Month: March 2004

ZMM for Teaching Lawyers and Pilots. Interesting page from J R Elkins’ West Virginia Univ “Moral Philosophy for Lawyers” course material, with a very positive view of Pirsig’s ZMM.

And memes are self-reinforcing. Talk about blindingly obvious. It’s my Catch-22. How do you argue rationally against scientific fundamentalism / logical positivism ?

I’ve read Dawkins, though I’ve still never read “The Meme Machine”, but now I’ve just read Susan Blackmore’s “Waking from the Meme Dream“. Stong Zen thread here – clearing the mind of those certainties of memes from the history of humanity – to allow a little doubt in. Waking from the collective dream that scientific rationale is the answer to everything.

I’d only previously seen memes as matter of fact metaphor for how ideas spread – I’d never seen it before as the reason why bad, but easy to understand, ideas become the norm. Again blindingly obvious. A natural selection process tending to conformance and common denominators in the space where ideas compete for airtime – the brain and the web of comms media. Where ideas are concerned good (fitness) equals easy to communicate / understand / fit the web of communication – fit with available schemata – it does not relate to any intrinsic value relationship between the content of the idea and it’s application in the world beyond communication itself, without some postive feedback. If we all hold logical / scientific schemata, and our feedback allways post-rationalises event outcomes against ideas as inputs, then all ideas will tend to be scientific.

BTW the “TAO” site (Hungarian ?!) where I found Susan’s paper has some magic content – lots of links to full texts of many interesting works including Pirsig’s ZMM naturally, only some of them in Hungarian.

Where to start – I have 12 pages of notes from David Gurteen’s 3rd Knowledge Management Conference in London yesterday 3rd March 2004. (Matt Mower has blogged notes too.) The main speakers were David Snowden (IBM / Cynefin) and various advocates and users of the Cynefin framework – Martyn Laycock, Bruce Cronin, Les Johnson, Anabelle Mark. Personal impressions …

Overwhelming sense of re-inforcement, of those ill-expressed ideas of my own in this blog and my underlying thesis, by the Dave Snowden / Cynefin consulting framework analysis of modelling organisational complexity. This wave is a “Kondratiev Tsunami”, and Cynefin has given us some surfboards on which to survive when it thunders up the beach of general business management in 3 or 5 years time. Hype ? Actually I hope not, ‘cos we (all) really need this to happen on so many levels.

Not much is actually new. Boston Consulting 2×2 grids, as I’ve opined before, but with a new twist of axes that focus on what really defines the manageability of an organisation – order<>unorder and complexity<>simplicity. The way human behaviour contributes to that order and complexity (as complex-adaptive, post-rationalising agents in complex-adaptive systems”), and the socially and culturally conditioned “schemata” we humans hold to guide our decision making, are thrown into immediate spotlight as the issues to be “managed”. Anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and story-telling are as old as human life, and surprisingly for some, many philosophical writers and management commentators have been pointing out their relevance to what makes the world go round for aeons too. Cynefin get’s this stuff into management powerpoint-land not a day too soon for those of us in businesses riding the Information & Communications Technologies wave. Aren’t we all ?

How many of those presenters and participants yesterday had languages and philosophy as their first degrees ? How many had learned their wisdom in cybernetics and the like ? Most.

The questions are ancient – when you act or plan to act, how do you know what’s true and how do you know what’s right ? Newton / Einstein, Socrates / Pirsig, Rudyard Kipling / Douglas Adams / James Willis – all human life is here.

More coherent report to follow.