> need to create together.</p>
 
<p>So our goal is first of all a liberation from a certain fixed way of looking at things, which we acquired while growing up and through education. And then to – not exactly connect all the dots (which may be something each of us will have to do on our own), but foster this whole art, this capability we have all but lost, of connecting dots in general. We undertake to organize it as an academic, and real-world activity. We undertake to institutionalize it, give it the status of "knowledge creation" – which is what it really is, as we have already seen, and as we are about to see. </p>
 
</div></div>
 
<div class="row">
 
  <div class="col-md-3"></div>
 
  <div class="col-md-6"><h3>The substance of this page</h3>
 
<p>So we are about to see only one small part of 'the elephant'. But this will be a crucial part. It will also be a [[paradigm|<em>paradigm</em>]] in its own right – a paradigm in knowledge work. In the large puzzle we need to put together, there is a piece we need to create and place in first, because it will show us what all the rest is going to look like.</p>
 
<p>In what follows we will looking at exactly the same 'piece in the puzzle' that we saw in Federation through Images. There we used keywords such as [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]], [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]], and [[guided evolution of society|<em>guided evolution of society</em>]], and the image of the bus with candle headlights to describe it. But while there our angle of looking and focus was on the foundations or  <em>epistemology</em>), here our point of view will be the society's new needs, and the capabilities of new technology. We will then have covered all the three main motivations for [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] that were mentioned on the  front page.</p>
 
<p>We'll tell the stories of two [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] – Douglas Engelbart as the icon of [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]], and Erich Jantsch as the icon of [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]]. But we'll also put on our map just a couple of the [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] on whose shoulders <em>they</em> stood.</p></div>
 
<div class="col-md-3">[[File:2Elephants.jpeg]]<br><small><center>The smaller elephant will call the larger one into existence.</center></small></div>
 
 
</div>
 
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  <div class="col-md-3"></div>
 
<div class="col-md-6">
 
<p>Wiener made a transition most interesting for us – between the first of the above insights to the second. He did that by pointing to the work of another [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] whose essential message was ignored. His point was "See this really central insight that my distinguished colleague found out, and yet he found himself ignored – truly our communication doesn't work!" The [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] was [[John von Neumann]], whose many seminal contributions include the design of the first digital computer – <em>and</em> (with Morgenstern) the game theory, which is what Wiener was talking about. </p>
 
<p>Let's add to Wiener's observation that the research on a specific theme that interests us most here virtually exploded in the 1950s – i.e. after Cybernetics was published, resulting in more than one thousand research articles. The theme is popularly known as "prisoner's dilemma". All we'll need from this research here, however, is once again the most simple fact this research stands for – that <em>it may be the case</em> that rational self-service (exact, mathematical maximization of one's own gains) brings all players to an outcome that is inferior to what they would achieve had they collaborated. The point here is that collaboration <em>may</em> lead to a win-win situation; competition may lead to a lose-lose situation! </p>
 
<p>We don't need to go into details. Our theme here is perhaps <em>the</em> core belief, which is as germane to our contemporary condition as the unquestionable reliance on the scriptures was five centuries ago – the belief that we don't really need to team up and collaborate and build a better world (or systems); that all we really need is to do is to play competitively within the existing systems. If we agree (make a convention) that [[religion|<em>religion</em>]] is the ethical fiber of the society – what binds each of us to a purpose and all of us into a society – then this qualifies as our contemporary [[religion|<em>religion</em>]].</p>
 
<p>The alternative is what Wiener was establishing, and arguing for – cybernetics. If we cannot trust the market, then what <em>can</em> 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. You may now begin to understand  [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] / [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] as the next step in the same direction. The details will follow. </p></div>
 
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:vonNeumann.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[John von Neumann]]</center></small></div>
 
 
</div>
 
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<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
  <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Democracy 2.0</h2></div>
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<div class="col-md-3"><h2>Liberation dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Toward an informed approach to contemporary issues</h3>
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<div class="col-md-7"><h3>XXXXXXX</h3>
<p>"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them," said Einstein. Systemic thinking offers itself as a natural or <em>informed</em> alternative. And if we follow this alternative for just one step, if we begin to apply it – as we just did – then Einstein's most famous word of wisdom can be paraphrased as "We cannot solve our problems with the same <em>systems</em> we used when we created them." If you are still frowning, more evidence will be provided; and an invitation to resolve the remaining hesitancies in a conversation.</p>
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<p>While the choice of themes for our dialogs is of course virtually endless, we have three concrete themes in mind to get us started.</p>
<p>If, however, you are ready to join us in exploring this possibility, then you might already anticipate, perhaps with trepidation, the possibility of reducing all our problems, with all their "wickedness" and complexity, to a single and straight-forward challenge – of updating our systems!</p>
+
<p></p>
<p>You might then have no difficulty understanding why we are talking about democracy: If we the people should really be in control, and if suitable controls presently don't even exist, then the very first thing our democracy must be able to do to still merit that name is to develop the capability to recreate <em>itself</em>, that is, its own systems. Or more generally, to recreate 'our games', instead of confining us to playing competitively within them.</p>
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<p>[[File:PSwithFredrik.jpeg]]<br><small><center>Fredrik Eive Refsli, the leader of our communication design team, jubilating the completion of The Paradigm Strategy poster.</center></small></p>
 +
<p>Point: Federates knowledge across disciplines. Threads... whole methodology. POINT: How to handle issues. RHS – prototypes.</p>
 +
<p>POINT: invitation to bootstrap together. Created for RSD6. Invitation. An intervention. Central point.</p>
 +
<h3>Conversation about socio-cultural evolution</h3>
 +
<p>This is a simplified version of the [[power structures|<em>power structure</em>]] theory, still rich enough to strike a good conversation. The point is the de-volution. The unguided evolution. What do we do when we don't have knowledge? A careful indeed snapshot of our evolutionary moment. We have been evolving destructive systems from the beginning of time. The more aggressive ones prevailed. Further, they create our awareness. FAAAAR from being "free to choose", we become our own worst enemy. ...</p>
 +
<p>Key point: We look left, look right, and we adjust what we do according to "interests". The result feels safe... but the systems we create can be arbitrarily meaningless, making us work, compete... Can we do better than that?</p>
 +
<h3>Conversation about strategy</h3>
 +
<p>POINT: There's a better way to do it! Excerpt from the abstract...</p>
 +
<p>Even the environmental movement seems to have forgotten its own history! How should we direct our efforts so that they <em>do</em> have an effect?</p>
 
</div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
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----
 
<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
   <div class="col-md-3"></div>
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   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Liberation dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-6"><h3>The science behind innovation</h3>
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<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Conversation about the book</h3>
<p>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 ended up researching, for the OECD in Paris, the theme that animates our initiative (how our ability to create and induce change can be directed far more purposefully and effectively). Jantsch's specific focuse was on the ways in which technology was being developed and introduced in different countries, the OECD members. Jantsch and the OECD called this issue  "technological planning". Is it only the market? Or is there some way we can more effectively <em>direct</em> the development and use of the rapidly growing muscles of our technology? </p>
+
<p>The book breaks the ice – offers a theme that cannot be refused</p>
<p>So when The Club of Rome (a global think tank, consisting of 100 selected international and interdisciplinary members, organized to do research on the future prospects of mankind, and if the situation demands it also intervene) was about to be initiated, in 1968, it was natural to invite Jantsch to give the opening keynote. </p>
+
<h3>Conversation abut science</h3>
<p>Immediately after the opening of The Club of Rome Jantsch made himself busy crafting solutions. By following him through three steps of this process, we shall be able to identify three core insights, three pieces in our 'elephant puzzle', which we owe to Jantsch.</p>
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<p>Heisenberg – 19th cent. science damaged culture. Can we, in 21st century, do the opposite – and empower culture. Even do the kind of things that were NOT done in the past? </p>
<p>But before we do that, let's put on our map Aurelio Peccei, the [[giants|<em>giant</em>]] whose keen insight and resolute initiative made The Club of Rome and its various achievements and insights possible.</p>
+
<h3>Conversation about religion</h3>
 +
<p>Enlightenment liberated us from... Can it be again? Really conversation about pursuit of happiness...</p>
 
</div>
 
</div>
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Jantsch.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Erich Jantsch]]</center></small></div>
 
 
</div>
 
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 +
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 +
 +
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<p>This [[prototypes|<em>prototype</em>]] 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 <em>already</em> focusing their energies on characteristic contemporary issues; and who have <em>already</em> 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?</p>
 +
<h3>A strategy</h3>
 +
<p>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 [http://www.knowledgefederation.net/Abstracts/ThePS.pdf abstract]:
 +
<blockquote>
 +
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.
 +
</blockquote>
 +
</p>
 +
<h3>A federation of insights</h3>
 +
<p>[http://www.knowledgefederation.net/Misc/ThePSposter.pdf 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|<em>giants</em>]] across fields of interest are combined together into [[threads|<em>threads</em>]], which are then woven together into [[patterns|<em>patterns</em>]]. There are only two, so let's focus on them for a moment.</p>
 +
<p>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 [[patterns|<em>pattern</em>]], 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.</p>
 +
<p>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 [[patterns|<em>pattern</em>]], the [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]], 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|<em>threads</em>]], and thereby also demonstrating some of the [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] 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|<em>homo ludens</em>]]. The <em>homo ludens</em> is the cultural species that is ignorant of – and generally uninterested in – the questions of meaning and purpose. The <em>homo ludens</em> 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".</p>
 +
<p>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 <em>certain things</em> 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 –  namely that the academic tradition too may be suffering in some degree to this same [[homo ludens|<em>homo ludens</em>]] devolution. This little piece of [[polyscopy|<em>polyscopy</em>]]-enabled theory would then postulate the existence of a most curious cultural sub-species, called the <em>homo ludens academicus</em>, which according to common logic should not exist at all. As everyone knows, our social role is to make sure that the biological <em>homo sapiens</em> is evolving as the <em>homo sapiens</em> also culturally.. But we can fulfill that role only to the extent that we ourselves are still on the <em>homo sapiens</em> track! We left the exploration of this most interesting question, of the real-life existence of the <em>homo ludens academicus</em>, to some future conversation.</p>
 +
<p>The question that we offered to the Research in Systemic Design community was to look into <em>their</em> system – which is of course also <em>our</em> 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-life effect. The poster explains how and why this unpleasant situation may result. Shall we take this opportunity and examine carefully what is going on? Or shall we be uninterested, and resume our business as usual?</p>
 +
<p> But if the academic publishing is a paradox and hence not a solution – then in what way <em>can</em> we fulfill our all-important role? The poster presents an answer in terms of a single keyword – <em>bootstrapping</em>. If our own system is no longer suitable for the purpose it needs to achieve – then we need to change it! We need to <em>create</em> new ways to collaborate, and communicate, and achieve impact. But isn't that what we've been talking about here all along?</p>
 +
<h3>A call to action</h3>
 +
<p>The poster both made a call to action – and enabled a suitable response. We invited the RSD community to co-create the poster together with us. The <em>bootstrapping</em> 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 collaboration or federation tool that federates the knowledge of the community – and joins it with the insights of the represented [[giants|<em>giants</em>]], and with our own insights. Our invitation was of course to help co-create both the tool itself and its messages.</p>  </div>
 +
</div>
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----
 
<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2></h2></div>
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   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Liberation dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-6"><h3>We must find a way to change course</h3>
+
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>A dialog for general audiences</h3>
<p>"The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. 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 this in 1980, in One Hundred Pages for the Future, based on this think tank's first decade of research.</p>
+
<p>It is clear that – if we should truly break the bubble created by contemporary media's messages and interests – we need a stronger medicine that what The Paradigm Strategy poster might produce. You might recognize the themes represented there (What strategy may really make it feasible or even easy to resolve the large contemporary issues?) as hugely relevant and interesting – yet they are not what the majority of people are interested in. So how can we break the silence and strike a conversation that matters?</p>
<p>Peccei was an unordinary man. During the WW2 he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months, without revealing his contacts. He later wrote that he was grateful for this experience because it formed him.  Peccei was also an uncommonly able and successful business leader. While serving as the director of Fiat's operations in Latin America, where the cars were not only sold but also produced, he established Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the development of the Third World countries. When the Italian technological giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president; he managed to bring Olivetti up again. And yet the question that most intensely preoccupied Peccei was still much larger than the ones just mentioned – the nature of our civilization's condition, and how this condition was changing.</p>
+
<p>We here put forth a theme that is so close to everyone's socialized identities, which is so loaded with emotions, that it is highly unlikely that it <em>can</em> at all be ignored.</p>
<p>Here is one of the ways in which Peccei later framed the answer (in 1977, in The Human Quality,  his personal reflections on the human condition and his recommendation for handling it):
+
<h3>A meme</h3>
 +
<p>This dialog, and the book that the dialog is about, are technically steps in a federation of a single idea or meme – the essence of the teachings of the Buddha, as interpreted by Thailand's enlightened monk and scholar Ajahn Buddhadasa. This meme is, however, a key piece in the puzzle of the emerging paradigm which links personal interest ("pursuit of happiness") with the societal interest (reconfiguring our society's nuts and bolts to meet the needs and the challenges of our new and changing condition). It's like a piece of magic – linking most snuggly and seamlessly with one another! The following excerpt from a speech heard at the Suan Mokkh forest monastery that Buddhadasa created is found in Liberation's introduction:
 
<blockquote>
 
<blockquote>
Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world.
+
We are living in a world laden with problems that are so new and so complex, that even our best minds hardly have a clue what we might do about them. And here we are offered an insight, or we may also call it a meme, which – if we could bring it back home with us and put it to use in our daily lives and workplaces – would transform our world so thoroughly, that those problems would naturally disappear!
 
</blockquote>
 
</blockquote>
</p></div>
+
</p>
<div class="col-md-3 round-images">[[File:Peccei.jpg]]<br><small><center>[[Aurelio Peccei]]</center></small></div>
+
<h3>A conversation about religion</h3>
 +
<p>It would be difficult to find a theme that better represents, both as an example and as a metaphor, the general societal paradigm shift we've been talking about. "Religion" for most people means believing in something – for ex. that Jesus was "the son of God", or that Muhammed was "the last prophet". Science too means believing in something – which again for many people means believing in something opposite from what the religious people believe. So whether one is pro or against religion, this conversation is bound to arouse strong feelings – because it will challenge the beliefs of <em>both</em> traditional camps. The interlude might be as follows: At the dawn of the Enlightenment the people liberated themselves from a stringent religious worldview to became free to "pursue happiness" here and now. But what if in the process we have misunderstood <em>both</em> religion <em>and</em> happiness? What if at the inception of our great religious traditions we will find a <em>phenomenon</em>, we may even call it "a natural law", which brings with it a possibility to create an incomparably better human life, and society.</p>
 +
<p>The issue here is at the core of the paradigm shift. Sketch: Today our [[religion|<em>religion</em>]] is a combined belief in the naturalness / value of selfishness, which is turned into the best world for all by the survival of the fittest. In this sort of ideology it is difficult to find a place where [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] can truly blossom. And vice versa...</p>
 +
<h3>A conversation about science</h3>
 +
<p>The liberation book quotes a whole page-and-a-half from Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" – the excerpt that tells how the 19th century science created a "narrow and rigid frame of concepts" (a way of looking at the world) which marked not only science but also the worldview of the majority of people. And "how lucky we are" that the modern physics disproved this "narrow frame" and the corresponding worldview. This sets the stage for science giving the people back what is due to them – a broader worldview, that will help them rebuild whatever in culture has been damaged. Heisenberg pointed to religion as <em>the</em> prime candidate.</p>
 +
<p>The "liberation" we are talking about is not only the essence of religion; it is also what may be needed to put science on a new and better track. Buddhadasa talks about "seeing the world as it truly is" as the goal of Buddhism. Athletes work on themselves, on their own material. It appears that the scientists don't need to, that "the scientific method" and being "objective observers" are enough to secure the best results. The nature of human creativity, however, turns out to be something else, not how we see it today (...). The development of creativity, of humans with clear vision, has its dynamic and its "natural laws" that underlie it. Do we know them? Can we harness them?</p></div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
 +
 +
<!--- KF DIALOG
  
 
<div class="row">
 
<div class="row">
   <div class="col-md-3"><h2></h2></div>
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   <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Knowledge federation dialogs</h2></div>
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Planning as feedback, systemic innovation as control</h3>
+
<div class="col-md-7"><h3>Conversation about the prototype</h3>
<p>With a doctorate in physics, it was not difficult to Jantsch to put two and two together and se what needed to be done. If our civilization is on a disastrous course, the reason must be that (as Engelbart put it) the "headlights and braking and steering controls) we have inherited from the past no longer serve their most central purpose. So let's then waste no time, let's get busy creating new ones! Right after The Club of Rome meeting Jantsch gathered a group of creative leaders and systemic thinkers and researchers in Bellagio, Italy, to co-create a draft.  The result was so basic that Jantsch called it "rational creative action". The message is obvious and central to our interest: Certainly there are many ways in which one can be creative. But if our creative action is to be <em>rational</em> – then these essential ingredients must be present in it. </p>
+
<p>Prototype becomes complete when there's a feedback loop that updates it continuously. And when it lives in the community, acting upon how we think and what we do. This conversation will serve both ends.</p>
<p>Rational creative action begins with forecasting, which explores different future scenario; it ends with an action selected to enhance the likelihood of the <em>desired</em> scenario or scenarios. A key role is played by a new social process they called "planning" (notice that this had nothing to do with the kind of planning that was at the time used in the Soviet Union):
+
<p>The prototype, as we have seen, was carefully designed to serve as a paradigm proposal, and as a proof of concept. We motivated our proposal by pointing to three sweeping changes and trends, and to the need to adapt what we do with knowledge to those trends. We then showed how substantial, qualitative, quantum-leap improvements can be achieved within the order of things or paradigm modeled by [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]]:
<blockquote>[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.”
+
<ul>
</blockquote>
+
<li>Regarding the foundations for truth and meaning: We saw how in the new paradigm a foundation can be created that is <em>triply</em> solid: (1) it is a convention – and a convention is true by definition (2) it reflects the epistemological state of the art in science and philosophy; (3) it is a prototype – hence ready to be changed when new insights are reached</li>
Policies, which are the objective of planning (as the authors of the Bellagio Declaration envisioned 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):
+
<li>Regarding the pragmatic side, making knowledge responsive to new needs of people and society: The prototype has that as an explicit goal. The improvements that are possible within it cannot be overstated – and we pointed to them by using various framings such as "the largest contribution to human knowledge", as what we <em>must</em> do to make our civilization sustainable, and as "evolutionary guidance", necessary for meaningfully continuing our cultural and social evolution.</li>
<blockquote>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 institutions and norms which form their homes and castles.</blockquote>
+
<li>Regarding the IT side – we have seen that this technology offers a whole new <em>principle</em> of communication – and hence a new principle of operation to our knowledge work and our institutions. We have seen that this technology was <em>created</em> with that very purpose in mind, with Douglas Engelbart and his lab, and demonstrated in 1968. We have seen that (was it because it did not fit into the prevailing paradigm?) their proposal was not yet even <em>heard</em>.</li>
 +
</ul>
 
</p>
 
</p>
<h3>The emerging role of the university</h3>
+
<p>Thomas Kuhn's view of new paradigms points to "anomalies" and to new possibilities for creative work as distinguishing characteristics. And so, by telling stories or [[vignettes|<em>vignettes</em>]], we could point to large anomalies that were reported a half-century ago by Werner Heisenberg, Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, Douglas Engelbart, Erich Jantsch and very many other [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] without meeting the kind of response that might reasonably be expected. On the side of the new achievements, we showed a large collection of [[prototypes|<em>prototypes</em>]], each pointing to creative challenges and opportunities, and vast possibilities for improvement and achievement, in their specific areas.</p>
<p>The next question in Jantsch's stream of thought and action was roughly this: If "rational creative action" is a necessary new capability that our systems and our civilization at large now require, then who – that is, what institution may be the most natural and best qualified to foster this capability? Jantsch concluded that the university (institution) will have to be the answer. And that to be able to fulfill this role, the university itself will need to update its own system.
+
<p>Is there room for this new academic species at the university? What action should follow?</p>
<blockquote>[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 designing 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 integrated approach to world systems, particularly the ‘joint systems’ of society and technology.” </blockquote>
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<h3>Conversation about transdisciplinarity</h3>
In 1969  Jantsch spent a semester at the MIT, writing a 150-page report about the future of the university, from which the above excerpt was taken, and lobbying with the faculty and the administration to begin to develop this new way of thinking and working in academic practice.</p>
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<p>Knowledge federation defines itself as a [[transdiscipline|<em>transdiscipline</em>]]. Norbert Wiener began his 1948 Cybernetics by describing a pre-war transdisciplinary group of scientists in the MIT and Harvard, discussing the issues of the method. Cybernetics emerged, from Mas as a common language and methodology through which the sciences can share their results across their disciplinary dialects. Mathematica biologist / philosopher Ludwig von Bertalanffy developed the general system theory for a similar purpose. In 1954, at Stanford University,  von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James G. Miller and Anatol Rapoport initiated what later became the International Society for the Systems Sciences. What we've added to these most worthwhile efforts is "the dot on the i", the capacity to turn this into something we the people can understand and be guided by.</p>
<h3>Evolution is the key</h3>
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<p>All these efforts to melt the disciplinary silos and make knowledge freely flowing and accessible to all were by their nature transdisciplinary, of course. Was <em>that</em> reason why they never really met with the kind of response, at our universities, that would give them universal visibility and impact? Similarly, as we have seen, Douglas Engelbart and Erich Jantsch – whom we credit as "founding fathers" of [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] and [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] respectively – found no response at major universities for their ideas. Engelbart liked to tell the story how he left U.C. Berkeley where he worked for a while after completing his doctorate, when a colleague told him "if you don't stop dreaming, and don't start publishing peer-reviewed articles, you will remain an adjunct assistant professor forever." </p>
<p>In the 1970s Jantsch lived in Berkeley, wrote prolifically, and taught occasional seminars at the U.C. Berkeley. This period of his life and work was marked by a new insight, which was triggered by his experiences with working on global / systemic change, and some profound scientific insights brought to him, initially, by Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel laureate scientist who visited Berkeley in 1972. Put very briefly, this involves two closely related insights:
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<p>"The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to form coalitions", Wiener observed in Cybernetics, commenting on the kind of social dynamics that develop in a competitive environment, that was diagnosed by von Neumann's results in game theory. Is the academic discipline such a coalition? Can we evolve the university in a collaborative way, and make it more humane and more useful to our society?</p>
<ul>
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<p>Let's begin by acknowledging that this theme could not be more interesting and relevant than it is. To say this more technically, what we are talking about is arguably <em>the</em> "systemic leverage point" with highest potential impact. Every society has a number of especially creative individuals, who are capable of doing what may seem impossible. The question now is about the ecology by which creative people are empowered to contribute to the core issues of our time – or not.</p>
<li> we cannot – that is, nobody can – recreate the large systems including the largest, our civilization, in any way directly; where we <em>can</em> make a difference – and hence where we must focus on – is their evolution;</li>
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<p>In the conventional order of things, when strengthening the university's usefulness and responsibility or responsiveness to the society is on the agenda, there are essentially two strong voices that are heard: (1) Tighten the funding and the publish or perish, and force the researchers to  prove themselves (or rove the value of their work) on the academic market; let them "publish or perish";  (2) Tighten the funding and make the academic researchers prove themselves on the real-world market; let them survive if they can secure their own funding. We however champion a third possibility – where creative human beings are given the freedom to pursue socially relevant causes. The university that is marked by dialog and collaboration, not strife and competition. While our initiative was largely self-funded (by the enthusiasm and savings of our inspired members), it must also be said that it would have been impossible without at least some of us being on tenured academic positions – and in places such as Japan and Norway where the academic freedom is still valued and carefully protected. We would like to submit to this conversation that <em>more freedom</em> not less is what our general conditions are calling from. The academic "publish or perish" is so obviously "Industrial-age" that we really don't need to say more about that. On the other hand, the university can now take the leadership in the transformation of our society to the extent that it is capable of first of all transforming its own culture and values. It is noteworthy that some of the [[giants|<em>giants</em>]] that initiated [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] and [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] did not find support for their work at the leading universities. Can we do better now?</p>
<li>the living and evolving systems are governed by an entirely different dynamic than physical systems – which needs to be understood</p>
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<h3>Conversation about knowledge federation / systemic innovation</h3>
<p>Jantsch was especially interested in understanding the relationship between our that is, people's values and ways of being, and our evolution. He saw us as entering the "evolutionary paradigm". The title of his 1975 book "Design for Evolution" points unequivocally toward the same direction that we tried to frame  with our four keywords. Specifically [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] we adopted directly from Jantsch.</p></div>
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<p>There are several themes and questions here. Can we give the university the capability of evolving its own system? Can we direct innovation, or creative work, in a systemic way, and help direct our society's evolution? </p>
 +
<p>Another pivotal issue – how do we use the 'muscles' of our technology? In what direction is our capability to create and induce change taking us the people, and our civilization? Can we refine our steering of this centrally important activity?</p>
 +
<p>Essentially this is what Erich Jantsch tried to do. And what Wiener started. And what Engelbart struggled with. The issue is – shall we let uninformed selfishness and competition, streamlined by "the market" or "the survival of the fittest", guide the way we steer and build our systems? And how we use our capability to create? Or do we need freedom, responsibility, information, and knowledge? And if this latter is the case (which we should be able to show beyond reasonable doubt – but leave it open to conversations which will build something even more important – our capability to talk through this important matter) – then what should this information be like? Who will do [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]]? In what way? Jantsch's proposal is of course a starting point. Our various [[prototypes|<em>prototypes</em>]] are another. There is infrastructure being built up at the ISSS and the ITBA. Can we build on those?</p>
 +
</div>
 
</div>
 
</div>
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DOUG DOUG DOUG DOUG DOUG
 
  
<h3>Engelbart's legacy</h3>
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<p>The meaning and the value of everything that Engelbart created, or dreamed of, must be understood in the context just presented.</p>
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-------
<p>Even the technical pieces that he received the credit for, the interactive user interface, collaboration on a distance... Doug experimented with linking people together in a seamless way. With a mouse in the right hand and the chorded keyset in the left, and the eyes fixed on the screen – one does not even need to move his hands to do most of the instant processing...</p>
 
<p>Similarly the Open Hyperdocument System, which was the design philosophy underlying the NLS system that was demonstrated in 1968. People thinking together will not necessarily create... old-fashioned books and articles! Why not let the new hypermedia documents freely evolve, or even better, be loose conglomerations of a variety of media pieces, assembled together according to need... But the Word and the Powerpoint and the email and the Photoshop... – they are all just reproducing the processing of the pre-Web kind of documents. Each in its own document format, not interoperable... Can't create new workflows!</p>
 
<p>And then there are higher-level constructs, quite a few of them. Let's just mention a couple: the Networked Improvement Community (NIC) is a basic new socio-technical system for a (generic) discipline – the B-level improvement activity... But there's another, C level – improving the improvers, organized as a NIC of NICs. But that's exactly what we are calling the [[transdiscipline|<em>transdiscipline</em>]]; and that's quite precisely what the cybernetics, and the systems sciences, are about.</p>
 
<p>It is most interesting in the larger context we are exploring to see that Engelbart developed an original <em>methodology</em> for [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] – already in 1962, i.e. six years before the systems scientists did that in Bellagio! The methodology is based on "augmentation system"... (explain?)</p>
 
<h3>The unfinished part</h3>
 
<p>Engelbart was quite clear that it was a paradigm that he was struggling against. When in the early 1990s he taught the "Bootstrap Seminar" to share his ideas and initiate their implementation, he would begin by talking about the historical paradoxical responses to emerging paradigms. (An example was  IBM's Thomas Watson's prediction that "there is a world market for about five computers".) He would then ask the participants to discuss paradigm-related mishaps and challenges in pairs. Then he would talk more about paradigms.</p>
 
<p>Engelbart also saw an original solution to the Wiener's paradox. He called it [[bootstrapping|<em>bootstrapping</em>]]. The point is to not (only) tell the world how the systems should be, but engage in re-creating systems hands-on. Typically, but not exclusively, this is achieved when the developers of the system use themselves as the initial human part of the system. This idea was the core of Doug's all action in the last two decades of his career. When in the late 1980s he and his daughter Christina created an institute to share his gift to the world, the institute was first called "Bootstrap Institute", and it was later renamed "Bootstrap Alliance". The idea is clear – to bootstrap, the key will be to create alliances with businesses and universities and other institutions, and [[bootstrapping|<em>bootstrapping</em>]] the systemic change together with them.</p>
 

Revision as of 08:47, 17 September 2018

Elephants.jpeg

Even if we don't talk of him directly, the elephant in the picture will be the main theme of all our conversations. Our purpose is to ignite the co-creation of the vision of the emerging paradigm by (1) materializing just enough so that some of its characteristic contours can be discerned and (2) orchestrating the activity of connecting the dots further – which is what these conversations are about.

Changing our collective mind

Changing the subject

You might consider, just as we do, the news about Donald Trump or some terrorists as nothing really new. Why give those people the attention they don't deserve? Why use the media to spread their messages? If you are entertaining such thoughts, then you might be ready for some really good news!

Also five centuries ago an abundance of daily spectacles occupied the people's minds. And yet when we look back, what we see is Leonardo, and Copernicus... We see the rebirth of the arts and the emergence of the sciences. We see those large and slow events because they give meaning and relevance to all particular ones. We notice them even from this distance because they were so spectacularly large – and that's also why the people living at that time failed to notice them! But how much more spectacular will it be to witness this sort of development in our own time!

Although we don't talk about him directly, the elephant in the above ideogram will be the main theme of all our conversations. It is a glimpse of him that we want to give and have by talking about all those people and things. And when we talk about the elephant, you should imagine the exotic large animal appearing in a room full of people – not today, but five centuries ago, when perhaps some of those people had heard of such a creature, but none of them had ever seen one yet. The elephant in the room is a breath-taking sensation! We use this visual metaphor to point to the whole big thing – the Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we will have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And isn't that what we've been doing all along!

Be mindful of our challenge: A paradigm, a new "order of things", is nothing but an immense rearrangement of relationships. There are just about infinitely many dots to be connected! We can not, and will not, try to connect them all. As the above picture might suggest, our goal is to only connect sufficiently many, so that some characteristic contours of the whole big become discernible. And to make further connection making fun and easy, by providing guidelines, and by turning this work into a social game. Yet in spite of all that, you will have to make most of the connections yourself and in your own mind – and that's inevitable!

Changing the protagonists

By shirting our attention from Trump-style scandals and sensations to the elephant, we can also give attention and credit to our giants. We can begin to truly understand what they were talking about. If earlier we heard them talk about all sorts of different things like "the fan", "the hose" and "the rope", we can now see that they were really talking about the elephant's ears, trunk and tail. Given the spectacular size and importance of our 'animal', we will then not only appreciate our giants' insights as a new breed of sensations; we will also appreciate the fact that we've ignored them so long as a new breed of scandals.

"The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. 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 this in 1980, in One Hundred Pages for the Future, based on this global think tank's first decade of research. Regarding the specific way in which the course will need to change, he observed: "The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

Peccei was an unordinary man. In 1944, as a member of Italian Resistance, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months without revealing his contacts. Peccei was also an unordinarily able business leader. While serving as the director of Fiat's operations in Latin America (and securing that the cars were there not only sold but also produced) Peccei established Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the developing countries catch up with the rest. When the Italian technology giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president, and he managed to turn its fortunes around. And yet the question that most occupied Peccei was a much larger one – the condition of our civilization as a whole; and what we may need to do to take charge of this condition.

In 1977, in "The Human Quality", Peccei formulated his answer as follows:

Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world.

Let us note in passing that the all-important insights that were reached by Peccei and The Club of Rome a half-century ago have not been ignored only by "climate deniers", but also by the activists and believers. Already in 1968, at the point of the Club's inception, its founders decided that they would not focus on individual problems, but on the overall condition or "problematique" from which they all spring – which can of course only have systemic and "outside the box" solutions.

Changing the tone

If you hear us knowledge federators sometimes say such off-the-wall Trump-like things as "the climate change is a red herring", we do not mean to belittle the excellent and necessary work of our colleagues. Our point is that the climate, or any other "problem", becomes a red herring when it diverts all our attention from those deeper evolutionary tasks on which our ability to find lasting solutions will now depend.

By focusing on the elephant, we will work on contemporary issues, both large and small, both global and local, without even mentioning them by name! Instead of struggling to coerce the people and systems who created the problems to create solutions, our strategy is to inform and empower us the people, so that we may co-create solutions – i.e. systems – ourselves. Instead of seeing our contemporary condition as a dictate to do what we have to do, we turn it into a mandate to do what we wish to do. What could be a richer source of opportunities for achievement and contribution, than a whole new paradigm that is being born!


The nature of our conversations

We are not just talking

Don't be deceived by this seemingly innocent word, "conversations". These conversations, with which we want to extend and continue our initiative, are where the real action begins; and the real fun.

Elephant.jpg

Our goal is to organize this activity, and foster this collective capability - of federating knowledge or 'connecting the dots' – so that this new guiding vision (the view of the new paradigm, i.e. of the new course of our cultural and systemic evolution) can emerge.

When we say "conversations", we don't mean "only talking". On the contrary! Here truly the medium 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, of our time's important issues. We want to give voice to ideas that matter, and to people who merit our attention. And above all – by developing these conversations, we want to create a manner of conversing that works. We want to re-create our public sphere. We want to change our collective mind so that it can think new thoughts!

The guiding vision we are co-creating together will not only change our understanding of our world, but also the way we handle it. We will no longer be struggling to improve our candles; we will be creating light bulbs.

Conversations merge into one

This simple strategy, to federate a vision, and to self-organize differently, can make any conversation matter. Two people can be conversing across a coffee table; by just recording and sharing what's been said, they can make their conversation be part of this larger one.

What we above all have in mind, however, is to stage public conversations. Conversations that will enrich our large global one with the knowledge and insights of their participants. Conversations that will put important themes into our public sphere. Conversations which, when recorded and shared, will be real reality shows, showing the birth pains of a whole new stage of our evolution.

Dialogs not discussions

This 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. Let's hear what Bohm had to say about this matter.

I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.


Paradigm strategy dialogs

Paradigm strategy

The paradigm strategy dialogs are tailored for informed professionals (academic researchers, social entrepreneurs...) who have already recognized the characteristic global or contemporary issues as context in which strategies and priorities need to be forged; and who have already adopted systemic thinking as methodological foundation. Can we still say something, or better still – can we engage them in a certain new way – that will make a difference?

Here is how we introduced the paradigm strategy at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design RSD6 conference, in 2017 in Oslo.

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, within the current paradigm.

Another metaphor that may explain this strategy proposal is the one we've used already – the construction of a light bulb, as an alternative to trying to improve the candle.

Our presentation was both a strategy proposal, and an intervention into the RSD6 conference as a system. Our goal was to engage this community of academic change makers to transcend the conventional academic lecture and publication conference format, and to self-organize and collaborate in a new way. Our purpose was to apply everyone's collective intelligence toward co-creating an evolutionary guiding light for everyone else – and hence ignite a wave of change. (Yes, this sentence is a mouthful. But just read on, and its meaning will be clear.)

The Paradigm Strategy poster

PSwithFredrik.jpeg

Fredrik Eive Refsli, the leader of our communication design team, jubilating the completion of The Paradigm Strategy poster.

The Paradigm Strategy poster is designed as a way to (1) communicate the paradigm strategy and (2) choreograph a small but significant set of first steps toward self-organization and co-creation of knowledge – and hence into the new paradigm.

The left-hand side, with yellow background, represents the current societal paradigm, that is – the current way of evolving culturally, socially and systemically. The techniques for weaving together core ideas of giants, which were outlined in Federation through Images – vignettes, threads and patterns – are applied to come to the main and central point or gestalt (represented by the circle in the middle), which is the wormhole into the emerging order of things. The right-hand side represents the space where the emerging paradigm is being co-created, by highlighting a small subset of the prototypes that we discussed in Federation through Applications.

In a nutshell, the poster weaves the findings of giants into two patterns – the Wiener's paradox and the homo ludens. The first one (which we discussed briefly in Federation through Stories) is there to show that academic publishing (specifically in systems research, and then also in general) tends to have no effect on public opinion and policy. The second one, the homo ludens, points to the way in which we've been conducting our lives and careers, and evolving culturally and socially – without suitable information and knowledge. (Technically the homo ludens is a pattern, so it must be understood as a way of looking at things, not as "the" reality – as we explained in Federation through Images. The purpose of formulating such 'side views' is to be able to look in a new way, and discuss degenerative tendencies, however small or large they might be.) The messages it conveys are central to our story line, and deserve a paragraph of its own.

The threads

We implement what Vannevar Bush asked for in 1945 – we link ideas and people associatively into threads, which roughly correspond to what Bush called "trails". The threads not only federate ideas (give them strength by linking them together into higher-order units of meaning) – they also add a dramatic effect, by combining the ideas so that they amplify one another. But here we take this process of "upward growth" of knowledge even further, by weaving threads into patterns, and patterns into a gestalt. We'll come back to that in a moment.

The poster presents a small selection of four threads, of which we have already seen one, Wiener – Jantsch – Reagan, in Federation through Stories. And we have seen also how this single thread already allows us to see one of the two patterns on the LHS of the poster, the Wiener's paradox. We here show another straight-forward thread, Nietzsche – Ehrlich – Giddens, which will allow us to already see the second pattern, the homo ludens. And these two patterns will then be all we'll need to reach the pivotal, paradigm-shifting insight.

The thread we want to show you begins with Friedrich Nietzsche looking at modernity from the point of view of digestion:

Sensibility immensely more irritable; the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever; cosmopolitanism in food, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to “digest” anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: The historian, critic, analyst, interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents-all science!

Artificial change of one’s nature into a “mirror”; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, “tempest,” and the play of waves are encountered.“

Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and weariness.“

So take a moment to digest the above excerpt, in the context of its background: What Nietzsche observed, already in 1888, was that an overload of not only information but of impressions of a variety of kinds, is leaving us, modern people, in a state of emotional and cognitive spasm! But let's continue with this thread before we come back to this observation and draw conclusions.

The second protagonist in the thread is Stanford University's famed biologist, environmentalist and "pessimist" Paul Ehrlich. We'll, however, quote here only one of his personal observations we heard him make – that when he was in the 1950s staying with the Inuits as a young researcher, he noticed that every member of the community was able to understand and handle all the community's tools. A woman would perhaps not handle the hunting knife, but she perfectly understood how it works and was able to use it if needed. Compare this with the complexity of your smart phone; you will be challenged not only if we asked you to explain how it's all put together – but even if we would ask you to name all the professions and specialties whose knowledge has been combined to compose the little gadget in your pocket. The point here is that – within just a generation or so – the complexity of our world became practically impenetrable.

Add to this the fact – yes, we have to put it into this picture, it's our main theme after all – that we do not at all have the kind of information that would help us penetrate through this complex reality; that we've indeed used the modern information technology to let everyone just broadcast... and hence to vastly increase the overload of impressions... How do we cope? The third hero of our thread, Anthony Giddens, will help us answer this question. Here is how the famed sociologist formulated the concept "ontological security" in Modernity and Self-Identity:

The threat of personal meaninglessness is ordinarily held at bay because routinised activities, in combination

with basic trust, sustain ontological security. Potentially disturbing existential questions are defused by the controlled nature of day-to-day activities within internally referential systems.

Mastery, in other words, substitutes for morality; to be able to control one’s life circumstances, colonise the future with some degree of success and live within the parameters of internally referential systems can, in many circumstances, allow the social and natural framework of things to seem a secure grounding for life activities.

So we can already see the pattern which we are calling homo ludens – where we have given up knowing and understanding; where we simply learn our profession, and our various other roles as well, as one would learn the rules of a game – and we play our career and other 'games' competitively, to increase (what we perceive as) our personal gain. But let's wait with the discussion of this pattern and its consequences until we've seen some of its deeper sides – which we'll turn to next.

Understanding evolution

We are here of course talking about our socio-cultural or 'software' evolution, which has long ago surpassed our biological or 'hardware' evolution in speed and importance. The homo ludens here is a simplification of the more comprehensive and more precise power structure theory – still good enough to bring the main points across. This here is a sketch of some of the conclusions and consequences, of a deeper analysis where the nature of our socialization is explained by weaving together some of the core insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Damasio, Zygmunt Bauman and other leading researchers in the humanities.

The scope or way of looking here is look at our socio-cultural evolution in two ways instead of just one – which we delineate by the corresponding two keywords, homo sapiens and homo ludens. Although both are always present in degrees or as tendencies, you may think of the homo ludens as a cultural species, which has (most interestingly) been acquiring supremacy in the recent period. The homo ludens has successfully adapted to the social condition where the complexity of our world combined with the overload of information and of impressions in general has made our reality impenetrable. The point is that the homo ludens is not the homo sapiens; he does not seek knowledge or use knowledge. He ignores the larger purpose of his work, and all other larger purposes. Instead, he simply learns his profession as a social role, as one would learn the rules of a game, and plays competitively. The homo ludens is guided by what's been called "social intelligence" – he has his antennas tuned to the "interests" of the powerful players around him; and by accommodating them, he acquires his own power position.

Some consequences of the homo ludens evolution seem worth highlighting:

  • The systems in which we live and work can be arbitrarily misconstrued, wasteful and dysfunctional, without the homo ludens even noticing that.
  • This theory explains why politicians like Donald Trump may raise to highest positions of influence – the homo ludens perceives them, perhaps rightly, as the kind of people who "get the things done" in our present order (or dis-order) of things.
  • The two evolutionary paradigms are – to use Thomas Kuhn's useful keyword – incommensurable (each has its own epistemology, and sees and organizes the world in its own specific way). The homo ludens knows from experience that the homo sapiens is on the verge of extinction; and that one has to be the homo ludens if one should be successful. The homo sapiens looks at the data and the trends, and reaches the opposite conclusion – that the homo ludens must morph into the (cultural) homo sapiens if our civilization, and our species, should have a future.
  • This theory predicts the existence of a most curious cultural sub-species – the homo ludens academicus – which should not at all exist according to conventional logic (isn't the very purpose of the academic institution to guide us along the homo sapiens evolutionary path?). The existence of this subspecies still needs to be confirmed by field research, of course. If, however, this species is discovered in reality, this would explain the un-academic resistance of the academic people to update their own system, when the available knowledge is calling for such updates. The homo ludens ignores the larger societal purpose of his institution. He just sticks to the rules – which provide an "objective" and "fair" frame of reference in which his career game is played.

The next step

What is to be done in this sort of situation? The poster indicates that the key step – from this paradigm into the next – is in the simple act of bootstrapping (we need to re-socialize ourselves, by daring to co-create the systems in which we live and work). A small but significant act of bootstrapping is then choreographed by the poster – which provides an invitation to take part in re-creating the poster itself. A virtual space is provided where the poster is the background, and where one can add verbal and visual comments to its various parts.


Liberation dialogs

Understanding religion

It would be difficult to find a theme that better represents, both as an example and as a metaphor, the general societal paradigm shift we've been talking about. "Religion" for most people means believing in something – for ex. that Jesus was "the son of God", or that Muhammed was "the last prophet". Science too means believing in something – which again for many people means believing in something opposite from what the religious people believe. So whether one is pro or against religion, this conversation is bound to arouse strong feelings – because it will challenge the beliefs of both traditional camps. The interlude might be as follows: At the dawn of the Enlightenment the people liberated themselves from a stringent religious worldview to became free to "pursue happiness" here and now. But what if in the process we have misunderstood both religion and happiness? What if at the inception of our great religious traditions we will find a phenomenon, we may even call it "a natural law", which brings with it a possibility to create an incomparably better human life, and society.

The issue here is at the core of the paradigm shift. Sketch: Today our religion is a combined belief in the naturalness / value of selfishness, which is turned into the best world for all by the survival of the fittest. In this sort of ideology it is difficult to find a place where systemic innovation can truly blossom. And vice versa...

A conversation about science

The liberation book quotes a whole page-and-a-half from Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy" – the excerpt that tells how the 19th century science created a "narrow and rigid frame of concepts" (a way of looking at the world) which marked not only science but also the worldview of the majority of people. And "how lucky we are" that the modern physics disproved this "narrow frame" and the corresponding worldview. This sets the stage for science giving the people back what is due to them – a broader worldview, that will help them rebuild whatever in culture has been damaged. Heisenberg pointed to religion as the prime candidate.

The "liberation" we are talking about is not only the essence of religion; it is also what may be needed to put science on a new and better track. Buddhadasa talks about "seeing the world as it truly is" as the goal of Buddhism. Athletes work on themselves, on their own material. It appears that the scientists don't need to, that "the scientific method" and being "objective observers" are enough to secure the best results. The nature of human creativity, however, turns out to be something else, not how we see it today (...). The development of creativity, of humans with clear vision, has its dynamic and its "natural laws" that underlie it. Do we know them? Can we harness them?


Knowledge federation dialogs

A theme that matters

The theme is about the organization, role, direction... of creative work – innovation in the commercial world, research in the academia... And specifically about the organization, purpose and direction of development of knowledge work.

The rationale is that this – innovation, and knowledge work – is what drives and gives the direction to our society's evolution, or as Engelbart framed it the "common economic-political vehicle" in which we ride into the future. The crux of our proposal is that we need a public dialog about the direction in which this key system has been evolving, and most importantly about the way it may now need to be evolving – so that our direction, or evolution, may acquire a new direction. This is the new leadership role of the university that Jantsch has been talking about a half-century ago.

But we won't be only talking. We strike this conversation by presenting a prototype. This allows us to avoid talking about how to improve the 'candle' – and begin talking about how to create the 'light bulb'.

Notice that this public conversation, about the prototype presented on these pages, at the same time completes the prototype. Our proposal is for a knowledge-work system that is capable of self-reflecting and evolving – by engaging everyone's insights, or our 'collective intelligence', to co-create an (as Bela H. Banathy called it) "evolutionary guidance system" that can guide us toward a good, desirable or meaningful future.

An academic result of a new kind

An academic reader may have recognized that our knowledge federation presentation on these pages is in fact a careful presentation of – and a case for – a new paradigm in creative work. On the front page we motivated this proposal by three changes that developed during the past century (in our understanding of epistemology, what knowledge and meaning are all about; in information technology; and in societal needs). We provided four pages that elaborated the details, where we showed how the knowledge federation prototype

  • provides a new methodological foundation for creating truth and meaning, which allows us to repair the reported fundamental anomalies and align knowledge work with contemporary needs of people and society
  • provides a platform for taking advantage of contemporary information technology that fixes the core anomaly we have in this domain – namely that the information technology we have was created to enable re-configuring of knowledge work that we are calling knowledge federation, and yet we used the technology to merely re-implement the old patterns that emerged based on the printed text (or to use Engelbart's metaphor – he created the technology to give our 'vehicle' a whole new source of illumination, the light bulb – and we used this technology to merely recreate the candles)
  • provides exactly the kind of information, the "evolutionary guidance" that can help us "change course" – by doing no more than just taking advantage of the knowledge we already own (by fitting the pieces into the new emerging reality, the metaphorical elephant, instead of fitting the pieces in an old and outdated paradigm – and throwing away or ignoring whatever fails to fit in

Thomas Kuhn pointed to two key characteristics of a new paradigm: It (1) resolves the reported anomalies and (2) opens up a new frontier to research. We have seen in the first two modules, Federation through Images and Federation through Stories, how the new approach to knowledge resolves a variety of anomalies – core research insights that were reported but never really integrated into daily live, or even into academic praxis! We showed how knowledge federation can dissolve those anomalies and provide a vast frontier for new kinds of results, and new kinds of interventions into our academic and social reality (Federation through Applications and Federation through Conversations).

And so we are now able to submit to this conversation our paradigm proposal as a way to enable, or trigger, a sweeping change – by doing no more than what we anyway need to do, namely align knowledge work with the relevant knowledge. Self-reflect and act. Use the academic mirror to create an even larger mirror where we the people may see the world we are creating, and ourselves in it – and adapt our way of being in the world accordingly.

A conversation that matters

With this we are opening a dialog that truly matters – the one about the role, the organization and the evolution of the university. "[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing society's capability for continuous self-renewal", Erich Jantsch wrote in 1969. And he gave a concrete proposal, how the university needs to be organized to fulfill this role. We now undertake to extend his proposal by an entire paradigm – and to reinvigorate this most timely conversation.

If we understand that we cannot and should not trust "the market" to turn our candles into light bulbs (give us institutions or systems that are capable of using the new technology and the best of our work and intentions toward our true benefit) – then it must strike us as to put it mildly ironic that the only institution that is publicly sponsored to allow people to be freely creative has organized itself according to the survival of the fittest model (which is here called "publish or perish"). And yet – whatever has remained of true academic freedom has made this work presented here possible. We now want to offer our prototype and our related experience as an experiment – or as a model 'light bulb' – to ignite the next step of our society's illumination.

Can university reform itself and provide the most needed leadership role? We believe that it can, and that it has to. By creating this conversation that matters, we hope to give a new impetus to this most needed evolutionary direction

See

The dialog

David Bohm saw the "dialogue" as simply what we must do in order to shift our present paradigm (or put even more simply "what we must do") – see On dialogue. Two volumes edited by Banathy and Jenlink deepened and refined our understanding – download a copy of one of them here. Bohm's dialogue is a slow and completely unguided process. We experimented with turning Bohm's dialog into a 'cyclotron' by increasing vastly its energy – see the project's web site.

Issue Based Information Systems were conceived in the 1960s by Horst Rittel and others to enable collective understanding of complex or "wicked" issues – see this Wikipedia page. Dialog mapping tools such as the IBIS / Compendium, and Debategraph have been conceived to empower people and communities to tackle "wicked problems" of people to co-create knowledge – and even to turn the usual debate into a genuine dialog. See Jeff Conklin's Dialog Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.

The Paradigm Strategy

Poster, abstract, blog post

The Liberation

Book introduction; background in blog posts Garden of Liberation and Science and Religion