I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Former US Supreme Court Justice

I've had a number of people ask me about this quote.  "What on earth does it mean?" asked one?  Most of us are not used to working with complexity.  We live within it; we name it; we love it or hate it... but actually trying to find our way through it...from one end to the other side is difficult. It's more than a maze because most mazes have walls and narrow runways.  Complexity really is far more ambiguous and un-bordered and unbounded and ideas and parts keep running into each other, getting tangled, seemingly unmanageable.

The creative process demands all the ups and downs of mood swings; a willingness to get lost and stay lost, without undo stress until, within a flash, a hole opens up and provides a new or different way of seeing and sensing... a coming to knowing differently. Suddenly there it is in plain sight! A new and interesting way forward. 

In March, with Matt and a great KreW, we co-designed and facilitated the launching of what I consider to be a worthy problem: How do we cure brain cancer within ten years?  Currently the thinking is it will take 50 years and 50 billion dollars.  However, Cure For Life Foundation, of Australia rejected that assumption and began pulling together resources to drastically cut the time and cost.  The CFL Foundation realized that the goal could only be reached by group sourcing... gathering brilliant minds together from many fields, and ways of thinking.  The DesignShop process was determined to be the best way forward and the project was given the name Global Brain Exchange. 

DesignShop #1, in Sydney, brought together 40 participants for two days.  The challenge: Create the path forward enabling brilliant minds from five continents to uncover the processes, technologies, and paradigm shifts that would make the goal accessible and acceptable.  One of the outcomes was to "inform future work and influence the future direction of The Global Brain Exchange".  In deed, together we got that outcome and found the next step forward.  We learned enough, pulled and tugged at ideas, followed threads of possibility and in the end, have next steps forward. 

By the end of the two days, participants had ceased speaking of worthy problems and started identifying worthy solutions! As participants and facilitators we moved through the ups and downs, the knowns and unknowns, the breaking of our own assumptions about an idea or or way of thinking. There is no better high for me than taking part in the unfolding of Group Genius. 

Recently I watched the documentary, Connected, by Tiffany Shlain. I learned about the hormone, Oxytocin that is released when people connect.  Oxytocin, according to Paul Zak, is responsible for trust, empathy, and other feelings that help build a stable society.

DesignShop #2 will be held in the Nashville, USA sometime this fall.  It will incorporate the learnings from the first and continue creating the GBX ecosystem. Together, we will find the funding, create the next set of questions to ask and work our way through more ambiguity. We are still on this side of complexity but confident that the other side will be reached without compromise. As Margaret Wheatley said in her book, Leadership and the New Science, 1993:Reality changes shape and meaning because of our activity. And it is constantly new. We are required to be there, as active participants. It can’t happen without us and nobody can do it for us.

Proponents of the singularity typically state that an "intelligence explosion", where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.

Wikipedia

I've been following the Singularity Movement through Kurzweil's blog for years. It has been facinating and curious to me.  Much of what I read and hear seemed too complex for me to understand but I knew I could pick up the developing patterns. 

So this past weekend I attended the Singularity Summit in San Francisco to come face-to-face with the thinkers and makers of the movement.  I was curious to think about my own role in the coming years as the possibility of the Singularity unfolds and embeds itself in key decisions of governmental and corporate policies, strategies, as well as the everyday behavior of "we, the people."

I was attracted by the words for the Summit --

The Singularity is an event that could transform the world to its foundations in a way only comparable to the emergence of life itself. As converging technologies lead us towards the Singularity, we must ask ourselves: what is our own responsibility to ensure these technologies are used wisely and benefit everyone? We hope that the discussions here help you find your own answer to that question.

So having attended, what is my answer? I sat and listened with about 300 others to the 20 speakers. I was definitely one of the oldest people attending.  I met professors in philosophy, AI, humanities, linguistics, biology and computer science, all there to listen, to absorb, and to further their own thinking. But it was the youth I was most excited by.  There were a handful in their teens, but most seemed to be younger than 35, many in their early 20s.  My friend, Sharon, who attended with me, and I were freely invited into small conversations with these young minds. They were open in their enthusiasm, visionary in their vision to improve the state of the world, and passionate in their explorations and doing-ness.  Many participate, as fellows or staff or students, in Singularity University programs which has the express purpose of graduating students who will go forth and bring solutions to a billion people!!! So I asked them if this was an impossible goal and their answer was a universal, "No, we're on it" as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

I felt significant changes in my beingness as I listened and conversed. I seem to lose my place, the me I felt I knew. Many of my talents and ways of thinking about myself seemed to become inconsequencial. At times I recalled the feeling of being in an isolation tank ... floating, drifting in and out of reality.  I found myself asking myself, "Who and what am I"?  For the first time, I saw myself within the Singularity movement, not standing outside.

When one of the speakers announced that there was a Singuarity volunteers web site, I immediately went to  and realized that I had no expertise for any of the volunteer jobs but one.  I could spread the word in a responsible manner.  My friend, Christine Peterson, from the Foresight Institute reminded us all that the Singularity movement is not foriegn to govenments or corporations. It is being actively explored by those with money and power.  Our work as ordinary citizens then is to step up and learn as much as we can, to inform ourselves and to take part in shaping the Singularity movement into technologies and thought processes...into art and science... that are used wisely and benefit everyone. 

Traditionally, we have let the governments and corporations do the work for us and look at the mess we are in! Now it is our turn.  So as I play with the essence of the Singularity movement, what can I grok? What matters that I can do? Our future is not without risk but I don't think it is useful to spend my energies being fearful or fighting the movement forward. That is not me. I sense that Singularity plays some part in our emerging paradigm. Singularity is part of the core seeds we are sowing now that will play out well into a future of some sort.  I plan to advocate that the best aspects of our humanity join with the movement and insure we have a collective, active partnership with technology moving forward.  In some ways, I think this is nature's most elequant and challenging design evolution.  Should she succeed, perhaps we will come to know ourselves for the first time. 

"Don't go looking for ideas directly. Instead, go in search of the seeds of ideas: the elements from which ideas can grow."  The Universal Traveler, 1972

When we first started our work with corporations, the executive teams consistently told us "As executives, we don't have time to read, and our employees don't read."  No time for reading? No interest in reading? With a world going through tremendous changes, how was it possible to discount the essential importance of reading widely and often?

Matt was teaching a course called "Redesigning the Future" and he handed out a reading list of 500 books, necessary for understanding the complexities of the world.  The authors Matt called on were not those on the NY Times best seller list.  Rather, they were selections that reached way back in time, and also took the reader's imagination into the future. They were fundamental to understanding the new emerging sciences and world cultures to seeking out new patterns and possibilities.

To us, reading was an essential aspect of a new way of working.  We drew on Mortimer Adler's book, How to Read a Book to help us design a useful module to help participants work their way into reading.  In particular, we were interested in his Syntopical Reading section. While Adler was mostly focusing on an individual doing syntopical reading, we knew we wanted to make it a group exercise. 

Then we watched the power of this module come to life.  We adapted it for many occasions and several times our Syntopical Reading exercise transformed an organization.  The power and purpose for reading has slowly found its way back into many organizational worlds. 

Here are general instructions:

1) Provide each participant with some simple suggestions for how to read a book in an hour.  (adapted from Adler's body of knowledge)

2) Ask participants to choose a book that they want to read from the library. Suggest that they can read any book that looks interesting and to not to choose books too closely related to their field or product lines.

3) After reading, have the participants divide into groups of 7 or 8 and have them form a circle. 

4) Now, ask each participant to become the author of their book.  Each in turn states their name as author and tells us the name of the book they wrote, why they were compelled to write the book, and as author, what did they want to suggest to the organization... ideas that could make a significant difference.  Each author had five minutes to create their story. 

Be sure each participant assumes the role of author rather than talking about the book they read.  With this kind of story telling, the ideas expand, and often hidden design assumptions reveal themselves.  For instance during the second day of an event we asked cosmetic company participants to choose books for overnight reading.  Participants wandered through the library choosing good night reads.  One chose When Elephants Weep. Little did we know he was head of research for the company. As he assumed the role of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the author, he put his whole heart and mind into telling his organization why they should immediately stop animal testing. They did, within the week! Probably no amount of interest groups or consultants could have been so successful so fast.  But when their colleague, speaking as an impassioned expert, made his case, everyone listened. Something they had held onto for years, fell away within a five minute presentation.  But there is more to the story.  Other authors, spoke of values, integrity, changing ways of working, technology improvements, biology, complexity, etc.  Many of these presentations, while not directly about animals connected with the the elephant's intelligence in a variety of ways, reinforcing the idea that there were better ways to learn about their products than test them on animals. Suddenly the entire organization became more self aware, more eager to learn about themselves and to shed some long held beliefs. 

I could write many more such stories and if you've done this exercise you too probably have things to share. It is powerful. 

What I've learned through my years of developing our process and method is how easy it is to have people make fundamental, often transforming changes when they can do it for themselves.  We just need to provide interesting, challenging, and inspiring exercises chunked together through interesting iterations of design.

The future is rational only in hindsight. MG Taylor Axiom, 1983

Serendipity plays an interesting part in life. I recently went to Amazon's wish list to look for a birthday gift for my son, Jeff, and saw How the Hippies Saved Physics. It caught my attention, looked good so I ordered two copies.  Meanwhile, a group of us are beginning the writing of a book which we currently call 30 Years of WOW.  The story we want to write is the story of Matt and Gail Taylor's work, and more importantly the impetus that gave rise to the work and how it is becoming  a ubiquitous way of working. The story is full of time lags, other originators, and imagination writ big!

I had not read far in the book to have the entire 70's return to the forefront of my memory.  Our fashions, music, protocols and assumptions about a way of life.  I grew up in Kansas City, Mo, generally considered to be a conservative environment. Yet the 70's were in full bloom here too.  Maybe not the San Francisco scene, but the same questioning and restless searching. Where was society heading? Wasn't life meant to be richer more satisfying? Wasn't there ways to make life better for everyone? 

Sound bytes from the Hippies book:

"The hippies self-consciously opened up space again for freewheeling speculation, for the kind of spirited philosophical engagement with fundamental physics that the Cold War decades had dampened. More than most of their generation, the sought to recapture the big-picture search for meaning that had driven their heros - Einstein, Bohm, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger - and to smuggle that mode of doing physics back into their daily routine."

"The hippie counterculture sported a playful worship of youth, spontaneity, and 'authenticity.'"

"Try as we might, we cannot cleave off the goup or its activities from the 'real' physics of the day. Many of the members' activities placed them on one end of a spectrum, to be sure. But no hard -and-fast dividing line separated them from legitimate - even illustrious - science.'

Matt's course, Rebuilding the Future (1976), was about the rate of change and how to prepare for it and design our future rather than letting it happen by default.  This course, too, was full of diversity: very mainstream people, hippies, multiple ages, races, life styles. We had one thing in common, a hunger to help shape the future. 

The next 25 years, according to Matt would bring about more change than had occurred since the middle ages. Ordinary citizens would have more power than any king or queen who had ever lived.  We were each part of the future and should bring it about by design, not default.  Matt's course had us explore the cycles of the creative process, not just in our personal lives, but as a larger cycle within culture and meaning.  Culture follows science from metaphysical thought and vision, through intent, insight, building. There is basically a generation of time lag between the understanding of science working its way into mainstream thinking. This creates paradigm shifts when the old way of thinking - Cartesian, clockwork, heirarchical -  begins to die and a new paradigm is birthing.  Mostly, people took sides and had nothing to say to each other. 

My work when I joined Matt's class was in education.  The Learning Exchange, a Teacher's Center attracted some of the best and brightest teachers within a 100 mile radius of Kansas City, MO. We worked with Dean's of Education, professors, teachers at all levels, parents, and community leaders. Yet it was rare for me to find someone interested in the future. I longed for people to exchange ideas with, to perturb my own thinking about the future.  The Renascence Project offered that for me. 

This was our mode when we founded MG Taylor Corporation. How could we help educators, community leaders, rebels, and ordinary folks to give the future a try? What is it we needed to provide to unleash this dormant knowledge about the future? Matt and I were both passionate about our beliefs in Group Genius.  We had our own experiences and wanted to incorporate it into whatever we were doing. 

As the book, How the Hippies Saved Physics, indicates we were not the only ones interested in a different future.  The 70's represented a wake up call and a number of us were listening and acting on our internal beliefs. We were going against mainstream although I doubt if many of us recognized this at the time. I, for one, was simply doing what I had a passion for. It just seemed like the thing to do. 

Over the next several journals, I plan to take different aspects of our method and write about how they got incorporated into the process.  I'll be starting with:

SCAN
expertise
design of the walls and environment
working big
building trust
play
diversity

All of these concepts were developed within a context, place and time called the 70's.

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."
                                                           - Gregory Bateson

We are lucky here on the Mendonoma Redwood Coast, an area that covers the northern most coast of Sonoma County and the southern coast of Mendocino.  Rural, yes, but sophisticated too.  We have an incredible Art Center and community of artists. We have a small, community managed, theater capable of bringing New York Operas right into the theater.  We have no street lights, little traffic and the closest thing to a franchise are our local True Value hardware stores.  We have two radio stations, one a public one and the other capable of assisting us through potential disasters.  Our stores are unique and heavily involved in community through the arts in one way or another.  Our independent bookstore, the Four-eyed Frog serves people all over the country through its wonderful web site. Local foods are both a vocation and advocation here. 

And now, we have Nora Bateson bringing her film about her Dad, Gregory Bateson, to our theater. We who live in the midst of natural abundance and a do-it-for-ourselves economy have the pleasure of hosting Nora as she presents her film, An Ecology of Mind on July 3rd at 7pm in our Point Arena theater.  I bet those of us able to see the film on July 3rd will think a little more like nature.  I look forward to coming to knowing the Mind of Nature more fully.

"Big History assembles accounts of the past from many different disciplines into a single, coherent account of the past."  From What is Big History?, Lecture 1, The Great Courses*

The past refers to the last 13 billion years!  Several months ago, I watched Professor David Christian's TED Talk on The Big History and then I listened to Bill Gates speak of the importance for young people to engage in such a course.  A group of us decided to invest in the 48 thirty minute DVDs and listen to the lectures together, over dinner, wine and lively conversation.  For me it is a wonderful, perhaps life changing, time.  We are not yet halfway through the series but each of us is finding new meaning, new understanding. We are seeing patterns that we can not see from a close up, near term perspective. 

In a nutshell, Christian speaks of eight thresholds beginning with the Big Bang and continuing through today.  Each threshold is an extraordinary  increase in complexity, and by its nature, fragile.  Threshold five brings life to our planet.  Threshold 6, 7, and 8 include human history. We are very recent. 

Humans appear as the 7th threshold, the Paleolithic Era. Christian's working theory is that what makes us human is our unique form of adaptation "collective learning".  All living beings adapt and change but it is very slow often over millienum.  Collective learning enables us to combine, store and reuse information. 

Those of you who know me know that I like to find patterns.  I attempt to work and see at a meta level. If you go to our library, you will find books that help me see and seek patterns.  Patterns are always prevelant in my design and facilitation. 

The following two quotes are magnificent in helping me see patterns from the past unfolding today. 

"There was neither non-existence nor existence then." What we are talking about is a sort of state in which there is not quite nothing, but there's not quite something: there's "sort of a potential". --- Rigveda, the basic Hindu scriptures.

I think of paradigm shifts.  The old is crumbling, disolving; the new is forming, solidifying. We are approaching our 9th threshold and a sort of potential.  We are in a fragile moment in history.

"The evolution of multi-cellular organisms was a complex process. For such organisms to work, billions of cells had to cooperate and communicate with great precision.  It was also necessary for them to be able to communicate with each other in some way, and for each cell to know its place and role in he functioning of the organism as a whole.  These are staggering organizational challenges. However, such challenges were not entirely unprecedented, for evolution can involve cooperation as well as competition. In fact, simpler forms of cooperation that do not count as multi-cellularity had already evolved.  Even eukaryotes formed through symbiosis between distinct types of prokaryotes."

This seems to me to be the same pattern we must repeat today, but on a higher order.  Is this not our challenge today ... for billions of people to learn to cooperate and communicate with great precision? 

Is this not our next collective learning adaptation? Today's mantra for collaboration and cooperation are not fads. It is more than a current trend.  When we take a long now approach, we can see that we are being shown the easiest, most natural route to crossing Threshold 8 successfully. 

Time and work is precious today.  If you are reading this you are probably one of the people building the scafolding for the next threshold.  There always seems to be more work than we could possibly do. Still I invite you to find some friends and enroll in an awesome experience.  You can rent the course from many libraries and The Learning Company has sales for more than 80% off.  I got my set for $90, a very good investment.  And, let's get the kids enrolled. It can be a wonderful family experience!

1: to engage the attention or energies of
2 a : to take up (a place or extent in space) <this chair is occupied> <the fireplace will occupy this corner of the room>
b : to take or fill (an extent in time) <the hobby occupies all of my free time>
3a : to take or hold possession or control of <enemy troops occupied the ridge>
b : to fill or perform the functions of (an office or position)
4: to reside in as an owner or tenant
— oc·cu·pi·er noun

Origin of OCCUPY
Middle English occupien to take possession of, occupy, from Anglo-French occupier, occuper, from Latin occupare, from ob- toward + -cupare (akin to capere to seize) — more at ob-, heave
First Known Use: 14th century
from Merriam-Webster dictionary

This morning I listened to the TED talk : The Birth of a Word. The author, Deb Ray, uses his 18 minute talk to explore the unfolding of his child's first words and then moves on to show the research going on to map words and how they filter down throughout  the social environment. As I listened I began to think about the word "occupy" and where the spikes and filtrations of this word were humming and streaming throughout the world.  The talk was made in March, 2011, before we, the 99% gave a deeper meaning to Occupy. It would be both fun and significant to map this word as it travels through time.

Clearly, Deb's talk revealed how important it is to choose words carefully and meaningfully.  As our new global paradigm unfolds, it seems essential to bring new words forth and to give them meaning through all of our media.  What are the words that speak to a better more equitable world?  Words like "environment, sustainable, health, peace" are useful words, but they are often co-opted by the media reporting the old news. They are not thoughtful, crafted words to speak a new language at this moment in time.

This is not to infer that we need all newly invented words. "Occupy" comes from the 14th Century! But it is recontextualized and made fresh and tactical. I think it would be interesting to search all media and find words that are emerging, not yet popular, words filled with new meaning and purpose.  If we could map these words, we could find ways to spread them and accelerate the development of a new paradigm. 

I'd love to hear your words ... words that you are tracking as you work to cause a new paradigm to progress and mature. 

In the movie, Twelve Angry Men, a jury must decide whether or not to reach a guilty verdict and sentence the 19 year old defendant to death. At the beginning of the play, eleven jurors vote “guilty.” Only one man, Juror #8, believes that the young man might be innocent. He must convince the others that “reasonable doubt” exists. One by one, the jury is persuaded to agree with Juror #8.

The film was produced in 1957 but I only stumbled on it a few weeks ago while looking for a good rental movie.  Now, it is on my list of "see often" movies. I have much to learn from it. 

The drama is a beautiful show for how to bring a diverse, non-engaged group of people into a conversation that allows each person in his own way to challenge his assumptions and authenically change his vantage point.  This kind of process is at the heart of Group Genius. 

Juror #8, against all odds, asks questions and plays 'Spoze with the other jurors making sure that each of the men are brought into an environment of care and listening.  The young boy being tried has had every bad break possible, including a lawyer appointed by the state, who simply did not care if he lost the case. He just assumed his guy was guilty. 

The movie started with 11 jurors against one and the one, Juror #8, was not even sure of the boy's innocense. He only claimed there was reasonable doubt which meant that he was not guilty for sure. With one question and one test, Juror 8 began the process of getting the others to begin the process of thinking for themselves rather than to assume that he could give away their vote without careful consideration. 

One question led to someone else's question and slowly the group came together to ask real questions of each other ... ones that mattered not only to the boy but to each of the jurors.  It was a prime example of the MG Taylor Axioms: 1) Everything that someone tells you is true. They are reporting their experience of reality. 2) To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time. 3) To add someone's experience to your experience--to create a new experience--is possibly valuable.

These three axioms unfolded over and over throughout the 90 minute film which in the drama was the better part of a day. 

And in the end, most of the jurors left feeling that "WE" found the boy not guilty.  Each played a part and changed their vote only when to do so was authentic, not because others pressured them to conform. 

Of course I wish politics could have this form of dialog. Our world would be so much better. But, my message here is for all of us as facilitators of Group Genius to engage and learn from Twelve Angry Men.