STORIES

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Information technology and contemporary needs

Liberating and directing creative work

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.

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.

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.


The nature of our stories

Our stories illustrate a larger point

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, 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.

How to lift up an idea of a giant

The stories we'll tell, which are technically called vignettes, are part of our technical portfolio. They help us lift up core insights of giants from undeserved anonymity. Vignettes are engaging, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories. They are 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 their field, and give them the interest and the visibility they deserve. Show that they are sensational, and make them a subject of conversations. And thereby also, of course, give them the power of impact the ways in which we think and act.

By joining vignettes together into threads, and threads into patterns and patterns into a gestalt – we can create an overarching view of our situation, which shows how the situation might (need to) be handled.


The incredible history of Doug

How the Silicon Valley failed to hear its giant in residence

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

Douglas Engelbart, the main protagonist of our story, is not only knowledge federation's iconic progenitor or "patron saint" – to quite a few of us he has also been an exemplar and a revered friend. Among us we call him just "Doug". So we'll continue this tradition to a degree also here on these pages.

Engelbart too stood on the shoulders of giants

It is in fine agreement with the nature of this telling to also at least mention the giants on whose shoulders Engelbart was standing. We'll here mention only one – because he too deserves to be lifted up as an icon, as a scientist who pointed, and most authoritatively, to the strategic value of this line of work that Engelbart initiated, and that we've undertaken to continue.

Vannevar Bush was the giant who most vividly and from an authoritative position pointed to the urgent need for (what we are calling) knowledge federation – already in 1945!

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

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

Engelbart's epiphany

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

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

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

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

Engelbart's vision

What is it that Engelbart saw? How important is it? Why was he not understood?

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

Doug-4.jpg

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

Around 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.

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.

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.

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.

The 20th century printing press

The printing press is a suitable metaphor for explaining the role of Engelbart's insight and inventions, in the context of our larger interest – connecting the dots in an image of a contemporary Renaissance-like or Enlightenment-like development; and shedding a guiding light toward that development. Gutenberg's invention is sometimes mentioned as the main factor that led to the Enlightenment – by making knowledge sharing incomparably more efficient. What invention might play a similar role today?

"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 by his very first slide. "But we've also got to change our way of thinking." Doug's second slide pointed to systemic thinking as the missing ingredient. His third slide was there to explain exactly why. So let's look closer into each of its three paragraphs; you will find this exercise well worth the time.

The first paragraph sets the stage for Doug's core discovery.

Many years ago I dreamed that digital technology could greatly augment our collective human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems.
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".

The second paragraph frames the core of Engelbart's vision.

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.
"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 instantly 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 already 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 – completely new processes become possible. And as we shall see – also necessary!

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 scientifically 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 broadcast information! Would you be confused? Well that's exactly the condition in which the development of information technology has brought us to.

The third paragraph points to the unfulfilled part, which remained only a dream.

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.
Technological and 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".

The incredible part

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.

The other incredible point is that he tried for more than a half-century to explain his insight to the Silicon Valley – and failed!

So here is one of the reasons why we found this story to be worth telling. Why we told it, for example, as a springboard story at the very inception 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 – may actually be not only possible but also far easier; something that the Silicon Valley failed to achieve or even understand – owing to the idiosyncrasies of its entrepreneurial culture.


Wiener's paradox

Publishing had no effect

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

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

What we have is a paradox

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

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

The solution is bootstrapping

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

Doug's last wish...


The future has already begun

Be the systems you want to see in the world

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

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

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

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

We came to build a bridge

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

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

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

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


YYYYYYY

Innovation 2.0

The system

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

System.jpeg

System ideogram

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

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

Changing scales

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

The next industrial revolution?

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


See

Evangelizing systemic innovation.

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

Evangelizing knowledge federation.

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

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

The incredible history of Doug continues

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

Unraveling the mystery

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

HEY but this is really the whole point!!!

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