I grow weary of stories,
these shabby accountings of events, true or invented
or spun for the teller's advantage. What does it matter
what happened, or did not happen, and why
or why not? The past, what was, is history,
and what could have been mere fiction,
acid eating eternally into our souls' open wounds.
In our crowded fearful world we cackle incoherently, cacophany
like battery chickens in our tiny cages. Here, now, there is only space
to talk. Action is impossible, and in any case forbidden,
and renders all our conversations moot.
The time for talk and stories is long past -- we will be judged
not by our narratives, our recollections, our impassioned speeches,
our skill at presentation, or debate, or rhetoric, or manipulation of truth,
but by what we do. And as long as we just chatter on, tell tales,
transmit information, read facts and opinions, acquire knowledge, write,
analyze, shout, whisper, scream, communicate in a thousand inchoate ways,
we accomplish nothing.
We pass our deadened, lonely, fearful lives in dazed perpetual unreadiness,
reacting to the ceaseless flood of data which monopolizes our attention,
as it saps the energy we need for action.
And each distracted learning yields new ignorance
and leaves us paralyzed.
Conception numbs perception, leaves our minds
congested with such rich and blinding wisdom that
there's nothing left to see the truths that only come when we imagine.
See there, a man with a strange compulsive disorder:
He packs for an incipient and momentous journey, but then stops
and unpacks everything, moving each item to a different stack,
and then repacks it, purposefully, only to stop and repeat the cycle
of perpetual preparation, going nowhere.
(My Summer Fiction copy of New Yorker has arrived,
so full of stories: Another personal horror tale from Boyle,
a trilogy of interwoven stories from Munro, of anguish and humiliation, starkly told,
as is the style today of good Canadian writers.
But these are narratives of helplessness, their heroes mostly victims
living and reacting in the passive tense.
I search in vain for clarion calls, primal truths, direction how to put things right,
the purpose of our lives, perhaps, or even insight into why cats purr.
There is no instruction here on what to do, now or ever.
The magazine has a do-it-yourself bumper sticker, I _______,
and at first I scribbled WRITING in the empty space,
but then to my dismay I saw my 'R' looked like a Freudian 'A'
and that my mobile message would just advertise my own complicity
in using words as sad apologies for doing nothing, really, yet --
which would be all the more ironic on a car they call an 'Odyssey'.)
Life's meaning won't be found in human words, so often full of rage,
apology and grim regret. It's found instead in silence -- speechless, breathless,
in the summer rain, the rustle of leaves in the wind, a child playing with a dog,
a hawk soaring in the sun, a moonlit walk at midnight, when time stops --
when the Earth connects you to her soul, and whispers: "Love without bounds, open your senses and your heart
and experience the wonder-full and ever-deepening joy
that comes from being one with us -- you're home
and there is nothing here to fear."
And cats purr, of course, because they understand all this, instinctively,
and, so, because they can.
One
of the value propositions for Knowledge Management is to improve
decision-making. At a recent Toronto KM Consortium meeting, we agreed
to study whether KM actually achieves this objective.
When we looked for a model of the decision-making process, one that
seemed especially intriguing, in light of recent controversies about
its authors' decision-making skill, was that used by NASA, illustrated
in the table at right.
Whether we decide instinctively (whether to flee or fight), rationally
(what laptop to buy), or morally, aesthetically or emotionally (who to
vote for in the next election), or using some combination of the above,
we do tend to follow this process. Our decision criteria can be
objective or subjective. The process can be one-pass or iterative,
formal or informal. In some cases we 'back into' the process -- making
a possibly impulsive decision and then attempting to justify or test it
by going back through the process. The facts and assessment of unknowns
can be exhaustive and methodical or cursory, often depending on the
importance of the decision and the consequences of making the wrong
one, though I've heard more than one CEO pride himself on his ability
to make fast decisions with incomplete information, even if better
information was available.
Some of us are prone to groupthink -- unduly influenced by the
preferences of others, even if those preferences are uninformed,
illogical or volatile -- you see this often in election campaigns.
There are different styles of weighing alternatives, too. Some prefer
to find consensus, and consult extensively with others whose judgement
they trust -- recent studies indicate, with the benefit of hindsight,
that such an approach yields superior decisions. Others take an
adversarial, black-hat or 'devil's advocate' position to try to get
opposing perspectives before making decisions. In his new book, the Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki cites the importance
of careful design of a decision-making or advisory group (most
critically that they be informed, representative of different
stakeholders and perspectives, and independent thinkers).
We tend to be influenced differently by others in the decision-making
process, depending on our personal values and our position in the
organization or group -- some of us are deeply influenced by others'
authority (status or education), reputation, or trustworthiness (which
means peers' views get more weight than either superiors' or
subordinates').
Inaccurate, incomplete or biased research or debate can also produce inappropriate decisions -- some of us are more aware of 'spin'
in what we read and hear than others. Marketers have perfected
techniques that range from manipulative to dishonest to influence
customer buying decisions. And as these fall from favour, subtler, more
subversive techniques -- like story-telling -- are taking their place.
Some legal decisions are considered so critical that there is a special
standard of fairness -- "due process'.
Technology sometimes gives us the opportunity to defer making decisions
and keep many options open until more facts are available and the risk
of decision error drops -- rapid prototyping for example.
Here are four brief stories about decisions, that reveal good and bad decision-making processes:
A friend of mine was hiring for a research-analyst
position. There were three excellent candidates, but all four
interviewers rated a tall, well-spoken, attractive, well-dressed young
man as their clear choice. The word three of them used to describe his
superior je ne sais quoi was
'presence'. It turned out presence was all he had -- his research
skills were questionable, and the interviewers later kicked themselves
for not looking more closely at his sample work-product before hiring
him. Before he could be hired, he quit for a much higher-paying job in
PR, a job he had no credentials for, and where he is now Vice President.
A colleague was trying to decide between two new house
models. He and his wife were each leaning slightly towards a different
choice. He drew up a chart listing all the buying criteria they cared
about, weighted each criterion and rated each house on each criterion.
The house his wife preferred got a higher total score, but my colleague
wasn't convinced. He kept trying to rig the numbers or weights to
change the scores, but couldn't do it, so he relented and they bought
the house his wife preferred. A year later he was delighted with the
decision, and couldn't understand how he was attached to the other
house at all.
A woman I know was going out with two guys, and was under
growing pressure to make a decision. All her friends preferred Guy A,
with whom she shared many interests, over Guy B, who spoke little
English and with whom she had almost nothing in common. She chose Guy B
anyway, citing 'pure chemistry', and eventually married him.
Twenty-five years later, it was obviously the right choice -- they're
still together and very happy.
A small Canadian company was successfully courted by a foreign company that appeared, on the surface, to be a perfect tactical
fit -- the Canadian company had great products and R&D, while the
foreign company had lots of cash and market presence around the world.
Five years later everyone from the Canadian company was gone and all
that was left was a warehouse. The strategies and cultures of the two companies, it was clear in hindsight, were completely incompatible.
This year, Canadians and Americans will both decide on a new federal
government. The electoral process in both countries is badly flawed,
the electorate is largely ignorant of the issues, and is being
deliberately misled by campaign advertising, while the media, in
typical fashion, are oversimplifying many of the choices and completely
disregarding others. The only thing we know for sure is that, in both
countries, more people will consciously decide not to vote than will vote for any of the alternatives. I wonder what that tells us about The Wisdom of Crowds?
Last week I listed forty actions
-- technological, social, entrepreneurial, political -- that could
create a new
'tipping point' to restore our planet's, and our, health, and replace
the thirty thousand year old, well-intentioned but fatally flawed and
unsustainableculture called civilization. These forty actions would undermine civilization and render it obsolete, not by taking us back to hunter-gatherer culture, but by taking us forward to a post-civilization culture in balance and harmony with nature.
This transition to a new culture --which I have called Relater-Sharer culture -- could, I argued yesterday,
take decades or even centuries to accomplish. It will start slowly, as
more and more of us abandon the existing political, educational,
economic, business, religious and media systems and institutions, and
build a new culture with the building blocks shown in blue in the chart
above. Increasing natural scarcities, pressures and disasters (factors
shown in green above) -- all consequences of civilization's excesses
and failures -- will begin to dissuade adherants of civilization's
perpetual growth mantra, and create a further sense of urgency for a
sustainable, Relater-Sharer culture, as the established institutions of
civilization continue to prove themselves unable to adapt.
I also made the point yesterday that the mechanisms by which we usually
try to bring about change -- politics, law, economics, and formal
education -- really aren't up to the job this time, and although
sympathetic changes to these systems won't hurt, ultimately they're
neither sufficient nor necessary to take us forward out of the mess we
have created for ourselves and our world. For that reason, they're not
represented in the building blocks of Relater-Sharer culture shown
above. And although these artefacts of wealth and power will be
wielded, as always, by those most determined to maintain the status quo,
they ultimately won't be effective against builders of the new culture
who will simply opt out of these bankrupt systems, which are as
unnecessary in a Relater-Sharer world as they were in the
Hunter-Gatherer culture that preceded civilization.
Several readers have said this analysis is informative but not helpful
-- it doesn't indicate what each of us, as individuals, can do that
will at least not make things worse,
and which could make the transition a little less painful and a little
quicker, perhaps, for our descendants. Here is such a list, a
combination of the forty actions in last week's post and the Save the World Roadmap I published last year, but taken down to the personal, practical, present-day level. Answers to the question: What Can I Do Now?
Trust your instincts:
Reconnect with them, listen to them, and don't let other people tell
you you're stupid, crazy, irrational, or immoral. If you're unhappy
it's for a reason. Your gut
feeling, your intuition, is written in your DNA, and it's the source of
knowledge that allows every living creature to know
what to do. And it worked for man for the first three million years of
his life on Earth as well -- before language, before laws, before codes
of right and wrong -- and these were arguably the most successful,
leisurely, and happy years of man's existence. Listen to them, and
they'll tell you what to do.
Listen, Learn, and Teach Others:
Spend time both in nature, away from civilization, and with people,
listening and talking about things that matter. In nature, reawaken and
reconnect with your senses, focus each sense until you really see,
hear, smell, taste, feel, connect with the rest of the living organism
called Earth. Open yourself up to the joy, and learning of nature. Pay
attention. Re-learn to wonder. Then, 'back' in civilization, have the
courage to talk openly to people about things that really matter to
you. Ignore the raised eyebrows and comments about your seriousness and
intensity -- you'll find most people care, too. Then listen, don't
preach. Leave behind one
practiced, important (to you), articulate idea or thought with the
other person, like planting a seed. Learn to tell stories -- it's the
only effective way to teach. But share what you know. When you're
talking to someone who strongly disagrees with you, listen, don't try
to convert them. There's a reason
why they feel so differently from you -- ferret out and really
understand what that reason is (don't assume they're ignorant or
stupid). Then sow a single seed of doubt. And read quickly and
selectively, but don't let it keep you indoors, or away from people.
The real learning is outside. So travel when you can, but forget the
hotel chains and chain restaurants. Live with the locals, talk to them,
try different things, listen and learn.
Learn and Practice Critical Thinking:
Challenge 'established wisdom', especially your instincts tell you it's
dubious. Learn your vulnerability to spin, and how to recognize and
discount it. Learn to avoid the intellectual fallacies of groupthink and arrogance, but also avoid black hat thinking. Develop emotional intelligence, but never use it to manipulate.
Re-Learn How to Imagine:
The school system and most business environments drive it out of us,
and it's easy to get caught up in your own left brain. It can also be
frightening: imagining literally means putting your thoughts into
images. But it's powerful, motivating, educational, and creative.
Imagine -- picture it -- what
it happening in Sudan where genocide is happening right now. Imagine
what is happening in the factory farms before you decide what to make
for dinner. Imagine what you could be doing if it wasn't for your
boring, meaningless job. Imagine a better way of doing something, a
better way to live. Imagine what could be. Your instincts will tell you what to do next. If we can't imagine, we can do anything. That's what got us into this mess.
Use Less Stuff:
Consumerism is doubly addictive -- you get the fleeting pleasure of
acquiring something, and then you have to work harder and earn more
money for The Man so you can pay off the debt you incurred to buy it.
Learn to live a Radically Simple
life -- buy better quality stuff that lasts longer, make your own meals
instead of using processed foods, think before you buy, don't get into
debt (only buy when you have the cash in your account), buy local
rather than imported goods (especially stuff from countries that have
poor social and environmental standards), complain about excessive
packaging, recycle, reuse, buy used, share tools with neighbours, turn
off the lights, cover the pool, use energy-efficient lighting, keep
your tires inflated, carpool, walk or bike instead of driving -- you know what to do. Make a list, draw up a schedule, and do it.
Stop at One:
Consider the virtues of a single-child family. Learn why children in
such families are the happiest and most successful. Better yet, adopt.
Become Less Dependent:
Learn how to fix things and make things instead of always having to buy
replacements. Cut your own lawn, and perform other services yourself,
even if you can afford someone else to do it. Self-sufficiency is good
for your self-esteem, reduces consumption and waste, helps the
environment, and is good exercise.
Become an Activist: Pick a cause you care about, research what needs to be done, use the Internet to organize, and do it. But follow Peter Singer's advice
to make sure your time is well-spent. Especially the parts about not
getting caught up in administration, and not trying to change, or
enforce, laws. The most fruitful activism is all about informing and
educating people, making them aware of their options, and their power
as citizens and consumers, often one person at a time, until enough
people have changed their minds or their behaviours to change the
system.
Volunteer:
Rather than sending guilt money, go out and spend time helping those
suffering or in need. Pick a charity that you really care about -- the
soup kitchen, the animal shelter, whatever. Get involved, and talk to
the people you're helping. Don't get talked into fundraising activities
-- really get out there and do something with your own two hands.
You'll learn a lot, you'll feel better, you'll make a difference, and
you just might find out something important about yourself.
Be a Role Model: Talk to others about, and show others, what you're doing,
not just what you're thinking. People are far more inspired by a good
role model than a good speech. And if people tell you you're a good
role model, get out there and flaunt it in the right places -- if
you're a woman engineer, go out to the schools and tell girls what a
great career it is. If you're doing half the things on this list, you're a great role model -- inspire others to follow your example.
Be a Pioneer:
If you have the time and the passion for it, pick a new cause, use the
Internet to find like minds, do your homework, organize, and do
something completely new. Start a community energy co-op. Set up a
'virtual' market for local crafts, organic or free-range foods, or
whatever needs better local distribution. Establish a community-based
business. Or create a whole community, self-selected, self-organized,
self-sufficient, with people you love, and show the world how much more
sense this makes than living in a community of strangers and driving
long distances to work for someone you dislike so you can buy stuff you
don't need made by other strangers even unhappier with their lives than
you are. The new culture will be built bottom-up, one community at a
time, and the sooner we start finding a community model that works well
in a post-civilization society, the better.
Find or Create a Meaningful Job:
Each of us has talents, interests, and time. It's amazing how many of
us spend all our time doing work that we find uninteresting, and which
doesn't effectively use our talents. We become wage slaves,
underemployed and bored because we're convinced or afraid that a better
job doesn't exist. And we work so hard at it we have no time left to
challenge that conviction or fear. That's what the corporatists are
counting on. Don't give them the satisfaction. Find the time to figure
out what you really would like to do with your life, how you'd really
like to make a living. Then research the possibilities, talk to people
who are doing it, find out what's possible, learn what's involved in
creating your own business (and don't listen to accountants or MBAs).
If we were all doing jobs we loved, with people we love, and in charge
of our own careers, the corporatists would have no staff, and their
environmentally devastating empires would crumble.
Share Your Expertise:
If you have talents, specialized know-how, or technical or scientific
skills and knowledge that could be useful in solving birth control,
clean energy, disease prevention, conservation, animal cruelty,
pollution and waste, local self-sufficiency, non-animal foods,
'more-with-less' product streamlining, self-organization,
collaboration, consumer and citizen awareness and activism, animal
communication, conflict resolution, mental illness, and other issues
contributing to environmental deterioration, create 'open source'
spaces where others can access what you know, contact you, and
collaborate with you and with others to solve these problems.
Be Good to Yourself:
You're not going to be any use saving the world if you're depressed,
unfit or stressed out. Don't take the problems of the world personally,
or blame yourself for them. If news or failure to accomplish something
gets you down, go out and do something you enjoy. Eat healthy and stay
fit, but don't make a religion of it -- indulge yourself from time to
time. Learn how to prevent illnesses instead of waiting for them to
occur. Spend time with people who like you, and accept their
compliments warmly. Love yourself, realize that you can do anything you
want to do. Appreciate that you're part of the solution, and that makes
you extraordinary.
Infect Others With Your Spirit and Passion:
Love openly, completely, as many people as you can. Be emotional,
except in those very rare occasions when dispassion is needed. Smile
excessively. But refuse to tolerate cruelty, suffering, unfairness,
bullying, jealousy, apathy, despair, cynicism or hate, in yourself or
others -- alleviate it, disarm it, discharge it, whatever it takes to
stop these negative emotions and activities, and appreciate that
they're signs of sickness, not evil.
A period of great change is always turbulent and unsettling, and the
transformation to a Relater-Sharer culture won't be achieved in our
lifetime. So we will need to be, like all pioneers, patient,
indefatiguable, and aware that the beneficiaries of what we do starting
now will be our descendents, future generations who will only know us
from stories. As human beings, and as the species that created this
mess in the first place, we owe them no less. We know, instinctively,
that that is why we're here.
If you're an American, I can
appreciate that your immediate priority for saving the world is to get
rid of "the worst president in the history of the United States". His
administration has almost certainly caused more damage to the environment
than any regime in any country in history. What is exasperating is that
our struggle with this psychopath is distracting us from a much more
critical struggle against a much greater enemy: the growth that is
killing us and our planet.
The thesis for much of this blog since it began sixteen months ago has been: Our
world is headed for ecological collapse, due to the relentless and
catastrophic rate of increase in both human population and per-capita
resource consumption ('footprint'). We are already consuming
resources at over twice the rate at which our planet can sustain such
consumption, and by the end of this century, at forecast growth rates,
twice as many people will each be consuming twice as much again, so we
will need eight Earths'
worth of land and resources just to meet immediate demand. This
consumption will, at current rates of sprawl, use up every square inch
of livable, arable land on the planet just for residential housing. It
will require five times the energy that we can reasonably expect to
find, extract and push out to the planet's insatiable humans by the end
of the century, even if we abandon all environmental constraints and
burn every ounce of coal and wood, fire up hundreds of new nuclear
plants, and exhume every gallon of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon that
has taken millions of years to accumulate under the earth, the seabeds
and the permafrost. As by-products of this activity, we will also
generate five times as much pollution and waste as in all previous
centuries combined, befouling the water and air, poisoning our food,
raising the atmospheric temperature enough to bring about massive and
catastrophic climate change, and eliminating all wilderness areas,
every plant and animal species not used for human food, the forests
that provide us with vital oxygen and medicine, and lowering the water
table around the globe enough to desertify much of it and create a
massive fresh water shortage.
On one point, the scientists, informed humanists and head-in-the-sand
eco-holocaust denyers can agree: This cataclysmic future will never
happen. As man shows himself incapable of reining in his own
rapaciousness and greed, nature will intervene with increasingly potent
and dreadful surprises to prevent this human cancer from destroying her
body. If it weren't for civilization, this would have already happened,
quickly, simply and painlessly as it did for three million years before
man invented a system he thought was better. But civilization has now
raised the ante, introducing a whole new series of political, social,
religious, technological, moral and economic systems, illustrated in
the above chart (from last week's post),
designed to counteract and overcome natural forces. Let's follow this
chart through and see what we're likely to face by the end of this
century.
Overpopulation -- more people per square mile than the Earth can reasonably support -- naturally produces mental stress,
which manifests itself in war, physical and psychological violence,
neglect, repression, mental illness, and a lowered immunity to disease.
In a natural system, this disequilibrium, combined with the scarcity of
food and other critical resources in an overcrowded population, is
sufficient to reduce fertility, increase mortality, and bring
increasing numbers of natural predators to the table, and hence restore
the population to natural levels.
But man has too much invested in relentless growth in population and
consumption to give up that easily. He has invented the following
ingenious methods to sustain growth and civilization even as nature is
trying to limit them:
Monoculture agriculture:
Intensive cultivation of land with larger and larger quantities of
fewer and fewer varieties of food plants and food animals. This is
sustained by: genetically engineering plants for higher yields; soaking
fields in chemicals, herbicides and pesticides to kill everything else
that interferes with these selected plants; soaking fields in
increasing quantities of fertilizers to compensate for the degradation
of the soil caused by the chemicals, herbicides and pesticides (and
exacerbated by overuse, and the runoff from clearing land not designed
for agricultural use); poisoning and shooting wildlife that tries to
eat human agricultural products; stuffing animals full of growth
hormones and antibiotics to increase meat yield and ward off the
natural diseases that come from overcrowding and monoculture; cramming
these animals into tiny quarters to increase yield, and then debeaking,
confining and drugging them so the stress of this horrendous
overcrowding doesn't cause them to kill themselves and each other. This
agriculture is dependent on cheap supplies of foreign oil for the
petrochemicals needed to sustain it, massive government subsidies,
huge, inexpensive tracts of land to grow corn and grain for cheap
animal feed, and concealment of the incredible cost and damage of
monoculture agriculture to the taxpayers and the Earth's ecosystems.
But in the meantime it results in huge quantities of deceptively cheap
food, which in turn keeps human population growing.
Salvationist religions:
As overcrowding produces stress and epidemic disease, the people could
get disheartened about the benefits of civilization and rebel against
the power elite. So we need religions to say that nature is evil, war
and suffering are honourable and 'natural', and we must conform to a
strict moral code -- and have large
families. And if as a result we're miserable all our lives, we'll get
our reward in the next one. These religions teach us we're not
responsible, we need not act responsibly, that if we destroy the planet
it's not our fault, and someone else will fix it.
Corporatism and its political and economic propaganda:
The myth machine must ensure that the teeming billions don't realize
just how bad and unsustainable the situation is, and start taking
things into their own hands -- with revolutions, civil wars, terrorism,
and other behaviours that disrupt the population growth and consumption
necessary for civilization to continue. So the corporatist elite must
control the education system, preserving the myth that pre-civilization
man lived a "brutish" life, the myth that wars are caused by
megalomania and 'evil', rather than as a response to desperation and
suffering and deprivation, the myth that with hard work anyone can be
rich and happy, the myth that we all have a fair say in our political,
legal and economic systems, the myth that our 'leaders' are working for
democracy, rather than hoarding their wealth and power. And the
corporatist elite must control the media, to perpetuate these myths, to
'dumb down' the citizens into mere consumers, and to keep the majority
ignorant of political, economic and ecological reality. And of course
the corporatist elite must continue to control the political and
economic centres of power -- governments and corporations -- so they
control the means of production, the law, and the judiciary, to keep
wealth and power for themselves, and to lock up and silence those who
pose a threat to it.
These man-made systems -- the skewed, destructive, elitist, subjugating
economic, political, legal, social, health, educational, agricultural,
corporate and criminal justice systems, and religions and the media --
produce some poisonous by-products as well. The bankrupt and
propagandizing education system crushes human initiative, creativity
and imagination, so that many of the people who could get us out of
this mess give up or drop out. Without imagination or conscience or
knowledge of ecology, we get strip mining, clearcut forestry, massive
flooding for hydro dams, and the deadly threat and toxic radioactive
poisons of nuclear power and nuclear bombs -- technologies that
needlessly accelerate the destruction of the environment and the loss
of biodiversity. With a little better education, we might have solar
and wind and geothermal energy, erasable paper, hydroponics and
advanced ceramics instead.
This same lack of education and imagination has given us a health
system that treats the rich and neglects the poor, instead of a health
system that prevents disease for all.
And the massive inequality created by corporatism aggravates the stress
that destabilizes the third world, ruins third world economies and
makes them into desperate, violent welfare states, whose destitute
majorities produce the only thing they can that has marketable value --
more babies.
And so the circle goes round and round, producing more and more people and more and more mindless, wasteful consumption.
What will it take to break the cycle? If we acknowledge that the cycle
is unsustainable, what is its weak link? I believe there are three weak links: disease, instinct, and technology.
Disease: If you've read Demon in the Freezer,
you know that every species has its own unique poxviruses. They are
nature's choice of disease for dealing with massive overpopulation, and
mosquitos, for example, have a host of selective poxviruses that keep
their numbers in check without unbalancing the rest of the ecosystem.
Poxviruses need a certain concentrations of numbers within a certain
travelling distance of each other to thrive. With our record numbers
and mobility, we are the perfect target for a new poxvirus, and
nature's ability to evolve new viruses when there is a prolific host is
extraordinary. And we are just starting to learn about prions, another
mechanism for spreading epidemic disease, and one that is probably
unstoppable. And our monoculture agriculture has greatly increased the
vulnerability of our foods to epidemic disease as well (as BSE and
Avian Flu have demonstrated recently).
Instinct: For
three million years man survived, and thrived, by trusting and
following his instincts. We have forgotten how to listen to them, and
been brainwashed to distrust them, but they're still in our DNA and
they're still telling us what to do. I believe the drop in fertility in
many countries with high population density is due more to instinct
than to education or birth control technology. I believe the worldwide
rejection of globalization, 'free' trade, 'preemptive' war, cultural
homogenization and consumerism is an instinctive revulsion, not a
spiritual or parochial one -- we intuitively know that there is
something very wrong with the way we live and the way we are headed,
and that economic, political and social imperialism -- and the
destruction of cultural diversity -- are part of the problem, not part
of the solution. We know violence, abuse, rampant crime, pollution,
global warming, extreme poverty and hopelessness are symptoms of the
fact that something is very wrong, and we know something must be done.
We don't need someone to show us or teach us this. We just know it.
Technology:
Technology is the innovative application of knowledge. It can do an
end-run around the most entrenched and change-resistant political,
economic or legal system. The corporatists recognize that the Internet
has produced a knowledge and communication explosion, and have tried to
squelch and corner every possible disruptive technology by patenting
every single conceivable process. They even tried to create an
alternative Internet under their own control. But they can't put the
lid back on Pandora's box. Margaret Mead said it only takes a few
people to change the world, and never has there been greater
motivation, or opportunity, for that to happen.
You'll notice that my three civilization 'weak links' have nothing to
do with politics, economics, or law. These are lousy levers of change,
and tend to entrench power,
wealth, and the status quo. These systems, and the corporatism that
depends on them, will collapse, but they will last longer than most of
the other elements of civilization on the chart above. If we depend on
the politicians, the economists, the lawyers or the business leaders to
get us out of this mess, we're in for a big disappointment. Not that
these systems aren't going to be faced with convulsive change in this
century: Watch for massive immigration embargoes and blockades,
fire-bombing of plague areas, dozens of coups, wars, suspensions of
civil liberties, many new forms of hyphenated-terrorism, and
revolutions. But none of these will change much. Have they ever, really?
On one side, monoculture agriculture, salvationist religions and corporatism. On the
other, epidemic disease, instinct and technology. An epic battle, a
fight to the finish, that will start in this century but could last
hundreds of years -- It's not as if there's a shortage of pawns. Some
have called it "humanity's final exam".
It is that, and more. Since we are a part of nature, this battle is in
fact a civil war. Which side we each take, or support by our ignorance,
our apathy, our indifference, will determine how we are assessed by our
descendents, and how we are judged by history.
We won't be around to see the end, but we are already witnessing the
first skirmishes. We owe it to our children and grand-children to, at
least, not make the situation worse. In tomorrow's post, entitled What You Can Do to Save the World,
I'll suggest some ways I think each of us can help 'not make the
situation worse'. That may not sound like much, but if enough of us
refuse to make the situation worse, it could make a huge difference.
My Salon Blog colleague Ted Ritzer keeps a list
of Useful
Web Sites (for all web users, not just bloggers) originally
compiled by Kevin Kelly, of Wired,
The Well, and Whole Earth Catalog fame. Kevin no
longer maintains his list, and instead has an intriguing Cool Tools site, but it's only
for the rich -- virtually everything on the site costs money, often a
lot of it. So Ted and I agreed it's time to update the Useful Web Sites
list, and we need your help. What links and free
downloads should every self-respecting Internet user have on their
desktop?
The list should not
include pay
sites, nor should it include news sites, blogs or other sites that
appear on blogrolls (too many, and too subjective). Nor should it
include highly specialized sites (I have a personal list of favourite
genealogy sites, but I realize that few people would consider these
'essential').
To make the list manageable, I've identified 21 categories for the essential links
(let me know if you think I've missed an entire category). If I get
enough response, I'll publish a list of the Top 3 in
each category and keep it on my sidebar or Spurl it (Spurl lets you keep your
web bookmarks online and share them with others).
The examples shown for each category are my personal favourites and
some of them are eccentric, so they may not make the Top 3 list. Quite
a few of them come from the excellent Jason
Lefkowitz' Quality Software list (thanks to Internet Time for the
link):
Last
week I met with Graham Westwood, CEO of ProCarta Inc. While many others
are giving up on the promise of 'explicit', 'codified', knowledge to
solve important business problems, ProCarta has found a compelling
niche for the rigorous codification of explicit knowledge: Areas of high risk.
Graham uses the analogy of a 'recipe' to resurrect the reputation of
'best practices'. Rather than a rigid, invariable series of steps that
must be followed precisely to the letter, the procedures, suggestions,
caveats and best practices incorporated into the ProCarta applications
provide a flexible recipe for effectively and efficiently navigating
areas of high business risk. Even a master chef will follow a recipe
the first time he or she tries something new. The flexible nature of
the software allows the ideas, suggestions, newly-discovered best
practices and warnings to be written, wiki-style, into the recipe,
providing additional guidance for other users.
The company's approach to IT is also quite radical: Rather than sending
IT consultants out to integrate its risk management solutions into the
company's existing IT infrastructure, ProCarta develops its
applications outside the IT infrastructure, as simple, portable,
stand-alone solutions. The business processes involved in addressing
the high-risk problem is analyzed by the user into Processes,
Activities, and Tasks, with each Task assigned to a specific identified
Role. The regulatory requirements, best practices, and expert guidance
and caveats are then keyed in to each Task. And then with the push of a
button, the easy-to-use, non-technical ProCarta software produces a set
of web pages with the corporation's look-and-feel. The resultant
website takes users through each step in the risky process, isolates
the Tasks in each Role, and even turns out job descriptions.
One area where ProCarta's solution has received considerable traction
has been Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance. 'SOX" compliance procedures
were developed to prevent a recurrence of the Enron/Arthur Andersen
disaster. They address the corporate security environment, division of
responsibilities, new oversight and review responsibilities, and the
auditor attestation process.
To those who shrug off the value of prescribed procedures and best
practices as an unwelcome imposition on the freedom and personal
judgement of professional managers, Graham points out that, where at
one time 'corporate cowboys' were highly respected as individualists,
in high-risk areas they can get the entire business into serious
trouble, leading to jail time or bankruptcy.
As Drucker has often pointed out, in today's business world we are all
subject matter experts, and almost everyone's job is unique. We are
always to some extent the best at what we, uniquely, do. And for that
reason best practices that attempt to capture what someone else does well, have not proven terribly fertile ground for knowledge transfer. "That might be a best practice for his
job, but that's not what I do -- my job is different". But in some
high-risk areas, everyone doing something different is not a recipe for
flexibility and entrepreneurship, but a recipe for disaster.
James Surowiecki, the financial reporter for The New Yorker, has a new book out called The Wisdom of Crowds.
It is essentially about decision-making, and the two most fatal (and
ironically, almost opposite) judgement errors we make when making
decisions:
Groupthink -- the tendency of people's judgement to
coalesce around a single point of view (and not necessarily the most
logical or wise one). You can witness this with a group that wants
to believe something -- the members tend to attach too much credibility
to assertions that support that belief, and deny, or not even hear,
assertions that contradict it.
Arrogance -- the tendency of those with power and influence
to believe their experience or gut feeling is more reliable, more
credible, than the consensus of advisors, focus groups, or even
customers. Some CEOs even pride themselves on their ability to make
critical decisions with imperfect information, and feel that asking for
such information is unnecessary, or even a sign of weak leadership.
The consequences of both types of flawed decision-making can be catastrophic, and constitute what I have called the cost of not knowing. I have cited Surowiecki before
in this blog, and I have enormous respect for his sharp, challenging
mind. His is no conventional wisdom -- he's imaginative, brilliantly
logical and profoundly skeptical. Groupthink can be prevented, he says,
by ensuring the group has intellectual diversity, independence (from
each other) and is neither too centralized nor too decentralized. A
group with these qualities is inherently more knowledgeable and its
judgement more sophisticated, informed and reliable than any CEO or
'subject matter expert' that business, with its cult of leadership,
tends to rely on for making critical decisions.
The greatest knowledge failures in recent history are preventative failures,
sins of omission -- notably 9/11, SARS, bird flu, BSE, the Great
Blackout of '03, Enron and other corporate rip-offs, and, in Canada,
the Walkerton e coli deaths,
not to mention many murders and other crimes. To what extent did our
failure to prevent such disasters result from simply not having
critical information, and to what extent were these failures aggravated
by groupthink or individual arrogance? Was groupthink on a very large
scale behind the dot com bubble, and is it happening again now? And is
the dearth of genuine innovation in large organizations also partly
attributable to these judgement errors?
Surowiecki tackles these questions thoroughly and provocatively, and
proffers some steps we can take to employ the wisdom of crowds (or,
more precisely, substantial, informed, well-designed decision-making
and decision-influencing groups) to prevent groupthink or arrogance
from producing knowledge failures. But Surowiecki's most unsetlling
lesson is that much of the time, these failures arise not (or at least
not just) because we don't know, but because we don't want to know, or
don't care to know.
Painting above is Van Gogh's
'Pollard Birches'. Pollarding is the process of harvestiing the tops
off trees without killing the tree, so that they grow back. Its
earliest practitioners gave me my surname.
Here is my answer to this week's That's Awfully Personal question:
Q:
You wake up in a strange new world where everyone gets paid the same
salary no matter what they do for a living, even if there's no obvious
'market' for it, and no matter how many hours a week they work at it.
And everything costs 'whatever you can afford'. What would you do for a
living? Is this something you're already good at, or something you'd
like to *become* good at? What kind of people would you like to work
with, or would you prefer to work alone? And what would you do with
your new-found leisure time?
A:
For a living, I'd study and report on the languages of other animals,
so that ultimately we could learn to talk to them, and learn from them
(more than we do already). I have some skills that would help: Strong
analystical and problem-solving ability, creativity and communication
skills. But I'd need to study linguistics, to be a better listener, and
to pay more attention to detail. I'd like the project to be
self-managed, and the team working on it to be self-selected (that
means we would pick each other, not that I would pick the team). My
spare time would still be spent as it is now -- writing -- though I
would probably also spend more time talking with, perhaps in a
teaching/coaching (but not lecturing) capacity, young people.
If you're interested in playing That's
Awfully Personal each week, the questions, and a complete
explanation, can be found here.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
_______,
One
of the value propositions for Knowledge Management is to improve
decision-making. At a recent Toronto KM Consortium meeting, we agreed
to study whether KM actually achieves this objective.
Last week I 
Trust your instincts:
My Salon Blog colleague 
Last
week I met with Graham Westwood, CEO of ProCarta Inc. While many others
are giving up on the promise of 'explicit', 'codified', knowledge to
solve important business problems, ProCarta has found a compelling
niche for the rigorous codification of explicit knowledge: 
