Highlights of the 50th Annual Meeting of the ISSS

July 9 - 14, 2006 | Sonoma State University | Rohnert Park, CA

This was my first ISSS conference. For Gail and me, it was the culmination of more than a year of periodic co-design, dialogue, planning and coordination with a host of other individuals and organizations. Over the course of the conference, I was fortunate to be able to play multiple roles: participant, designer, facilitator, performer. And there was so much I missed, or simply couldn't take part in absent of being in more than one place at a time. All in all, I'm left looking forward to the next opportunity to play with this remarkable community. Here are my highlights:

Nora Bateson reading her father Gregory's Allegory - "a flirtation between different ways of knowing"...

Pille Bunnell's elegant and provocative presentation drawing, in part, on Humberto Maturana's concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition...

Alexander & Kathia Laszlo's "Transiting To Sustainability: Nine criteria for walking the talk and dancing the path"...

The DreamScape art installation and ongoing performances of the Autopoetics...

The level of engagement and depth of stories created during the Thursday morning backcasting session...

Joanna Macy's inspired presentation on Friday morning...

Spending an hour and a half with Peter Bishop, chairman of Studies of the Future graduate program at the University of Houston...

And last but by no means least, that I was...

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Let's have a "See What Happens Day!"

"We can't be part of the future if we don't have the stories." Participant in the ISSS conference

Last week during our Backcasting exercise at the ISSS conference, one group suggested a "Let's See What Happens Day" around environmental crisis.
Multi-dimensional, many-sided stories unfolded on the sides of story cubes such as this. Here's the idea: In order to bring to life the reality of global change, a series of simulations throughout the world would take place. Citizens would be made aware that on a certain day, all electricity, gas stations, water, etc. would be cut off. Citizens would have time to prepare and get ready but the simulation would be real. Several should be planned each year. Modern life would come to a halt during each of these simulations. What would happen? What would we learn from these kinds of events?

Learning from the simulation…
In the day-to-day work of organizations, it is difficult to "see," let alone understand, the complexities of the system within which we work. Information flows and feedback loops are fragmented and often subject to time lags so that it becomes very difficult to have any sense of cause-and effect. These effects are magnified in departmentalized organizations as well as those spread out geographically.

A benefit of a robust simulation is that it can model and reveal the 'whole system' in an intense, time-compressed period.

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Kind of Genius

Tucked near the back of the July issue of Wired, there is an article about two types, or classifications, of creative genius: conceptual and experimental. The article focuses on the research findings of David Galenson, who in 1997 "almost by accident" happened upon an observation which turned to curiosity turned to hypothesis and ultimately into theory. The creative class of conceptualists figure out what they want to create before they set out to create it. "The hallmark of conceptualists is certainty. They know what they want. And they know when they've created it." The vast majority of conceptualist geniuses, according to Galenson's research, peak at a relatively early age or stage in their careers, most often twenty- or thirty-somethings. Experimentalists are tinkerers, forever approaching a realization of an idea, never quite knowing when their work is finished. Coming to knowing rather than knowing. They are typically late-bloomers, producing their best work after years of playing with ideas, tinkering, toying, tweaking.

Is it possible to think of organizations, communities and even civilizations in these terms?

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The art of scaffolding

"Planning is the ordering of resources over time. Success is getting things to follow in the right order." Paul Case

For many years I thought of planning as a linear process. It could be collaborative or not, but generally it was a typical project management process. Then when I read Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control, in 1993 and read chapter four: Assembling Complexity, I learned to think about planning differently. It is the story of restoring a prairie. Nature has a lot to share! Nature does not work in a linear fashion, achieving one goal at a time. Rather, it cycles through plateaus each one attracting a new higher order plateau. Actually, to me, nature seems to have a more fun creating than most project teams have.

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Galumphing

"Anthropologists have found 'galumphing' to be one of the prime talents that characterize higher life forms. Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in puppies, kittens, children, baby baboons - and also in young communities and civilizations. Galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity. It is profligate, excessive, exaggerated, uneconomical... In the higher animals and in people, it is of supreme evolutionary value."
Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Matt and I have long used the word 'galumph' to describe our cats racing through the house with a certain gait, or when they chase grasshoppers or snowflakes with a wild spirited abandon. However, this is the first time I have come across the meaning and context of the word. I think back to the organizations and communities that began with a galumphing. The Well, Wired Magazine, GBN, The Calvert Fund, The Whole Earth Catalog, the Open Source phenomenon, The Learning Exchange, MG Taylor Corporation, Architectz of Group Genius are a few that come to mind. Years after their origin - even though some are now deceased - the memory of them brings them back to life. They all galumphed themselves into being. Each brought delight to both the production and user communities. There was an eagerness to engage, to play, to build on the ideas.

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