Month: March 2006

Yet more from Anecdote. A great Dilbert cartoon, about the artificiality of fitting numbers and rationality to strategic plans. Works on many levels. The “complexity” in the square root of the negative number, or simply the fact that the result is “imaginary”, and the strange recursion in the mobius strip timeline. Many a true word.

Also followed the Anecdote links to “Open Space“. Something I’ve been following for some time, though I don’t believe I’ve ever blogged about it. Johnnie Moore used it as a facilitation method for a group of knowledge management bloggers I’ve been involved with. Like much new management consultancy buzzspeak, it’s easy to take a cynical view of old ideas packaged with new jargon, designed to sell new textbooks and new consultancy services. But it is based on the sound idea that human narrative interaction is the best means of organisation through complexity.

I could see it as an antidote to the John Cleese “Meetings, Bloody Meetings” approach. The idea that if you must have meetings, make sure they are “efficient”, and impose rules of participation that stick to the agenda, speaking one at a time, we have one meeting here, and so on. Whereas, OpenSpace facilitation encourages agenda formation by invitation of the participants, and positively encourages the idea that people will naturally group around multiple sub-meetings / sub-agendas, where they have greatest interest, enthusiasm, contributions. The grouping and re-grouping, by physicaly walking about and moving chairs around is fundamental. The only imposed structure is the Open Space format, not the agenda content, nor any specific decision-making outcomes – so clearly it’s not the right process for every “meeting”. Imposed informality almost. Good where genuinely open outcomes are expected from complex situations. Preparation and facilitation skills are about allowing what happens naturally to happen – so establishing genuine openeness and trust in the transparency of any implicit prior agendas is crucial, as is allowing and encouraging the right forms of interaction to happen, even though uninitiated participants may initially find the apparent chaos uncomfortable. (This is a good brief summary article by Diane Gibeault.)

The “Data Rat” from David Pope, via Anecdote.

Also from the guys at Anecdote, Two linked posts on building trust and the value of silence in narrative knowledge.

And, a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s blog. Not really a fan of Gladwell, in the sense that I saw a lot of over-sensationalised unoriginality in his Tipping Point and Blink, despite their content being essentially true and, more importantly, with messages consistent with my own – My therapist tells me I’m just jealous of his publishing success 🙂

Wow, how come I never made the Malcom Gladwell connection with this post.

Monitoring system behaviour by translating its functional patterns into music. [Also via Rivets]

Can’t quite work out where the name “Post-Autistic Economics” comes from, but this is essentially about numbers being irrelevant in economics. Naturally I approve. [From AdBusters via Rivets]

Post Note : Of course I remember now why the word “autistic” struck a chord – Dave Snowden’s quote from earlier …

“The only humans who analyse all the data and then make a rational choice are autistic, but economists insist this is the way we all work.”

This is about the 3rd or 4th time I’ve blogged about this stuff. Here in a pretty realistic looking gadget package. Could its time have come ? [Previously]

Had an interesting conversation with a Chinese colleague, sitting on a flight from Fuzhou to Beijing the other day.

Western educated, just completed a PhD in Manchester, England, and therefore lived in UK for 4 years or so, he was commenting on cultural differences and how he liked being back in Beijing, after I had commented about how frustrating I had been finding the lack of BBC (or any Western news channels) and Google in China for a whole week. Whole range of topics in general discussion.

Part of the discussion had started around the local behaviour in business meetings – and a strong “listening” culture amongst the locals, verging on disengagement to western perception. A recognition that “translation of understanding” was a very slow process, not because of symbolic lingusitic differences, but because the thinking was quite different – We compared notes on the “quaint” english translations on consumer goods and business / retail premises, that we in the west find so amusing – that is itself quite indicative of that different world model behind the two languages.

I remarked on the enormous boom in the Chinese economy, and how so much of the outcome was going visibly into more monumental buildings and malls (and human bodies) filled with Western “fashion” brands and consumerism, and how even the smallest shacks doing local business were decked out in multicoloured flashing neon. How in fact, in some ways hard to put a finger on, it was reassuring that there was still some conservatism in authority to resist the excesses of western “freedom”. He said, western attitudes to Chinese repressions (Tiananmen Square and all that) were much more extreme than most Chinese. He remarked on a personal street mugging experience in the UK, and discovering that there really were no-go areas of intolerance to outsiders, and how the balance of rights of the victim vs those of the attacker (and criminals in general in media reporting) seemed wrong. He’d come to feel it was his own fault he’d been mugged, and he found that idea strange. He couldn’t imagine feeling that in a Chinese city, in fact he couldn’t imagine feeling similarly threatened in the first place. And there were ever greater wealth class variations in the booming economy – walking in areas in any one of several Chinese cities we had both experienced, there was a highly visible “shanty-town” economy living in bamboo and corrugated sheet dwellings plugging the gaps and sprouting from the roofs of the higher rise developments, and still a strong attraction to the urban from the rural. People scratching out livings side by side with those consuming what the malls have to offer. Conversely having scraped together enough, there was still a strong trend to return to rural roots, rather than aspire to greater urban weath.

Western rights and freedoms were OK, but in moderation he said. I showed him I was reading Nagarjuna’s “Mulamadhyamakakarika” (The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way) in an attempt to find that moderation. He smiled.

Some of the interest in reading such a work is in the translation itself – from Sanskrit directly to English and in some cases via Tibetan dialect. The range of possible phrasing involved in any given translation highlights the enormous subtlety in succesfully grasping the actual thoughts and meaning being conveyed. Quite different for those of us with a Greek / Latin heritage in our thinking.

Copy of Nick Rose’s 1998 paper from the Journal of Memetics, on some of the important misunderstandings and controversies in memetics, and distinctions between genetic and memetic mechanisms that mean the analogy is only approximate.