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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
"An elderly Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life... He said to them, 'A fight is going on inside of me.' It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves.One wolf is evil---he is fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed,
arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride,
competition, superiority, and ego.The other is good--- he is joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity,
hunility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth,
compassion, patience and faith.The same fight is going on inside every other person.
His grandchildren thought about this for a minute, then one child asked,
'which wolf will win, Grandfather?'The old Cherokee replied softly, 'The one you feed.' "
This wonderful proverb I found on RECURSIVEirony, the blog of my multi-talented old buddy, Christopher Palmer, who has the distinction of witnessing me writhing around on the floor of his tech room in the throes of embarrassment agony after I had accidently sent out an incredibly embarrassing (and slightly explicit) email to a group email list. All present thought this very amusing, especially my futile request to "take back" the email. The good news: that was about 6.5 years ago, and the subject matter of the email was about my new found love at the time, the same man whom I'm still happily building a life with.
One must eventually come clean with whom one reads and is influenced by. I'll make one of those disclosers now, since we're all trying to extract the signal from the noise and find good filters of information and insight. In this respect, I highly recommend Gwynne Dyer an independent, syndicated journalist whom I religiously read because he's a master synthesizer, a great communicator, and tries to provide people a refreshing peek beneath the curtain of contemporary affairs. (Other factors do help as well: the fact that he's an expatriate Canadian, an accomplished CBC documentary filmmaker who did an excellent series on the history of war, and entertained me with his wife over a lovely lunch the year before last in their London home.)
Cloudy Sky over Iranian Desert
© Rob Howard/CORBIS
All of this came to mind after reading his recent article "Let's Attack Iran!"(18 January 2005.) In it, Dyer alludes to all the fuss Seymour Hersh's article, "The Coming Wars" in The New Yorker has caused (also a good read), while pointing out the interesting bit -- that is, how the mainstream media is trying to cope with it (not very well).
Dyer then illuminates for us some obvious reasons why Iran should NOT be the focus of the US's attention. There are important observations, for instance: the fact that Iran under the mullahs has never invaded another country nor sponsored terrorism; the reality that Europe's diplomatic pressures will likely curtail their nuclear capabilities any way; and with a longer view in mind, Iran has a chance of changing itself given that the younger generation is pro-Western and more moderate and modern, unless of course a US invasion turns them into newly minted radicals first. Again, the pattern of the US biting off its' own nose in spite of its' face, something you would think US leaders would have learned given Iraq's difficulties. I'm sure a new chapter of Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly will be written in years to come about the seriously maladaptive learning disability of this American administration. In fact, we may not have to weight that long, with such a clear picture now of how history is likely to record this.
The focus on Iran is particularly perplexing compared to more real and present dangers, like China or Pakistan and North Korea. Pakistan, most especially, is already nuclear, more unstable in many ways, probably housing Osama Bin Laden, and is known to be housing the nuclear scientist who was selling his know-how to unfriendly regimes. Yet Americans don't seem to be troubled by these facts.
As Dyer conjectures:
So why this apparent haste in the Bush administration to attack Iran now, and why the seeming enthusiasm for such a hare-brained project in wide sections of the US public (or at least of the media that claim to speak in their name)? Edward Luttwak, the military historian and strategic analyst who is renowned in Washington for his maverick views, recently described US foreign policy post-9/11 almost as an exercise in emotional physics. Never mind all the elaborate strategic plans and projects of the neo-conservatives, he implied; what really drives all this is just push-back.After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States.
Emotional physics: for every reaction there is an opposite and equal reaction. Yes, that's a succinct way to describe the psychology of the US right now. The trouble is the Powers That Be may not even be aware of this dynamic dancing figures in their heads, a systemic myopia which invariably happens when decision-making circles are so small, so tightly circumscribed and so tightly controlled with few real world feedback loops checking their assumptions.
As many people know who read The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker is one of the most interesting and gifted writers around. A superb pattern-recognizer and storyteller, Gladwell adroitly elucidates important cross-cutting themes and memes within our midst. As a wise writer once said, a good book reads you just as much as you read it. Gladwell has a knack for writing about topics that do precisely that, whether it be helping us see more deeply into how social networks shape our world to how our brains shape us.
His book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Difference, for instance, turned the conventional wisdom of systemic change on its head. Instead of happening slowly and incrementally, which is how most change is perceived, Gladwell made a compelling case that change also happens quickly and unexpectedly -- and seemingly overnight whether it be fashion fads, the hit success of popular TV shows, or the rapid drop in crime in New York. He argued that "idea epidemics" could spread as fast and decisively as any physical one, which is an obvious and refreshing message for worldchangers, although not without some untoward implications as well.
Gladwell's most recent book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, is also worth checking out because he picks another important meme: the implications of recent discoveries in the neurosciences and studies about how our brain works for daily life. Indeed, if I was to pick one game-changing discontinuity for the future, I would have to say it will most likely come from this space, especially any insight that enables us to dramatically increase our bandwidth for learning and memory -- something that a knowledge-intensive economy would eat up (and drive) like a hungry mob of microbes in a sewage dump. So watch this space closely.
© Images.com/CORBIS
Russell R. Charpentie
Blink was inspired by a number of his articles archived on his website; in particular, The Naked Face which is an intriguing read about how people in law enforcement make life or death snap decisions. In a nutshell, the book highlights the role of our intuition and subconscious "rapid cognitive processes" in our decision-making, with examples that include everything from choosing our mates to making a strategic call in the battlefield. Again, Gladwell's aim is to challenge assumptions:
'We are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition,'' Gladwell observes. We assume that long, methodical investigation yields more reliable conclusions than a snap judgment. But in fact, ''decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.''
Well, sometimes. Therein lies the problem, as David Brooks highlights in a playfully balanced book review of Blink in the New York Times. This kind of "thin-slicing", a term Gladwell coins, is good only under certain conditions. In many conditions, "thick-slicing", the power of slower reflection is just as important and critically so. There are many situations where our impulses are just plain wrong. The trick is knowing the difference: when to trust your instincts and when not to. As anyone who has had flight training knows, this lesson becomes very clear. There are moments when your gut instincts can kill you: like when an aircraft stalls, to break out of it, the thing you need to do is point the nose down to the ground instead of pulling up which the reaction we naturally want to do.
In my work, I see this a lot with executives in industries and policy-makers in government agencies experiencing large systemic change, something we are seeing across the board these days (another tipping point of sorts which I won't digress about for now.) In these organizations, many of the "old hands" feel lost because their instincts -- the knowledge built up through years of experience -- is not a reliable guide to their decision-making. The good ones know that the future will not be the same as the past, requiring them to think "out of the box" and challenge their assumptions. This is hard because this involves a certain cognitive dissonance and discomfort, and often requires a retooling of capabilities, competencies and mindsets. And this is a process that doesn't happen overnight, despite the hope of some of these executives in search of quick fixes. Rather, this is something that can only unfold with slower reflection and iteration (heuristics designed to expand the zone of proximal development, to use learning theory jargon).
If only certain world leaders would similarly engage in this kind of deeper reflection -- a slowing down to go fast, which is the best method to surface and test key assumptions! While we can't blame Gladwell for what people do with his ideas, I do fear that books like his will inadvertently help rationalize and support the irresponsible actions of leaders who justify their decisions by their "gut" feeling.
In a similar vein, I disagree with Gladwell that most people distrust instinctual responses. With the President of the United States as a prime example, I know too many people who rely on nothing but these primordial senses and are proud to do so. As much as I am an advocate of the "whole person" approach to problem-solving, one that honours all forms of intelligence and knowing, I also think we can't throw the baby of rationality out with the bath water. I think it's safe to say that the invention of dentistry, public sanitation, germ theory, and the fact that we no longer burn witches at the stake en masse (at least not in the physical sense) are all positive byproducts of the Age of Reason.
A longer view might help put this into perspective as well. For instance, pale-neuroscientists, the folks who study how our brain has evolved over the past million years or so, argue that an instinct-driven way of being sufficed in an evolutionary time when we lived in smaller tribal groups with more localized and immediate challenges (like finding a safe way to hunt a wooly mammoth). But relying on instincts alone works less well -- as I've shown, often fatally -- when we have to make decisions by interpreting a much richer array of information spanning different time and spatial scales (like managing an enduring and collective response to challenges like global climate change, pandemics, or the massive reduction in arable land.) As any game explaining exponential change shows us, this kind of thinking is counter-intuitive and hard to grasp without rationality, whether it be through a process of scientific reasoning or using tools like computing to figure things out. This doesn't mean there is no role for intuition, which is often just a form of pattern recognition, as Gladwell successfully argues. It's just that we need to compliment this with a more sophisticated form of problem-solving that knows when to use what tool and where, that can judiciously blend the right kinds of intelligences at the right level in space and time. It's not overstating things, I don't think, to say that our fate as a species might depend on this leap in cognitive ability and consciousness ( a preoccupying theme of mine, I know.) Namely, we need to find creative ways to make real and relevant to mass audiences the connections between the global in the local and the local in the global.
Getting back to Blink, the book is definitely worth reading. Like all of Gladwell's fascinating pieces, it is written exceedingly well with delightful and memorable stories. But Brooks' main critique is right. There is no theory, no grounding to Gladwell's thesis, unlike The Tipping Point which had a proto-theory of change that showed how his "idea epidemics" spread through social networks within a matrix of key actors with catchy names ("connectors", "mavens" and "salesmen"). This kind of framework is missing, but will likely come from other writers seeking to cover these burgeoning ideas in the cognitive science space.
Indeed, stepping back from Blink, Brooks points out something even more important:
'Blink'' is part of a wave of books on brain function that are sweeping over us as we learn more about the action inside our own heads. This literature is going to have a powerful effect on our culture, maybe as powerful as the effect Freudianism had on our grandparents' time (the last time somebody tried to explain the brain's backstage process).We should be a little wary of surrendering this field to the scientists. Philosophers ranging from Vico to Michael Oakeshott to Isaiah Berlin were writing about thin-slicing (which they called ''wisdom'') long before the scientists started picking apart our neurons, and long before psychologists started showing people snippets of videotape. And much of what they observe is more profound than anything you can capture with some ginned-up control group test in a psychology lab.
Having some distance to see how these memes are affecting our worldview -- our resource allocation, our policy-making, our choice of tools and techniques -- would be an important thing for sure. Remember how Darwin's ideas got skewed and perverted into social darwinism, the ubiquitous "survival of the fittest" doctrine, which Darwin himself discredited as being a simplified and incomplete view of evolution, but nonetheless was such a compelling explanatory framework for Victorian society at the time that it stuck and is regrettably still with us, dominating economic and political policy-making and right-wing projects. We wouldn't want the same thing to happen with the next wave of frameworks coming out of the cognitive sciences.
So who and what do we turn to for this kind of wise commentary, sense-making, and counterbalance to these discourses? Any candidates come to mind? I can think of few intellectuals who can overcome the barriers to entry (that is, mastering all of the knowledge across relevant fields) to get beyond the surface of popular reporting and guide us into deeper epistemological insight. This is a worry, a key limitation as science outstrips the public's ability to digest it. Perhaps someone needs to take Gregory Bateson's "Ecology of the Mind" approach the next step? He advocated an architecture of problem solving: a way of reflecting on reflecting, a way to upframe how we are thinking about thinking so that we can get this distance and see the forest through the trees, and perceive how certain memes are influencing discourse and discovery in a systemic way. Indeed, in a protean postmodern sense, it would be rather appropriate to have a kind of meta-analysis about how we're analyzing our brain, about how we're making sense of the discoveries about cognition. So I look forward to seeing more of this kind of meta-framing work. It delights those neurons of mine, both rapid and slow.
Related to my book review and discussion on professional amateurs and hobbyists, I found some old notes referring to an article by James Fallows called The Case Against Credentialism (1985), which looks worthwhile.
In the article Fallows explains how certain cultures have rewarded behavior that eventually proved ruinous to the society as a whole. For instance, the British upper class’s desire to be free of the taint of commerce is a good example, although the Chinese experience stands out as well. In the latter case, for centuries, the antipathy to merchants was so strong that many commerce-minded Chinese, especially in southern provinces like Canton, had to flee for their lives to other places, the legacy of which is the incredible network of overseas Chinese around the Pacific Rim and beyond.
Falllows and critics like Henry Mintzberg, who quoted this work in Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Management, believes a similar process is at work in America where credentialism is becoming seriously maladaptive in the business world. In this case, the problem isn't a restriction on commerce, but rather the opposite: the widespread rise and personal exploitation of it. The skyrocketing executive pay packages and recent corporate scandals are just two indicators of this.
An article in the New York Times, China Promotes Another Boom: Nuclear Power by Howard French (January 15, 2005), talks about how China has decided to use nuclear energy to satisfy their crushing need for power because it's the least bad option in terms of environmental impact.
China will commission nearly two nuclear power plants per year between now and 2020.
A controversial solution, to be sure, one that has been religiously debated in the West and is being currently promoted by a range of partisan, industry, and less partisan forces for America's own energy security and sustainability. For instance, after work we (at GBN) did for a US agency in the Spring of 2001 on different energy pathways for a sustainable future, my old boss, Peter Schwartz, came to a surprising conclusion: that nuclear energy was the only stop-gap linking our current technological system and infrastructure with the best outcome, something along the lines of a hydrogen-based economy. (See "Go Nukes".) In short, nuclear was the least bad option. Coming from a Berkeley-based think thank, this was a bit of a heresy. I should add, in this scenario, reviving nuclear also assumed that R&D money would be poured into making the technology better, and in particular, technologies like transmutation, a yet to be discovered process to help make the radioactive spent-fuel less harmful (and maybe even useful.)
This was a disturbing conclusion (which I tried to have an open mind to), but a view that nevertheless lacks imagination. Of course, Peter and better brains have thought about this a lot more. Even so, I have difficulty accepting that we can't come up with a different, out-of-the-box design solution that helps shift the whole energy production model to a more much decentralized and distributed model, and more along the lines of McDonough's Cradle-to-Cradle principles. I'm all ears and eyes for what these might be!
Having said that, this is a fantastically difficult dilemma, one that is most acute in places like China. As Howard French puts it, with "80 percent of its electricity from burning coal, the lure of nuclear energy is as obvious as the thick, acrid, choking haze that hangs over virtually all the country's cities." So one can see why China is going down this road, albeit a road that few countries have elected (France (1/3 of their energy supply and Japan 10%) which makes you wonder right there.
But even these investments in nuclear -- as heady as they are, full of many hidden costs -- won't be enough to satisfy China's voracious energy needs. "With a country that add generating capacity from all sources equivalent to the entire current energy consumption of Britain - that even the enormous expansion program will do little to offset the skyrocketing power demand."
Another dimension that gets glossed over is that while nuclear power does require incredible technical resources, which China clearly has, the most important capabilities are sophisticated management systems and practices, which China may lack. "We don't have a very good plan for dealing with spent fuel, and we don't have very good emergency plans for dealing with catastrophe," said Wang Yi, a nuclear energy expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. " As the SARS experience confirms, this kind of omission is not very encouraging.
Nuclear power clearly puts huge burdens on good governance systems, planning, and institutions which need to be stable over long periods of time, especially when it comes to managing radioactive nuclear waste, which is harmful for up to 10,000 years. (See Learning from Nuclear Waste for more about these insights from a project on the Future of Nuclear Waste.) But human institutions rarely last that long and centralized systems are notoriously vulnerable to shocks and cascading failures. China has indeed been around a long time, but it's not immune to disruptive change, and could collapse or fragment which is a plausible scenario. As one observer put it, making the information technology analogy, China can crash because it's so centralized, whereas India cannot. India is just too distributed for that to happen, because it is comprised of many different 'Indias' with much of the economic and social life happening away from Delhi. Whereas in China, Beijing is the main center of the control. I think this changing in China with several different regions and "Chinas" emerging, but the point still holds. China's centralized governance system is terribly vulnerable and poorly adapted to an interdependent, complex world. This makes going nuclear is a risky choice because it's hard to predict and ensure the stability of these managements systems.
Yet there is an important opportunity here. Why can't we give the Chinese a very best option to their dilemma? A win-win market opportunity, which Storm Cunningham talks about in The Restoration Economy, and one that leapfrogs our own conceptual and problem-solving limitations, and thus a high leverage place in our global system to intervene. While we have difficulty experimenting with new approaches -- for political reasons, for infrastructure reasons, for Wall Street metric reasons, for public opinion reasons -- countries like China suffer less from these constraints. And they can't afford not to try new things, which is why they are pushing ahead with nuclear even though it's not going to be "the" solution. They need to try many things and quickly, and will be more open (in some ways) to radical alternatives. Why don't learn from China then while helping to improve the quality of the experiments, especially experiments that are not so costly to humans and the environment? And if China isn't open to this kind of dialogue, other countries in a similar situation surely will be, despite our checkered past in technology transfer.
Indeed, the ironic thing is that for all the West's eco-talk and halting walk, out of sheer necessity this fourth generation of Chinese leadership will likely prove to be the most proactive green regime we have around -- even if they don't seem so on the surface. These communists are clean revolutionaries and they have to be, given the co-related and auto-catalytic drivers of skyrocketing economic growth, population growth, and a brittle and breaking environment. They, more than most leaders in the first world, are seeing the strong cause-and-effect between these three drivers in space and time. They do have a Long View, and are determined to prototype a very different economic growth model than the West.
So watch carefully what happens in China, learn to read the signals and early signs in this rapidly changing place. For we can see most palatably in China both the past -- the culmulative effects of our current industrial/consumption model -- and the future through their experiments. In the meantime, to make our and their future better, why don't we offer better alternatives to the nuclear pathway, options that are truly a good design solution for both people and planet over the long run, and not just until the spent fuel becomes a serious liability or a disaster strikes.
"We are entering a new land -- some of us as intentional immigrants, most of us as refugees."From Ten Things to Do In A Conceptual Emergency, a wonderful little book full of gems like this, produced by the International Futures Forum.
Children at Mafraq Refugee Camp
Refugee children stay in the refugee camp at Mafraq, Jordan, during the Six Day War.
© Tim Page/CORBIS
The IFF was funded by BP 'to explore new ways of operating effectively and responsibly in a world of boundless complexity, a world we no longer fully understand and cannot control."
"A similar burst of creative inter-disciplinary collaboration in the mid-eighteenth century gave us the scientific method, the triumph of reason, Adam Smith and modern economics, our modern worldview. It is that model - the model of the Enlightenment - that is now hitting the buffers."
"The IFF posits the need for a 'second enlightenment' and has begun to develop a coherent body of e2 principles and praxis. This exciting work continues to be developed."
Colleagues participated in their sessions. Not sure what's happening now with the organization, but they are worth collaborating with and checking out. Graham Leicester is the person to talk to.
Roots, spreading
Once you take a Bonsai tree out of its' box, it can't return to the same container -- says the old saying -- because the roots expand too quickly, making a new box needed for it to grow again. Fearful of stagnation and constraints, I have never shied away from pulling myself out of my environments. But when do you stop doing this?
The year of 2004 was spent thinking and talking a great deal about this, with the return-to-Vancouver scenario being one of several possibilities for post-Paris, whenever that is. Indeed, it's been almost 10 years since I left Vancouver for Singapore, ending up in San Francisco and then Paris; and over a decade for Toby, my co-adventurer in life, since he followed his dream of being a software engineer in the heart of the computer revolution at Next and then Apple. But can we return to this box we left? If it's a question of roots, have they embedded themselves too deeply elsewhere in places that can't be nourished in a context like Vancouver. Or do these roots need a place to return to so that some harvesting of our experiences can begin? And what is the importance of this place to our identity and values, both current and future?
I know these are central questions many global knowledge workers (for lack of a better term) like us are wrestling with, which I've written about before briefly in "What is Home?". Substitute Vancouver with any other city, village or place that was once your home, but is now a geography at the periphery of your professional and personal world, and we find a generic and timeless dynamic many people can relate to. Personally speaking, I know, like John Donne's two twin-compasses in his A Valediction Forbidding Morning, the strong roots I have in Vancouver -- a fourth generation Vancouverite -- have enabled me to explore the world relatively grounded, and without much existential uncertainty. I'm clearly lucky. Less so for Toby, who immigrated to Vancouver has a young boy from England, and has now spent more time outside of Canada than in it, even though paradoxically he feels more Canadian than anything else. He feels the angst of rootlessness more than I. But I won't speak for him here. Only that we both get sentimental when we hear Neil Diamond's beautiful song,"I am... I Said", especially the lyrics that go like this:
L.A.'s fine, the sun shines most the timeReplace LA with where you are, and New York for where you're from, and you realize you can easily be lost between two shores. Between two different versions of who you were in time and space, and between two different stories about what you need to live and be happy. If nothing was missing in our new place, we could easily let go and move on. That's hard to do when you're from Vancouver, when you've been raised with the gold standard for good living, when your soul is Pacific Northwest through and through. I'm sure a Buddhist could do it, but detachment can be over-rated. Besides, I don't want to let go; some passions are worth holding on to, cravings like the cleansing smells of cedar and salt water after long rain. Or when the horizon is a dimensional blur, like a water-colour painting, a thousand shades of grey. Or on that odd day when the sun is shining and everything is fresh and intensely crisp in focus, so much so that it feels unreal, like we've never been outside before. But the best thing about the scarcity of sunny days is the collective vibe of the city, jumping from zero to full speed as people rush to the seawalls or mow the lawn or do anything outdoor oriented as an offering of thanks and appreciation to the weather gods.
And the feeling is 'lay back'
Palm trees grow, and rents are low
But you know I keep thinkin' about
Making my way back
Well I'm New York City born and raised
But nowadays, I'm lost between two shores
L.A.'s fine, but it ain't home
New York's home, but it ain't mine no more
So sensing a life phase change, every time I go back, I try on for size the idea of coming back for good, or at least a long period of time, a relocation idea that our parents of course actively encourage. (Although this idea of living in just one place I find so limiting and lacking in imagination, so what we'll end up doing is most likely living in multiples, appropriately fitting for a post-modern world.) Sometimes the vision fits, and I'm full with the deep satisfaction that comes with coming full circle. In these visions, I could see myself walking along the Stanley Park seawall with family in tow. I could see myself disappearing for hours in Granville Island, looking for the Parisian treats I miss. I could see the house on Bowen Island where we'd have long, languorous summer dinner parties with friends, still in our bathing suits, still slightly salty and tingly from an afternoon swim. I could see the funky converted warehouse near The Cannery where my Innovation Centre would be located, where I could gather interesting talent -- thinkers and doers -- from the very best places to catalyze an spectrum of worldchanging activities that do well by doing good.
"Downtown Vancouver"
© Richard T. Nowitz/CORBI
But this is the extent of my forward visions, with the professional side (versus the pleasure side) being the weaker in focus. And if I'm honest with myself, the main drivers affecting my positive feelings for Vancouver come from two other sources: my sense of personal past, and the abundance of family living there, with all of the blessings and constraints this brings. When I think of these feelings, I recall what an amazing childhood I had which took advantage of everything BC had to offer: stunningly beautiful surroundings, good affordable education, good affordable healthcare, and a chance to do activities on a regular basis: sailing, skiing, hiking in virgin territory, camping, float-plane flying with my father -- in short, adventuring of all kinds that many Europeans can only dream of. Also, when the prospect comes of having your own family, the critical mass of kin around you is always alluring. I myself benefited from growing up within a larger, crazy extended family, where the bandwidth of learning was so much higher than a smaller nuclear family. But many people are recreating this, forging their own non-kin based tribes to fulfill a similar social function, so there is no reason why we can't do the same wherever we are, although as a disclaimer, we are by no means suggesting we can do this without our wonderful families (which we can't!).
More than not, I struggle with the idea of returning to Vancouver. And this gets harder with every passing year. We've known people who have returned, and the results have been mixed. Most people invariably become depressed, alienated, and feel the loneliness of a "repatriate"; that feeling that while you have changed profoundly your surrounding environment hasn't experienced the same kind of shift, or at least, not by your reckoning. Not only are your old friends doing more or less the same thing with the same people and often complaining about being in a rut, they seem little interested in your experiences abroad, either threatened by them because they reinforce just how pedestrian their lives really are, which may or may not be true (more likely just an insecurity, the exotic being an illusion and relative). Or worse, they genuinely couldn't give a hoot about these experience or simply can't relate to them, so locked into their own world it doesn't even occur to them to ask about what's going on beyond the limits of Vancouver or Canada.
More positively, other repatriates just reconcile themselves, often quite satisfactorily, to the fact that Vancouver is a lifestyle choice, rather than something that's good for the career. (Again perhaps a false tradeoff but with some truth to it.) Then lastly there are the neo-Buddhists (if not in name, in practice) or the Green Digerati (high tech professionals with social and eco values) who feel that Vancouver is their reward or escape after years of working so hard in the rat race, a small sanctuary of sanity where people can be "whole people" again or be hedonistic on the cheap. But the stance of many of these people is more passive, the goal is retreat versus being an an active participant in a community, which is why we have so many amazing artists and successful professionals in Vancouver but nonetheless consciously apathetic ones.
I struggle mostly because of the mindset. I get frustrated with the narrowness of vision in the collective zeitgeist of Vancouver and amongst the people I talk to. Admittedly, part of the problem is that I may be talking to the wrong people. In fact, when I'm taking the pulse for getting "back in", many of the people I consult are asking me out to "get out" because I have seemed to have done it so successfully. The message: stay out, don't come back, life is worse here, you have more options outside. I think this is in part a failure of perspective and imagination; and I get angry when they ignore the facts of how lucky they are compared to most places on this planet. But saying there are starving children in Sudan just bounces off people's consciousness; the negative play rarely works. And part of what they say is true. There has been a malaise, which is easy to get into when you're sunlight deprived and it rains four meters a year (which it does in my parents' backyard on the North Shore.)
Clearly, impoverished mindsets can be just as damaging as a lack of material assets. Perhaps it's the cumulative effects of ten years of decline -- decline from poor politics, decline from the Asia Financial Crisis after math, decline from the shifting fortunes of a resource-based economy -- and the disappointment that in the wake of Expo '86 Vancouver didn't become the world-class centre it was promising to be. Perhaps it's also something in the grey concrete urban landscape, a poor architectural colour choice for a rainy dark climate, which is something we could have learned from cities like Stockholm, which has happily hued buildings of red, green and yellow, so much more uplifting to the eye. Perhaps it's the type of people Vancouver attracts, or the potent BC bud that's abundantly smoked. All of this combined seems to create this lackluster, this lacking in the kind of verve that makes San Francisco and Shanghai and London tick, places where the future is being created in overdrive. While I don't want Vancouver to become these places (heaven's no!) I naturally want to bring some of this can-do ethos back with me because some of this is needed for any kind of reinvention. I naturally want to return to my home city some of the knowledge and insight I've gained by working aboard with the best companies, most interesting people and innovations, and leading concepts of the day.
But how? Whenever I come back with new ideas to share, possibilities of what we could do if I returned to Vancouver, possibilities that have all become realities elsewhere in places like San Francisco, SIngapore and London, they all get shot down or dismissed because "they wouldn't work here." Some of this critique may be true. Having an innovation centre that helps multinational corporations, for instance, probably won't fly in Vancouver because there simply isn't the density of companies located there. A regrettable fact and this could change in the fullness of time. But what about an innovation centre designed to stimulate local innovation, local industries? An incubator of sorts that in turn becomes a magnet for the best and the brightest, much like some of the think-tanks I've been involved with (say GBN Global Business Network or SRI Stanford Research Institute). What Alex Steffen says at Worldchanging, What Seattle is Missing, may also apply to Vancouver.
Then the obvious strikes me: I'm in the better futures business. I help people imagine new worlds, new options and possibilities, and how to make them happen. And I often do this in far more protracted and problematic places and cases, whether it be poverty-stricken Africa or with a company in an industry in terminal decline. BC, once a "have" province, can certainly have anything it wants provided it creates the conditions for creativity, and has leaders who can image new possibilities together with the discipline and courage to fulfill them. While I'm sure we have the former capabilities, I'm not sure about the latter.
Graveyard of Ambition
Within this musing context, I was delighted when a friend-of-a-friend, Paris Simons, forwarded this magazine, Vancouver Review, to me. I'm scanning for things like this to help me in my personal long term scenario research, so please keep these coming! Clicking through the webpage, I discovered this article by Paul Delany, "Graveyard of Ambition: Does Vancouver murder dreams?"
While he starts out in the same place I'm at right now, he ends up more positively. Here are a few passages I liked:
The city needs a more mature sense both of its own history, and of what remains to be built. Starting from respect for the city’s great endowment of ocean, mountain and forest, we should cherish the continuities between current developments and earlier phases of growth. Fortunately, Vancouver is still a city where there has been relatively little demolition (except in the West End), and where few buildings are out of scale or isolated from their context. Sometimes that context is an instant creation, as in the latest Concord Pacific development east of the Granville Street Bridge. Along with the towers there is new park space, plazas, shoreline walks, and connection with other kinds of city life nearby. The challenge, here and elsewhere, will be to make such developments helpful to less favoured parts of the city, and especially the desperate problems of the Downtown Eastside.For the rest, laments about the “graveyard of ambition” need to distinguish between substantial hopes and mere opportunism. Ambition is not just a hunger for the new, or seizing money while it’s hot. It also depends on the existence of older buildings or institutions, of things that people hope to own or inherit. True possession of the future requires a deeper appreciation of the past, even in this young city (which is not so young in the sense that it has escaped the 20th-century devastations inflicted on cities in continental Europe). Vancouver needs more charitable endowments, more complex local skills, and respected traditions. Sometimes these complexities emerge from decline, as when Boeing’s troubles in the 1970s helped the rise of software and biotechnology in Seattle. Because diversification is by its nature unpredictable, it cannot be willed into existence by governments.
And I think this might be happening. I hear that many studies on the "future of BC" have been funded to this end (although my guess is that they will be designed to preclude fresh thinking.) But it's the doers I'm interested in. People like my old boss, Angus Reid, who I meet every so often to keep in touch. He is someone I could work with and will likely do so if I return, if the offer is still there. He is an exception -- we should have a list of these just to remind us that they exist -- of the entrepreneurial West Coast attitude that used to drive Vancouver, albeit less so than its' sister cities in North America. After selling his company to IPSOS, Angus is pouring his considerable energy and talent into projects that just might rehabilitate the idea that Vancouver and BC can become a world-class centre. One idea is to create an Aspen Institute-like event in Whistler, thereby attracting talent and hopefully the whole "creative cluster" of activities that happens around these institutions. (Vancouverites, please let me know of more of these developments and people. )
Delany also points to a timely comparative advantage that Vancouver should exploit:
We may lack ambition, yet there are still many people whose ambition is to come and live here. The shortage of power that I have described might even turn to the city’s advantage n a recent article in The Washington Monthly, Richard Florida [See Worldchanging review of his important book on the Creative Class] argues that US dynamism is threatened by fear of terrorism and the doctrine of preemptive wars:Vancouver and Toronto are set to take off: Both city-regions have a higher concentration of immigrants than New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. So too are Sydney and Melbourne. As creative centers, they would rank alongside Washington, D.C. and New York City. Many of these places also offer such further inducements as spectacular waterfronts, beautiful countryside, and great outdoor life. They’re safe. They’re rarely at war. These cities are becoming the global equivalents of Boston or San Francisco, transforming themselves from small, obscure places to creative hotbeds that draw talent from all over—including your city and mine.Cities like Zurich or Stockholm have benefited by their traditions of neutrality and peace, inglorious as their prosperity may have been. British Columbia, which is bigger than France and Germany combined, has no army base and is probably the least militarized place in North America. In coming years, there will be more freedom to travel and emigrate to Vancouver than to a US that is becoming much more fearful of strangers. Perhaps that will be the limit of Vancouver’s ambition, to be clean, prosperous and safe. Should that be enough, in a time when darker passions seem to be in the saddle everywhere else? Or should we get off that lotus-root diet and start to move faster, look further, and build higher?
Perhaps it's time then to be proactive rather than reactive from afar, to co-create a better reality for Vancouver instead of patiently waiting for it to just happen, which means perhaps waiting until its too late? This is the conversation I'm having with myself, which presents some dilemmas and choices at hand. I'm sure I'm not the only expat doing this, as I have been connecting other Vancouver natives who want get back home to people within my local network, in everything from media to biotech. An Office of Reverse Brain Drain I'm sure has been established, or should be!
But for me, in many ways, a global sandbox is an easier place for me to play in than my own backyard where boundaries are more tightly subscribed and social networks more intimate and incestuous; where the emotional stakes are higher because you care so deeply for the place that's formed you and thus don't want to fail it in any way, or especially, in front of the people who are closest to you. Indeed, it would be hard to return to a place where all of those fledgling experiences and people from your past see the newness of what you're doing within an old paradigm of who you are, and often with outdated assumptions about where the world is going. That's what really scares me -- bumping into these perceptual speed bumps, not being able to get through these barriers of mindset that constrain possibilities -- and why returning to Vancouver with my visions in tact will take far more courage than moving to India or New York or anywhere else I may go in years to come. A dilemma indeed, but one I believe will be answered in the fullness of time and with the feedback of my network (which is you!) It's time like these that I wish people like Ivan Head, my old mentor who recently passed away, was here to guide me. He would have words of encouragement, wise council, and some connections to make. Another reason not to defer too much longer. The network can all of a sudden contract. I miss you Ivan.
Key Words: Book review of Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything; the role of amateurs and hobbyists & volunteers in social innovation, bottom-up versus top-down approaches to knowledge-creation, implications of web, long-term projects, short term metrics, knowledge economy, implications for worldchanging.
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You see things as they are, and you ask “Why”?
But I dream things that never were, and I ask “Why Not?”
- George Bernard Shaw
Over the December holidays, in the sticky summer Brazilian heat (and partly a reason for my posting hiatus), and before the horrors of the Boxing Day Tsunami sucked up our collective attentions in its wake, I found myself drawn to a quirky story so completely removed from my surroundings and current events, a tale told in the delightful little book, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester, (Oxford University Press, 2003). Here are a few reflections and connections which I'm writing, passing the transit time away, in Rio de Janeiro's GIG airport, the first step in my re-entry into a Northern European winter, with its landscape full of shades of grey in lieu of the South's resplendent greens, reds, and frangipani white, which I'll soon miss.
Fortunately there is nothing colourless about the polymathic author, Simon Winchester, who has the rare gift of bringing life to seemingly arcane subjects. A curious reader's dream, Winchester makes what would seem to be the prospects of chronicling the history of a dictionary -- potentially a seriously tedious yawn -- interesting. But this shouldn't be surprising, since he has done this before: The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, and the amazing Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, which was about the infamous volcano in the Indonesian "ring of fire" whose eruption literally changed the world. And, come to think of it, in light of the recent seismic tragedy in southern Asia, this is a timely read: a penetrating reminder of how exogenous (outside-in) ecological events can create permanent social and political shifts -- a pattern for the future that's likely predetermined if not timeless. As Jon Lebkowsky, a fellow WC contributor, put in an email thread, "Humans have the gift of potential foresight yet we're in denial about our fragility and vulnerability to exceptional natural forces. I think that's the real story here." I agree: our anthropomorphic bias is so strong that we're seduced into thinking that big changes that matter are social, yet at the end of the day these may be insignificant, if not irrelevant, compared to environmental disruptors. (Also see Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World by David Keys, with a book review here.)
But I digress. Let's recalibrate our mental compasses to Victorian London circa 1850s when increasing prosperity and England's industrial prowess was breeding a great sense of optimism and courage to tackle hard problems (while also breeding a great deal of hubris and other social problems of course). This was a time when men (alas no women) in long white beards and smoking jackets spent their days being learned, thinking both broadly and deeply, individually and together in societies or clubs, which were all the rage at the time. (See Philosophical Laughing for a blog on one of the most famous of clubs, The Lunar Society. I argue we're in need of another forum for us to "laugh out loud" about impossible things, but then again, this is what we're doing on WC, aren't we?) And like many big ideas then, the idea of cataloguing English, in its sprawling entirety, occurred in one of these newly formed groups, the British Philology Society, and soon became the obtuse obsession of a small group of erudite hobbyists, convinced as they were that the existing resources (only two dictionaries existed, Samuel Johnson's and Noah Webster's) were grossly inadequate given the growing (self-)importance of the English language.
The Creative Force of Amateurs, Hobbyists, and Volunteers
Which leads me directly to my first observation: this massive and sustained effort that turned into the Oxford English Dictionary or OED (it was originally called the New English Dictionary and only switched names late in the game) would never have happened if weren't for an active and dedicated group of amateur philologists and lexicographers and other supporters who turned their passions into their life's work, not to mention thousands of volunteers from around the English-speaking world who dedicated much time and effort to supplying the OED's editors and staff with important content. Using a methodology called "historical principles" (what a word meant and when it mean it) this included everything from identifying words, both old and new, together with their illustrations, etymology and history, to even correcting proofs. While a far cry from an modern
Of course, linguistic cannons and efforts to codify things like this can be tools for power and social control, and many efforts to create dictionaries had this in the background. For instance, the French and Italians to this day have a formal government-sanctioned body that tries to regulate and vet, from the top-down, their languages. The OED decided to take a very different and far-sighted approach that must have surprised the intelligentsia at the time. The early founders of the project, visionaries to be sure, wanted to see how the language was being used from the bottom-up -- in magazines, in newspapers, in comics, and even in common conversation (perish the thought!) -- and not just within high brow literature and within elite milieus. They recognized the futility of trying to control English, which draws much of its power and success to its protean fluidity and flexibility, an enduring insight without question. (See an earlier post on The Future of English.
As an aside, Winchester does an admirable job summarizing in one short chapter the history of the English language, all 1500 years of it, which when juxtaposed with other languages -- e.g. Chinese, Sanskrit-based languages, German and Celtic languages -- one realizes that English isn't an old tongue at all, but more like a 20-something. Anyway, given the many-part BBC series on The Story of English, this seems excellent economy indeed (both in time and money, the video series is almost $100).<./p>
Another observation that stood out: as class-ridden as Victorian England may have been, the story of the OED reveals that it was also surprisingly open to motived intellectual entrepreneurs who proved their worth, something that is hard to imagine today with an equivalent project even though we purport to have a more egalitarian society. Provided manners were gentlemanly (and they were the right colour), amateurs could self-educate themselves and gain entrance to learned societies without, necessarily, formal credentials.
The most famous editor of the OED, a Scotsman named James Murray (1837-1915) -- possibly the most instrumental person in the project's completion -- came from humble beginnings and didn't complete even his grammar school education. Henry Bradley, another important editor, was a mere freelance writer before the OED and thus also lacked an upper class Oxbridge pedigree. This is not to say that credentials and connections didn't matter; of course they did. For instance, Murray's friends within the philology society contrived to get him an honorary LLD from Edinburgh, partly to boost his morale and more pragmatically as way to give him enough publicly sanctioned gravitas to head the project. (This was before he "made it" and eventually received a legion of honours, albeit with Oxford being the last to bestow one). But he did win the job without credentials to start, with having just the support of his peers and a firm conviction that he could do it. It also helped that there was a crisis to find someone suitable who could take on the project which was gravely floundering at the time.
For some reason, the OED seemed to attract these types: the self-educated, self-appointed, follow-your-bliss folks. (We even learn that celebrated author Julian Barnes, as a young man, was an OEDer.) Perhaps this was, in part, the key to its success? -- why the OED developed a novel methodology and took a different path than the norm? Amateurs, people without the homogenizing influence of a formal education which can engender group-think memes, people who can thus think out-of-the-box and have the time and energy to follow their curiosities, may in fact be the best people to start new enterprises. The computer industry, the Web, and Open Source were all started by driven hobbyists wanting to create something they could use. Indeed, the passionate force of amateurs has always marked breakthrough innovation and invention, a recurring theme in Daniel Bornstein's The Creators, his epic surveying the best artists, writers, and inventors in Western history. Leonardo Da Vinci, the Wright Brothers, and the renegade abbot who had no formal training in architecture but who nonetheless gave birth to the Gothic cathedral design are just a few examples.
But does the world today still permit these amateur experts and hobbyists to influence events, society and innovation at this level? The answers are unfortunately not clear cut: both yes and no. To start with the upside, a web-based, globally-connected world changes the scale and geometry of this phenomenon qualitatively and irrecovably. Kevin Kelly really puts it best in his prescient book, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (Viking, 1998), which was originally dismissed by some as hype at the time (and there really was lots then) but should be reread today for many excellent gems. To quote him at length:
The network economy has set into motion the power of hobby tribes and informed peers. Amateurs, plugged into the net, discover comets, find fossils, and track bird migrations better than the pros. By networking their interests and passing tips around, amateurs also create software in languages so new that they are taught in no classrooms. These self-organized communities, unleashed from their obscurity by the net, are the new authorities. (p. 105)A user group is a peerage of responsibility. Group members take education into their own hands, and distribute the job of keeping up among themselves...
... The most fanatical of user groups can be thought of as "hobby tribes", a phrase coined by science fiction writer David Brin. Hobby tribes are very informed, very connected, very smart customers. They band their enthusiasms together and become the experts. In some smaller niches they become the market too.
Expertise now resides in fanatical customers. The world's best experts on your product or service don't work for your company. They are your customers, or a hobby tribe. (Original emphasis)
Companies need user groups almost as much as users need them. User groups are better than advertising when customers are happy, and worse than cancer when they are not. Used properly, aficionados can make or break products. The network economy has the potential to enable a civilization of aficionados. As customers get smarter, the locus of expertise shifts toward affiliates and home-brew groups, and away from large corporations or the solo academic professional. If you really want to know what works, ask a hobby tribe. And not just in the realm of high technology. All knowledge is pooling into aficionados. Because shared obsessions amongst horse lovers, there are more horseshoers working today than a hundred years ago, in the age of cowboys. There are more blacksmiths making swords and chain mail armor this year than ever worked in the medieval past. A network of aficionados is already here.
The net tends to dismantle authority and shift its allegiance to peer groups. The cultural life in the network economy will not emanate from academia, or the cubicle of the corporation, or even prime time media. Rather, it will reside in small communities of interest known as fans, 'zines, and subcultures. (131-132)
I think Kelly is right in his assessment, more or less, and Peter Drucker pointed this out ages ago: watch the amateurs and hobbyists to know where the world is going. However, as the old cowboy adage goes, "never mistake a clear view for a short distance." There is still so much that needs to be done before we ween ourselves from credentialism, which Robert Fuller painfully describes in Sombodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank,. Or at least we have yet to develop the sophistication of knowing when to use traditional experts and when not to. For it would be silly to say that qualifications don't matter; clearly, they still perform an important social function of reducing the "evaluation costs" (as economists would say), the time and energy spent deciding who's good and who isn't. So the social progress that has to be made is:
When discussing how to deal with "disruptive innovation" Christensen and Raynor point to similar conclusions in The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Harvard Business School Press, 2O03). They argue that in situations where real innovation is needed, such as creating a new market or product, high performers in core businesses -- people with "right stuff" -- may be the last ones who should lead the project. This is because "graduates of the school of experience are trained for stable, operational environments, not new market environments." They argue that "It's often better to look for people who bounced back from failures... because this happens a lot in new market creation." Of course, this rarely happens in practice, the dilemma being: leaders want trusted managers to lead new projects, yet they only become trusted because they have delivered results within core businesses. A Catch 22. To overcome this, Christensen and Raynor's suggest two thing, both requiring significant process and mindset shifts:
Again, these are tall orders. Recognizing a disruptive situation -- a reality which many organizations are in denial about -- is an important first step that many companies never make. And then measuring or developing a process tracking someone's ability to learn is hard and time-consuming stuff (although the private sector has pioneered some of the best practices here as well.) At a higher level, part of the problem is the current climate of uncertainty, which has engendered much paralysis and "stuckness" and thus risk aversion to letting young people learn, even though this are exactly the kind people and context where this should happen, where out-of-the-boxers should be given a chance.
The sad reality is that James Murray wouldn't have a chance to be editor of this great project if it was started today. Lacking mainstream credentials, he wouldn't have got in the front door. Having said that, common sense within business does prevail in some cases. How many of you have made your big professional leap precisely because you've done things which you had no business in being qualified for in the first place? I would suspect a great many of you fall in this category, as indeed I have repeatedly throughout my career. (By the by, a fascinating piece of research by two British academics describes the glass cliff phenomenon, that is, the pattern in big companies where women are being promoted into risky, difficult jobs where the chances of failure are higher. The reasons are not pleasant, but the positive outcome, if they succeed, is that these women also make the best top executives because they've handled more unconventional experiences.)
However, from a big picture view, I think this reality is an indictment of people working within the dominant systems, corporate or government. Outside of the system and at its edges, this really isn't an issue. People are valued by what they do more than where they went to school. (In fact, my partner who is a software engineer has the reverse pathology: discounting PhDs when they come interviewing.) And alternatives/supplements to a credential-driven world are possible (and emerging) with peer-to-peer processes enabled by the web. However, these will only work effectively if supported by corresponding social norms. Clearly, trust becomes even more important in the land of mediated hobby-tribes where face-to-face contact is rare, if never. Indeed, in lieu of qualifications and gatekeepers, what enabled Murray to get his job as OED editor was the trust that he fostered with his colleagues and fellow society members. But these white bearded folks spent a lot of time hanging out with each other drinking port and smoking cigars. Then again, early users of the WELL probably spent the same about of time online with each other, and we can't vouch for the other activities.
The good news? An over-reliance on credentials and gate-keeping is a sign of ossification and rigidity of the dominant system. Elites become stagnant gene pools this way.
Meaning, this is a time when worldchangers can make a huge difference. Our degrees of freedom are highest when creative destruction hits. And to the edges is where many of the best and brightest may be heading. Indeed, this a trend to watch, which started over the past decade: smart people starting to leave their mainstream jobs and turning their passions into their life's work, or smart young people realizing they had other socially cool and interesting options besides the usual career flavours: doctor, lawyer, teacher. Social entrepreneurship courses in all the top schools, for instance, are way oversubscribed. In addition, some of the CEOs I've worked with over the past eight years have confessed this to me as well. When I ask them the "what keeps you up at night, the answer is often about losing marketshare in the talent pool. I have no figures to measure this at hand (some would be handy so please forward!), but I sense this is a very significant shift, as Daniel Borstein has written in How to Change the World. As Bornstein argues, the proliferation of social entrepreneurship around the world is filling some of the institutional voids. And together with the blogging phenomenon, these new developments are providing new opportunities to empower passionate hobbyists and amateurs to launch amazing projects. The incredible post-Tsunami actions and activities is just one example of thousands of what can happen. For example, SEA-EAT (South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami] was a project heroically launched just last week by WC contributors, Rohit Gupta and Dina Mehta, which was reported in the Asian Times. Efforts like these are truly inspirational and hopeful.
Making the Long View Sexy Again
But can we sustain this kind of activity over the long term? Sure we can get things going when a disaster strikes, but can we continue this over years and years -- and possibly far beyond our life spans? The OED took over 70 years to complete, starting 1857 and after many crises which threatened the whole project and a major lack of funding and pressure from its funder, Oxford University Press, it was completed in 1928. Murray and its original founders never lived to see it finished. The interesting thing, of course, is that no one expected it to take this long. The original estimate, I think, was ten years. But no one really knew. It was an open-ended problem that had to be sorted out through the act of doing of it. As the editors confronted the enormity of the challenge, they adjusted the time horizon in increments -- "just another ten years, we promise" and so on -- until it finally got enough public (and importantly, royal) support, making the prospect of it not being completed untenable in the eyes of its principle sponsors, "the Delegates" (the name of the committee overseeing this) at Oxford University. Fear of disgrace then, as now, is a powerful force. To satisfy the publishers, the OED team also decided early on to publish their work in batches or in "fascicles" as each letter was being completed. This did much to keep the effort sustained, visible proof that something was being manifested.
Like GBN cofounder Stewart Brand, musician Brian Eno, and others at the Long Now Foundation, (which I've written about in Patience) I worry that we don't have enough people with the will and means and mindset to work on long term projects, especially since it's these kinds of projects that the world needs the most. The Long Now Foundation was created because of a noticeable absence of these projects in business, government, science and art. Their goal is to build a coherent, compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking, and to help nudge civilization toward "making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare" as Brand said in his book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility.,
Indeed, it's hard to image an OED-like project starting today and surviving given all the setbacks they experienced. Please let me know if I'm wrong about this -- I would be happy to be --but as Brand and others have documented long term projects are ge
