Card Sessions: Adjacent Strategies
Finding ourselves unfolding paths through possibility spaces.
Scene and Scenius
Since humanity is not yet at a collective level of evolutionary understanding, we are focussing on and amplifying, individuals who serve as channels for archetypal energies, of catharsis, uplift, truth, love and beauty.
Did You Notice?
“>” = media
- attention > the art of paying attention > situational awareness
- will > broadcast > interact > play > flow
- intelligence > mind > ability
- behavior > feedback > agency
Behavior, Patterns of Play and Strategies
The only core challenge:
behavior > understanding understanding > agency
Behavior: negotiated self-interest
There’s invariably bandwidth issues with our negotiated self-interest. We like flow as an abstract ideal or future vision that we can vaguely point to and/or strive towards, but we like our behavior inside our comfort zone, more.
Compare the possibility of agency related to adding considered, considerate comments, with the like button clicking behavior. From inside the comfort zone, the like button clicking wins every time.
Agency: coping strategies
Again, bandwidth issues. Our conscious minds can process ten bits per second. Our full (9E) conscious, unconscious minds can process ten million bits per second. We don’t have conscious agency enough to tie our own shoelaces. Which means, 103% of our coping strategies, are utterly dependent on what current handshake protocol between conscious and unconscious we are holding to.
Cue three of the most liberating structures humans have ever penned:
Cognition
“Proprioception of thought.”
— David Bohm
Perception
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Action
“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of
events, not of words. Trust movement.”
— Alfred Adler
— Is there a way to implement these three, add them to my own handshake protocol?
— Yes. Read Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding, for a good enough take on feedback loops, particularly second-order cybernetics.
Understanding Understanding *is* feedback loops, particularly second-order cybernetics. The book and the ideas in it, can help you with figuring out slightly new ways of understanding, applying and experiencing different feedback loops between behavior and agency.
How to think about all this? A whole smorgasbord of options and ways to go about this. Pick one that works for you. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition is a comprehensive primer for how all of the above can be understood, eg:
“…the nature of cognition and the relation between cognition, perception and action.”
One of the best things with books, is that they can be seen, understood, read and applied, building shared understanding. Books are civilization affordances.
Civilization and human evolution can be neatly distilled:
Civilization = Shared Understanding x Understanding Understanding
“x” = patterning
Patterning and Strategies
Our coping strategies are almost completely premised on comfort zone and behavior related to negotiated self-interest. They help you cope, but always at a cost.
Other strategies, adjacent strategies are to 103% about turning our feedback loops and learning, into paths towards (improved) agency, agency in a context of exploring and exploiting (convivially, win^n) adjacent possible options.
These strategies require that we move into flow, divest from those patterns and strategies that would keep us from trusting, moving, flowing and evolving.
They require a leap of faith and trust, but are in the final reckoning always more than well worth it. Adding practice to our understanding, to our understanding Understanding Understanding, we gain knowledge.
Card: Scaffolding
In a network, knowledge that scaffolds, knowledge that spirals through situational awareness, will turned flow and intelligence turned ability in a hybrid context of technology, behavior turned agency and enaction.
Civilization is noticing what other human beings are doing, and human evolution is noticing what we can do differently.
Boundary Objects
Scaffolding in service to relational meaning-making.
Card: Mobilisation
Translation as a feature,
enabling mobilisation of
actors in order to reach
agreements.
Also, translation, writ extended, can negotiate, combine, include and synthesise:
- insight
- alignment
- agreement
- association
- coordination
Insight
Translation between a previous view of the world and a new, different view of the world, or rather, our mental model and representation of the world, or rather, our umwelt, the part of the world in which we move, interact, dialogue, transact and have our becoming.
“>” = media
Scaffolds
Phenomena that both support and constrain the development of some further phenomenon over time.
Generative Questions = Media
The media is the generative questions, the questions turned generative sequences (and the occasional synchronicity, serendipity and synkinaesthesia scenius detours) is the media.
Human beings develop thinks, things and gatherings in a context of scaffolding, in service to preferable outcomes.
Questions as:
- attractors for networks of evolutionary practice.
- centers for Card Sessions and Knowledge Labs.
- Small Group Genius affordances.
Card Sessions
Cards considered in light of questions.
A gameful way to help you reflect, reframe and rethink.
Add, considered, considerate, convivial, confluent, consilient and concrescent.
Circles of concern and influence, arcs and cycles of confluence, spirals, spheroid spirals and hopf fibrations of synkinaesthesia, enkinaesthesia and concrescence.
The Human Scaffold: How not to design your way out of a climate crisis
“Are the scaffolds of culturally significant behavior predominantly technological in the conventional sense, that is, mediated by the durable material precipitates of economic strategy including tools and instruments, machines, built structure, and so on? Or are they principally enactive and, by extension, somatic? Or do we see tradeoffs, historically, between reliance now more on external technology, now more on techniques of bodily regulation? Or is this a false choice? Is even the most thing-centered strategy of survival ultimately founded on the evanescent palpable traces (gestures, words) of an enactive strategy?”
— Josh Berson, The Human Scaffold p. 102
We collectively project love and admiration onto our avatars, but only to the extent that they are sacrificing themselves for human evolution.
Social collective intelligence scaffolding is human evolution affordance — individual, small group genius and collective modes of intelligence.
Card: Knowledge
Knowledge is circles scaffolding:
connect, talk, know, like, trust,
transact, relate and review.
(apply a mix of Dunbar, TIMN, other social constructs, heuristics and algorithms to preference and taste)
Leveling up our knowledge game
1. Relate
2. Understand
3. Opt
3.1 Opt, repeatedly, over time, for best practice.
3.2 Pursue best options, forming a superset to best practices, eg innovation.
3.3 Aviate, navigate, communicate. These three are known from airplane pilots and can be extended to how we can combine data, information and knowledge in ways conducive to lift-off.
Game^n
Play^n: Augmenting intelligence and agency.
Game^n: Interacting in ways conducive to connect, bridge, weave and leverage between engagement and return on engagement.
Win^n: Navigating a requisite variety of paths with preferable outcomes in mind
Our leveling up, from game to game^n, is happening precisely to the extent we are unlearning(thinks) and divesting(things) from sacrificing, to learning into aliveness. Everything from food the eat and the mindbodies no longer separate, to rediscovering ourselves on a bluegreen corner of the universe.
We in the audience and our fellow humans up on the stage, would benefit from understanding what bargains we are entering, what contracts, serving what covenants.
Our showing true love to our avatars, is when we respond to their brilliance, by rising up to the joint sauntering, briefly illumined by their work.
How? By engaging in information processing, social media turned social social media, in ways conducive to return on engagement and collaborative signal processing.
Platforms, Frameworks and Information Ecologies
MMMMOSPG: Massively Multiplayer, Multi-parallell and Multi-order cybernetics Online Signal Processing Game
framework, allows participants to grow both more resilient and antifragile, as they learn how to traverse s-curves.
Platforms and Onboarding
Have you been platformed? I’m sorry to hear that. As different from proprietary platform programming “social media” — onboarding to evolutionary games, eg game > game^n and agency > agency^n — doesn’t stop when you’ve signed up and pretended to scan through the intro.
No.
Evolutionary game onboarding, *begins* with signup, and continues with you participating, in the games. Think synkinaesthesia. Platforms turned place, turned playground, turned wise playground, in service to evolutionary (co)agency.
In short:
Play^n = Onboarding
Or, expressed differently:
”The whole point with dancing, is the dance.”
— Alan Watts
The generative review of antifragility is agency.
Antifragility as a concept extends well beyond what Nassim Taleb has outlined.
cf Jean Russell with her collaborative sketches on and around thrivability.
Thrivability is to human evolution in a new paradigm, what antifragility espoused by Nassim Taleb is for human competition in the old paradigm.
By analogy and generative sequence:
behavior > feedback > agency
antifragility > feedback > thrivability
There’s a place beyond Social Cognition Abattoirs. Let’s meet there.
Since agency as a concept has been so thoroughly misunderstood and recently, high-jacked by eg Proprietary Platform Programming, I’d suggest we can use
Agency^n
Agency^n as a superset to agency.
Agency = Muddling through inside comfort zones
Agency^n = Magic, ever so slightly outside our comfort zones
Agency always and already in service to trust.
Trust, movement; movement, trust.
Our trust in our getting going, our paths made by walking, our joint sauntering back to the garden, irregardless of current state of disrepair,
is how we notice, acknowledge, celebrate and applaud the beauty of our souls.
And, little by little, reaching out to those in the audience that takes heart,
offering insights, seeds, seeds when embraced turning you beautiful beyond belief.
Paradigm
An Adjacency Named Preferable Outcomes.
Here’s one approach that can be helpful when homesteading our adjacent possible:
Probable
Often default behavior, continued over time.
- attention (look, shiny!)
- will (eg old white male entitlement)
- intelligence (shared misery and bracing for impact, aka mainstream media)
- behavior (comfort zones defened by industrial strength social teflon, the weaponized smile)
Preferable
Almost invariably co-extending with design, design as a superset to default.
- situational awareness
- flow
- ability (the ability to wisely wield what is intelligently apprehended)
- agency
Agency, social agency and networked agency, three characteristics of vibrant social, cultural, societal scenes.
Scene
Problem Spaces turned Possibility Spaces.
Scene: Shu Ha Ri
Shu: The Spectacle
Any which sensegiving narratives that offer an excuse for remaining inside the Social Cognition Abattoir. Dull prefab opinion.
Ha: The Smarts
Any which design, design synthesis and design thinking that makes you feel superior to the unwashed hordes and the spectacle. Slightly sharper, weaponized opinion.
Ri: The Enkinaesthesia
Any which events that are always and already augmenting our advancing along our evolutionary trajectories, a smorgasbord of options, a requisite variety of paths through possibility spaces to preferable outcomes. Options forming supersets to opinion.
Ri: Opinion transformed into knowledge
Knowledge is that which transforms problem spaces and which spirals and scaffolds possibility spaces.
Shu Ha Ri
At all levels, a passion for presencing paths and a joint sauntering to preferable outcomes as made distinct by our thoughts.
A human paradise, but our thoughts would not yet make it so.
Images
Jointly sauntering, attention turned situational awareness, will turned flow, intelligence turned ability and behavior turned social, networked agency. Walking each other back to the garden.
Questions
Identity
What (situational) awareness can help extend and evolve our (social) sense of self?
Boundaries
What boundaries and boundary objects can be understood and designed in ways conducive to shared understanding?
Labs
What events and labs can form knowledge navigation (processes) and knowledge ecosystems (structures)?
Heuristics
In a network, we play^n to win^n.
What dispositions can we choose to level up to, what heuristics can we make less wrong and learn how to play really well with people, purpose and planet?
Intelligence
What intelligence can be annealed into ability, ability to use-the-future and apply futures literacy to shape a more eco-systemic future?
What intelligence can be amplified in favor of adjacent possible portal access and paths towards preferable?
Cards
What large finite set of cards, together with what large finite set pattern pattern language, will enable a necessary and sufficient set of affordances, providing generative sequences and enabling structure preserving transformation?
Considerations
Where are we? How do we find the others? What next moves and steps?
Card: Our Thoughts
A human paradise,
but our thoughts
would not yet
make it so.
Card Sessions & Labs
- divesting from old, obsolete solution spaces
- contextual intelligence, creativity and ability
- mapping in a context of knowledge formation
- review, story, tasks and generative review
- boundary objects and dynamic knowledge repositories
- platform, place, playground and wise playground
- problem spaces and adjacent possibility spaces
Today
Behavior Turned Newfound Agency
Right here and now, there’s a new portal in your mind. It takes three weeks to go through. It would only take an instant, should you fully divest from everything in your mind you keep yourself attached to, that no longer serves.
Adjacent Strategies
Strategy
A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
“time to develop coherence around seven generations” strategy”
Similar:
patterns of play, patterns of play^n, master plan, grand design, game plan, plan of action, plan, policy, proposed action, scheme, blueprint, programme, procedure, approach, schedule, tactics, set of tactics
OODA and CECA
The art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements in a war or battle. Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Win.
POODDEAU
Perceive, Observe, Orient, Design, Decide, Enact, Act and Unfold. A convivial superset to OODA and CECA. Win^n.
Card: Strategy
A plan of action guided by the relevant next, informed by circles of concern, influence and confluence and designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
Adjacent Strategies: Creation of the relevant next
“Stuart Kauffman’s revolutionary notion of the Adjacent Possible as an organizing principle in nature shares much in common with logician Charles S. Peirce’s understanding of the universe as an ever-unfolding ‘process ontology’ of possibility space that is brought about through the recursive interaction of genuine possibility, transiently actualized order, and emergent (but never fully deterministic) lawfulness.”
— Donald Favareau
Preferable Outcomes
A more nature future
Information Ecologies: Six Dimensions
- unmuddling
- understanding
- navigating
- playing
- emulating, using (-the-future)
- learning (structure-preserving transformation)
Knowledge
Knowledge is anything which connects two or more of these dimensions.
Knowledge Navigation
“…we’re always trying to navigate between what is our projection including narrative projections just coming out of our subjective needs and what may be an accurate perception or disclosure of something that exists beyond our narrow needs.”
— Richard Tarnas
