Fuzzy Signals

Who is Fuzzy Signals?

Fuzzy Signals is a blog written by Nicole-Anne Boyer. That's just my formal name. It looks good on paper, but most people call me "Nic", "Nicole", "NAB" or a host of other nic-names I have managed to acquire over the years. To read more about me and what I do for a living – which is always hard to explain, since our language still doesn't have good words for it – please read on. So Mom, it's not really your fault after all that you don't know what I do!

A more personal biography, without writing a small opus, is forthcoming. But since my blog is semi-professional anyway, this might be useful background. It also had the advantage of being written already, which is always good on a Monday morning. Plug-and-play works for me.

Professional Biography (Version: October 2003)

Nicole's expertise is in helping people create better futures for themselves, their organisations, and the communities in which they coexist. The idea is that by thinking creatively, rigorously and wisely about the future (and past), more robust decisions are made in the present. As Charles Darwin famously said, "it's not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." Through a winning combination of world-class process tools and leading-edge ideas and content, Nicole excels at improving people's capacity to anticipate and adapt in time to key changes in an uncertain world. By surfacing and challenging key assumptions people are making in their "mental maps", Nicole helps people to understand their blind-spots and vulnerabilities as well as see new opportunity spaces and options for the future. Nicole helps people strike the balance between coping with too much uncertainty (which results in paralysis) and too little uncertainty (i.e. denial about what's changing, either through complacency or arrogance because of past success.)

During her six years at Global Business Network (GBN), Nicole was trained by some of the best in the field with mentors like well-known futurists, Peter Schwartz, author of The Art of the Long View and Inevitable Surprises and some of the most interesting thinkers and doers of our time (see GBN's network of remarkable people .) Nicole has also worked with Fortune 100 executives, public sector, and civil society leaders on a diverse portfolio of strategy and innovation projects, including the future of: healthcare and medicine, biotechnology and biosciences, air travel and airline industry, work in knowledge-intensive industries, the modern corporation, legal and professional services, business schools and business education, public education and pedagogy, biodiversity and climate change, global agribusiness, and the next phase of economic globalization.

Working at the intersection of so many things – industries, sectors, and disciplines – has given Nicole a privileged bird's eye view of emerging trends and important ideas shaping the future. Nicole has parlayed this insight into cutting-edge thought leadership; and her experience working across so many different cultures and contexts has made her skilled at enabling diverse groups of people to work more effectively together. As an independent practitioner, Nicole is currently working on developing a better "toolbox" for addressing complex global problems. This "toolbox" is a metaphor for practical, high leverage techniques including powerful processes like scenario planning and systems thinking, to new conceptual frameworks and theories (especially a better "meta-story" to organize action), to mobilizing social networks in order to create tipping points for action. Tapping into the energy, talent, and capabilities of the private sector to work on global issues is another focus of hers. For instance, Nicole has been very active in the burgeoning "Base of the Pyramid" community, which champions new approaches for creating wealth in the world's poor markets, and has written a primer called "Re-perceiving Business, From the Bottom Up." She is also working on a design methodology to help large corporations innovate business ideas for these poor markets.

Nicole's interest in creating new market spaces, and her knack for developing innovative learning experiences, came together in two conferences. With a keen interest in anticipating future ‘disruptive technologies' and business models, Nicole directed a meeting and learning journey called "The Clean Revolution: Technologies at the Leading Edge" (May 2001) in San Francisco. She was also co-director of the path-breaking "Customers of the Future" meeting in New York (October 1999), which tried to reframe and advance our industrial-age assumptions about consumers. Nicole has also spoken and written on the drivers of social and technological change, and has coauthored a chapter in the recent OECD book, "The Future of the Knowledge Economy" with colleagues Peter Schwartz and Eamonn Kelly.

Nicole is currently domiciled in Paris, France and Canadian by citizenship, but her worldview is decidedly global thanks to her experiences living abroad and enjoyment in learning about different cultures. Before joining GBN in San Francisco, Nicole was based in Singapore, and worked throughout southeast and north Asia, for a high-tech venture capital firm, with an interest in helping developing world countries stem the "digital divide" through the funding of appropriate information/high tech infrastructures. (An early, hands-on introduction to creating new markets at the cross-hairs of the private and public sectors.) Before that, Nicole was living in her hometown, Vancouver, BC, working as a public policy analyst and research manager at IPSOS-Reid, one of the world's largest marketing research and public opinion companies. She was responsible for writing a quarterly syndicated report on leading trends in public opinion, and worked as an analyst for a number of elections, including the controversial referendum in Quebec on its separation from Canada. Nicole's first job after graduate school was as a political speechwriter and Legislative Intern in the Parliament of British Columbia, which is a highly competitive program with just six positions awarded among hundreds of applicants. Lastly, to understand Nicole's full skill-set and formative training – in particular, her entrepreneurial spirit – we need to go even further back to her seminal experiences participating in the running of the family company, Aerco Industries, a nation-wide company in Canada focused on energy management solutions in the heating, refrigeration and air conditioning (HVAC) industry. She remains involved as an advisor to management.

Nicole's education is multidisciplinary,extensive, and of course a lifelong process. Through her training at GBN, Nicole has been schooled in the latest scenario planning, strategy, innovation, organizational development, and management theory and practice. She is an accomplished and sought-after facilitator, with over ten years of experience and a special interest in the recent research and pedagogy focused on breakthrough learning (e.g, "out of the box" thinking) and creativity techniques, including the use of visual information design. Nicole's knowledge base also includes: game theory, new risk assessment and uncertainty management tools, systems thinking, applied complexity (non-linear dynamics), and social network theory. Her work in the public and social sectors has ensured a fluency in the latest ideas on global governance, "adaptive" public policy-making, human development, and social entrepreneurship. Her formal education includes a BA (honours) and MA in political science from the University of British Columbia, where her published research focused on technology policy. Her undergraduate honours programme is well known in Canada for training future Prime Ministers (admittedly, they have not been the most successful PMs, but never mind that :) and influential academics. It is based on an Oxbridge model where you "read" in a peer group for two years with a senior tutor, the department Head. This education enabled Nicole to explore many interesting questions beyond the traditional confines of political science, as it is commonly taught. For instance, she remains intrigued and driven by the main question guiding her studies: why can't we – society, scientists, and business people – anticipate the unintended consequences of new technological developments? In her spare time, Nicole enjoys racing sail-boats, civil aviation, traveling, writing blogs and fiction, and the culinary arts.

The Power of a Prize?

If this blog is about spotting signals, I feel compelled to mention an obvious one: Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman and Iranian human rights lawyer, winning of the 2003 Noble Peace prize. (For the official Noble Prize news release and Ebadi's biography go to the Noble Prize website .)

This event is interesting on several levels. First, it has been fascinating to watch how this prize is being interpreted through the various media sources. The widely mixed responses, from euphoria and national pride, to outright cynicism, to rejection and criticism of the prize as a tool of Western imperialism and control, underscores just how important it is to watch and read multiple media platforms. This is one of the great advantages of the web and blogs, which makes the triangulation of perspectives (pentangulation if you have the energy) so much easier. You also access information through organizations like FAIR (Fair and Accurate Reporting).

The mixed reaction to Madam Ebadi's prize within Iran is the most interesting. It's an important sign, in the words of my Mexican friend, Alfredo Narvaez, of a new political complexity in Iran, "on that goes well beyond the static, traditional one" Ebadi may seem like a "social anamoly in her culture but "she is just the tip of the iceberg" – meaning, there is a great deal more going on beneath her in the society at large. I think this is right, and something the mainstream press need to correct if we are going to see (and not be surprised by) where and when the major shifts will come in Iran. To read more about this complexity, check out Christopher de Bellaigue's work, especially "Who Rules Iran?" in The New York Review of Books.Any other sources which describe the Iranian landscape, in its full richness and complexity, are welcome.

Most analyses are very bleak about the future of Iran. The latest report on Arab Human Development makes this clear; and the plight of Iranian women, in particular, is not pretty – the rate of declining literacy rates and other regressive statistics is truly depressing. 'Assertive' women are still being targeted as the recent killing of Canadian-Iranian woman, Zahra Kazem, poignantly reminds us. (Speaking of ‘assertive women', I was held for half a day in a Malaysian immigration jail for jumping to a shorter queue during Ramadan. There is more to the story, of course, but my bold movements were instrumental in my treatment.) We should also have modest expectations about Ebadi triggering significant change within Iran, even with her new-found status. For all of her good works, she is unlikely to do this. Shadi Sadr, who is "a courageous and talented newspaper correspondent" according to The Economist, makes the distinction between two groups fighting for woman's rights: "First there are those who believe that piecemeal legal reform, underpinned by an enlightened approach to Shia jurisprudence, can solve woman's problems. She [Sadr] puts Ms. Ebadi, who insists on the essential compatibility of Islam and human rights, into this category. Secondly, there is the more radical group that "take issue less with laws than with the whole legal superstructure." (Special Report, October 18^th, 2003)

This negative assessment of Iran's future may be right, but I also think this view is ignoring the complexity of the situation. There is a possibility of a longer term upside scenario where deeper demographic and social trends, together with other forces of globalization, push Iran in a more positive (for them and hopefully the rest of the world) direction. As Stewart Brand, GBN's cofounder often says, the pessimists are right in the short term whereas the optimists are usually right in the long term. Perhaps the modest but significant changes in Saudi Arab, triggered by the pressures of their underdevelopment, are a harbinger of other changes that may occur in places like Iran?

Something also needs to be said, or at least conjectured, about the politics of these awards and why this particular prize was awarded to a moderate Islamic woman. Sure this smacks of political opportunism; sure they had to scour the world, high and low, for the "right" kind of candidate. Regardless of motivations, I say bravo to them for their preciosity and sanctioned subterfuge! This is a good example of a much more constructive and farsighted way for the Western world to engage with the moderate Islamic community. The "better future scenario," to my mind, surely has chapter where the moderate Islamic world take control over their own destiny, succeed (even a little bit) in meeting the economic and social needs of their peoples, and thus win the battle against extreme forces who base their worldview on hatred and absolutes. The West must help them win this battle, not through imposed solutions or "hard" forms of power (contrary to the current, American-led geopolitical trajectory) but through softer mechanisms of influence and assistance. This award is clearly an example of the latter.

Many people will question the real impact of such a prize. Aung San Suu Kyi, the tireless, almost saint-like Burmese opposition leader, was also a recipient of this award in 1991 and look at her – still fighting a hard, slightly hopeless battle. So the cynical part of me understands the desire to poo-pooh such ‘superficial' tokens of recognition. At the same time, it is possible to imagine how these gold-plated awards trigger many unanticipated and subtle knock-on effects, not to mention bolster the brand equity of a certain cause and people. With a million causes to choose from, it's much easier when fund-raising in this resource-constrained environment to point to the latest cause celebre sanctioned by certain intelligentsia. This is good news.

On a higher level, this award is an important psychological lift for an extremely proud Persian people, a people with an ancient and accomplished civilization which gave our western world many things. Of course, many Westerners, even those in power, seem to be unaware of this history or think it's irrelevant. At the crudest level, all these people know is that America is now on top, and the losers must have lost for a reason. I'm not advocating the Clash of the Civilization thesis (which I disagree with) nor am I going to start condemning or explaining "why the West won" (which is complicated and full many conflicting assumptions and motivations). All I want to point out, here, is that the power differentials and differences between the Superpowers and the Islamic world, especially after the Cold War era and doubly so post-September 11^th, could be handled with much more respect and sensitivity. For many generations now, Iran and other parts of the proud Islamic world have suffered many indignities – especially the humiliations of increasing poverty – that have festered and swollen into a cancer we call now anti-western sentiment. So anything that can boost the bruised dignity and confidence of a once proud people is a good thing in my books. This is just common sense, based on truisms in human nature. We like to be respected. We like fair process. This matters a great deal when it comes to lubricating the sticky activities of human affairs. Why doesn't the current Bush administration understand this? It's so basic!

Now, I'm not a bleeding heart utopian – idealistic, yes, but with a solid dose of pragmatism and ability to see hard realities. Things are inherently messy and ugly in the halls of politics, and power differences are a fact of life. But we can get much further if we learn how to handle these differences better, with more attention to how these power differences incubate further misperceptions, antagonisms, and thus retaliatory actions. As Bob Fuller puts it, in his fantastic book, Sombodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank, "difficulties arise only when these differences are used as an excuse to abuse, humiliate, exploit, and subjugate." Fuller points out the simple but wise observation that there is a universal desire for respect, and while we can't ensure equality of outcomes in this world – there is just too much diversity amongst us for this idea of the Enlightenment – we can say without disclaimer that human beings are all equal in dignity and entitled to this. "Dignity is not negotiable," Fuller emphatically states. Not coincidentally, I believe Islamic thought and teaching has something to say to use about this. (I wish I knew what, exactly, but that is my sense. I'll be sure to ask my Muslim friends for their views on the matter.)

In sum, then, I think this award was given with all of these intentions, intentions that again mark the widening gap between Western Europe and America. It's hard to imagine this particular choice happening if this award was given from an American domicile rather than a liberal Swedish one. It's therefore quiet humorous to hear Iranian hard-line clerics condemn this award as being the bidding of the American administration. I think not. At the end of the day, the real reason I'm tickled with this award is that it's a cheeky f-you to conservative forces, which include the Iranian clerics but also the posturing American neo-cons who would like to remake the world in their image. And this view of mine, I'm afraid, is not very respectful. Oh dear. Back to square one, I think.

Courageous Arab Thinkers

Two interesting things – one macro and the other micro – concerning women in the Arab world.

Check out Tom Friedman's column "Courageous Arab Thinkers" in The New York Times today (October 19, 2003). It's about the release of the second Arab Human Development Report. which "explains how the deficits of freedom, education and women's empowerment in the Arab world have left the region so behind that the combined G.D.P. of the 22 Arab states was less than that of a single country – Spain." The implications of these findings? These pressures of development, which get real when economic prosperity starts to slip, are forcing even conservative countries like Saudi to reconsider its political structure (hence the recent decree allowing municipal elections) and social norms about women. The most desirable future wife these days in Saudi, according to Friedman, is now a women with a job! I found that rather amusing, especially in a country that still has a problem with women driving. Poetic justice often arrives just when you think it won't. But I suppose this can be seen as the beginning of a self-correction, one of those positive feedback loops, in what was turning out to be a maladaptive cultural and economic system. Which brings me to the next data point...

On NPR's Fresh Air program, I listened to an interview with Elizabeth Rubin (October 15th, "Rebuilding Iraq"), a freelance journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. Rubin has spent a lot of time reporting from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq. Two things stood out for me in the interview. First, she spent a great deal of time living quite intimately with Islamic women, sleeping in the same room, etc. Some of these women were full-fledged Burka-wearing members, that is, women who were practicing the most extreme interpretation of Islam. During these experiences she was amazed just how much they talked about sex. Even amongst their male relatives, there were many sexual innuendoes, jokes and even role-playing. I also heard, in another place, that incidents of lesbianism (or other forms of female-to-female intimacy) are common in these cultures as well. All of this shouldn't be surprising, but it still is because we have certain preconceptions and biases of what living that life is like. Some of these guesses might be right and justified – e.g. it can't be fun wearing that black thing in the heat of summer – but other views might be off the mark or just plain wrong. So I always get a kick out of hearing stories like these, little anecdotes that force us to nuance our thinking a little. All the talk about sex, well, when we think about it from a human perspective, regardless of cultural milieu, this makes total sense. This is a classic example of displacement activity: if one aspect of human expression is repressed or controlled, it pops out somewhere else, often in unexpected ways. I need to review "Motherhood" by Sarah Hrdy, the celebrated evolutionary anthropologist who surveys mothers across species, with a special focus on upper primates, which of course includes us. She makes a compelling case that whenever women's reproductive rights are controlled by males or the societal structure, some percentage of the female population always find "workarounds" to these prohibitions or constraints, even if it means highly risky actions and behaviours. There might be something similar going in the extreme end of Islamic society. So that's a hypothesis worth exploring some more I think.

Rubin was also asked what it was like being a female reporter in an Islamic environment. Most of the time, it was fine, she said because in their eyes Western women fall outside of their traditional gender categories, so the normal rules don't apply. Western women are perceived as being more like men rather than "their" definition of what a woman is; that we are something akin to a hermaphrodite – a social oddity, somewhat pitiable in fact, because we are denied the full experience of living as our sex should. I had a similar experience, albeit not that extreme, when I worked in Asia. They (my male clients, colleagues, etc.) couldn't place me in their social structure and hierarchy, so "they" treated me (mostly) as if I lived outside of it. This perception had humorous, often bizarre, and occasionally traumatic consequences in practice, but more about these stories another time (Remind me about the Yellow Submarine story!)

At the end of the day, I think there are many more advantages in living the life modern white, western woman do; and freedom to span social boundaries and categories offers up a boon of creative and existential opportunities. This is very clear to me. But at the same time, there is something enviable, even just for a brief moment, in the black and white universe the extreme Islamic communities have created for gender relations, a world where the roles and boundaries are more clear, and who you are (and should be) is given a firm framework from which to grow and develop. Their framework I believe is a distortion of Islam and objectionable on many levels. So I'm not saying I agree with it. But what I am saying is that our free wheeling way has its downsides too. Creating that identity framework from scratch is not always easy, and there are some psychological costs even if they are not always obvious or conscious.

Bricolage

Editorial note: I'm continuing with the theme of reviewing a review of a book. To be honest, I'm a little ambivalent about this rather Talmudic approach – a commentary on a commentary, a full three degrees of separation from the original content – but we are living in a postmodern, multi-textual universe so I guess I have permission to use whatever I want in the name of intellectual bricolage. Bricolage, by the way, is a nifty concept worth resurfacing, first developed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. It means the mixing and matching of old and new ideas in unexpected or unusual ways. In current-speak, think of it as recombinant intellectual DNA.

***

I'm not a frequent reader of The Financial Times, but the weekend edition often has some gems. I like surprises like this. I was particularly intrigued with a book essay by Mark Archer, "The Sum of Triangles and Squares" (October 11/12). [You have to subscribe to FT online to get access to this article, I'm afraid.] The essay was based on John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman by Robert Skidelsky. Not exactly a title that makes your heart pump with anticipation and excitement, but there were some sexy (quite literally) aspects to good-old Keynes, which I will get to shortly. For the keen Keyno-philes, this book is the latest volume, in a multi-volume biography, of this greatly accomplished man. I haven't read any of them, so I can't vouch for them.

[A dashing version of his earlier self]

So, now that I got all of the relevant sourcing and disclaiming out of the way, let me get down to business. A number of things struck me as I read the essay. First, I had no idea just how multifaceted Keynes was, especially his connection to the Bloomsbury crowd, nor did I know about his the trials and trysts as a late Victorian homosexual. (The title of the article is an allusion to a Bloomsbury saying – "they all loved in triangles but lived in squares" which is a deliciously perverse, pithy, and revelatory statement of how this group lived.)

Like many great thinkers and innovators, Keynes genius sprang from his exposure and connection to a wide variety of perspectives and people. In particular, he traveled in three diverse but important worlds: the Bloomsbury world (avant-garde), Cambridge (academics), and Whitehall (politics), which must have been fertile ground indeed for generating his ideas and putting them into action. Recent research into how social networks work confirm the power of "distant ties" and random linkages in spurring serendipitous discoveries, and engendering the conditions for practical implementation of ideas. Gladwell's book The Tippping Point makes this case well.

Speaking of what he did, Keynes succeeded in two very different activities. On the one hand, he revolutionized economic theory with his seminal work. But Keynes was also a statesman, and the chief architect of our present financial system and geo-economic arrangement (the prototype of the IMF and World Bank, GDP/GNP metrics, etc.) during the famous Bretton Woods conferences. Both of these achievements have a direct connection to the present, and some of the most pressing dilemmas we face. First of all, there has been much talk and fervent activity to develop another "Bretton Woods", that is, another sea-changing set of conferences designed to update our 60 year old financial system in a way that better reflects the needs and power structures of today. While the system has changed considerably (its digitization is one obvious example), its core assumptions around the central role of nation state haven't shifted much. So as these conversations evolve amongst today's avant-garde, it would be interesting to reflect on the first Bretton Woods and mine that experience for relevant learning and insight.

Secondly, key aspects of Keynes conceptual work still matter because he tried to replace some of the faulty assumptions of certainty embedded in classical economics with more realistic ideas that the world is full of uncertainties. No duh!!!!! Yet fifty years later we are still living with some of these outdated ideas in our financial and social systems. Despite plenty evidence to the contrary, many forecasting tools still cling to a desperate hope that the future follows neat predictable straight lines.

I am always fascinated and awed by people like Keynes who were successful in both the world of ideas and the world of practice. The ancient Greeks were probably the first to talk about the inherent tension between these two modes of being – a tension that is particularly taut today in our go-go world, where all of professional metrics and incentives encourage haste (and with lackluster results if the 90s are anything to go by.) It's clearly hard to have intellectual and creative breakthroughs if one is totally engaged in the hurly burly of daily life, whether it be working on a ministerial portfolio or running an operational unit of a large corporation. "Garbage in, garbage out" goes an old research saying. It's also the number one complaint I hear in business class lounges these days: no time to reflect, no time to make sense of things around them. But as an executive at a large engineering company told me, in his macho corporate culture, people are rewarded for (what Richard Normann calls) "hysterical hyperactivity." As long as he was on an airplane, going somewhere, or being perceived to be "putting out fires"... all was well with head-quarters. The unfortunate reality is that distinctively new ideas and enduring insights (beyond the faddish present) often take time to incubate; they require whites-space, long stretches of quiet contemplation, far removed from routine and responsibilities. For instance, the highly social Picasso gave birth to his famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the revolutionary first cubist painting, after he barricaded himself in his Montmatyr room, seeing hardly anyone from his rowdy Bande de Picasso (another group of philosophical laughers), for almost a full year. This is something to keep in mind when someone asks you to "think out of the box" by next quarter.

Getting back to the Greeks... because they were onto something as usual... Aristotle debated which mode of being – the intellectual (sophia) or practical (phronesus) – was the most worthy. The life of the mind, I think, was where he landed, but this is a little unclear because he also greatly admired the "doers" of the world, especially political leaders, like Alexander the Great, who "changed the world with his hands." In today's world, I think we have an unhealthy emphasis on just the practical side of things, as evidenced in the statement: "Teachers teach because they can't do." That's only partly true. Being able to think abstractly is just as important, especially when most of the value-creation is now coming from intangibles like ideas; and better futures depend on our ability to imagine alternative models or structures. As Aristotle put, the art of living is in the balance between contemplation and doing. Deep happiness, which the Greeks defined much more profoundly as a "flourishing in the mind, body and soul", could be achieved by a sequential to and fro, or dialectical flow, between the life of the mind and the life of action, one mode of activity informing and enriching the other in a virtuous circle.

I was wondering why this sounded so familiar. And then, I remembered the heaps of research in the management literature on "double loop learning" or "action learning", and the work on creativity and innovation. Business scholars like Chris Argyis (who, like Aristotle, is worth reading regardless of sector) and Peter Senge have made their careers describing the "Fifth Discipline". They and others, like Kolb, describe a learning loop which cycles, iteratively, through phases of personal reflection, observation of experiences, conceptualization/theorizing, and testing/experimenting. So this balancing act turns out to be quite an old idea – that bricolage phenomena in action yet again – and something that Keynes obviously did with acumen and talent.

Philosophical Laughing

An Article Review

Group Think: What does 'Saturday Night Live' have in common with German philosophy
By Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
December 2, 2002

Taking up a favorite theme of his – how innovation happens – Gladwell tells a number of stories about creativity in groups, ranging from the Saturday Night Live dream-team to the Lunar Men, a group of remarkable men at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, who gathered every full moon to discuss, literally, everything under the sun...or... rather, the moon. These noteworthy chaps included Erasmus Darwin (the grandad of Charles), Matthew Boulton (metals industrialist), Josiah Wedgewood (fina china entrepreneur), James Watt (Mr. Steam Engine) and Jonathan Priestley (discovered oxygen).

From the recent book, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, a group biography by Jenny Uglow: "their inquiries ranged over the whole spectrum, from astronomy and optics to fossils and ferns... One's personal passions – be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks – fired the others. There was no neat separation of subjects."

What were they doing? In an age before intellectual specialization, they were reaping the benefits of learning from each other across disciplines, and seeing novel insights from different perspectives. They also needed each other to think out-of-the-box and engage in "philosophical laughing" because "those who depart from cultural and intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence." [My emphasis] The SNL comedians – Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Bill Murray – also had a similar dynamic. But what made them so good together also had a dark side; in their case, it was a deep, often self-destructive, creative and emotional interdependency. Substance abuse, trading sex partners, and no social life outside of their cosseted world took its toll at an individual level. Belushi overdosed and Radner got cancer. The others dispersed, which is normal, because many of these groups have a natural life cycle. "The special bonds that created the circle cannot last forever."

Using these strikingly different stories from different eras, Gladwell helps us to see that you need the 'right' amount of groupthink for great ideas to occur. We often reflexively dismiss groupthink as a bad thing, but this is not always so – a timely reminder for us practitioners who are responsible for designing such learning processes. Group structure also matters. For breakthrough thinking and genius, we need to combine the best traits of a "club" – without being too insular and boring; and a "cult" which met people's higher emotional needs – without cutting them off from reality. In other words, you need the right kind of homogeneity and exclusivity; that is, a "safe" place to discuss provocative ideas within a bounded, shared context. But you also need enough diversity, external pressures or outside feedback, and experiential and intellectual fire power for things to be stimulating. (GBN tried to strike this balance with varying degrees of success.)

This analysis of an 18^th century informal society (which still exists) resonates strongly with our 21^st century present. It helped me articulate, in another way, what I'm seeing swirling and coalescing around me. Like at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we are at another moment in time where we need these kinds of support groups to incubate, test and enact really bold, assumption-changing ideas about our future – and in particular, alternative visions of what our future may look like. So like the Lunar Men, I'm seeing modern day pioneers and innovators-to-be (many of which are women this time) grouping together to engage in a form of "philosophical laughing." This time, these groups span geographies and cultures, and are connected with email, telephones and websites. Face-to-face meetings are still central. Group retreats are becoming essential. But the conversation is becoming increasingly "glocal", that is, the sweet spot between global and local concerns and needs.

The Pioneers of Change is one such social network, which I'm connected with; its aim is to be a safe place for reflection, experimentation and action across diverse groups of young people around the world. This is but one of many. Other groups or "floating initiatives" are looking at different parts of the proverbial elephant. For instance, working at the cross-hairs of the private, public and social sectors, we see examples like the Global Institute forming, which is trying to develop a fundamentally new approach to addressing global systemic problems. Many of the tools they are using (learning journeys, scenarios, dialogue) are processes that I have been trained in during my GBN years, and they are putting them together in a way that I have been dreaming about over the last 24 months. I knew someone was ahead of me! And thank goodness for that.

So, this is the kind of work I'm embarking on at present. I'm building my social networks, support groups, platforms for activity; and I will be paying careful attention to the group boundary conditions and structure. (Another very helpful and practical resource is also Leading Teams by Hackerman.) The intent is to help close the "ingenuity gap" I see between the unprecedented nature of today's global problems, and the social tools we have at our disposal to successfully deal with them. As Homer Dixon frames it, it's a supply versus demand issue: the demand is only going to increase for dealing with complex global problems – whether they be climate change, security issues, access to fresh water and other resource scarcities, global epidemics like SARs and AIDS, more effective intellectual property regimes, etc. – so we better work on the supply side, that is, creating the right amounts of social ingenuity at the right time. We experienced waves and waves of technological innovation; now it's time for a commisserat amount of social and political innovation. Of course this is a very ambitious, seemingly abstract and ungrounded, a really big thing to bite off, which I don't apologize for: we need equal parts ambition to meet the scale and demands of what's ahead. (Also see High Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them by JF Rischard.) And, as my first hand experience tells me, this does connect very concretely to real needs and issues on the ground floor of development. We need more options for the future, not less. Unfortunately we're at a "tipping point" where a number of macro driving forces – economic, ecological, social – are converging together in a way that may precipitously narrow the degrees of freedom for this kind of global strategic conversation.

Next full moon is Friday, October 10th – the harvest moon, I believe. So gather some people together, and do some philosophical laughing with your mates.

Other links to The Lunar Men.

Irrelevancy

"A theory has only the alternatives of being wrong or right. A model has a third possibility: it may be irrelevant," wrote Manfred Eigen.

I'm particularly interested in surfacing the irrelevant models – physical or mental &ndash which get in the way of creating better futures of ourselves, our organizations, and our planet. There are quite a few lurking out there, influencing our actions and ideas, whether we are aware of this or not.

So, what are they? What are these outdated ideas and assumptions which matter the most? Give me some examples, evidence, signals large or small of how they are no longer relevant for our time, no longer working, or just down right destructive.

Let's take an obvious one, at least to me. Large multinational corporations, many of which still function based on an industrial age logic and rationale, are brushing up against the limits of their organizational design and ability to create value. Something is quite broken in these companies, and the evidence is abundant. The business models in many global industries (airlines, automobiles, telecommunications, music/entertainment, even some consumer goods) are clearly sick, and the market system, as imperfect as it is, is starting to concur. It's evolve or devolve: those are the long term strategic choices for large corporations. I have lots more to say about this, of course. There are some subtle and not so subtle points to be made. And for the record, I'm not one of these people who thinks corporations are evil and totally beyond repair, nor am I someone who thinks they are the solution either. But all of this will have to wait for another posting, because I, too, am a little sick today. So do some thinking for me, and give me some of your thoughts.

Sniffle. Sniffle.

Starting, Stopping

I often start new things in the autumn. As the temperatures cool and air freshens, new energy is released. My body wants to move faster, and my brain quickens. Certain cycles and behavourial patterns get kicked into motion. Never mind the fact that it's been almost a decade since I finished school, the imprint of the western education system is still there; those ingrained Pavlovian instincts arrive every September, wanted or not... "Common' Nicole", they whisper, "it's time to 'apply' yourself... the holiday is over, it's time to get serious now." Apart from the rythmns of season and socialization, there is yet another personal pattern in action. You see, my creative-destructive impulse is at it again; she's shaking things up and blowing apart the certainties in my life just enough so that new growth can start afresh. In short, like the change of the season, like Shiva at his best, I'm starting some new things and stopping some old things. Dead leaves, dead pieces of me. But new bulbs are in the ground, and the creative possibilities are looking more spring-like all the time.

The thing I'm starting. Most obviously, I'm starting this blog after much encouragement from my other half, Toby, and way too much procrastination and needless anxiety about putting myself "out there" for all to see and read — a somewhat premature concern since my readership is likely to be modest at best. In any event, as an aspiring writer, I'm going to have to get over this fear, which, if you know me, may seem surprising because on the surface I'm one of those capital "E" extroverts. But like any crude Psych-101ism, the introvert-extrovert dichotomy fails to describe my lived experience and complexities; namely, when it comes to sharing the fruits of my creative endeavors, I am clearly a very shy girl and plain chicken. So consider this blog experiment as therapy.

Another hang-up was the commitment issue. Writing daily (more or less) takes time and energy. If my mostly failed attempts at journal writing in the past were anything to go by, I feared my lack of discipline would condemn this exercise as well. But there is something different about the blog format that makes me more hopeful and inspired. Call this an unintended consequence of the medium, but somehow, the fact that this is being published online and thus "out there" gives me enough of a psychological feedback loop to be more disciplined and committed about writing. Someone, at least in theory, is reading. Self-policing under this kind of virtual logic may work with positive results. Of course, time will tell if this hypothesis holds.

The thing I'm stopping. The starting of my blog is not unrelated to what I'm stopping. What ended was a significant chapter of my career. It was long in coming, and a very healthy and positive move, but a big deal just the same when the moment arrived. For the past 5 1/2 years I have been a scenario practitioner for GBN Global Business Network, which is an incredibly interesting company (now owned by the Monitor Group) dedicated to helping people in organisations adapt to and anticipate future change. Working at GBN was an amazing, intense, and rich apprenticeship in life and learning; now it's time to start applying this learning and skill set in different ways. I'll describe my GBN experience and what I want to do next in another place. The salient point here is that GBN's intellectual DNA, and many of the ideas and people I rubbed up against, will be an important wellspring for this blog and my future activities. Most obviously, the theme of my blog (see the Blog's Conceit) is unmistakably GBN-inspired: it's about extracting the signal from our current noise in the world. It's about making sense of things for myself and others in my community; and critically, it's about the dialogue and tension between these two spheres — the emergent insights of which are really the whole point of creative writing and expression. Of course many of my intellectual dials are still fuzzy at present. The task of sense making is just begun. So tune in and let's see if we can get some clearer signals.

The Blog's Conceit

How do we extract the signal from the noise? As human beings we do this all the time, consciously and unconsciously. This is how we adapt to changing circumstances. This is how we have survived this long as a species. Even so, learning to understand the environment in which we live, with perspective and in context, can be tricky. We all feel a little like fish these days, especially as the volume and density of information increases, and as the world becomes more connected and complex.

We still don't understand fully how we make sense of the world around us, but as scientists and practitioners are finding out, we filter this informational fog through the prism of our Worldview - that is, the mental soup that comprises of our beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world. Some of these beliefs are rational and conscious, but most of them are decidedly not, coming instead from deeper instinctual wells and emotions predating much of more recent cognitive appartus. So while this guiding system is very useful, our Worldview also makes us susceptible to having blind spots, which in turn prevent us from "seeing" and interpreting key signals, especially signals that are unfamiliar or don't fit our past experience, very often until its too late. This is why we are often surprised by certain developments when they happen, like the fall of the Soviet Union or September 11th, despite the fact that there were many indicators telling us that such events were inevitable, more or less. Much of human history is replete with these inevitable surprises. And today's geopolitical story, in particular Bush II Administration's reaction to September 11th and the debate around global climate change, seems to be falling in line with this unfortunate historical pattern. So misreading or missing key signals of change can have huge consequences and implications at both micro and macro levels.

What does this have to do with blogging? And what is blogging? While blogging may contribute to the informational noise, it also a potential mechanism for sensing and sense making . At the individual level, good blog writers - the ones that survive the competition for mindshare and attention - are robust informational filters and sensors themselves; they point to interesting articles, links, developments, images and video clips, often contextualizing or offering analysis of what these data points mean to them. Individual bloggers also represent unheard voices or perspectives often not seen in conventional media. You may not agree with their views or even understand them, and their facts and arguments may be plain wrong. More to the point, these different views help us ask better questions, challenge some of core assumptions, and thus assist in a deeper form of learning. As good signal-spotters and future-readers know, important indicators and insight is found by looking carefully and judiciously at the fringes and fault-lines of society and culture - the heretics, the disenfranchised, the amateurs, the court jesters and jokers, cutting edge artists and poets. So blogs can give us unprecedented access to these voices, which will only increase as the breadth and depth of web penetration increases in other parts of the world.

On an aggregate level, there is also something interesting happening as well. Through sites like http://www.blogdex.net which showcase the "most contagious information currently in the weblog community", we can see interesting and unexpected patterns, themes, and memes across a wide variety of individual blogs, and thus a diverse selection of social networks, perspectives and geographies. So that's very cool stuff for pattern recognizers like me, people who have earned a living out of helping people anticipate and shape the future. It may be too early too say whether blogging, as a web-based innovation, is a truly disruptive technology challenging mainstream publishing and media business models and practices. But typically, when any invention is able to tap into a fundamental human desire that's cheaper, faster, and better than other channels - particularly when that need is human expression and communication - something significant usually happens. So at the very least, it's worth hanging around this space for a while to see what happens.

So, in the spirit of "serious play", I hope to use this blog for exploring different signals of change and ideas for the future - everything from the profound to the profane, the significant to the silly, without being too judgmental of what's what. My hope is to engage with other like-minded souls in this game as well. The benefits in doing this activity collectively are clear; as Kevin Kelly put it, "no one is as smart as everyone." But then again, I'm reminded of what Anatole France also said: "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." I'm trusting that the pendulum won't swing too far one way or the other - that we'll find more wisdom and entertainment than stupidity and ignorance - but there are no guarantees, of course, when our signals are fuzzy.

Happy signal-spotting.

- nab