Wisdom in diagnosis, then, involves not only deep knowledge about human biology and an understanding of the array of diseases that plague humankind but also knowledge and understanding about how the mind works in coming to conclusions. Discerning when these biases are operating in our minds is called metacognition, the ability to think about our thinking. The attribute of humility is embodied in the concept of metacognition; we recognize that our minds are imperfect, that there are limits to the validity of our assumptions, that we are subject to biases, and that therefore we must have the sharp sense to doubt our judgments and question whether we considered everything that should have been considered.

From “The Best Medicine” at In Character, by Harvard’s Jerome Groopman, M.D.

The essay focuses on the effects of cognitive bias in medical diagnoses (and why they’re bad). The practice of monitoring biases is important for any type of decision. It’s an essential aspect of open/conceptual’s “meta factors” discipline.

Designers and marketers (not to mention politicos and entertainers) have become adept at manipulating these biases in consumers and users, but I wonder how many are aware of how their own biases may affect the design process itself — or simply the question of which problem to solve…

Here is the book the launched the “heuristics & biases” paradigm and here is a list of cognitive biases that have probably influenced things you’re working on right now.

If you want some practice, try joining the discussion at Less Wrong for a few days.

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Think of it as building on the field of human factors — applied not just to subjects and potential users but to the researchers and designers themselves.

It involves:

• ideas about our ideas
• methods for evaluating methods
• the discipline of developing new disciplines…

The term is new but the idea & practice are as old as philosophy. In a sense, meta factors is philosophy — stripped of its historical connotations and rendered more effective for today’s challenges & opportunities.

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Along with re-designing the website (yet again) and working on identity & positioning there are a few other things currently happening.

The first is that I’ll be speaking about “digital democracy” as part of Media Awareness Week at London’s Central Public Library. That’s November 5. There’s a promotional poster here, the library’s listing is here, and there’s more info on the content of the talk here.

Then you’ll find me trying to pull-off a somewhat more exuberantly original presentation at the SMarts (Social Media for the Arts) Conference at Museum London. That’s Saturday November 14 and there’s more info here — but I’m keeping everything to do with the talk itself very quiet for now.

There’s also a new reading group coming together in London to brainstorm & critique the practical implications of some high profile ideas pertaining to social media. I’m personally looking forward to those discussions and hope to learn not just from the books but from the collaborative experience.

Meanwhile I’m trying to put together a document — a book, hopefully — outlining the philosophical background behind all of this… Challenging but fun.

And with that you’ll see very soon some clearer descriptions of the Open Conceptual enterprise model, as well as its related practices and methodologies. Once everything is a little more formalized we can get on with really putting it into action and seeing exactly what works and what opportunities there are for improvement.

As of now there’s a lot to be done but the site should be ship-shape by the end of this weekend. Once that’s settled there will be more content coming through here — and more genuine action emanating from that.

Big thanks for your patience and support.

-Brian

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You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical cable.

So, is trading faster than any human can react truly worrisome?

The rest is here (if you want to read more about the practical ethics of quantitative finance). What interests me is the more general notion of mechanistic processes making our decisions for us and inhibiting our ability to recognize and react to possible hazards.

The problem isn’t simply speed (or delay), it comes down to mechanistic processes and structures that are inaccessible to human decisions, neutralizing the power of human judgement and intuition to deal with emerging patterns.

Read another recent New York Times piece about how valuable hunches are in battle:

“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”

The mind accomplished a lot over a couple hundred thousand years and we still don’t understand how the most fundamental processes work. Let’s not sell it out just yet. The mind — including intuitions, emotions, the whole ball of crud — is still our best asset.

What the machine-processes give us is objective safeguarding and reference — like instruments in an airplane.

But don’t planes have autopilot too? Isn’t that the same as algorithm-generated trading?

No. I think the difference is that the plane still goes the same speed and the pilot can still notice emerging dangers and use discretion to take over the controls. A fighter pilot wouldn’t let the computer fly in a dogfight (do they still have those?) — though computers come in damn handy to analyze and prioritize potential threats and targets (something I read about in Popular Mechanics when I was a kid, I think for since-cancelled Comanche helicopter program: I don’t know how sophisticated the real flight and weapons systems are).

In quantitative finance, the computers don’t just take over the controls for a while to make things cheaper and easier; the computers have actually changed the nature of task, introducing a different set of directions we can’t handle. There’s no “going manual” anymore, and we lose the ability to identify and manage emerging patterns.

Automated functions must exist to help us identify and correct mistakes (either by freeing our attention to notice them, or by providing objective benchmarks and measures), but they should not drive the process.

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Here he considers “how good is deliberative democracy?”:

The approach that starts and ends with voting among alternatives has a major shortcoming: no one gets a chance to make persuasive arguments to other citizens; no one has the opportunity of having his/her own beliefs challenged; no one is exposed to new facts or novel considerations that might make a difference in the choice. In other words, the “vote first” approach simply takes people’s preferences and beliefs as fixed, and looks at the problem of choice as simply one of aggregating these antecedent preferences.

The deliberative approach, by contrast, looks at belief formation as itself a cumulative and reasonable process; one in which the individual needs to have the opportunity to think through the facts and values that surround the choice; and, crucially, one in which exposure to other people’s reasoning is an important part of arriving at a sound conclusion.

I’m going to keep hammering this until people are sick of it: The Mindset of the Future is Process. It’s the key conceptual adjustment we need to make in order to address our current challenges — and to move towards the next generation of new opportunities.

Until now, both individuals and groups operate under assumptions of permanence — “this is the way things are” — until a crisis occurs and people start to say “but now we need to change.”

Our own institutions and ideas unintentionally conspire to fool us to believe that change is the exception when the truth is it’s the rule.

Permanence is not just exceptional, it’s deceptional — it’s mythological…

If you look deeply enough into your opinions and beliefs, you’ll find they aren’t just existing there, they actually depend on your ongoing efforts to reinterpret the world, adapting a supporting cast of ideas to keep your opinions and beliefs in accordance with new facts — like a balancing act.

All of this is background for my aim of digitizing our decision-making processes (which I’d like to get back to before this gets too metaphysical).

Any process needs both hard and soft aspects in order to function, i.e. it needs to have an element of fluidity, as in face-to-face conversations, and an element of solidity, as in putting it in writing.

Digital media does both.

The conversations we have in coffee shops and town hall sessions may generate a lot of energy, but that energy has to be channeled and stored or it dissipates. Everyone goes back to whatever everyone does until the next morning or next month when another batch of energy is generated and wasted all over again.

We also tend to forget (or misremember) exactly what our positions and ideas were. Without objective accounts of our conversations (and even with them) we can be astonishingly self-deceptive about our beliefs and reasons for believing.

Without articulation and objective deliberation (or at least deliberation that aspires to objectivity) we fail to notice inconsistencies in our thinking so we miss most of the best opportunities to learn and improve-by-process-of-correction — we fail to make our ideas and institutions more sustainable.

In other words, by failing to embrace change, we become more vulnerable to it.

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Future leaders in all spheres will have to contend with a world with finite limits, no easy answers, and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points of view. There will be no dominant voice.

In this context, I’m convinced that Gen X’ers will be the leaders we need. The experiences that shaped those of you who were teens in the late ’70s and ’80s, as I’ve outlined in past posts, translate into valuable contemporary traits and perspectives.

After some reflection it seems obvious — and there’s maybe some insight into the philosophy of history here: there’s a kind of symbiosis that occurs as we grow up: the world forms around us while we form within the world.

The challenges and opportunities we face now are not spontaneous accidents, they developed over the course of decades. Likewise, people’s competences, attitudes, values, and habits have developed over a long course of time and it seems only natural that generational characteristics will correspond with dominant challenges at their moment of full maturity.

There might be some further psychological or sociological insight here as well: as we grow up, how much are we affected by novel, incongruous, and emergent features of the world, which our elders (whose faculties of perception were already fixed by their upbringing) fail to notice — or notice in any generative way?

Still further, I’d guess that some people tend to notice novelty and incongruity more than others; how much does that affect which individuals eventually emerge as leaders?…

This isn’t to take anything away from Erickson’s work. If these suggestions have merit, we’d still have to go on and investigate and articulate exactly what features and characteristics are becoming dominant — which is precisely what Erickson has done for her forthcoming book.

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TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging?
Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that difficult to shape the story. The first part of the book is really a series of profiles of people — Justin Hall, Dave Winer, Jorn Barger — who were some of the key figures in pioneering blogging. In the middle of the book, my job became picking out the stories that had the most to teach us about what blogging was all about. At that point, the challenge became figuring out what to leave out.

You seem set on changing some of the popular notions of why people blog.
One thing I’ve become very conscious of is how careful you have to be making generalizations about bloggers. You have millions of people blogging. There are a multitude of answers to any question about what blogging is, who bloggers are or why they do it.

The author is Scott Rosenberg, the book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on where digital media has come from and where it is going. The volume of meta-commentary about the nature and future of blogging has gone up recently. Just about all of the mavens and A-listers wrote something-or-other on the subject last month.

Laura McKenna at 11D generated loads of response after blogging that

blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It’s still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It’s actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you’ll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal — a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that’s why I’m continuing to keep at.

To which Ezra Klein lamented

The blogosphere isn’t thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that’s a shame. But the upside is that it’s more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers. My blog certainly isn’t as fun to write as it used to be. But it’s also a lot better than it used to be. And it certainly pays more. And so it goes. The blogosphere grew up and it got a job, or, to be more specific, lots of jobs. That made it less fun, but, like a frat house legend who now goes to work every morning, probably more useful to society.

I’m not even sure that’s an analogy, as Klein (born in 1984) and more than a few of the other big blog-turned-job stars are at the age when they’d be finishing grad school, coming out of internships, and settling into responsible positions anyways.

No doubt there are a lot of exceptions, and, as Daniel Drezner pointed out:

new bloggers are not exactly neophytes on their subject matter. Johnson was the IMF’s chief economist, for example.

So exactly how much of the professionalization of blogging is inherent in the medium, vs how much of it amounts to the professionalization and maturity of individual bloggers?

I say, don’t worry because more generations of unprofessionals will arrive soon enough.

For perspective, consider that just as Ezra Klein complains the blogosphere lost its “joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years,” I imagine a number of older hackers and BBS and Usenet users complained that blogging circa 2003 lacked a particular “joyous, raucus, weirdness” of their earlier scenes.

(E.g. Jaron Lanier comes to mind. He made some remarks about blogging in that provocative essay of his, and apparently he still favours the old static HTML for his own site.)

Sort of as the Policy Blogger Class of 2003 co-promoted themselves into professional, respectable positions (read Rob Horning’s reaction), we might also see still-newer classes embracing still-newer platforms which established bloggers don’t see coming… changing the media landscape yet again, and disrupting Ezra Klein et al the same way they disrupted old-school pundits and columnists.

It won’t happen exactly the same way again. All I’m saying is that blogging will be vital for a long time, but certain kinds of blogging won’t necessarily be — because we’ll still have new classes graduating, hungry and irreverent, into a media landscape filled with opportunities that didn’t exist for previous cohorts.

Shortly before the policy bloggers got wound-up on the subject, there were already some high-volume conversations about the nature and future of blogging coming from more technology-oriented mavens.

Steve Rubel left blogging for lifestreaming:

Now that I have been at it for over five years, writing a weblog is starting to feel very slow and antiquated. It’s like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth. The statusphere, on other hand, is like playing doubles – and at the net all the time.

Robert Scoble went the other way (for a bit anyways):

Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.

One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. [...]

The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.

Chris Brogan struck a resolving chord:

I get this. I understand the interest in immediacy. The thing is, I think both are required. While I think there are several occasions where the instantaneous experience of the real-time web is compelling, I still think there are plenty of times when a well-considered blog post has some value.

There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.

[As long as these basic platform issues are unsettled, there's no telling where things will go...]

Come to think of it, there is a still-rising movement we should identify and try to understand more thoroughly: the general inversion of influence from top-down authority to bottom-up innovation.

Think way beyond media… Journalism is just a beachhead.

I.e. What would the world look like if, by 2015, digital platforms have undermined the foundations of higher education, or government itself, to the same degree the newspapers have been disrupted already?

To be continued…

[Note: I originally had the quotes from Rubel, Scoble, and Brogan before McKenna's. I made the edit moments after publishing.]

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Friedman elaborates:

Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.

That’s especially interesting after I was recently introduced to the notion of “relationship centred medicine” by Andrew via email. It’s quite new for me but I’ll surely be looking out for it more often.

Today we also heard about Amazon’s purchase of Zappos — uber-exemplar of not just customer relations but employee relationships and organizational culture as well.

I first heard of Zappos when I read a story last year that they pay new employees to quit.

Here’s Zappos-prez Tony Hsieh presenting at the Web 2.0 Summit a while back, and here’s today’s video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon and the immediate implications of the deal.

Hmmm… another topic to watch.

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These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between. [BusinessWeek]

The concept is well intentioned, but who wants to “firmly planted in the mud” when we’re talking about innovation?! Surely there are better letters — or how about numbers? — to use for a derivative analogy.

I’m a big fan of 8.

Rather than being stuck in the mud, let’s continuously circulate from Ground-Level to Blue-Sky — picking up insights at various places along the way, which feed back into the system, converging, colliding, mingling, and remixing in the middle.

Even 0 would be better than I.

The latter resembles a pedestal, calling to mind impressions of permanence and supposed perfection — precisely the wrong way to go.

Anything that suggests static existence has to be tossed out asap. We need images and metaphors that accommodate motion and growth.

Which makes me wonder, what shape are innovation gurus?

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From the book:

I prefer the word “learning” to “recovery”; many autistics learn how to overcome their cognitive disadvantages. Would we say that a non-autistic person, as he or she grows, “recovers” from having the disabilities of a four-year-old? Or would we say that the person has learned a lot?

Personally, I started learning a lot more — and with a lot less anxiety, guilt, resentment, depression… I became a lot happier — when I came to terms with my autism-like cognitive style and worked with it rather than against it.

Developing practices and ideas that nurture these characteristics has always been part of Open/Conceptual’s fundamental purpose. That should be evident by reading a lot of what I’ve written in the past two years (especially here).

I suppose I’m “out of the closet” now. I can’t figure out how high-profile I should be about this aspect (which is itself a manifestation of a characteristic from the autistic spectrum). Regardless of how much self-disclosure I use, watch for neurodiversity to come up more often in the discussion here.

Oh, and also, why don’t you get the book and read along?

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This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual.

As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that spontaneously occurred to me after a a long period of germination. I didn’t sit down and decide “ok, I’m going to articulate the mission now,” but the connotations are nonetheless intentional and specific.

“Designing” deliberately refers to “design thinking” as practiced by the firms like IDEO and promoted by leading consultants and educators. This has been a part of Open/Conceptual’s foundational background since the start, if not earlier.

Design and design thinking, of course, have their own methodologies; roughly speaking (according to my own interpretation), they come down to a fusion of art, science, and commerce:

• Art: Aesthetics and emotions are essential; also, the process is open to spontaneous insights and inspirations.
• Science: It’s a social, reiterative process that assumes imperfection, fallibility, and continuous improvement through observation and experiments.
• Commerce: The ultimate test of merit is, “Are people willing to spend their time, attention, energy, and money on this?”

What’s missing is the Civic element…

While I don’t deny that design can improve (and has improved) things in civic and social domains, I think there are some important ways the civic sphere is inaccessible to current design methodologies — starting with the fact that design tends to be oriented around specific projects and objectives, while civics is endless; it lacks any ultimate & agreed-upon objective.

So that’s kind of where Open/Conceptual comes in: at the level of epistemology, or meta-methodology: the objective is to design an ultimate objective... keeping in mind that “design” infers that the process is reiterative — an endless succession of improving-but-still-imperfect results — i.e. we have to accept we won’t ever arrive at (or even articulate) “the” objective, but it’s the process of working it out that matters.

To put it another way, this is a philosophical enterprise: an attempt to do philosophy — not via weighty tomes full of impenetrable prose, but by modeling it into organizations and institutions that generate analogies and metaphors.

It’s kind of a microcosm for how we should try to conceive and organize the rest of our world. As I wrote last year:

Open Conceptual is where we end up by thinking creatively about everything — or at least that’s the objective. But the notion that creative thinking leads someplace is just a metaphor. We don’t really go anywhere: we grow: we cultivate creative mastery and freedom — which brings us back to the first meaning: Open Conceptual is the enterprise led foremost by creative thinking.

Exactly where it leads is impossible to know at this point, but generally, it’s the best way to go (I mean “grow”), because as long as we’re working this way, we continue to learn — we continue to stay informed and in practice so we’ll be competent and resourceful enough when genuine opportunities and challenges emerge.

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The search for a “beta-think” metaphor builds on a more fundamental one I worked out last year, when I proposed that relevance will become the key to a new theory of human motivation:

I may not have realized it at the time, but my intellectual project was being supplied by metaphors from the internet — and more importantly, from the social web, or “Web 2.0.” The old dichotomies were inspired and perpetuated by mechanical metaphors — collisions and friction, turning gears, pressurized steam, etc — so it’s perhaps inevitable for us to conceive a new theory (or at least attitude, or vocabulary) of human nature using the marquee technology of our age. [...]

So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation from domination and control to connectedness and meaning…

Google’s search engine acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.

So what’s the improved metaphor for beta-think? I don’t know yet — but I do know how we can work it out: by simply doing and making things in beta: prototyping and adapting and reiterating, etc.

By developing more open organizations and processes — based on the idea that people are motivated by relevance, not just money, power, and prestige — we’ll get progressively better metaphors and models for imagining how the mind works; as we get a better understanding of how the mind works, we can develop more effective organizations and processes… and so on, heuristically & recursively.

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That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate things by looking at how many unexpected new opportunities they generate.

Failure breaks things open and allows us to remix the pieces in different ways. If we don’t do this from time-to-time — if we just keep accumulating more mass onto the same framework — eventually it gets too bulky and falls on our heads.

It’s like forests that don’t have enough regular little manageable fires: eventually they get too dense, the ground accumulates too much dry wood, until one spark destroys thousands of acres without anything anyone can do to stop it.

This isn’t pseudo-profound stuff. This is just how life works — life outside the boxed-in board game version we’ve imagined ourselves playing for decades.

It’s like the shift from Newton’s physics to the less intuitive models of quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity: the new ideas aren’t as neat (and in many cases aren’t as useful) but they’re more accurate… and one day they will make sense and people will wonder how we could have been so stupid — just as we wonder how people could have once believed the universe revolves around a flat Earth.

That in itself is a good demonstration of what generativity means. Newton’s physics and calculus succeeded because it passed its DNA through generation after generation of subsequent discoveries, inventions, and ultimately a cult of efficiency that took over the world.

But now it’s becoming more difficult to stand on Newton’s shoulders. His ideas aren’t as generative anymore; they perpetuate more than they generate.

The technical edifice is so massive and sophisticated and dense that younger generations are having trouble seeing opportunities there. In science there isn’t much left that’s fit for Newton to explain; in engineering there’s plenty left to build, but the great challenges have already been conquered is largely gone.

The bridges and dams have been built, the moon has been conquered, the atom has already been split….

So we’ve been breaking-off Newton’s limbs and leaping away from the edifice to smash bosons, create ambient intelligence, and who-knows-what-else.

The new sciences address things that happen randomly, things that grow, things that don’t fit on the static grid: string theory, genetics, nanotech, etc.

Much of the new science — like the new economy — is not about layering subsequent successes on top of each other, but they are generative in the sense that they open up new fields to explore. They are adventures that could very likely fail to prove their original hypotheses but can’t fail to generate new ideas and insights.

E.g. String theory might eventually prove to be a “failure” in the limited sense — I suspect because it is tethered by what our math and mental models are capable of; we need to make some kind of conceptual leap — but whatever resolves the problems will be articulated by ideas that emerged by accident in the process of adventure.

In the process of writing this I remembered an older post (that should have been imported to this blog but doesn’t seem to have made it) about failing in a good way:

I just published (and deleted) a truly stupid post. Which is fine.

This blog is all about trying things out, challenging myself to explore and define new boundaries — that I don’t quite understand yet — as opposed to beginning (and then staying) within bounds.

Some of the best things are discovered by accident, and I wouldn’t want to miss out on them.

For example, a few days ago I was picking out random books and I accidentally found one about Henry Hudson.

I’d never heard of Hudson — or so I thought — until I flipped it over and read the back. Turns out this is the guy who lent his name to the Hudson River in New York, and Hudson Bay — and thus the Hudson Bay Company, HBC, The Bay.

Yes, he found the Hudson River for the Dutch (at the site of what is now New York City), and he found Hudson Bay for the British. For these accomplishments, Henry Hudson was seen as a total failure in his time.

Hudson’s backers weren’t looking for what he eventually found — nor even where they very interested after he found them. They wanted to find a route to “the Orient.” The expidition that took him all the way to (what is now) Albany NY was supposed to travel north of Russia, to China…

That obviously didn’t go as planned.

Nor did his expidition that took him into Hudson Bay, which was also supposed to reach China, although it did manage to set up one of history’s longest commercial dynasties. That expidition — and Hudson’s life — ended in mutinous disaster.

As we explore new ideas and new ways of doing things through the web, are we emulating Columbus and Hudson by “failing good”? Are we paying enough attention to the potentially positive accidents around us? Or are we more like Hudson’s financiers, who were disappointed that he never sailed over the North Pole?

Sometimes we react to these accidental discoveries as, “Oh well, I’ll take what I can get… could’ve been worse,” but accidents are aren’t mere consolations, they are the heart of life’s most essential processes.

Randomness and uncertainty are the keys to what we know of evolution and quantum theory so far — and, I believe we’ll soon learn, the keys to psychology and every related human science.

After all, what motivates us? What actually compels us to do things?

It isn’t perfection, and it sure as hell isn’t efficiency.

Even looking at the people who hold perfection in high esteem, it isn’t perfection itself that motivates them, it’s the challenge of pursuing it — and the sneaking uncertainty that they can’t attain it: it’s a dare.

Then there are the discoverers, creators, and adventurers who are drawn to the unknown — or rather, to what-they-think-they-know-but-can’t-prove…

If you take the uncertainty and randomness and genuine risk out of life (as in, risking oneself, not just other people’s money) you take the life out of life…

So why would we perpetuate organizations, rules, and systems that are based on the fundamental assumption that randomness and uncertainty can be mechanized and ordered into a irrelevance?

It’s the fatal flaw of both communism and industrial capitalism — not to mention fascism.

As a partial aside, I worry that our response to the finance crisis — “we’re getting it under control” — is simply an extension of the same defective ideas and attitudes that set off the crisis in the first place… like smothering a fire with wood: it’s still smoldering underneath, and now we’ve adding more fuel.

We’ve got a long way to go before overcoming these defects. And how do we get there?

I don’t know — but I do know that in order to move-on we’ll need to generate a lot of new ideas and a lot of new stuff. Most of it will fail — yes, but most of the stuff we have now is failing too… at least we won’t be sitting helplessly in the midst of collapse.

Ultimately there’s no single solution — nothing we can design and plan and settle on. What saves us at critical moments is a) luck, b) an abundance of options, and c) the ability to navigate uncertain terrain…

That last is the one that’s most in our control. Like any ability, it develops through practice. Unfortunately for most, by the time you actually need it, it’ll be too late to start learning.

The society that embraces uncertainty, nurtures a love for it (i.e. a love of learning) and develops institutions that thrive because of randomness rather than despite it, will eventually have the most success, generation-by-generation.

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I should’ve excerpted what he wrote in his previous post:

When MPs enter the blogosphere with their demonizing rants, they often get what they deserve. And when media types attempt to sell the public on shallow controversy, they too suffer as a result. Unfortunately, such practices have, more frequently than not, put a saddening distance between the serious thinkers of both camps who would like to have meaningful discussions over the national state. So, we have arrived at the place where reflective MPs don’t blog and serious journalists won’t write on serious issues that just won’t sell. The historical healthy tension between politicians and the media has now become a debilitating arena of national distraction. Things have clearly changed and only serious dialogue, thinking and writing within these two camps can bring us back to a serious national mood. It would be interesting to see what the journalists/delegates at Charlottetown would make of all this.

I genuinely believe there will be tremendous improvements to the quality of blogosphere commentary and conversation in the next year or two as more late adopters (i.e. normal people) get on and balance things out.

I’m even imagining (I mean, dreaming of) a day when all politicians are expected to use blogs (or whatever they’re called in the future) and social media to make their attitudes and convictions fully open, articulate, and honest. I want it to be just as standard & required in the future as conventions and fundraisers [and staged debates] are today.

We need to see exactly where people’s ideas come from. As it is now, I’m not sure too many people know where their own ideas come from. Leaders should be compelled to make a more rigorous account of what they’re supposedly promoting — both in campaigns, and while in office.

There’s a saying that “daylight is the best disinfectant.” By making things more transparent and accountable (I’m talking about more than just money) — open to scrutiny by anyone, i.e. on the web where everything is findable, and forever — the people who have the most to hide (incopetence, sketchy motives) will struggle the most.

Some will argue that the critics and commenters might have sketchy motives too — well I’m sure a lot of them do, but everything they do is open to scrutiny as well. The ones who are just trolling to undermine the discussion won’t get any traction on the mature web.

Now that the web has become an essential part of our political system and our daily lives, most people online don’t have any time to waste on snickering, sneering, and snark. People ultimately want quality — if it’s available. Attention, popularity, and authority will gravitate to those who provide the most relevant and generative value for people.

With a little work, the good guys & gals will win in the end — regardless of which party they represent.

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• Draft Enterprise Model
• The Practice of Theory

The other day I jotted down a few points — trying to distill the underlying mission of this amorphous enterprise. It has a few different aims. I’m doing this one first because it’s the most relevant and the easiest to explain.

Make decision-making processes more open and objective, specifically through digital media.

This means advocating and educating people to bring all of our discussions and arguments and negotiations online to make them more

• articulate
• defined
• accountable
• machine readable
• measurable
• transparent
• organized
• scalable
• searchable
• reverse-engineerable
• replicable
• repeatable
• testable
• correctable
• extensible
• replaceable
• dynamic
• self-organizing
• generative
• sustained
• effective
• adaptable

I’m sure there are a lot more characteristics we could add to that list. The gist is that the web gives us tools to make our political and moral and business discussions a lot more open and objective, like science.

One important mindset-change we’ll need to make is to remember that all of our institutions, policies, programs, and ideas are works in progress. Business leaders like Roger Martin and Tim Brown call this design thinking.

Instead of reacting to crises by panicking and throwing around blame (or conversely, getting defensive), we need to start looking at our failures and crises (and successes) as evidence — information for us to build on, like the kind observed in science — to demonstrate how our policies and practices are performing.

We shouldn’t be surprised by crises. We should be watching for them the way geneticists watch for mutations, or the way programmers watch for bugs.

More importantly, we need to learn the habit of hypothesizing and anticipating specific outcomes.

Whenever we “solve” a problem, or make any kind of decision, we shouldn’t just say, “There’s that problem solved” and forget about it. Solutions are actually beta models that need to be followed-up on and assessed. We need to actively watch the results to see how the solution is performing — and not be surprised or defensive when it performs poorly — and make adjustments accordingly.

So the decision-making process needs to involve just as much predicting as planning. Instead of simply saying, “we’ll implement A and then B, and finally C,” we should frame it as, “we’ll see how A performs; if x occurs then we’ll implement to B, if y occurs then we’ll implement B2… and if z occurs then we might have to go back and change A to A2…” etc.

That’s why decision-making needs to be fully documented and digitized and opened up: monitoring and assessing and adjusting to performance is a big, big process — far too big for any old-fashioned, top-down organization that existed before the web.

Fortunately there are plenty of skilled, passionate, and knowledgeable people around who would do that work voluntarily… not merely out of a sense of duty (though that may be part of it), but because it’s a fulfilling challenge — a way to feel relevant, responsible, and respectable — as well as being a great opportunity to learn and work with complementary people.

The reason people don’t do more of this kind of voluntary work now is the whole system conspires to discourage it. Even within an organization: projects are divided and tasks are cordoned-off to specific people; nobody wants to step on toes (or have their toes stepped on) so people stay silent about obvious problems and opportunities; people guard their own little areas of responsibility to ensure coworkers and up-and-comers don’t undermine them, or make their job redundant.

But in politics and civics, participation is already encouraged, right?

Sure, but mainly the kind that reinforces an established player’s authority. Too many volunteers are still expected to be deferent and grateful for being bestowed with the opportunity. And the people assigning tasks don’t know what exactly everyone has to offer; knowledge and energy are wasted.

The only person who knows what one is capable of, creatively, is oneself (albeit with a little mentoring and nudging-along). Further, we don’t know exactly how we’re best able to contribute, creatively, until we actually start interacting and learning within the task.

You can’t plan where all of the best contributions will come from. A large part of what motivates us to get involved is that it’s an opportunity to find out exactly what we can do…

This whole transformation is going to require not just learning new practices and attitudes; it’s going to require substantial sacrifices in the short-term (and “short-term” in my scale can stretch to span a generation). A lot of organizations and people will have to give up some of their authority, influence, and competitive advantage — which they maintain by keeping things closed-off and under wraps.

This movement is very bad news for anyone used to playing at politics and business like a card game in which the object is to get as much as you can while preventing your competitors from getting anything, whether that means market share, information, whatever.

That cut-throat style worked for a time but that time is coming to an end. The web is naturally tilting the table towards greater openness. The game is changing whether we like it or not. Competitive advantage is increasingly going to the most nimble and adaptive, not the most robust and fortified.

More importantly, changing the game is in everyone’s best interest in the long-term. Considering the magnitude of power at mankind’s disposal, and the potential for tremendous harm that can occur when that power is concentrated around too-few decision-makers, we need everyone to be involved in the process of making decisions, and we need it all to be accounted for.

To get an idea of what I mean by making it “accountable,” see Jeff Jarvis’s last post on metadata for news.

As these processes become more developed, as everyone becomes their own publicist, we’ll start to get a better sense of how journalists can benefit by uploading much of their work to people and organizations themselves. We’ll increasingly expect organizations and institutions (and anyone “important” — or anyone who aspires to be) to syndicate everything about themselves into information feeds.

(If you’re worried about honesty, I expect that as our cultural expectations evolve towards openness, attempts to hide or withhold information will become taboo to the point of ruining those who are caught. The risks will be too great — or at least that’s what we should aim for.)

Journalists will specialize more in selecting from that, editing, scrutinizing and checking it, adding commentary, and turning it into stories.

Meanwhile, politicians and businesses can benefit because much of their thinking and decision-making will be downloaded to journalists and on to the general public. For example, what’s the point of polling and running focus groups when you’re already getting both quantified and qualitative feedback in real-time?

I realize this picture is fairly idealistic at this point, but that’s why I titled it an aim. And don’t forget it’s still in beta. I’m still in the process of deciding and discovering exactly how these ideas might work…

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I was inspired to start editing it myself but found I wanted to change too much — not that I disagreed with the spirit of the thing (which I agree with almost too-passionately) but because I have my own perspective, with my own specialized vocabulary, which I use to address the issues that I’m in the best position to understand and affect. Accordingly, I’m inclined to frame it in rather different terms.

But the last thing I’d want to do is oppose or contradict what Haque and Eaves or the rest of the best are saying.

It shouldn’t be a tug-of-war over terminology and semantics. That’s the old way of doing things — what Generation M is supposed to overcome.

But, nor can we merely “agree to disagree.” We have to keep the dialog open and alive.

What these conversations and debates do, which we need to ensure they continue doing, is generate familiarity & orientation, adaptation & integration.

The notion of Familiarity replaces the notion of categorization. Instead of silos we have networks of relations. Instead of neatly arranging everything (and everybody) into discrete slots, we need to appreciate things for the various traits they share with this-and that — and, ultimately, their individual character.

Orientation replaces the overconfident notion that we actually know where everything is and where we’re going. We can’t plan everything. We will go off the road from time to time (maybe because the road gets washed-out or collapsed, maybe because we see better opportunities in previously untravelled & unexplored areas), so it’s better to have the ability to re-orient ourselves in changing environments.

I’ll leave Adaptation and Integration with you… and there are a lot more notions to explore…

What it comes down to is that this is really an anti-manifesto kind of movement. It’s about the process — whether it’s the process of remixing or sharing or debating… — not anything that could be laid out comprehensively in absolute terms.

Put simply, it isn’t about the document, it’s about the dialog.

At the same time, we need documents and draft manifestos as platforms or frameworks and references for dialog. Discussing things like this is the best way to exercise our minds, voices, and vocabularies; to generate familiarity and rapport with others; to understand their ideas and appreciate their perspectives.

… as long as they keep our conversations and adventures alive.

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The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve:

One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, and member of the class of 1939. In his book InRetrospect reflecting on the war, he wrote that while at Harvard he had developed “an approach to organizing human activities.” There were three steps: “Define a clear objective…develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan.” This was still the essence of the HBS method. Strategy, planning and measurement. Of course, McNamara’s methods came to seem macabre when he applied it to counting bodies in Vietnam.

[If you haven't seen The Fog of War yet, you should.]

Broughton goes on in his post to suggest “the McNamara Syndrome persists at Harvard Business School and more widely among business and economic leaders. It consists of three very dangerous elements”:

1)       Excessive faith in systems, long-established networks, language, thinking and a set of assumptions which change more quickly than you do…

2)       An over-justified confidence in one’s methods, instilled by schools and prior success…

3)       Brilliant people often end up working and thinking inside a bubble. Inhabitants of this bubble reinforce each other’s behavior, assuming it to be all equally brilliant…

Any of this seem familiar?

In today’s economy, the goal of increased home ownership, fine, became the mortgage meltdown and the creation of far too many credit derivatives.

What really caught my attention was

In McNamara’s case, he assumed that what worked at HBS, Stanford and Ford would work at the DoD. This is the subject of Halberstam’s brilliant and tragic book The Best and the Brightest, about McNamara and the other men around JFK. The financial collapse is The Best and the Brightest replayed in the economic sphere, though stripped of the public service ethic in Kennedy’s generation.

That highlighted part (my emphasis) represents one of my most persistent complaints.

“The best and the brightest” in our society owe their success to a rigorous sort of disposition that is reinforced from a very early age. In turn, they continue to refine our institutions and conventions towards those values.

Our whole system of education and career advancement is set up to promote people who thrive within established frameworks, where there are “right and wrong answers,” competing to win zero-sum games in closed, rule-directed systems, with clear “winners and losers.”

The lessons learned along the way — from classroom to sandlot, continuing on through graduate school, carrying over to the negotiating table, board room, golf course, etc — aren’t easily unlearned when people find themselves facing big, ambiguous, complex challenges that require the reticence to dwell in uncertainty, adaptiveness, humility to give up on goals and plans that turn out to be misdirected, and the creativeness to develop new frameworks.

Instead, the best and the brightest — so used to winning and being right (not to mention being recognized and rewarded for it) — have interpreted the open and dynamic systems they face at the highest levels in the real world as being like the simpler challenges, in closed systems, they had dominated all their lives.

The more I think and write about it, the more I believe that much of the past century was an experiment — an attempt by mankind to control everything with machines, mathematics, and rigid management regimes — which eventually failed.

According to current assumptions about success (i.e. our need for certainty and confirmation), that’s supposed to be bad news.

But if we start to bury those arrogant ideals and look at the world more openly, as we ought to — as an inherently uncertain process, beyond our ability to control completely — then the realization that the 20th century was an experiment, is, in fact invigorating…

Our response to the ongoing collapse of the old models should be, “Look at how much we’ve learned!”

And look at all of the opportunity…

No related posts.

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

I understand that previous generations have made similar complaints in the past, when they were young. I’m inclined to think that the big difference between today’s radical sentiments vs, say, the 1960′s, is how much of a technical advantage we have. Not only do we know how to program DVD players and tweak security settings on Facebook, but we are also using that technical advantage to advance our theoretical knowledge.

So it isn’t like we simply have a different perspective. Some of us can make pretty serious, objective cases when we argue [as Haque goes on]:

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

And no, this isn’t just a reactionary youth movement. We’ve already got a stacked roster of role models who have either carved a niche or dynamited their presence into the heart of the old landscape:

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. [...]

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

I find myself starting to get a more radical edge.

This is not comfortable for me. In the past I’ve been fairly conservative by nature, but these points just seem increasingly obvious to me. Where does this lead?

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When you package seminal books in a design-conscious concept, I turn into a total sucker.

The latest set to catch my eye is the Penguin Magnum Collection (just a UK & Australia thing?), featuring six narrative non-fiction classics updated with iconic cover photos. [via CR via BMD]

A couple of them are on my to-read radar (not exactly on my to-read list). If I saw these seven or eight years ago I might’ve given into the craving to buy; I’d have those barcoded spines planted on my bookshelf, looking at me every day, reminding me of my transaction.

I’m glad I’ve outgrown that impulse.

But now I have a new impulse: making this stuff…

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“Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).”

It’s a good following to the last post, about success not being exclusively a matter of personal (or group) characteristics, nor exclusively a matter of the environment, but a result of how those different factors interact.

It’s the same with ideas, behaviours, beliefs, business models, etc…

We all say we understand that “there’s a time and a place for everything,” but we also have a tendency to get into habits of assuming that a) such-and-such an idea failed in the past, we learned our lesson — “it’s wrong” –  or b) such-and-such an idea worked in the past so it is right, it’s been proven — “it’s right.”

It isn’t enough to know that something is right or wrong, we need to try to understand how and why as well; so when circumstances change we can adapt our ideas accordingly.

No related posts.