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It is hard to imagine that the US doesn't have a plan to annex Canada. A nation that has no hesitation in trumping up charges against a country half a world away when it is perceived to threaten its energy security, and then bombing the hell out of it, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of civilians and utterly destroying its infrastructure and social fabric, would not think twice about seizing control of a nation that offers it even more (and whose animosity would severely threaten its national interest).

There was a plan, in the years between the two world wars, to do just that. It was declassified decades ago and now makes rather quaint reading. But there is no question that there is an American "contingency plan" to annex Canada if need be, just as surely as there is one to bomb Iran as the next stage to secure the oil on which the entire American economy utterly depends.

There are reasons to believe that the US doesn't expect it will have to do this. More than half of all Canadian business, by revenue, is foreign-owned, and the vast majority of that is American. The employment picture is probably comparable, although it's hard to compute when franchisees of foreign companies are considered Canadian companies. Likewise, there are no records of citizenship or residence of land-holders in Canada, so determining how much land is in foreign hands is impossible to determine. But it is pretty evident that the Canadian economy is substantially foreign-owned and foreign-controlled. If we did something to displease our American owners, they could shut down our economy pretty effectively.

This sell-out has occurred over decades, with both Liberal and Conservative regimes dismantling Canadian ownership regulations consistently. Then we signed NAFTA, effectively ceding authority to write social or environmental laws any stronger than those of the weakest laws anywhere in the three countries. When you can't write laws to protect your own people, you really have no sovereignty left. The right-wing Harper minority government has made no secret of its desire for full political and economic integration with the US, and the reaction of the Canadian people has been astonishingly blasé. Our economy is so dependent on the US already that the value of the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar moves in lockstep with the Dow.

There is reason to believe that this control will not be enough to placate those in the US concerned with trying to sustain that country's unsustainable economy, however:

1. The US desperately needs the oil from Canada's bitumen sludge mines (the so-called "tar sands"), the worst ecological disaster on the planet. These operations are currently uneconomic, and it will take huge improvements in technology, and the energy from whole farms of nuclear power plants and natural gas from Canada's fragile arctic, to extract the oil from the sludge. It will also take staggering amounts of Canadian fresh water. 
2. Speaking of water, the US needs Canada's Western glacial water to replace the rapidly disappearing glacial water that provides people, industry and recreation with most of their water in most of the Western US states. Canada's water is also running out, except in the Arctic, but the US shortage will be much more severe and come much sooner.
3. Electricity from Canadian hydroelectric plants supplies a substantial amount of US electrical needs. But Canadians are trying to shut down coal-fired power plants and use hydro power to make up some of the difference.
4. As global warming melts the Arctic, there will be huge pressure to plunder the hydrocarbons in that area. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the US thirst for oil, but the US is desperate for anything they can fill gas tanks with. Much of this energy is under Canadian waters, but the US has recently said it will not honour Canadian sovereignty over these waters, and considers them "international waters". Burning this energy will, of course, accelerate global warming.
5. Likewise, as the Arctic melts, the lucrative Northwest Passage will be open for shipping year-round. It is clearly in Canadian waters, but the US disputes this sovereignty.

None of this bodes well for the future of Canada-US relations, and as the US starts to run out of land, the hunger for more land will make the situation even more volatile.

This could all come to a head if Canada were to do (or try to do) any of the following:

1. Restrict foreign ownership of land, resources or assets or shares of businesses in 'strategic' industries.
2. Increase social or environmental regulations to the point the bitumen sludge mining operations or Arctic development became non-viable at any price.
3. Restrict taking of water from Canadian waters, or sale of electricity to non-Canadians.
4. Proclaim sovereignty over Canadian waters.

These are not especially grievous things for a country to do -- most countries believe it is their right to do these things in areas of their own jurisdiction.

But not Canada. If we were to try to do any of these things, the US would simply say "no". They would start by protesting, and suing us under NAFTA and other extraterritorial laws. And if that wasn't enough they would do whatever it took to get the restrictions on their untrammeled access to our resources, land and waters removed. Whatever it took.

Harper rolled over on NAFTA already, settling for a fraction (still unpaid) of what the NAFTA courts said the US stole from us illegally. He has no intention of doing anything to impede Canada-US integration.

But at some point Canadians will have had enough of Harper's arrogance, just as they did with the previous Conservative administration of Mulroney, and turf him out of office. He is in power now only because his right-wing party competes with four left-of-centre parties who split the vote in our absurd first-past-the-post voting system. Most Canadians would be glad to see the end of him, and sooner or later they will get their way, and a party or coalition amenable to the majority will be elected. And that new government will almost certainly do one or more of the four things above. The US will then say "no" and do whatever it takes to have the restrictions blocked or removed.

What will we do then? I suspect we will do nothing. Four in ten Americans want to annex Canada anyway, according to a recent poll. In another poll, only 57% of British citizens would support action to defend Canada from US annexation.

Canadians are pacifists at heart. Most of us no longer believe the war in Afghanistan is worth continuing, and most of us always opposed the war in Iraq. We have among the most liberal immigration laws in the world, taking in far more than our share of refugees and immigrants (though now, under Harper, American war objectors are no longer accepted, but that will be a short-lived anomaly). We acknowledge, I guess, that our natural wealth was a fortune of birth, not something we really earned. It belongs to the world, to all of us, and if someone wants to steal it from us, we'll just shrug and say "too bad, it was nice while it lasted".

Americans, believers in manifest destiny, the private ownership of everything, might makes right, and the end justifies the means, can't really understand this. They see it as cowardice, or complacency, tacit approval for their takeover of everything Canadian, and for their American worldview. They will turn the rest of Western Canada into a deforested and toxic wasteland, and Northern Canada into a melting, oil-slicked military stronghold. And we will let them, while convincing ourselves that It's not really that bad, There is no other real choice, I don't know anything about that, or There's nothing we can do about that.

That's what empires do to colonies. And that's what colonies do when they do it.

Category: Canadian Politics

The first section of my book Finding the Sweet Spot is about discovering where what you're good at, what you love doing, and what is needed in the world (that you care about) intersect. The book describes a number of exercises you can use to help hone in on this 'sweet spot'. Over our lives, as we learn more (including more about ourselves) and change, this sweet spot will change, too. The search for the sweet spot is a lifelong, evolving one.

On the weekend I pointed you to an approach my friend Jean-Sébastien has successfully used to help a group of people find their collective sweet spot -- the work they as a group are 'meant' to do. Today I want to bring to your attention an approach you can use personally if you really haven't a clue what you are meant to do -- if you don't even know where to start. It's an exercise in acquiring self-knowledge, designed by Otto Scharmer's Presencing Institute.

The exercise entails answering the following 17 questions, a process that Scharmer says should take you a couple of hours. It's called the U Journaling Practice, and the questions are as follows:

1. Challenges: Look at yourself from outside as if you were another person: What are the 3 or 4 most important challenges or tasks that your life (work and non-work) currently presents?
2. Self: Write down 3 or 4 important facts about yourself. What are the important accomplishments you have achieved or competencies you have developed in your life (examples: raising children; finishing your education; being a good listener)?
3. Emerging Self: What 3 or 4 important aspirations, areas of interest, or undeveloped talents would you like to place more focus on in your future journey (examples: writing a novel or poems; starting a social movement; taking your current work to a new level)?
4. Frustration: What about your current work and/or personal life frustrates you the most?
5. Energy: What are your most vital sources of energy? What do you love?
6. Inner resistance: What is holding you back? Describe 2 or 3 recent situations (in your work or personal life) where you noticed one of the following three voices kicking in, which then prevented you from exploring the situation you were in more deeply:
• Voice of Judgment: shutting down your open mind (downloading instead of inquiring)
• Voice of Cynicism: shutting down your open heart (disconnecting instead of relating)
• Voice of Fear: shutting down your open will (holding on to the past or the present instead of letting go
7. The crack: Over the past couple of days and weeks, what new aspects of your Self have you noticed? What new questions and themes are occurring to you now?
8. Your community: Who makes up your community, and what are their highest hopes in regard to your future journey? Choose three people with different perspectives on your life and explore their hopes for your future (examples: your family; your friends; a parentless child on the street with no access to food, shelter, safety, or education). What might you hope for if you were in their shoes and looking at your life through their eyes?
9. Helicopter: Watch yourself from above (as if in a helicopter). What are you doing? What are you trying to do in this stage of your professional and personal journey?
10. Imagine you could fast-forward to the very last moments of your life, when it is time for you to pass on. Now look back on your life's journey as a whole. What would you want to see at that moment? What footprint do you want to leave behind on the planet? What would you want to be remembered for by the people who live on after you?
11. From that (future) place, look back at your current situation as if you were looking at a different person. Now try to help that other person from the viewpoint of your highest future Self. What advice would you give? Feel, and sense, what the advice is -- and then write it down.
12. Now return again to the present and crystallize what it is that you want to create: your vision and intention for the next 3-5 years. What vision and intention do you have for yourself and your work? What are some essential core elements of the future that you want to create in your personal, professional, and social life? Describe as concretely as possible the images and elements that occur to you.
13. Letting-go: What would you have to let go of in order to bring your vision into reality? What is the old stuff that must die? What is the old skin (behaviors, thought processes, etc.) that you need to shed?
14. Seeds: What in your current life or context provides the seeds for the future that you want to create? Where do you see your future beginning?
15. Prototyping: Over the next three months, if you were to prototype a microcosm of the future in which you could discover "the new" by doing something, what would that prototype look like?
16. People: Who can help you make your highest future possibilities a reality? Who might be your core helpers and partners?
17. Action: If you were to take on the project of bringing your intention into reality, what practical first steps would you take over the next 3 to 4 days?
    

The purpose of this exercise is not, as it might first appear, to create a roadmap of your future life and career. The real purpose is to get important insights about yourself. If you've never thought about your Gifts or your Passions, these insights are likely to come from questions 2, 3, 5, and 7 -- but only if you give a lot of thought to them, and if you have either the experience or imagination to really know what the answers to these questions are or might be. If you can't answer these questions easily, you may have to try some new things to discover what you really love, and what you really do well. You may also find that some of the things you've idealized, that you think you would love doing, you'd actually not like at all.

For others, more knowledgeable about their Gifts and Passions, the insights may well come from the "What's holding you back?" questions 1, 4, 6 and 13.

Questions 8-11 are about perspective. In my book I suggest as an exercise writing your own obituary, assuming you've accomplished everything you hoped to in your life, to gain that perspective. Insights from these questions are likely for those who are so bogged down in their day-to-day existence they can't see any way out, or forward.

If (or once) you have that perspective, the insights are likely to come from the "First next steps" questions 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. If the first 11 questions have forced you onto the high-diving platform, these last questions are the ones that will push you to jump. You may get cold feet and be tempted to go back and modify your answers to the earlier questions, and make those intentions and dreams more modest.

I hope you can resist this temptation. Better to sit down on that high lonely perch and think awhile, than to make the humiliating climb back down the ladder. I confess the last four questions are the ones that I found the hardest, and my tentative answers to them brought me the most startling insight. I'm a lifelong procrastinator, and even in my Last 37 Days exercise (another exercise I'd highly recommend for gaining self-knowledge) I was pretty damned complacent -- saying it wouldn't give me enough time to do anything new and important, so I'd just spend it in reflection, alone.

So my answer to question 14 was: My future begins with meeting a lot of new people, people I've intended or always wanted to meet, and inviting them to co-invent our future together. That will take a lot of courage, perhaps more than I have, yet. It will also require me to keep an open mind about the new people I meet, to love them more easily, and to see the opportunity to live and make a living with them, even if it may not be obvious at first. I think I know what I am intended to do, and to be, but perhaps this answer will change as I explore, collectively in conversation in community with people I love, our collective intention.

And my answer to question 15 was: It would be the first collective design of an (intentional) Natural Community with three or four Natural Enterprises operating within it. The very concept of a genuine collective design, of trusting other people enough to have them co-design your future, is very frightening. But I don't think working models are likely to come from anyone's individual genius -- not social or ecological models anyway, since they are inherently complex. Individual genius is useful only for the merely complicated designs -- technologies. And technologies aren't going to fix what's broken.

My answer to question 16 was: I haven't the faintest idea. My initial answer was the people in my blogroll, and specifically that subset in my Gravitational Community shown in the right sidebar of this blog. But I don't even know most of these people, not really. Somehow, however, I think we'll awkwardly find each other. With lots of practice inviting others to explore these important questions with us, we might finally learn who we're meant to live and make a living with. I am completely convinced it is not one person, not a nuclear family. In community is the future of the world, even though almost none of us remembers or knows what real community is about.

And my answer to question 17 was: Keep on being myself, and doing what I do, specifically: to play, to love, to learn, to converse, to give (ideas, energy, knowledge, capacities), to be self-disciplined in maintaining my health and expanding my personal capacity, to write, to reflect, and to be attentive. Some may say that is not 'intentional' enough, that it is not a clear vector towards my intentions in questions 14 and 15. But we can only control so much of our own lives, and we have to learn to trust that, by being the best we can be, and by being open, the paths we must follow, together, will emerge from our collective wisdom, and these paths will realize our collective intention.

We must not procrastinate, but we must be patient.

What insights did you get from answering these questions? What did you learn about yourself? Where do you see your future beginning?

Categories: Natural Enterprise, Intentional Community

That's the head of an exhausted, wet chipmunk peeking out of the towel, after I rescued him from our pool today. Our man-made world poses such strange perils for wild creatures! A couple of minutes after I took this shot, he jumped up and scampered away.

Birth of a Natural Enterprise: My friend Jean-Sébastien Bouchard relates the story of how he put together his new enterprise Grisvert -- for those who read French this is an inspiring and instructive story. He formed the business using a practice called the Five Breaths of [Collective] Design, which looks like a great methodology to assist in Finding the Sweet Spot.

Being Ready for the Crises Ahead: Chris Corrigan makes a list of what you can do to mitigate, adapt to and prepare for coming catastrophes, which is pretty close to my list.

No Simple Answers: Jon Husband reproduces an excerpt from a Thomas de Zengotita's book that decries our insistence that every article, every exposition, every critical analysis, to be worth anything, must provide a solution. This is interesting to me, because I have often complained that reading news that is not actionable is a waste of time. But that is not what de Zengotita is arguing with -- all he's saying is that it is not up to the author to provide the action -- and that in our modern complex world no one is (or can be) in control.

What Do We Want to Get Out of Blogging?: Cassandra laments the growing introspection and decline in community and interconnectedness she sees in the blogosphere, and then asks readers What do we want to get out of this activity? I confess I've been a bit discouraged that my blog's popularity has flattened out, but I don't think popularity is the main reason I blog. I tend to comment rarely on others' blogs, as I prefer to write something here and trackback to them. Mostly I still think out loud on these pages, which is useful to me and apparently to others, and I love the fact that my readers point me to stuff I should read (which makes my online time much more productive). And that you keep me honest, telling me, usually gently, when my writing is not up to par, and why. I still think blogs are awkward conversational media, so I'm spending more and more of my online time in IM and v2v, but these media, at least the ones worth keeping, will eventually merge into one 'voice', Friendfeed plus a lot more all in one box.

The Death of the Oceans: Fertilizers and smog deposits running off into our oceans have created massive dead zones on coasts all over the planet, as the runoff creates algae blooms that suck oxygen out of the water, killing all marine animal life. Since most marine animals live near the coasts, our farms and cars are essentially killing our oceans. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

And Arctic Melting Faster Than Scientists' Worst Fears: "The trouble is that sea ice is now disappearing from the Arctic faster than our ability to develop new computer models and to understand what is happening there. We always knew it would be the first region on Earth to feel the impact of climate change, but not at anything like this speed. What is happening now indicates that global warming is occurring far earlier than any of us expected."

Misplaced Euphoria as the US Dollar Rises and Oil Price Falls: James Kunstler explains how the rising dollar and falling oil price are just pre-crash symptoms. Thanks to Bruce Stewart for the link and the three that follow.

The Future is Frugality: Mike Shedlock contemplates what a future after 2 trillion dollars in mortgage losses have been written off will look like. It's a future without credit. And with no credit, our economy will grind to a halt. (The NYT chimes in with another in its excellent series on consumer debt, saying many consumers are paying an average of over 20% in interest and fees on their soaring debts, while the assets that secure them are in free fall -- thanks to reader EJ for this link).

Advice for Graduates: Don't Get Caught in the Corporatist Trap: George Monbiot suggests that young people starting work for a large corporation "leave the moment you’ve learnt what you need to learn (usually after just a few months) and the firm starts taking more from you than you are taking from it." It's advice meant for aspiring journalists, but it applies equally to any career.

Lenders' Troubles Worsening Fast: Karl Denninger looks at the fundamentals of the entire credit market, not just the sub-prime loans, and finds it hemorrhaging. (And it hasn't helped that, on top of the $3 trillion and soaring US credit card debt, another $1.2 trillion was shifted from cards to home equity loans before the housing crash). (And Rob Paterson shows a scary chart comparing consumer debt/GDP in 1929 and now).

The Ball Is All That Matters: Several of my favourite bloggers are mourning the recent loss of beloved companion animals. Beth Patterson writes a lovely eulogy for Ling. Barbara Klaser writes about her dear Independence. And Sharon Brogan fondly remembers Spike.

Why People Commit Atrocities: Psychologist TherapyDoc asks how ordinary, sane people can commit horrific atrocities, as happened in Nazi death camps, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur, and is happening still all over the world, including in US-funded torture prisons, and in homes where people are abused, and in thousands of factory farms that most of us rely on for our food. I answered this question two years ago: It's because we let them, encourage them even by our inaction or worse, when we say: It's not really that bad, There is no other real choice, I don't know about that, or There's nothing we can do about that. Without our complicity it cannot go on.


Just for Fun: Create your own Superhero character. Mine is above (still deciding on a name for him, and his trusty sidekick). Thanks to Beth for the link.

Thought for the Week, from Sharon Brogan:

Love

I've looked everywhere:
the junk drawer in the kitchen,
the catch-all on the dresser,
in every cupboard and cabinet.
I scolded the cat and got down
on my knees to look under the sofa.
It's not in the garage, the basement,
the attic. I cleaned out the car,
the glove-box, the trunk. I've swept
all the corners, emptied the desk.
I asked Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.
I searched Wikipedia, called
everyone I know. I switched out
the bed linens, shook out the rugs,
shuffled the pages of all the books.
It is not here. I've looked everywhere,
year after year, but I cannot find it.

Three years ago I reviewed, in glowing terms, and excerpted parts from, a book called Presence with four authors, one of whom is MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer, creator of Theory U, illustrated above, which is the backbone of the concept called Presencing, and of the book.

In light of yesterday's post, in which I explained what "presence" has recently come to mean to me (a combination of self-awareness of which one of several dozen types of activities I am doing at any point in my day, and employment of the appropriate process for that activity, a process that has been allowed to emerge and continuously improve through practice), I thought it might be worth taking another look at my earlier review.

At the time, as excited as I was about the concept, I described the book and its ideas as flawed and tentative. Since then I have found the book really difficult to act upon. More and more I've come to realize that it was Scharmer's Theory U that I liked, and that the rest of the book (notably Peter Senge's apparent insistence on putting "institutionalization" at the end -- top upper right -- of the U, presumably to make it more appealing to business executives who want theory to be actionable in traditional command-and-control measurable-results terms) actually detracted from Scharmer's theory. I'm pleased to see that Scharmer's latest version, above, has eliminated the hierarchical junk from the model and made it more personal, where the assessment of learning and responsibility for action are left to individual team members, as they should be. Theory U is now more consistent with Open Space type methodologies that are trusting of individuals but allow the insights and actions to emerge from collaborative effort. In fact, his latest 2-page summary of the theory contains an even better, clearer graphic of the process:



Theory U is in essence a problem-solving (or more accurately perhaps a problem-addressing) process. Scharmer proposes this process to optimize both collaboration and innovation, and as a guide for coaches to use to enable collaborative and innovative capacity in individuals and teams working on (especially intractable) problems.

• The co-initiating step includes self-organizing the team, studying patterns and paying attention -- being aware. Its principal 'product' is an engaged and informed team.
• The co-sensing step entails making sense of what you are now aware of. Its principal product is understanding.
• The presencing step is the most challenging for traditional organizations to accept, I suspect. It is what Scharmer calls letting go and letting come, a being open to possibility, using imagination and critical and creative thinking. Its principal products are emerging approaches.
• The co-creating step is one of iteratively exploring and experimenting with these possible approaches. Its principal products are working models.
• The co-evolving step is the continuous and improvisational study, improvement and innovation of these models, collaboratively in peer production with the community of users of these models (the models 'continuously becoming' better and better products and services in practice -- there is no longer such a thing as a 'finished product', just the latest and best evolved 'version'). Its principal products are sustained innovation, relationships and resilience.

Those of you who've read the proofs of my new book Finding the Sweet Spot will probably recognize, as I did, that Scharmer's U is a very similar process to the one I recommend for creating Natural Enterprises. These Natural Enterprises I've so long admired, places where work is responsible, sustainable, joyful, meaningful and natural, are the organizational embodiment of Theory U.

And he says this about what happens to teams that have been through the U process together: "Often they begin to function as an intentional
vehicle for an emerging future." So this process is also the process that Intentional Communities use to self-form and thrive.

Maybe I should get our mutual friend Andrew Campbell to introduce me to Otto.

Read my earlier review.

Of late I have been practicing meditation, and it is finally starting to bear fruit. What I have realized is that I (and perhaps most people) have always lived life automatously: Reactive, un-self-aware of what I am doing, and why. Mechanically.

Now that I am starting to learn to pay attention to these things, I've surprised myself: I've caught myself on some occasions acutely aware of what I'm doing, the process I'm following, and why, and on (too many) other occasions, operating completely dysfunctionally, embarrassing myself. The difference, I've concluded, is that in the former cases I'm present, and in the latter cases, absent. I have no idea who this mindless idiot is that operates my body most of the time, but it can't possibly be me.

There are two parts to this presence: The first part is this self-awareness -- knowing and noticing and paying attention to what you're doing. It is hard to both do something and to pay attention to yourself doing it, but it is not impossible. The second part is following a process, one that you're comfortable with, but not so much that it's subconscious.

I think the key to both is practice. We can learn to be both active, engaged, in the moment, and aware that that's what we are. Being and observing ourselves being. And we can learn to use a process diligently, consciously -- a process that we've found to work, and that we're so comfortable with we can adapt it to suit each different circumstance. We're so comfortable with it that we don't have to think about it -- but we do. These things take a great deal of practice.

I don't like practicing. Perhaps it's a vestige of being forced to practice things when I was younger. Perhaps it's impatience, inattention, lack of self-discipline. Perhaps it's that often what I have practiced (e.g. four-finger typing, bad musical instrument playing) have been poor habits, such that practice actually made me worse at it.

Here are just some of the things that I do all the time that I have started to become aware of my process for doing them (two of which are illustrated above):

• processing information 
• designing things
• making things
• solving problems
• conversing
• writing (fiction & non-fiction -- different processes)
• researching
• crafting and telling stories
• meditating
• facilitating
• sensing, listening, observing, paying attention
• intuiting
• explaining, teaching, coaching and interpreting
• creating
• imagining and envisioning, letting go and letting come
• advising
• collaborating
• deciding
• innovating
• achieving consensus
• self-directed learning, especially of things I like that are also needed
• inviting
• provoking and infecting others

For a few of these things, I have evolved a very good process, and do tend to follow it. But for most of these things, I have no process. I have no clue.

Some of these processes are linear. Others are iterative, or interactive, or improvisational. In some of them I adapt the process to suit others, and to suit their processes for doing these things. In others, I confess, I'm still far too dogmatic, still too fervent in the belief that my way is the best, or nearly so. In some cases my collaborators use different processes than I do, so everything in the collaboration becomes a building of bridges, a translation of frames, an adaptation and co-production. A dance.

I think it makes sense to develop (and evolve) a process for doing each of these things, and then practice using it until you become very competent (but not dogmatic) at it. And then, each day, each moment, as you begin to do things, be aware consciously of the various activities you do, and the process you use, deliberately, to do each. That doesn't mean designing new processes for everything you do. It means simply being aware of what process you do use, and letting it evolve to become better. And also being aware of being aware, self-aware, present, deliberate.

Chop wood, carry water, as my friend Rob Paterson reminds me. Do each task, mindfully, until you understand exactly what you are doing and why you're doing it precisely that way. Practice, consciously, getting better, improving the process and the execution of the process, refining, getting faster, more skilled and competent, presently aware, managing, adapting oneself.
This is a different take on the being versus doing discussion I've had here, and with myself, lately. Presence requires you to be self-aware as you do the activity using the process.

At last I understand when meditators speak of mindfulness, what they are referring to. Simply being aware of what you are and what precisely you are doing, and how, and why. The word attention is from the Latin "to stretch to". Such folly to be constantly stretching, in all directions, without knowing, being aware of where or how or why you are stretching.

Aha.

Category: Let-Self-Change

Last year I described thirteen economic, political and environmental crises that are long overdue, and which will almost certainly occur at some point in this century. These crises will be the result of our generation's short-term thinking, greed, and mismanagement of the the economy, of power and of the Earth's resources. Our actions, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century and to some extent even before, have been irresponsible, shortsighted, selfish and unsustainable. What's worse, rather than accept responsibility for this behaviour, we have mortgaged the future to try to sustain our unsustainable lifestyle and actions just a little longer, in the misguided belief that technology or innovation will find some way to solve them, and allow rampant population growth and consumption growth to continue indefinitely.

The generations that will inherit the mess we have created over the next three generations should rightly be furious at us for doing so, but unlike the boomer generation, who rioted in the streets in the 1960s and swore to "never trust anyone over 30", our successors have been sanguine, pragmatic, even timid about the challenges we have foisted upon them.

Recently, I was asked which of the thirteen interrelated looming crises I thought would be the first to occur, the first domino to fall, and when.

In answering this, I would offer a few caveats:

• Prognosticators have a long track record of overestimating the rate of change in the near future and underestimating the change over the longer term. Unlike many of the experts in economics, ecology, technology and social trends, I think the next twenty years or so will be merely tumultuous -- the real crises, the ones we are unlikely to be able to cope with, probably won't occur until the 2030s. 
• This doesn't mean that we're not going to have some earlier previews of the crises to come, and some short-term improvements in some areas that might give us false hope that the longer-term problems had been solved. For example, we're going to have a series of serious recessions before 2030, I think, but the next Great Depression will not likely occur until after then, after we have had some temporary respite from the smaller downturns. And while Peak Oil is inevitably going to make the price of oil unaffordable for almost all endeavours we now take for granted, we will see spikes and retrenchments of oil prices in the interim, in response to short-term events, that may blind us to the inevitable long-term energy crisis that awaits us.
• The longer-term crises that will prove to be our undoing are likely to be masked by short-term crises that will distract us from paying attention to them. The media will worsen this situation. Only in retrospect will we realize which of the burning issues of the day were the ones that were really important.

Because they're interrelated, some of these crises will precipitate others, and our ability for forestall some of them will delay the occurrence of others. And the timing of some of them, like pandemics, is largely unpredictable -- if they occur soon, they might cause some of these other crises to occur sooner than I'd expect, and if they occur later, they might delay the onset of others.

Having said that, here is my wild guess about when these crises will occur. I'd welcome your "second guesses":

First Wave: Approximately 2010 to 2030

• Consumer Credit Collapse: After a brief upturn in the housing market in the US particularly, housing prices will plunge again as the orgy of consumer spending that has occurred since 1990 (see charts above) comes to a sudden halt, after a whole series of bank collapses cause a severe tightening of credit. Since 1970, in real dollars, per-capita total assets have doubled, financed entirely by debt, so that net worth of 95% of the population has actually declined. The apparent wealth of bigger houses, second cars and expensive furnishings is all an illusion, and the tightening of credit will throw all these overpriced assets into the market at fire-sale prices, and bankruptcies will soar. Between 2002 and 2007, $1.2 trillion of credit card debt was shifted into mortgages. With home prices falling further, that debt will be called, and added onto the expected $3.0 trillion in other credit card debt, carrying double-digit average interest charges, will crush millions of consumers.
• $US Collapse, US Debt Crisis and Trade Imbalance Crisis: Even the most optimistic economists have acknowledged that the US debt and trade deficit, each around $10 trillion and growing at an astronomical rate, cannot be sustained. The recent "small collapse" of the $US reflects this, but it is not enough to solve the problem. It simply cannot be repaid, even if interest rates are suppressed and the US economy keeps churning out more and more money to paper it over. Ultimately creditors (in Asia, and in the Mideast), realizing their receivables from and investments in the US are essentially worthless, will balk, and the dollar's collapse will be sudden and total, just like all the overextended and mismanaged currencies that have preceded it.
• Inflation and Interest Rate Spikes: The real rate of inflation in affluent nations has long been in excess of 10%, but government authorities have fudged the numbers to report low rates to justify low indexing of pensions and wages, artificially low interest rates on debt, and to enable them to blame consumers for their inability to make ends meet. Rates on loans and mortgages are already jumping even as governments keep pushing down the interest rates they pay to bondholders and charge to banks and corporate lenders. As commodity prices leap and credit tightens, and as the $US goes into freefall, we will start to see the hyperinflation that plagued mismanaged economies throughout previous centuries. These spikes will exacerbate the housing and credit collapse and bankruptcy rates, and slow international trade to a crawl.

Second Wave: Approximately 2030 to 2050: Continuation/recurrence of the above crises plus:

• Economic Collapse in China and India: These economies, overheated, dependent on sales to affluent nations that will no longer be able to afford their products, dependent on cheap energy, and facing unending environmental catastrophes because of exhaustion of the soil and pollution of the air and water, will crumble. Factories will be abandoned, riots will break out, civil order will break down, and famines and civil war will rage.
• Severe Water Shortages: Water will become a scarce resource and economic activities dependent on it will become unaffordable and, with rationing, impossible to sustain. Irrigation in agriculture, tar sands development, and most mining operations will cease. Hydroelectric power plants will shut down. Human settlements in dry areas on all continents will be abandoned. The US may invade Canada to access fresh water.
• Oil Shortages and Permanent Price Spikes: As new oil projects prove incapable of producing significantly more energy than they consume, realization of the end of the oil economy will finally dawn on us all. Oil prices of 5-10 times current levels will require a permanent and painful adjustment to economies and ways of life. Areas that are inhospitable without fossil fuel heat or cooling will be abandoned. So will suburbs and areas far from employment, as outlined in The Long Emergency. Large-scale re-localization of economies will occur, as long-distance transportation of goods and people becomes uneconomic. Industries dependent on oil, such as agriculture, plastics, textiles, paints, chemicals and pharmaceuticals will face massive restructuring. Economies dependent on foreign trade will be shredded.
• Stock Market Crash and Global Depression: The combination of most or all of the above will bring about a crisis in capital markets, a huge shrinkage in consumer spending, and an unprecedented dislocation of people and industry, precipitating the second Great Depression. The last one ended with a massive government investment in war and social service spending. This time, governments will have no money to rescue the economy, so the depression could continue for decades, just as the boom of the last century endured for an unprecedented period.
• Pandemics: The concentration of monoculture agriculture, the horrific overcrowding of farmed animals with almost no genetic diversity, and human overcrowding, combined with global warming and the destruction of tropical ecosystems will, together, inevitably unleash pandemics that will affect all species of life on Earth: humans, plant crops, forests, farmed and wild animals, birds and fish. The economic losses and economic disruption caused by these pandemics will be far more devastating than the simple loss of human life. Such pandemics will become more frequent as ecosystems become more crowded, less varied and more fragile. They could happen anytime.
• Bioterrorism: As these crises start to occur with greater regularity and greater severity, a sense of desperation and hopelessness, already seen in some of the more overpopulated and desolated nations of the planet, will become more widespread. Bioterror is easy for desperate groups to perpetrate, and need no national sponsorship, and the spread of knowledge and new technologies will make it even easier. With so much of our population, food supply and infrastructure centralized, it will be impossible to prevent, and its success will encourage more of it.

Third Wave: Approximately 2050 to 2070: Continuation/recurrence and worsening of the above crises plus:

• Conventional Civil & Regional Wars Escalating to Global Wars: In socially and environmentally stressed and overpopulated areas such as Pakistan/India (two nuclear powers), the Mideast, South America, Africa and Southeast Asia, already endemic local warfare and genocides will escalate and spread into regional wars, which, as resources become scarce and nuclear and biological weapons become more affordable, will engulf the whole planet. 
• Climate Change Crises: Large-scale desertification, droughts, heatwaves, the death of the oceans, widespread, violent weather events and rising sea-levels caused by glacial and ice-cap melt and ocean current disruption will all wreak havoc on an already crisis-weary planet. Some projections suggest that, by the latter part of the century, as many as one billion people in low-lying coastal areas will be permanently displaced.
• Food Crises, Famines and the Collapse of Industrial Agriculture: A combination of oil scarcity, water scarcity, diversion of cropland to fuel production, and desertification and other climate change disruption is likely to make the industrial agriculture model completely unsustainable. The switch to local, subsistent permaculture will be difficult and painful.
• Large-Scale, Endemic Unemployment: Most of the planet has lost the capacity and knowledge of how to make a living for themselves. As larger corporations prove to be unsustainable and close their doors, the immediate effect will be large-scale chronic unemployment (already evident in many struggling nations). It will take generations for citizens to re-learn the long-lost skills of feeding, clothing and looking after themselves.
• Infrastructure Collapse: For many years the global infrastructure of utilities, distribution, transportation networks and production has been neglected and underfunded. This neglect will worsed as the economy weakens, and large parts of the infrastructure previously maintained by either tax dollars or private consortia will crumble and fall into disuse, and will just be abandoned.
• Endemic Chronic Disease: It was interesting to see that the gnomes of Davos identified the soaring rates of chronic diseases in affluent nations as one of the top ten global business risks this year. We will soon, I predict, discover that this is caused mostly by the toxins in our food, air, water and soil, and by the nutritional and micronutritional poverty of the modern industrial agriculture diet. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done, and the soaring rates of these debilitating chronic diseases will bankrupt health systems, cripple the workforce, and create an unbearable burden on the healthy.

Not a particularly bright picture, I admit, and more than any species can possibly hope to overcome. All civilizations end, and so will ours. It won't be pleasant, or sudden, but this is how I see if unfolding, based on a combination of a lot of study of history, anthropology, economics and current events, and a bit of intuition. If you think I'm missing something from this list, or if you think my timing is off, or that something else will be the first domino to fall, please jump in. If you think that technology, or ingenuity, or leadership, or spirituality, or some great collective consciousness and global collaboration, is going to rescue us, there are lots of other sites with readers anxious for your reassurance, but I've heard it all, and I'm past such wishful thinking.

In the meantime, this world is still a wonderful place, and it needs our attention to the issues at hand, and to the creation of models of a better way to live for the survivors of the sorry mess we've (with the best of intentions) created. Let's have fun, fill the world with love, conversation and community, do what we can to make things better, or at least no worse, and let the future unfold as it will. Fare forward, o brave fellow passengers on this lovely fragile little spaceship.

Category: Why Our Civilization is Unsustainable

Last week in Quebec City I had the pleasure of meeting with about 20 senior librarians and information directors at a workshop to discuss the trends in and future of Knowledge Management and research, and the evolving role of Information Professionals.This included an interesting debate on the different "information behaviours" of most members of Gen Millennium, such as:

• Their preference for just-in-time, conversational, real-time knowledge exchange (e.g. face-to-face, voice-to-voice or IM rather than e-mail or voice-mail). In this, they are much like their grandparents, except they use technology (such as videoconferencing with screen-sharing) to expand their reach to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
• Their aversion to e-mail, groupware and other one-size-fits-none and over-engineered tools.
• The fact that their learning style is self-directed and self-motivated; they don't expect or wait for their employer to tell them what learning programs to sign up for.
• The fact that they mark a return to an oral culture, and lack the patience (and some think, the ability) to craft well-articulated written research or arguments; they do have a skill for telling stories more effortlessly than previous generations however.
• They expect to have 12 different jobs during their career; the downside of this is that they're unlikely to ever know the business of their employer (as distinct from their particular area of specialty) well enough to know how what they do fits with and adds value to (or could add value to) what everyone else in the organization does.

Over the past year I've been writing about KM 2.0 (I've given up calling it KM 0.0 -- a little too cute I think), and last week's discussion refined my thinking somewhat about what this will entail. I'm now convinced that "knowledge workers" in the 21st century (i.e. anyone who spends a significant portion of their time processing information, which these days is most of us) need skills (S), tools (T) and processes (P) in six areas, none of which they currently possess:

1. Personal Content Management (S,T,P): Help, and tools, that enable workers to organize their own knowledge (on their hard drives and wherever else they keep it), and 'subscribe' to others' content and 'publish' their own. I put the terms 'subscribe' and 'publish' in quotes because this is simple, informal, RSS-based publishing of and subscribing to informal content (blogs etc.), for no charge. This is the model that is replacing the old KM 1.0 process of 'submitting' information to large, centralized, indexed repositories.
2. Simple Virtual Presence and Enabling Conversations (T,S,P): Real-time, intuitive technologies that enable recordable IM, VoIP, desktop video, file-sharing and screen-sharing, and allow users to switch between them simply, and to find and connect with the people who have the knowledge they seek. This technology is needed to help people self-organize communities of passion and converse easily and competently with people in these communities.
3. Environmental Scanning and Sensemaking (S, P, T): The capacity to add meaning, sense and value to information, in at least five ways:
• Alerts and Briefings: Filtering the firehose of new information to decipher what's both new and important, and précis what people in the organization need to be aware of
  
• Research: Asking the right questions about information to distil what it all means, what it implies, and the risks and opportunities it presents
• Guidance: Competent, understandable, practical, strategic advice on what actions are recommended in the organization
• Events: Peer-to-peer, community-of-passion-organized and -managed events (physical and virtual) that allow knowledge-sharing and collaborative conversations among the people who care about the issue
• Self-Assessment Tools: Means by which those affected can self-assess their knowledge, skills, strategy, and capacity to act on an issue
4. Professional Research Capacity and Risk/Opportunity Assessment (S,P): Everyone needs to be a competent researcher -- this is essential to innovation. Most people think research is the same as search, and very few schools teach how to do research properly. Information professionals need even deeper research skills, to teach and assist the other employees of the organization, and they also need to learn their employer's business, to make effective use of the research they do. In doing so, they develop the capacity to understand and articulate the risk implications and innovation opportunities that emerge from new information, and the cost of not knowing. Some current examples of risk areas for assessment: The impact of climate change, the threat of pandemics, exposure to currency collapse, interest rate spikes and oil price spikes and shortages, business continuity and reputation risks, and the threat of disruptive innovations by companies not currently seen as competitors.
5. Just-in-Time Canvassing (P, T): Only rarely do front-line employees have sufficient lead time to obtain precise, accurate, detailed information, and most of the time they don't need it. They need a fast, approximately-right, summarized answer, now. To get it they need a process for quickly canvassing all the people who might provide that approximately-right answer, in next to real time.
6. Story Crafting, Story Telling, Story Collecting and Story Recording (S,P,T): We are learning that one of the most effective ways of conveying information with the necessary context to know what it means is through stories. Crafting a story entails re-creating it in an understandable, visual, concise way. The new book Back of the Napkin presents a simple and compelling way to do this, but there are many other methods. Also needed are multimedia tools that collect and record stories and anecdotes, and the skills to use them.

I see the role of Knowledge Management and of Information Professionals in the 21st century as facilitating the development of these skills and introduction of these processes and tools in their organizations. I'm not sure what we call it. Probably not KM. I've referred to it as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Work Effectiveness Improvement, Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) but none of these accurately encompasses the six enabling roles above. Maybe we should call it Working Smarter, and staff it with a cross-functional project team with a five year mandate to measurably improve these six capacities in organizations. A couple of years ago I wrote about creating a magazine called Working Smarter that would address this capacities; perhaps it's time to resurrect this idea, and not fuss about whose function it is.

This would be a big undertaking in most organizations. In order to free up resources for it, many organizations would have to face the distasteful prospect of admitting that their KM 1.0 investments and infrastructure, including intranets and websites, are ineffective and could be substantially dismantled at a considerable saving and without significant consequence to the organization.

I don't expect to see this happen overnight. Many organizations are quite wedded to their existing websites, groupware and centralized repositories, and have employees whose full-time job is just indexing, maintaining and creating search tools for all this content. But in order to rise to what Peter Drucker identified as the greatest business challenge of the 21st century -- improving the productivity of "knowledge workers" -- we will have to make the transition from content to context, and from collection to connection.

Category: Personal Productivity Improvement

PS: Several of my readers have asked me why I bother writing about knowledge and innovation when I'm predicting cascading crises and the collapse of civilization in this century. It's a good question, and here's how I answered it in a recent comment thread: I have no difficulty bifurcating what is happening and what needs to be done in the short-term (which, human nature being what it is, will be business as usual until we have absolutely no choice but to change everything we do), and what will inevitably happen in the longer term (and I'm learning that most predicted crises happen later than when the brightest prognosticators think they will, but ultimately end up changing things more than they think). What happened in 1929, and in 1939, and in 1989, and in 2001, were all predictable decades in advance by those with foresight and the knowledge of history. We will continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic even after the first of the civilization-ending catastrophes befall us, because that is what humans do -- we concern ourselves with the needs of the moment, and prolong the inevitable as much as possible. I don't think we'll see any sea-changes in behaviour in my lifetime (statistically another 20 years) and that's a whole generation. So I think it's useful, and fun, to prognosticate about technology changes over that period. My guess is that we'll face another Great Depression in the 2030s (although there will be some grim recessions before that) and the cascading crises will increase thereafter until it becomes impossible to deny that our civilization is coming to an end (about 2060s or 2070s). By then it will be too late. This is essentially what John Gray says, and I find his argument compelling. I'm not depressed about it, nor do I think it's avoidable. Just going to do my best to create some working models for the (few) survivors to follow, which is now taking up half of my time. The other half is having fun, here, now, in the context of all the ultimately irrelevant issues, toys and inanities of the day. Short of suicide, it's the only way I can see to deal with things. Musical deck chairs, anyone?

The ultimate test of your rock-balancing finesse, via Forum Ouvert (Open Space) practitioner JS Bouchard, who, with his family, were such wonderful hosts to me during my visit yesterday to Québec.

Mainstream Media Finally Pick Up on Ivins-Squalene Connection: The motive of Bruce Ivins to send the anthrax-tainted letters to media and politicians -- to get the US to attack Iraq so that his vaccine, with the unauthorized and dangerous additive squalene, could be quickly fast tracked and tested on a guinea pig military -- has finally been discovered by the NYT, more than a week after I wrote about it. Squalene puts the immune system into overdrive, by generating what has been called a "cytokine storm", but can also lead as a result to permanent autoimmune hyperactivity diseases when the immune system never reverts to normal function. The result is severe inflammation and irreparable damage to critical healthy cells and tissue, which can be crippling, agonizing, or fatal, as in arthritis or diabetes or lupus or endometriosis or MS or chronic fatigue syndrome or asthma or allergies or inflammatory bowel disease or any of the dozens of other chronic immune system hyperactivity diseases. Hey, but what's a few lifelong disabilities and deaths when it comes to testing out a wacky vaccine against bioterror? What's more interesting is that the people who had the most to gain from provoking an unjustified war against Iraq so they could test this vaccine, were the senior Homeland Security and Bush administration officials desperate to develop such a vaccine. Of course the FBI has its patsy now, and dead men tell no tales, so we're never likely to find out who really sent the anthrax letters. Now the mainstream media have made the Ivins-Squalene connection, will one of them connect Squalene to the companies and higher-ups who wanted it tested despite its monstrous side-effects? For example Glenn Greenwald points us to a NYT article (by Judith Miller) written a week before 9/11 on the Pentagon program to develop a vaccine-resistant anthrax for its own biowarfare program. Guess they'd need their own 'special' vaccine for that, huh?

The Coffee Shop as Social Gathering-Place: Chris Corrigan picks up on an idea in Architect Magazine on how coffee shops might morph into the business and community gathering places of the future. I recently predicted the end of offices, and with their demise will come a need for such f2f gathering spots, equipped with videoconferencing and screensharing and other social tools to allow others who can't attend to be part of the conversation.

Building in Space for Nuance: Amy Lenzo points out Seth Godin's suggestion that, while design solutions/ideas should be intuitive, they also need to create space so that those who don't intuitively 'get' the solution/idea (or some subtle and ingenious facet of it) can ask questions without feeling foolish or critical. This perhaps ties into the approach of Back of the Napkin, which basically lets you recreate how you came up with a solution/idea by telling an illustrated story, one step at a time, with the opportunity for Q&A and collaborative conversation.

The Disconnect Between the US Election Campaign and the Life of Americans: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been inviting real American voters to tell them about the economic problems they're having. The letters are heart-wrenching and show just how irrelevant the election campaign and the media coverage of "the issues" is to them. Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone about this, tells some of the stories and concludes (thanks to Jon Husband for the link):

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers -- that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence -- immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.
The Virtue of Beauty: A lovely piece of contemplation by Pohangina Pete on our obsession with the utility of things with poetic interjections like this:

The sun comes and goes, and a cold wind with it. A woman carrying a surfboard returns from the beach, wringing water from her hair with one hand, the board clutched under the other arm. She slides it into her BMW and drives off, leaving the winter beach empty except for the roar of the surf, the scurrying wind, the arcs and jinks of swallows. Something splashes in the creek, down among the dry dead raupo, and a duck calls. Then the rain arrives, drizzle at first then heavier, then the sun follows, shining through the haze of rain and out at sea a rainbow forms. Tell me what this is useful for.
The Climate Change Paradox: In the last few months I've met several climate scientists, and they're scared. Changes are occurring much faster than they predicted even a couple of years ago, and accelerating. There's increasing evidence that some of these changes are self-reinforcing, and pushing past tipping points that will careen us into out-of-control climate changes. They're now working to try to recommend steps that will reduce global warming by 2 degrees celsius this century, while forecasting and trying to develop adaptation plans for 4 degree changes, because they know the politicians' plans to keep it to 2 degrees have no chance of working. The problem is, a 4 degree change would be catastrophic. So if they're honest, and admit what is likely to happen and what it will mean, they'll be ridiculed by the climate change deniers, and people will just stop trying to deal with the issue. But if they lie and say that fixing the problem is possible, and if people do what they suggest and it's still not enough, they'll be accused to saying too little too late. They can't win. And alas, neither can we.

Why McCain Will Win: I've been predicting a McCain win since I spoke with Joe Bageant and read his book. Now the polls are tipping his way, and others are trying to explain it by blaming the media. But people don't believe the media much -- they believe their friends, and the people they see and hear. The 40% who are uneducated, white, working-class Americans therefore believe McCain when he says the Iraq war is winnable, and that he cares about their values. That's all they need to hear. To win, Obama needs 84% of the remainder of voters, an impossible stretch. And as Elizabeth Kolbert reports, McCain has thrown away all his previous principles and jumped on the pro-big-business, anti-environment bandwagon to line up the big right-wing corporatist campaign donors. On top of all that, says Sara Robinson, Obama supporters are from the Quaker/Puritan cultural heritage who don't fight back, giving advantage to the muckraking and mudslinging McCain supporters from the Scots/Irish/Cavalier heritage. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the Robinson link.

...and Bush Steps Up Iran Invasion Plans to Help Him Win: Sy Hersh has the latest startling news about the Bush regime's covert war on Iran, and plans to provoke violence to justify another all-out war.

Debunking the Hydrogen Economy...Again: European Tribune debunks the irrational hysteria surrounding the MIT announcement of a more efficient way to produce hydrogen. Once more, for those who missed it: Hydrogen is not a fuel source, merely a (not very efficient, yet) way to store the fuel once it's produced.

Borrowings From the Fed, since 1910: A scary curve of desperate borrowings to cover reckless loans. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.



Permaculture Building: A Model for Intentional Community?: The 500sf home above was built using local, healthy, natural materials into a woodland hill in Wales, is sustainable and energy-efficient, and cost about 1500 hours plus £3000 ($6000). They're planning on creating whole communities of similar homes, but are, of course, having problems with zoning authorities. Imagine a whole Intentional Community of such buildings, blended together into the natural landscape! Some good links on this website, BTW. Thanks to Mattbg for the link.

Quotes for the Week: In response to a question I asked at the IFLA conference in Québec City yesterday What is the essence of good research?, David Stern of Brown University replied: "Asking the right questions". And from Justin Kownacki in a Twitter comment: "Social media is populated largely by people who are not good at being social in real life".

Thought for the Week: Looking Away from Beauty: From Orion Magazine, by Rebecca Solnit, to think about if you're watch the tainted Olympics:

Bodies in peak condition performing with everything they’ve got are an image of freedom, as are pristine landscapes like Yosemite and the Tetons. But the reality of freedom only exists when these phenomena aren’t deployed to cover up other bodies that are cringing, starving, bleeding, or dying, other places that are clearcut, strip-mined, and contaminated. Television coverage of the summer Olympics probably won’t cut away from those sleek athletes to the charred bodies of massacred villagers and the anguished faces of young gang-rape victims in Darfur, or the bloodied heads of young monks and uncounted corpses and prisoners in Burma and Tibet. But the associations between the two are crucial to our sense of compassion, and of what it means to be a part of a global community. 

Four years ago I reproduced a synopsis of two of the critical arguments from Daniel Quinn's book Story of B, written by David Sheen, along with my own narrative. The first argument, The Boiling Frog, is that the population explosion depicted in the curve below is creeping up on us so slowly (and we have been lulled by dubious arguments that it will peak at 'only' 9-11 billion) that we won't be able to cope with it until it overwhelms us. The second argument, Population: A Systems Approach, is that, contrary to conventional wisdom and intuition, the most humane and effective way to bring this explosion under control is to cut food production.  (And yes, I know that a frog heated slowly in water is actually smart enough to jump out before it boils, but that doesn't invalidate Quinn's argument.) I think it's worth re-reading, since four years later nothing has changed.

Red lines indicate sustainable population and sustainable footprint at forecast levels of consumption and allowing for improvements in food technology, but with no provision for non-human species on the planet. Green lines include a provision for non-humans to inhabit half the world's habitable area.
Of all the radical ideas I have espoused in How to Save the World, none has proven to be as controversial as my belief that substantial human population reduction is a necessary condition (I am not sure whether it is a sufficient condition) to prevent ecological catastrophe in this century. The chart above, which I explained in this post, shows the impact of our continued population explosion, far beyond the levels of sustainability represented by the green and red lines on the chart (the green line allows for coexistence with other creatures, the red line hogs all resources on earth for humans).

The chart below right shows the vicious cycle that Daniel Quinn argues, in The Story of B, has led us to this point. The argument is that (a) the exponential curve shown above is creeping up on us so quietly and quickly that if we wait for the first undeniable evidence of cataclysm, it will be too late, and (b) the root cause of the population explosion is excessive and ever-increasing food production, and the paradoxical and counter-intuitive solution to human misery caused by overpopulation and starvation is to cut food production.

It is this second argument that causes the strongest reaction, and I have been unable to briefly articulate Quinn's line of thinking (and there's no room in this blog for a 40-page treatise). But I've just discovered a brilliant précis of both arguments (a) and (b) above, on David Sheen's Anarchitecture site. I've reproduced David's précis of both arguments in their entirety below, and thank David for his diligence in putting this online. I would encourage readers to buy the extraordinary Story of B so they can read these arguments in their entirety.



Read the whole article, including the David Sheen synopses.

Perhaps because of the ponderous nature of the term "Intentional Community", many such communities are called cohousing neighbourhoods. Other terms like ecovillages, communes and housing cooperatives are also used. Since even wikipedia mis-defines some of them, it may be worthwhile defining what we mean by all these terms.

The original meaning of "community" is a place shared equally. The term has been debased to mean just about any agglomeration of people with something "in common", but for purposes of defining Intentional Community the original definition is useful. "Shared equally" doesn't mean all under one roof, or identical accommodation for everyone, or even equal investment. It does mean that the "place" is jointly owned by its members, not "privately" owned. You may pay a lump sum for the use of a unit for your private enjoyment, but you do not "own" it -- the payment is really a prepayment of rent to the community members collectively, and it is the collective, not you personally, who can transfer that right of private enjoyment to someone else when you leave, charging them a prepayment of rent and reimbursing yours at some pre-agreed "price".

This might seem to be a big deal to a society that is obsessed and paranoid about "private property", and accustomed to considering their "home" as their most important asset and investment. But the reality is that most people really rent their property from the mortgage company, and hope to reap a speculative gain on the change in value when they cease doing so and rent someplace else.

The big difference is that, just like a renter, in an Intentional Community you can't do whatever you want with "your" unit because it isn't "yours". In a regular neighbourhood of isolated strangers, you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't reduce the resale value below the mortgage, or defy local neighbourhood ordinances mainly designed to ensure you don't reduce others' resale value. As long as you can get your head around the fact that your "asset" in an IC is a prepaid expense and a share in a collective place, rather than a piece of property, an IC may be for you. Alas, most financial institutions can't get their head around this difference. They effectively own the property that you secure your mortgage with, and they can repossess it and do what they want with it whenever they are so inclined. When they're asked to finance a prepaid expense and a share in a not-for-profit entity, they tend to get skittish.

There are some places that call themselves ICs (especially in struggling nations) that are not. Buying your own private property in a condominium development that throws in a "share" of an adjacent golf course or other "common" facility (and may even throw in maid and chef services) does not constitute being a member of a community -- a "place shared equally" -- let alone an IC. Real estate developers are a sleazy bunch, though, and they like to pass off timeshares and resorts as "communities". A "place shared equally" means a place where decisions are made collectively by members, and not outsourced to or initiated by political or economic agents (agents, what's more, who are generally acting in their own interests).

An Intentional Community is one that has an intention -- literally a "stretching toward". That means something they are striving together to do or to be together. That can be a set of beliefs, or shared goals, or a way of living. In an ecovillage that may be something to do with environmental sustainability, food self-sufficiency, organic and/or vegetarian diet, and living lightly on the land. For a commune it might be shared spiritual practices.

So an Intentional Community is a group of people:

• who share a place equally, and own it collectively,
• who make decisions about it collectively, and
• who have a shared set of beliefs, goals and/or way of living

An Intentional Community could inhabit urban, village, rural or even virtual space. It could be designed by the future members collectively, or retrofitted by self-selecting members already living there or in close proximity.

What about co-housing and housing cooperatives? While the term "co-housing", like "community", could be taken to include commercial condominium, strata title and resort developments, true co-housing communities grew out of the Danish model and are real housing cooperatives (a cooperative is identical to an IC, as defined by the three criteria above, except what they share equally is an enterprise, not a place, and instead of sharing a way of living they share a way of making a living). Although true co-housing is a form of Intentional Community, the shared set of beliefs, goals and/or way of living are often more limited and pragmatic than they are in "deeper" ICs.

Take for example the 29-unit Nubanusit Cohousing Community in Peterborough, New Hampshire (pictured above). It calls itself a condominium, and you buy your unit outright, and have, presumably, the right to resell it to anyone you want. But in many respects it does look like true cohousing:

• the homes are high-efficiency and aspire to high environmental sustainability standards (and there are no roads or driveways; parking is in a common area on the perimeter of the community)
• the design and development and common area operation of the community are governed by a Core Values statement
• members must self-assess their "readiness" to belong to the community, including a willingness to undertake collective work
• the house sizes are modest and the "common house" which is collectively owned is substantial in size and function
• the adjoining farm is organic and biodynamic and open for partial ownership by members who choose to be active in its operation

The private ownership of units can help placate both members and mortgagors worried about exactly what they own (and fussy local zoning authorities wedded to the anti-communitarian definition of "single family dwelling"), but in this respect Nubanusit is not true cohousing and not really an IC.

The issue is, How much difference does this really make? Is insisting on collective ownership of all the land and buildings of the community a form of ideological purism, that could be holding us back from creating and retrofitting thousands of such developments as a model of a better, more environmentally sustainable and socially responsible way to live, a stepping stone to help our whole society rediscover the value of self-sufficient community and take back decision-making from remote and powerful political and economic interests?

Or will communities like Nabanusit, as they're resold again and again over time to strangers who had no part in their design and rationale and are indifferent to their Core Values, end up looking like every other exurban community on the planet? It really all comes down to the ownership of private property and decisions on who can and cannot become a member of the community. Without collective ownership and collective decisions on membership, what may start as a true community with shared intention could easily end up as just another neighbourhood of convenience, with residents dictated solely by proximity to their places of work.

And while this particular community claims to pursue ideals of sustainability, responsibility and diversity, might the next community, perhaps right next door, bring together a racist criminal gang whose shared goal is to launder money through its community, or a wingnut cult, or an elitist group of rich executive profligates whose shared goal is to fence themselves off from everyone else, entertain politicians extravagantly and lobby for the deregulation and privatization of everything? Could gang headquarters and militia camps and gated neighbourhoods meet the above criteria of an IC?

You can see how tricky this can all get. Mashing us all together in lonely, socially indifferent, ecologically destructive subdivisions sprawling indistinguishably out from all our cities does have the advantage of keeping us from self-organizing in antisocial ways, not just social ones. Just take a look at some of the popular websites that attract "communities" that advocate the murder of those who disagree with their ideology, or revel in videos that depict torture and humiliation, or hate-monger, or enable sex slavery or wage slavery or the abuse of women and children, and you can see that the power of community cuts both ways.

Nevertheless, we need some working models. So if you've ever thought about creating or joining an Intentional Community, here are some questions I'd like your thoughts on. Imagine you've found a great bunch of people and a great site for such a community:

1. Given the choice between paying a one-time prepaid charge (that could be mostly financed through a credit union) of, say $300,000 (repayable in full if you left, once another suitable member was found) plus $200/month dues, or a monthly rent of $2000, to live in an Intentional Community, which would you prefer?
2. How many hours a week would you volunteer to put in to maintain the community without compensation? 
3. What would you do there to make a living?
4. Would you prefer your own separate building, a private unit within a larger building, or a single communal building?
5. What would be your preferred size of IC: 12 people, 50 people, or 250 people?
6. Nice part of a city on a public transit route, edge of a town of 2000, or in the country miles from everywhere with lots of green space? In what country?
7. What's holding you back? Can't find the right people? No time to research? Family/work obligations?

Category: Intentional Community

I'm preparing for a discussion forum on Friday in Quebec City, and one of the topics we'll be discussing is how the "information behaviours" of Generation Millennium differ from those of previous generations, and what that means for the tools they (and the rest of us -- they outnumber even the boomers) will and won't be using in the future.

Out of my research on this has come a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts of my generation that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular, and just as CDs, which my generation thought were the last word in music storage, are disappearing even faster.

Here's the list:

1. Hard Drives: The price of bandwidth, and the price of storage space in cyberspace, have both dropped precipitously. Expect them to drop further. We may even get to the point where companies will pay us to host our content, even if it's confidential, just so that their clients can find out what we care about and can ask for a bit of our targeted attention. At the same time, Homeland Security is going to be scanning our laptops every time we cross borders, and delaying or charging us if they deem the content to be uh... unpatriotic. So why keep anything on a hard drive anymore? Let the storage and processing all be done in cyberplaces with lots of space and processing power and just stream the results to us, so our machines can be light, pocket-sized, always-connected, pure communication devices. 
2. "Wall of Text" Reports & Documents: Generation Millennium is returning to an oral/visual real-time culture, where blocks of text are used only when visualizations don't convey what's happening better and more succinctly, and where written language is used only when spoken language is unavailable (and with communication becoming more and more instant and real-time, that's not often). This is not to dispute the elegance of well-crafted prose, stories and exposition, just to say it will be conveyed orally, not in written form. Iterative real-time conversation, visualizations, body language and voice inflection simply convey much more than the written word. Ultimately, good communication is more about context than content.
3. "Best Practices": It's natural that people want to hear what the leading companies and individuals in any area of business endeavour are doing, but the sad truth is that most "best practices" are so devoid of context, of the knowledge and history that explains why they are so effective, that they essentially become unactionable. Show, don't tell, and discuss, don't proclaim, are the information behaviours of the future. Less efficient, perhaps (stories take a while to tell, and voice is harder to browse through for fast learning), but much more effective.
4. Email and Groupware: I've written enough recently about the coming death of e-mail so suffice it to say it will be replaced by simple real-time face-to-face, voice-to-voice and IM technologies. Groupware has been dying for a decade: it's overengineered, asynchronous, complicated and unintuitive more-is-less technology, and will be replaced by its opposite.
5. Corporate Websites: I recently co-judged a competition of nominated best-of-class business websites, and I was aghast at how unnavigable and useless most of them were. My own research has indicated that most people who visit these sites are job-seekers, the media, and competitors. A combination of marketing/PR hype, just-in-case recycled internal junk, and self-congratulation, most corporate websites are devoid of useful content, and those that do have useful stuff have it buried where it can't be found. You just can't put a filing cabinet up online and expect people to wade through it. And your relationship isn't with Company X, it's with Individual Y at that company. Individual Y's blog, with lots of contact info, timely, casual-style articles and useful links, and instant connectivity options, is to the corporate website what your personal company rep is to walking into the company cold and asking for help. Next-gen blogs by individual employees -- personal, casual, chatty, accessible, hosted but uncensored by the employer -- will soon blow even the best corporate websites out of the water.
6. Corporate Intranets: Same rationale as #5. The main way knowledge is, was, and always will be exchanged in organizations is person-to-person in real time. Rich context, iterative, personal, demonstrative, have-it-your-way information, conveyed through conversation. Accept no substitute. 
7. Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content: The only people who really care about taxonomy and boolean search are librarians, and unfortunately they usually don't know enough about their employer's business to know what to do with the esoterica that requires such tools anyway. With luck, they'll learn the employer's business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won't need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer. "Information is always trying to be free", as Marshall McLuhan said a half-century ago. And they won't sell their research and analysis either: They'll give it to colleagues to use first, and later they'll give it away to clients to show how smart they (and their employers) are.
8. Cell Phones: Now let me get this straight: On my increasingly-compact, full-screen, full-keyboard laptop I can get wireless anywhere for a small flat monthly rate, and then make unlimited phone calls, download files and communicate in a dozen different ways for free. But now on this tiny awkward cell phone, you're going to charge me for every message, and severely restrict what I can send and receive. And I'm going to put up with this why?
9. Classrooms: There is really nothing that can be done in a classroom that can't be done using desktop videoconferencing with screensharing, for free. No travel costs/time/pollution. No bums on chairs. Unlimited multi-tasking without nasty looks from the instructor. And with YouTube, SlideShare/SlideCast and other tools, you have access to the best presenters in the world on virtually any subject imaginable.
10. Meetings: Same rationale as #9. With simple virtual presence tools you can actually exercise the Law of Two Feet without getting off your ass.
11. Job Titles: Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)
12. Offices: When I started working, executive offices had heavy dark wood paneling, fireplaces, and liquor cabinets. Now they're 10x10, utilitarian, sometimes shared, often empty, and sometimes without walls. Meanwhile the pay for executives has soared. People would rather have the money than the real estate, and as the cost of space, and travel to and from it, rises, the cost/benefit of offices worsens all the time. The next generation works anywhere, anytime, anyway -- home, car, coffee shop, and there is "virtually" no reason to go into an office to talk on the phone and work on the PC. As soon as simple virtual presence tools become second nature to the senior people in organizations (twenty years or so from now) the office will vanish.

I was tempted to add "keyboards" the this list but I'm not sure. Why is voice recognition and transcription improving so slowly? Even translation software is improving by leaps and bounds. I was also tempted to add "everything made by Microsoft" -- but that would be too obvious.

Anything I've missed?

Category: Technology and Society

In the virtual world Second Life, there are people who are there to play being someone they're not, and other people who are trying to be authentic. At one extreme there are people who come in and act as a member of the opposite sex, or as a machine or animal. There are those who come specifically to play faerie and S&M roles, living out fantasies behind the mask of their avatar. There are those who act "realistically" but assume airs or false bravado, who essentially lie about who they are and see how long they can fool others with their charade. Then there are the many who act, and speak, in chat and voice, just like who they are in real life, except better looking. And at the other extreme are those who alter their avatars to look as much like themselves as possible (and sometimes even caricatures of themselves) and insist that everything be completely "realistic".

These groups tend to self-select others who share their passion for fantasy or realism. The role-players shrug off accusations of inauthenticity from realists as anal, puritan and self-important, insisting that Second Life is just a game -- harmless fun. The realists portray the role-players as autistics, liars, time-wasters who are preoccupied with esoterica and too irresponsible to use virtual worlds for much needed, authentic conversation and problem-solving.

I have a foot in both camps. I see Second Life as a remarkable imaginative tool: You can create worlds that don't (or even couldn't) exist in reality. You could (theoretically anyway) film a group's spontaneous experiences in Second Life and edit it into a movie that would be unlike anything you could do in real life. For those who, because of difficult personal circumstances or disabilities, are restricted in their ability to seek or have deep, loving, personal relationships, Second Life is exactly what its name implies, a second chance to live a healthy, normal life.

On the other hand, it can be a place of escapism, aggression and addiction. The degree to which some people obtain gratification from dominating and humiliating another person, and to which others are willing to subjugate themselves just to be "loved", is very troubling. Many of the places in Second Life are precise and banal imitations of real life, except with vastly more conspicuous consumption and private ownership. The poor play at being rich, with massive private mansions and torture chambers filled with expensive playthings (you need pay nothing to have fun in Second Life, but some people spend enormous sums of real money buying land, clothing and toys for their avatars). In a world that needs no hierarchy, there is a lot of it. In a world where "physical" violence is very difficult to perpetrate, there is a depressing amount of psychological violence.

In today's complex world we all have (for perfectly practical reasons) multiple identities, and I've written before about the challenges of moving between identities (and the media that tend to keep them separate) as relationships evolve and the communities we are each a part of bump together and overlap. My identities as business executive, as family member, as friend, as colleague, as writer, as speaker, as student are each different. They are all authentic, but they emphasize and de-emphasize (or even hide) different aspects of my history and personality, of who I really am.

In addition to identities we also have multiple personas. These are public roles that we assume or display, that we play. Many of these roles are assigned tacitly or explicitly, through a job title, a screenplay, a team roles list, duty roster etc. People who are insecure or unsure who they are will muddle their personas and identities: They will act, for example, how they think a father is supposed to act, in the presence of his children, rather than authentically. In some cases, when they're really messed up, this can actually be a good thing, but for the most part it's dangerous and confusing to others. It's hard to trust someone when you know (and people know when what they are seeing is a persona and not an identity) that it's only an act, a role-play.

Some personas are authentic, while others are utterly and purposefully false. Some of them are protective colouring that is designed to make it easier to survive in a crowded, judgemental and often intolerant world. Sometimes the gunk of our personas sticks to us so closely that, like some theatre makeup, it is very difficult to take off afterwards. After enough time and practice playing a role we may not even realize that many aspects of our persona are not authentic, not really ourselves at all. We 'become' our role, our job, to the point that our true identity is lost.

In many human activities, from the workplace to the theatre, we also recognize archetypes (from the Greek = original model). Archetypes are recognizable symbols or patterns, which may be simplified (stereotypes) or exaggerated (caricatures) to increase their recognizability. Humans are, after all, pattern recognizers, and putting a label on a certain type of character or behaviour enables us to think and communicate with others about it in a meaningful way. If we say Obama acts presidential in the same way that Kennedy did, for example, we are establishing Kennedy as an archetype. The cliché about "they broke the mold after they made her" likewise identifies someone as an archetype. All similar people thereafter "in the same mold" are merely copies.

Much use is made of archetypes in the writing and criticism of literature, in art, and in psychology. Many of the gods of different religions are archetypal -- intended as models to study or follow. The cards of the Tarot deck, especially the major arcana, are also archetypes, handy in the search for patterns of people and behaviours necessary to tell fortunes.

Three years ago I wrote about one of those Tarot archetypes, The Fool or Jester, and specifically the interpretation of one Australian writer of the card's meaning:

The archetype of the wise Fool is one that is found in many cultures in all parts of the world. His lack of experience in the ways of society is seen on the surface to be a disadvantage, but in reality it ensures that his mind is not closed to unusual experiences that are denied to ordinary men.

He is the vagabond who exists on the fringe of organized life, going his own way, ignoring the rules and taboos with which men seek to contain him. He is the madman who carries within him the seeds of genius, the one who is despised by society yet who is the catalyst which will transform that society.

The Fool is the Green Man, the harbinger of a new cycle of existence, the herald of new life and fresh beginnings. He can be seen as the innocent spirit about to embark on physical incarnation; the young child who has yet to learn of the perils of the world; or as the seeker after enlightenment chasing the elusive butterfly of intuition in the hope that it will lead to the mysteries.
In the earlier article I wrote about cats as exemplars of Playing the Fool: "I have seen cats of all ages, cats of amazing wisdom and style who otherwise show themselves to be cunning and astonishingly self-sufficient, chase a piece of string dragged by a child around the house for an hour or more, indefatigably and with enormous concentration, creativity and energy. What is the purpose of this unexpected playfulness? Is this the cat's way of discharging the tension and anxiety that preoccupies her more sombre and sober moments? Is it her way of teaching the child (or the adult, since I get great pleasure from such games, until usually some intrigued child coaxes the string away from me to learn more about this magic trick) important lessons about instinct, about reflexes, about strategy, about the need for play, and a hundred other lessons we are too besotted with WeltSchmertz (sadness over the evils of the world) to appreciate?"

I got to thinking, after reading Chris Corrigan blogging cryptically about learning the value of Playing the Fool at OSonOS, about whether the injection, into an Improv session or an Open Space session, of someone Playing the Fool or some other archetype, as a role, a persona, might be beneficial in getting new perspectives and breakthroughs for the group. The Fool is, after all, the naive seeker of knowledge and self-knowledge. Could someone Playing the Fool ask just the right "stupid questions" to get a group grappling with a complex problem out of their thinking rut? How about someone playing The Magician, the powerful, self-confident master who knows, and shows, that all he and others thought was true is just illusion?

The Magician card reversed is the Juggler, the indigenous Trickster, a conjurer who shows how illusions can wreak real magic (like the colourful butterfly wing that contains no pigment, whose rainbow of hues is the optical deception created by the way the wing's molecules are layered). What value could be achieved by having someone adept at biomimicry delighting and inspiring the group with nature's own tricks to overcome adversity, as they struggle with an intractable human problem?

Or how about planting a Hanged Man in their midst, one who is willing to let go of everything he has always been told is true, to look at the world from a fresh and inverted perspective, and trust his instincts and subconscious? Or the Hermit, the one who keeps bringing everything back to reflection, self-organization, self-sufficiency, adaptation, when the group is clamouring for the politicians or management to fix the problem, or calling for a committee, or a revolution?

And of course, we could always plant the Devil. Imagine the creative conflict and friction that might come from having a Devil's advocate in the room, arguing, just for the sake of challenging all conventional wisdom and the propensity for groupthink.

Dave Snowden has warned me that for such mischievous plantings to work in Open Space and other types of event whose group dynamic is based on trust, the provocateurs would have to be Actors, clearly identified as such, wearing the appropriate 'mask' or accoutrements of their persona. To have someone within the group do this surreptitiously, he suggests, would be a betrayal of the group's trust and throw the authenticity of everything in the event into doubt.

I'm not so sure. I've played the Fool and the Devil and other archetypal roles in meetings, not dishonestly but just to stir things up when I felt that stirring up was needed. I've seen other people move into these and other roles, and the effect on groups is astonishing, perhaps for the same reason that self-deprecation is so powerful in Improv comedy sessions.

Those of us who are continuously learning have all of these archetypes within us, and for them to emerge as personas is, I think, the most natural thing in the world. Kittens and puppies playing together take turns in the dominant (Magician) and submissive (Fool) role, and this is how they learn about complexity, about how to solve problems, and ultimately, about their own identity.

Perhaps what we need is to give each participant in a problem-solving or brainstorming event a set of cards representing all the common archetypes, and have people self-identify and 'wear' the card which represents the persona that has emerged for them, that they are playing, at any point in time during the event. We might learn as much about ourselves as we do about the challenge the event is about. I think de Bono used something like this in his Six Thinking Hats creativity sessions. Some of the more sophisticated emoticons (e.g. the wink) serve a similar purpose, of giving the listener context for "where we're coming from" in this.

Some of the desktop videoconferencing tools allow participants to put up an emoticon indicating how they feel about what they're hearing (happy, unhappy, excited, confused) so speakers who can't 'see' the audience can get feedback that way, without interrupting the event.

In Second Life we've been using the Talking Stick and a Placeholder to encourage group listening and manage the order of conversations, and to 'park' subjects to be discussed once the current one has run its course.

It would be interesting to see whether, in real-time, face-to-face events like Open Space, and in real and virtual conversations and group discussions, we could develop a whole set of "where I'm coming from now" emoticons and archetypal symbols, that we could each display and change on the fly, so that we could accurately 'read' all of the other participants as we spoke and listened. A new, unspoken, supplementary language.

I suspect that animals in the wild, wild children, and perhaps some indigenous peoples, have no need for such artifacts -- they can sense what is not said much better than we can, and they probably have less 'gunk' preventing them from knowing themselves well enough to signal and read accurately "where they're coming from" without the need for artifacts. But we've largely lost that sensing capacity and that deep self-knowledge.

Anyone up for inventing, and learning, a new language?

Category: Language and Communication

Women Deserve Better: Just go watch this stirring performance