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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
I just received an email from a friend, Joe Tankersley, a Disney Imagineer and corporate storytellerwithin a corporate setting. Well, unfortunately he was living the pathway of Hurricane Charlie.
Fortunately, he and his family are alright. Like many, I'm sure, he is reporting the following phenomenon: "In the aftermath of the storm, neighbors found themselves carrying on conversations and offering to help folks they barely acknowledge most days. I've also been really fascinated by the way information is flowing. Everyone shares whatever they have heard about conditions--school closings, power returning etc. When the roads were cleared neighbors and relatives were coming by to check on us and vice versa. Those with ice were delivering it to those without. As is always the case, hard times bring out the best in people. Seems somewhat a shame that we can't have a more connected community everyday."
I responded something like this: Nothing like nature to unite human natures. A common story. But I'm glad your anthropological senses are making the most of such disruptions. I'm almost a disruption-fetishist myself (even if I'm at risk) just because of how they shake-up human relations, just because they make visible so many invisible relationships, flows and issues. And I agree with you collective action and commons-sharing is always fascinating to watch, and even more amazing to experience first hand. NYers talk a lot about this post September 11th, i.e. how they met neighbours for the first time; how they still have block-parties as a result of this powerful community-forming event. As you note, it's sad when this is an anomaly versus the norm. American society didn't used to be this way; it's pro-social aspects were what made outsiders like Tocqueville admire the country so.
One hypothesis about these events: I think they showcase, more acutely than ever, the existence of much deeper relatively untapped reservoirs of human potential, which seem to gush forth like water through a hole in a dam. This glimpse of collective human potential contrasts sharply to the more tepid flow (or lack thereof) defining day-to-day social and civic arrangements. It's a striking reminder of just how shallowly our current institutions, both in the private and public sectors (curiously the big ones), tap into these deeper wellsprings of collective feeling and action. I suppose some people think this is a good thing. Better to keep the masses quiescent, the cynical power-brokers might quietly say to themselves. And sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Social movements do spiral in unpredictable directions, namely, the massive collective action that happens during revolutions often results in some pretty horrific things.
Most people would also qualify and bracket this state of cooperation, these bursts of pro-social behaviour, as a temporary phenomenon— as something that's exceptional as opposed to the norm. Hundreds of years of political theory and cultural assumptions about human nature tended to reinforce this view quite definitively, almost to the point where it's hard to imagine anything else. Many people even assume that this view of human nature is tantamount to a law of nature, immutable and unchangeable. But this is logically and empirically not true. Neither of these assumptions are a given. Shift the context, the tools, the underlying organizing values and frameworks, and we might get a different collective versus individual equilibria. And no, I'm not dreaming up utopian visions. Everything from applied Open Source approaches to widespread experiments in social entrepreneurship may reveal a different set of models and approaches.
Three books, recently read, lay these claims out quite clearly: "The Success of Open Source" by Steve Weber, "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, and "Smart Mobs" by Howard Rheingold. I hope to do a collective review of these books, and other recent material soon so I can summarize some of these findings and ideas, but please don't hold me to that :) The point is that, unlike other revolutions, these ideas are already in the rapid prototyping, learning-by-doing phase; and they are manifesting themselves daily, quickly going mainstream, in a way that many entrenched interests will find surprisingly and perplexing. Another inevitable surprise to put to the bookies. This is also another role for Worldchangers. Translators and boundary-spanners will be sorely needed!
I've been seeing colours lately. This may have something to do with the fact that I'm several shades of red myself. Unluckily, I managed to contract chicken pox in the heat of a Parisian summer. They say the adult version is bad, and I can vouch for this statement fully. Pretty bloody horrible.
Back to colour—and not mine. I stumbled upon some notes on the artist Chuck Close, notes no doubt scribbled down from an interview I had read based on a recent exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. So we can still thank museum PR departments and media for introducing us to socially useful things. Now if these same PR people can only resist the desire to tag-line everything to snazzy auditory epithets; in this case dubbing Chuck Close as the "reigning artist of the Information Age." As if that vacuous statement has any meaning whatsoever. But moving on...
The below images are samples of his work, which can be seen on his website. His work is quite ubiquitous, so I'm sure many of these images trigger recollections.
The first, if rather obvious thing, about this artist is his faux pointillist approach and style.
(Georges Seurat and friends are the western innovators of the pointillism school in post-impressionist France. His masterpiece, "Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte" (1884) is wonderful to see in the flesh. I'm fortunate to have the Musée d'Orsay close by with excellent pieces of this work.)
Close takes photos of faces, blows them up super large, and then using a grid paints the picture, showing every possible detail. Hence his rather literal name, Chuck "Close". And his work is exactly that: close-up and personal. Close freely admits his subjects are not always very happy with how his paintings turn out. That's not his concern. As he sees it, his job is to amplify the story that's submerged or resting in people's faces. Invariably what he sees in these faces appears distorted, unflattering, characterized to some extreme, and may even be deeply unsettling, a truth revealed about themselves or the human condition, something betrayed by a slight expression in the eyes, an arched eyebrow, or sagging mouth. Universal yet highly personal. Abstract but intimate. Geometric meshed with the organic.
Close claims that he is in "non-interference" camp of artists. That is, it's very important to him that he doesn't force an interpretation of what he's seeing on the viewer. He wants people to make their own assessments of the story the face is telling or at least give some room for individual narration. This is also part of his own process. Each point he places, Close explains, is like a laying down a building block, but each building block doesn't determine what the building will eventually look like. This design emerges slowly until he sees the image as a whole.
When asked how and why he developed this approach, Close admits that he is fundamentally lazy, had no patience, and was nervous wreck most of the time when it came to his artistic projects. Sound familiar? At one point, however, he said he didn't want to just accept his nature —or indeed any kind nature, the green or red-blooded kind —and decided to created a process to counter and keep in check his tendencies. With an incremental approach, Close says, "you don't have to wait for inspiration. You don't have to wait for good days or bad days." Without being pejorative, Close likens his approach to "woman's work," like quilting, which as a process had certain advantages: women could do it in their odd moments, and start and stop it quickly when other duties (laundry, fixing meals or feeding a family) intervened.
His one-point-at-a-time technique has a lot to teach us creative types who routinely get mired by pathos and neuroses, whether it be the quest for an illusive perfection, paralysis-by-analysis blockages, or just garden variety inspirational dead-ends.
"Why should I get out of bed today"
"Is my work really crap?"
"Will anyone really give two hoots about what I write?"
"This is just a waste of time".
Give up. Give up. Give up."
"Not good enough. Give Up"
A familiar internal dialogue, non? Without question, in the emotional roller-coaster life of an artist, so much is won or lost in the daily head game, which is why the Close approach started out as a corrective to this pathos, simply as a way to keep working, to keep the ball rolling. Instead of saying to yourself, "where am I going to start?" with Close's method the answer was never an open one. It was always clear and affirmative in nature, a positive building off of whatever he had. Sure, there is no tidal waves of inspiration, no intoxicating rushes of insight. But he felt the productive tradeoff was well worth it. Close claims he cares more about his work now because of this, and I believe him. Many creativity experts praise daily structure and practice, like the well known "Morning Pages" technique of Julia Cameron's The Artists Way. I consider blogging a form practice as well, a place to build courage and a voice for future writing projects.
I made another connection when writing this as well, the lure of colours again refocusing my attention like a child fixated on a shiny new object placed in front of her. I recalled the first time I saw a mandela or sand painting (not Nelson) being created. I saw the Tibetan form (there is a Native American form as well) on a chance occasion while touring the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the early 1990s as a university student. I vividly recall seeing the work, almost completed, from a vertical vantage point, peering down several flours into the wide base of the Rotunda, where several Safron-coloured monks were sedately but purposefully working their magic with brightly coloured sands, their beautiful creation an emergent property in our midst. I quickly learned that creating a mandela was a spiritual meditative practice that uses mystic circle designs or cosmograms. That each work is a like a prayer. But as life is inherently transient and fleeting, so too is a work of art. And this is why when the mandela is finished it's destroyed, simply swept up into a paper bag and taken back to Tibet; like ashes from a funeral pyre, the sands are released into one of their sacred rivers with a ceremony. I found this so poignant, so strange, so counter-intuitive, inconceivably difficult, and clearly something I could never fathom doing, being the impatient, egoist westerner, the Chuck-Close person that I am. But perhaps Close has found a middle way with his approach and common sense discipline? Perhaps the gap between the admirable detachment of the monks and me is not that wide? In any event, I'm glad Close is well west on the cultural compass. It would be hard to peer into his fascinating faces if they were swept away by a fast-moving stream.
Pronunciation: hyu-'ris-tik
Function: adjective
Etymology: German heuristisch, from New Latin heuristicus, from Greek heuriskein to discover; akin to Old Irish fo-fúair he found
Definition: involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods; also : of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance.
This is a word we should see in use more. It's an accurate reflection and invocation of what we need to see more of today, not just in our companies but in the world in general. We need to do more trial-and-error experiments as we try to figure out the right social ingenuity -- whether it be new business models or social ventures -- for the future. We need to develop a broader learn-by-doing ethos instead of the paralytic "have to have all the answers first to plan and then execute model." Nature doesn't work this way. And nature has always experimented, tried alternative approaches and options, so why wouldn't this work in any complex adaptive environment? We clearly live in one of these at present.
The heuristic approach is also essential for many effective strategy and innovation processes, processes, processes which are starting to become more mainstream in the business world (if they weren't already practiced without this kind of codification or framing.) For instance, I recently started using the "discovery-based" planning (see below image I created) or "assumption-based" planning concepts in my practice. This kind of approach is much more effective for strategy formulation under highly uncertain situations. Clayton Christensen, one of the most cited business thinkers around, mentions these in his recent book, The Innovator's Solution. Henry Mintzberg, in "The Death of Strategic Planning" called this the difference between "emergent" and "deliberate" strategies. Most companies get into trouble when they cling to the deliberate one far too long instead of shifting gears to where the market is really heading.
And another dimension of this applies to general life: Hermina Ibarra, from INSEAD, wrote a great article called "How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career" which applies this same argument to professional development and planning. Click here for the PDF. Must read for the many who are currently stuck with what they want to do with their life!
All of this seems like common sense to me. This seems a much better approach than the old plan-and-then-execute paradigm, which assumes you have more control over things than you really do. Or means that you are ignoring key uncertainties. But as straightforward as it may seem to me, and many of us, this linear mentality, strengthened by many economic (industrial, factory-forward) and cultural (Western idea of progress; Judeo-Christian cradle-to-grave) assumptions.
(I also published this on the WorldChanging blog.)
Yes, one of the last bastions is sliding steadily into the global monoculture gutter. It's true: France gets its first drive-thru boulangerie (that's a bakery, but oh-so-much-more in French culture.)
France has adopted fast-food ideas from the United States to cater to millions of foreign tourists and its residents, but they co-exist alongside traditions such as proper sit-down meals in restaurants and daily trips to local boulangeries.
Read the rest in the APF
I used to laugh off these things as inconsequential. And I can even see a croissant-to-go as being convenient, especially for those long haul drives to the South. But a more troubling thing lurks beneath the surface of this trivial, perversely amusing anecdote. I'm starting to understand the pushback in France, and Europe in general to these kinds of influences. I'm beginning to see what's driving super-empowered angry people like Jose Bove, the infamous McDonald's-burning, anti-globalization activist, to such feverish lengths. And this is not out of any Gaullic solidarity; I have none. No, this bugs me because it smells of monoculture, and monocultures are just suboptimal and demonstrably bad. Any student of complex adaptive systems will tell you that.
Sure, the global monoculture dance is two-ways. In spice-phobic Paris, I'm grateful for regular access to sushi, tom yum gai, and a passable tika masala. I'm just worried we've gone too far at a structural level. I worry that some critical reservoirs of difference, different models for doing things, are disappearing and being leveled. I especially worry because our globalized agriculture system is increasingly brittle and fragile, as evidenced by many troubling signals and symptoms - e.g. foot & mouth, mad cow, SARS, declining soil productivity, and so on. (See my essay, "Getting into the Dirt" (Feb 2004)) If I was a betting person, I'd said future inevitable surprises, big failures and disruptions, will come from this system.
As much as it gets ridiculed, places like France have some deep wisdom we should surface, understand, and preserve: they know about the advantages of local production - the deep connections between local food, the land and communities - through thousands of years of culture. This is one of those culture-is-embedded-knowledge situations. (It's by no accident the world "culture" is derived from "cultivation.") Unfortunately, today I see these connections rapidly uncoupling thanks to a variety of drivers: demand from younger generations, EU regulations and common market pressures, and business models requiring scale, scope and aggressive growth targets.
But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, or at least I hope that's the case. I hear that local production is getting new legs in North America. Is this true? I'm told that the farmer's market phenomenon is growing beyond the usual Californian conclaves. So this is good news. However, experts in local production say the biggest problem is making the economics and business model work, which is a stretch beyond dense urban centres. Vintage hog farmers in West Virginia are great, but if they can't make a good living out of it because of scale and distribution (how to get to market) and demand issues (consumers wary of weird kinds of pigs), this is unlikely to take off. So do people know of examples where local production is working? What are practical, high leverage solutions to balancing the forces of monoculture?
