Card Sessions: Contextual Intelligence
Cards considered in light of great questions.
Contextual Intelligence
1. Review: Attention turned situational awareness
2. Story: Will turned flow
3. Tasks: Intelligence turned ability, ability turned performance; seven years worth of effort followed by overnight success.
4. Generative Review: Leveling up our game from Game to Game^n.
This means that the seed of our leveling up our game, deriving more, better, different return on engagement out of our engagement, aka happiness, is from having our will turned flow, sourced deeper, from our social sense of self being anchored and better aligned with both essential character and evolutionary purpose.
Me: Essential Character
We: Evolutionary Purpose
Me/We & We/Me: A social sense of synthesis, selfhood, service and purposefulness.
Cards for Insight: Contextual Intelligence
Card: Contextual Intelligence
The ability to understand the limits
of our knowledge and to adapt that
knowledge to an environment different
from the one in which it was developed.
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
management (knowledge flows) = boundary objects x contextual intelligence turned ability
“x” = patterning in general and shared understanding in particular
Card Sessions: Contextual Intelligence
One possible starting point for Card Sessions and Small Group Genius Labs, is in between Me and We, in the intersects of Will and Intelligence.
1. Play^n disposition
Bringing your listening, reading, understanding self to the table, to the Card session.
2. Intelligence
Accessing the ambiance and gathered wisdom of the scene, place, room, session and participants.
3. Review
Situational awareness. Getting and sorting compass readings, bearings and initial mapping approaches, in light of probable, possible and preferable outcomes.
4. Wherewithal
Agency, small group agency, social agency and networked agency combined with other resources.
5. Behaviour
This remains to a large extent highjacked by proprietary platform programming, with a great many human minds normalised into shared misery.
6. Purpose
A quest to re-discover essential character, nature and evolutionary purpose.
This part of the Lab can take months and years, until ready to proceed.
The Lab can provide a play environment, a micro-world, exploring moving beyond constraints, moving beyond poverty of imagination.
7. Awareness
“The nature of reality is transactional.”
— Alan Watts
Good enough is good enough. Divest from navel gazing. Divest from dwelling at the same place. Divest from making the same points. Divest from uninformed opinion. Divest from weaponized communication. Divest from proprietary prefab sensegiving. Divest from everything that insults your soul.
Ecological Awareness — Alan Watts
https://youtu.be/K1aiVgcO3H0
8. Attention
The light outside of the Plato Cave, the Netflix Mancave, the Well Coiffed Comfort Zone, the Consuming of Shiny Dank Memes can be confusing, initially almost blinding. Removing the blinders, will help you learning to see. This is THE worthwhile dilemma: perception.
9. Service
Generative sequences. Synthesis, selfhood and service. Learning into aliveness. Self, implies other. Each and every single human question, comes with community as the answer.
This part of the lab is where all the serious work gets done, which is all the more reason why it needs to be recognized as both part of The Great Work, and, even so, work still remains a subset of play.
The Lab is a half-way house away from mindless drudgery. It is a Way Station, where you gather for a while, gather your thinks, things and gatherings, in synthesis, in selfhood, in service to an emerging, unfolding, cultivating and evolving path.
You have a unique gift to bring to the rest of the world, don’t waste it by clicking the like button, turning your social cognition to mush. Learn into synthesis. Learn into selfhood. Learn into service. Learn into aliveness.
10. Knowledge
This is the part of the lab and the card sessions where a great many participants believe they’re done. Not quite yet. Knowledge is a means. Knowledge is a spiraling, a scaffolding of possibility spaces. Knowledge is how we intersect, fold and unfold, in between process and structure, weaving complex responsive processes with complex adaptive structures. This is how nature does everything. This is what we can build further on.
- How would we know?
- Flow. Flow is how you know.
This part of the Lab and the Card Sessions, is where it is perfectly possible to connect, network and distribute initial lab and session artifacts, with surrounding information ecologies, and, over time, perform knowledge gardening and knowledge navigation, forming and stewarding knowledge ecosystems.
11. Will
When an individual human being chooses thinks, things and gatherings from among a considerable number of events according to desire, need and anticipation, in and with all the preferred thinks, things and gatherings, and, throughout all the related choices, there’s exercises and deep learning:
- becoming aware of thinks
- moving towards desired things
- agreeing with others in a context of gatherings
- waiting until thinks, things and gatherings comes together and begin to make sense
- persisting throughout a whole generative sequence, a whole set of connected learning events
- restraining impulses and desires in service to individual becoming
- rising to the occasion
- annealing personality and social sense of self with essential character
- controlling movements in service to win^n outcomes, to the extent of access to contextual intelligence and ability
- learning how to prolong attention in service to unfolding path
All these, are signs of will, skillful will, will by design and knowledge flow.
12. Leverage
This is the return on engagement dimension, part and step, to the play^n instigation of and game^n immersion engagement of all the previous steps. Over time, and in light of, and augmented by, contextual intelligence, leverage becomes impact. Impact, if we level up from Win to Win^n, becomes making a lasting difference. When scaled out, making a lasting difference becomes plenitude. Which, distributed sufficiently evenly, is community.
Leverage can be seen, understood, practiced and measured, as the generative review of will. The flow that emerges out of a turning of will, through leverage, into flowing through events, is character and presence.
Stewardship is the knowledge navigation and scaffolding of leverage. Thus, stewardship is a superset of leadership.
Shu Ha Ri
Shu: School of Hard Knocks
Contextual rigidity. Stiff upper lip, putting on a brave face, adopting a weaponized smile.
Ha: Stewardship in a context of Constraints
Contextual intelligence. Culture as play, game, win and culture as play^n, game^n and win^n. Magic slightly outside our comfort zones. Navigating according to slightly different constellations.
Ri: Mastery as a function of Relational Meaning-making
Contextual ability, aka flow.
13. Ability
Ability is understanding understanding. Ability is that understanding that serves, serves any and all virtues, including
- listening
- reading
- networking and
- understanding
With understanding understanding, being almost fully co-extensive, co-extending and co-evolving, with multi-order cybernetics.
1. Intelligence
&
13. Ability
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Contextual Intelligence: Social Learning
Card: Social Learning
How are we learning
from other people?
Progress f(human evolution):
Engagement, Social Learning and Return on Engagement
Situational Awareness: Where and When are we?
The core challenge:
- behavior turned agency (or obstructed by attachment to rigid opinion)
- attention turned situational awareness (thoughtware as a superset of app use)
- will turned flow (social cognition, applied to social learning)
- intelligence turned ability
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Social Machines, differently designed social machines, can help with individual, small group genius and social collective intelligence, helping us move beyond our own attachment to our own pet theories.
1972
One of my pet theories: 1972
Look it up. The way that human beings turned into Minionated Produce inside Social Cognition Abattoirs, began already in 1972, and then, quite some time later, in 2006, something called Like Button was introduced.
The users lack of situational awareness and decreasing social cognition skills, did the rest.
Contextual Intelligence:
1948: Shannon
1960–1970: Mad Men
1967: McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
2021: Tribal Attachment to Mostly Uninformed Opinion
Opinion resides alive and well, at oblique planes to both information processing and contextual intelligence.
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
What intelligence initiates, ability generatively concludes.
In between:
- Card Sessions and
- Small Group Genius Labs.
Circling through, spiraling through, spheroid spiraling and hopf fibrating through, any and all ways of traversing Questions, Cards and considering Cards in light of Questions, works and can be turned to good use.
From everyone according to ability.
To everyone according to intelligent, win^n outcomes conducive distribution, according to need.
The thirteen steps can be seen, understood, followed and practiced as a generative sequence.
Generative sequences:
- tracing paths through possibility spaces
- performing structure-preserving transformation (change with less pain)
- unfolding wholeness (eg as an antidote to the fragmenting, shared misery inducing social media habits)
- building and cultivating data, information, knowledge and wisdom
The Card Sessions and the Labs can be situated in ways conducive to Societal Reimagination, which, when applied, can help augment and leverage, Societal Innovation.
Societal Reimagination is to Futures Literacies, what
Societal Innovation is to Small Group Genius Lab and Networked Agency, Practice.
Literacies and practice, practice and literacies.
There’s a close analogy:
Intelligence and Ability: Practice and Literacy
Careful though with drawing too strict and too rigorous analogies, the english language is full of empire.
Indigeneity, from all across the bioregions and bearers of ancient wisdom, is necessary to consider, in order to divest from the centuries of colonial homogenization of discourse, the putting of monolith costumes on regional, vibrant cultures and communities.
The “:” in between each and every analogy, is a portal to a rediscovery of meaning, a deepening of purpose and a learning into aliveness.
The board shared, is Ba. Ba is japanese for “enacting and cultivating a place where there’s co-creation conducive to knowledge”.
May Ba suffice as a good enough beginning departure point, moving beyond what colonialism that no longer serves, beyond colonial and neo-colonial masters and narratives.
As for the large finite set pattern, pattern language underlying Questions, Cards, Card Sessions and Generative Sequences — this has been covered in other CMM posts. Most of the pattern language understanding, is very abstract. However, I’ve provided quite a few glimpses, even so.
