Power corrupts

I think it corrupts deeply and instantly, in ways we often don't notice. And sometimes it becomes more obvious.

In the last 24 hours I've meed made aware of this, by Boing Boing: G20 police uses arrested student as trophy in group photo

... and this from Rob Paterson: Bra girl charged for posing as a Pc | More Heavy Hands?

Thank god that technology may help us see what is going on a little more clearly, however disturbing it may be.

More us and them...

Us and Them continues to engage my attention, as David Berreby explores how the mind codes information about our experience. Whenever I engage with this subject, I'm struck by the complexity of what goes on inside each of our heads as we make sense of the world. For instance, it's fascinating to see how the mind processes the raw stimulus sent by the eyes to present a stable image from the upside down, jiggly data hitting the back of our retina as we move through the world.

He cites historian Derek de Solla Price who shows how even the metaphors we use to describe the workings of our mind have changed over time, reflecting the prevalent technology. Plato compared the mind to a chariot; Freud uses images of pressure emotions blocked or directed, consistent with the age of industrial machinery. The age of computers gave us metaphors from cybernetics, and now in the age of the internet, the latest thinking sees the mind as a network...

... A network in which everything is connected to everything. People who have seen a picture of rotting food judge someone's ethical lapse more harshly; those who have heard the name "Michael Schumacher" write more quickly than a control group. A team of experimenters pose as mental patients by claiming to hear inner voices; after being admitted they report no more voices, but their everyday behaviour is now seen by psychiatrists as evidence of illness (so walking around becomes neurotic pacing).

As with so much of the science around this, the comforting idea that we are individually captains of our own ship starts to look distinctly dodgy.

Five chapters in, I can highly recommend this book!

Us and Them

Stephen Fry repeated an old geek joke the other day:

"The world is divided into 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don’t." Pause to allow you to wipe the tears of helpless laughter from your weeping eyes.

I've been slowly making my way through Us and Them - Understanding Your Tribal Mind, by David Berreby.

Berreby explores the myriad ways in which we humans like to sort each other. Black, white, asian, red state, blue state, soccer mom etc etc. We do it all the time, mostly barely noticing, and with vast impact on how we experience the world. As the jacket blurb says

Everyone is a part of many groups at once, of course - you might be a woman, a parent, a Republican, an American, and a Hindu. So how do we decide which identities matter? Why to they matter so much? What makes people willing to die, or to kill, for a religion, nation, race or caste?

In the early chapters, Berreby patiently examines many of the categories we casually use today, and unravels them. We like to speak of, say, the French as a solid category that goes back down the generations. But close examination reveals that somehow it includes Sarkozy (who's Hungarian by birth) as well as Joan of Arc.

This apparently homogenous category turns out to be wildly heterogenous, a complexity our marvellous minds delete in order to get through the day.

I was shocked and fascinated by his examination of Tutsi and Hutu, one of the most destructive categorisations in history. It appears that these "tribes" are not some ancient adversaries, but an a byproduct of a century of colonial history. He gives many examples of categories that possessed us in the past but have vanished today, and of others today that would make no sense to our forebears. These safe boxes turn out to vague and impermanent.

Here's how he puts it:

Given that we are capable of changing classification systems all the time, why bless certain categories - like race or nation or religion - with permanent relevance?.... It's not "good statistics" that make us do this. Quite the opposite. We don't gather statistics and then make human kinds; we begin with human kinds and than go out and measure.

...Human kinds are convincing when others are convinced, not only because we want to conform but also because, as a practical matter, people's beliefs organize their lives and thoughts.

We use categories as if they are based on reality, but this is sleight of mind.

We drift into essentialism, seeing as innate in people a quality that's in reality is based on filters in our minds. (Reminds me of my favourite cognitive bias.) And when we make our problems of ones of identity we tend to become rigid and defensive. As Berreby writes,

If you want to believe you're connected with all your fellow Hindus, or Tutsis, or Americans, dead and alive, because of a shared essence in all of you, then you might find the thought that everything was different fifty years ago to be a problem.

Our boxes shape our world in immeasurable ways, but so far Berrebey's work ignites in me a sense of wonder and a glimpse of a unity that joins us all together.

Connecting

Dave Pollard's weekly round up of links reminded me (via Sheri Herndon) of this bit of wisdom from Meg Wheatley:

In order to improve the health of a system, connect it to more of itself

Watch this

Thanks to Alex Kjerulf for pointing to this remarkable story.

Peer pressure, inverted

I'm a sucker for stories of psychological experiments, especially ones containing the word ostensibly. You know, the ones where the subjects think the experiment is about one thing but really it's about something else altogether.

Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily reports one such: We're more likely to behave ethically when we see rivals behaving badly. Ok, the samples sizes don't seem that big but the pattern is fascinating if it's true. It appears people will cheat less if they see a rival (eg member of rival university) cheating.

LOL. Mark can add that to his collection of herd effects.

Nurturing ideas?

I'm just chucking a few small specks of mud at a very big wall here. These loosely related thoughts are on my mind this afternoon.

At the end of a group the other day, I asked everyone to sum up their experience in about a dozen words. (The day had been spent on an innovation project.)

I was struck by the healthy diversity of responses and enthusiasms, the light and shade in each participant's short statement. Also, throughout the day, I'd been sensing that people were sometimes negating the ideas of others with comments like "It's been done before"; "You'd not get funding for that" etc. Can't blame them; there's a reality in organisations that ideas have a tough childhood and very few make it out of nappies.

My few words were "It's easy to have ideas. It's easy to kill ideas. It's important to nurture them". And I've been thinking about nurture a lot since then.

Someone told me today of a study in Sweden which showed that some babies' wiggle their fingers playfully in the amniotic fluid during pregnancy. But other babies clench them tight. And there was a correlation suggesting that the mothers of the tight-fingered babies were more likely to be experiencing abuse in the home. It took my breath away to be reminded how intimately we affect each other, and how sensitive we humans really are. How we nurture, or fail to nurture, each other can have profound consequences.

Then I went and googled "evaluate ideas" and turned up 42,400 entries. Then I tried "nurture ideas" and turned up....5,920.

I'm left reflecting further on what a nurturing mindset for ideas would look and feel like, and how we might try to keep language about business cases and deliverables out of the nursery a bit longer.

I'd vote for Jack

My good friend Jack Yan blogs today that he's standing for Mayor of Wellington. He's got some pretty sensible ideas in his manifesto (including free wifi!) and I'd sure be voting for him if I lived there!

Sometimes, copying can't be helped

I'm thinking about grabbing a fresh, juicy lemon, and biting straight into it.

Just the thought makes things happen inside my mouth... and I suspect things are happening inside your mouth too. It's a mirror neuron thing; we can't help but copy each other. (As Mark has been exploring for some time now)

Anyhow, this morning I saw an ad on the tube for the law society. It was about finding a good lawyer and had the headline "Help, I need somebody". And elsewhere was the line "not just anybody".

I noticed that a significant area at the bottom of the poster was used to attribute these words to Lennon and McCartney and acknowledge the rights of various big companies to them.

Well, I'd expect lawyers to be super-careful and I'm sure this is legally wise.

Any yet.. releasing a catchy lyric into the atmosphere is in some ways like biting on a lemon. People won't be able to help themselves picking it up and carrying it. I feel sad that a passing reference to a tune over 40 years old still requires this kind of boilerplate, and at some level I think it diminishes us as a society. I don't have any simple answers to any of the tangled issues this raises, but I just think things have gone a bit far.

Leadership in a self-organising world

Harrison Owen created, or maybe he just channelled, the Open Space process many years ago. He says he did so in two martinis and 20 minutes - pretty productive for a process that's been used hundreds of thousands of times around the world.

Here's Harrison talking about the paradox of leadership in a self-organising world. It's fabulous stuff. He serves his metaphorical liquor 100% proof and with great charm. I certainly feel challenged to up my game in future when talking about this stuff.

Harrison Owen - Talk I - Leadership in a Self-Organizing World from Harold Shinsato on Vimeo.

A few notes I made along the way - the meaning I made and not a transcript so your mileage may vary:

There is no such thing as a closed system
Management science is an attempt to manage systems as if they are closed
Management professors have tenure, business authors have books and managers have status which gives them a big investment in the notion of the closed system

There's no such thing as a non-self-organising system, only people deluded that they are organising it.

We do not get to decide whether to be in a self-organising system, that decision was made 13 billion years ago.

We're all surfers in a self-organising world. Some of us prefer the beach, and some of us think we're in charge of the wave. The challenge is to be in the flow of the wave.

Hat tip: Dave Pollard

Free tutoring

Following my post about disintermediating education, I was interested to see that the Khan Academy has posted over 800 videos on Youtube teaching algebra, economics etc etc. When course content is as free as this, it creates exciting challenges for educational institutions to create value for students elsewhere.

Hat tip: Dan Colman on the excellent Open Culture blog.

The power of less

Viv has a great post inspired by Matthew May's book on Elegance. Here's a snippet, but I recommend the whole thing.

We humans seem to be hard-wired to believe that more must be better. Adding. Vitamin C is good for us so lots of Vitamin C must be better. Nope. Some food is good, so lots is better. True, when we were hunter-gatherers, not so much today. Some information is good, so more must be better. Just ask anyone who has tried to implement a change by providing more information,or even a compelling case...

We’re also hard-wired to do something. Acting. Just look at how much emphasise we place on busy-ness, and on multi-tasking.

Therefore: "We mistakenly pose the question 'What should we do?' before asking 'What is possible?' We want a solution but we don’t want the patience to wait for the optimal one, favouring implementation over incubation."

Oh, wow. I can just imagine many people being horrified. Those same people who crave control. And certainty.

Where the tech power lies...

In recent years a profound switch has taken place in who has the technological advantage. Not so long ago, it was big organisations - government and corporations - that had the resources to lay their hands on the most sophisticated systems.

Yet in recent years, mired in regulation and bounded by cost, their systems have become cumbersome. Most people working in corporates wait months or years for upgrades to clear the IT department. People have to go through hoops to get some new app added to their system. Meanwhile, at home, it's not that hard or expensive for many of us to get the latest thing.

Where organisations require big technological firewalls, as individuals we can be nimbler, make more personal judgements for good or ill, and network very easily.

The tech advantage is now with the customer, not the corporation. The smartest network bypasses the corporate hierarchy. I think the significance of this has yet to be fully experienced.

And in his recent video, Tom Guarriello made another telling point: even when we're inside the corporate firewall, many of now have in our hands our own private computer - so what use is it the firm trying to ban us from facebook, or whatever?

Disintermediating education

Grant McCracken reflects on how universities might get disintermediated: basically so that the process of learning is completely separated from accreditation. I think a networked world offers people incredible flexibility and low cost to find information about what interests them, and many education bodies make that process relatively bureaucratic.

There are some interesting comments - one looks at the model of musical performance, where accreditation is completely separated from instruction.

At any stage, you are only judged on your performance (or knowledge) on the day you do the exam. You are not assessed on HOW you learnt, or who taught you, or what classes you attended or did not attend, over what period, or how long you took to learn

Do less

"We’re so lucky we don’t have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself."

The voice of Thomas Mahon, quoted in one of Hugh's latest posts. He's talking about how his tailoring business took off through blogging.

I think that's a radical perception of branding, and creates quite a challenge to anyone who sees themselves as a brand manager.

It reminds me a precept of facilitation: get out of people's way and they'll organise themselves more intelligently than you can.

It's also taps into thoughts I've been having lately about the circle of concern/circle of influence model. Regular readers will know I'm not a huge fan of models but this one is simple and carries some wisdom, despite some pedantic reservations of mine*

So often, I see stress caused when we try to manage conerns that are truthfully beyond our individual reach. A huge amount of brand building fails because it gets ahead of itself with grandiose ideas of when can be achieved. An awful lot of wasted effort goes into designing meetings and expecting fixed outcomes to be reached on a predetermined timetable - an approach that denies the participants the ability to organise themselves more subtly and enthusiastically.

* Circles with sharp boundaries suggest a neatness that's missing in the real world; we might do better to think of fuzzy, irregularly shaped areas. With some animation to show that even the fuzzy boundaries are moving.

Creepy advert watch

Lloyd had a bit of a rant yesterday. He'd seen an ad for Stella Artois saying if you bought their special pack of their beer, they'd plant a hedge for you in the countryside. His reaction is understandable:

If you really want to grow a hedge in the countryside, why don’t you just go and do that, rather than making people pay for your poisonous and habit-forming liquor and then spending money trying to make them feel good about you by doing something entirely unconnected so that they’ll buy more.

Yes, if I really want to do something for the countryside, wouldn't it be more efficient to go direct rather than using a beer company as my agent?

There's been a huge growth in this kind of promotion as Corporate Social Responsibility has taken off in recent years. I saw an ad yesterday for British Gas saying they are sending all their customers a ticket for a free family swim, somehow connected with their sponsorship of British Swimming. I don't want to sound sanctimonious but this stuff feels creepy to me. It's a little like strangers offering sweeties to our children.

Going round in circles

I often like to host meetings with people sitting in a circle. It means everyone can see everyone else, and it avoids inadvertently giving too much status to any particular individual. As I sometimes say, it's the best way I know to organise furniture without reinforcing hierarchy.

That's not to say that groups don't arrive with plenty of inbuilt hierarchies, but at least the circle can defuse it a little.

I've worked in circles as a host and participant for many years and been present to some pretty amazing and moving experiences in them. So I'm biassed, and I try to be careful to recognise that some people may find the experience uncomfortable.

This sometimes shows up in little quips about Alcholics Anonymous, and I guess that for many people circles may suggest something thereapeutic in which there's an obligation to reveal yourself.

AA references aside, I think sitting in a circle does increase our exposure and does mean we are more vulnerable - compared to the option of sitting on the back row, for instance. Circles lessen the sense that someone is in charge and that may be unsettling too.

All else being equal, I like to leave people to participate in circular discussions as the spirit moves them, rather than by rote. But I've learnt that often it's more comfortable, especially early in meetings, to get people to speak (for instance to introduce themselves) in order. And/or to get folks to form pairs or small groups to discuss and then feed back.

But without making it a dogma, I generally feel most excited in groups where we don't organise a set order for speech, and when it seems that everyone is willing to engage spontaneously. That's when I think we get closer to the sense of a group having a mind that is more than just the sum of the individual minds.

I say engage, rather than speak, because the easiest thing in the world when facilitating, is to panic around people who don't say much. Again when I sense a conversation is rocking, it's because there's some committed listening going on.

The source of uniqueness

Leonara of Treehugger reflects on this year's Do Lectures. Lots of good stuff, and this line particularly caught my eye:

Do Lectures are simply unafraid of being copied because they all know that what they are doing is completely unique and they are the very best at doing what they do. Everything else is just a pale imitation.

I wonder if the world might be a better place if we focussed more energy on that, than on protecting intellectual property?

Hat tip: Alan Moore

Time pressure

They say that creativity loves constraints, but experience suggests it's not easy to know which ones it really loves and which it wouldn't take to the prom.

Keith Sawyer reports some interesting research into the question: Do tight deadlines make you less creative? As with all such research, the answer isn't completely straightforward, but mostly, it's no they don't. The slightly more detailed answer is that some time pressures do work but only for certain people.

There's often pressure in meetings and workshops to get to defined outcomes on a defined schedule. This research confirms my view that this can be quite toxic to creativity. Keith's done a lot of research (see his book, Group Genius) on things like brainstorming which also suggests that intensity is much less productive than letting folks work reflectively and often on their own.

Innovation, disruption, control etc

This is a more than averagely rambling post, but when I read Alan Moore's thoughts about about innovation, it fired off a few too many synapses for a really coherent response.

Author Alan Bennett, once wrote that ordinary people can be instruments of the sublime when a situation arises which they must confront and engage with.

Bob Geldof made a similar point at a NESTA bash a few months back, where he said innovation happens naturally in response to strong need, linking Ireland's dire poverty to its subsequent reputation for innovation.

This is a hobbyhorse for me as I think so many innovation processes are simply toxic to creating conditions in which people feel moved to acknowledge real needs. Bureaucracies flourish by subordinating spontaneous human responses and awareness to standardised systems. Organisational hierarchy means we're going to be guarding our status before we share anything resembling our vulnerability.

And for me, the very phrase "innovation process" verges on oxymoronic; innovation goes with disruption and disruption is what processes (typically) endeavour to eliminate.

On top of this, as Alan argues, once an idea has been generated in response to need, it's quite likely to take on a life of it's own. It's not linear. So the Tour de France was invented by L'Equipe to maintain sales but went on to become something altogether bigger. Money bonds in Italy were devised to support internecine wars but evolved into a banking system. And there's an extended story debuking the somewhat preposterous idea that Westminster is the "mother of parliaments". In an earlier post I cited how the initiator of disruption is often not the main beneficiary.

All of which further challenges people's claims to be able to manage innovation. Yet claims to be the transformative agent are rife - even among folks who've been on the whole Web 2.0 bandwagon for a long time, who talk about radical change and then seem to imply that they know how to organise the whole thing for their big name clients.

Al is writing in the context of a discussion with Euan about coercion:

There are no conscripts in the networked society, only volunteers, said Euan quoting Drucker, and he additionally observed that coercion is a very poor way to inspire people to deliver their very best work inside organisations.

I like to talk about "coalitions of the willing" as a way of thinking about how to get things done in a networked world.

How to relate to people without coercion is certainly a question to live in rather than answer. I do a lot of work with Open Space which heads in that direction and gets to some interesting places. One of its challenges is that quite often, when conventional structures for doing stuff are weakened, we're faced with slightly scary realisation that we may not actually know what we really want to do. Some practitioners call it "freedom shock", and one way to deal with it is to demand structure so we don't have to sit with the awful ambiguity.

(A client who was going to run his own Open Space was chatting with me about how to do it and we got on to the subject of lunch. Specifically, whether it should be inside or outside. He wondered if he should set a guideline "so things don't descend into chaos". I teased him that if he really thought people having different ideas of where to eat their lunch was chaos, he needed to get out more.)

My own view is that we can do without far more of our organisational rituals than we think without genuine chaos descending, because there are loads of unconscious signals and markers by which human beings manage to share space. We're usually too busy thinking, planning and organising to notice, but in moments of silence and peace I think we can sense something holding us together way more exciting and energetic than any organisational diagram.

One way of thinking about this appears recently in Dave Snowden's blog. He writes about drivers and modulators. If we let go of the idea of being drivers or needing to drive, we may come to see what we may all be modulators, who have influence but not control, who are connected to the system and not outside it.

I emphasised the not being outside as I think the sense of being outside the system is connected an awful lot of misery we impose on ourselves or others. Misery for us, if it means we feel we don't belong and are powerless: we're under this system. Misery for others, if we think we understand the system and are therefore able and entitled to control it: We're above this, you see.

(I often think when someone draws a diagram to explain a human system they inevitably, if unintentionally, place themselves outside it and probably above it.)

The trouble with stuff

Often at the end of a lively open space, there are participants who say things would have been better with more structure, and/or express anxiety that things may have happened in conversations that they don't know about. Both these thoughts strike me as related to a scarcity world view where ideas are hard to come by, and need to be nailed down rapidly so as not to be scattered to the winds.

With this goes a desire for reporting which often turns out to be about proving to an absent boss that the day was not a waste of time.

I wonder if we could call it Golden Egg Thinking... the obsession with knowledge "capture", intellectual "property", identifying "deliverables".

In the fairytale, they kill the golden goose, but in organisations I think we often don't actually think about where the goose is... because we're so anxious/overexcited about the eggs.

What people seem to like about Open Space is the freedom it gives them to spend time as they please, and they're often pleasantly suprised how productive they find the conversations they join. I sometimes think it's this abundance that triggers the anxiety for structure: this energy is so unaccustomed that surely we must balance it out with some bureaucracy to keep it in check? I'm even tempted to suggest the call for "action points" is a kind of neurotic desire to deny the alarming amount of energy and action that is manifesting...

Anyhow, I was very pleased to find this delightful 10 minute Youtube of my mate Roland Harwood saying stuff that feels closely related. Asked to talk about "Objects of Desire" he declined to pick an object at all, in favour of the importance of waves. Here's a little of how he describes his thinking:

I've never been a big fan of owning 'stuff'. I prefer to live and travel light. I'd much prefer to have access to things I want, when I want them, rather than owning stuff which is why I love services like Streetcar (the pay as you go car) and Spotify (allows access, not ownership, of tonnes of music). And I get the feeling I'm increasingly not alone... And yet most businesses and organisations I speak to are overly dominated by product/object based thinking; a legacy of the 20th Century rise of mass industrialised business models pioneered by Henry Ford et al.

I had a great chat with Roland the other day where we shared our experiences of meditation, and I think we share a fascination with how the idea of the the unmanifested and the paradoxes involved in its relationship to the manifest.