Card Sessions: Lab^n
Lab: How People Think
In a network: Shu Ha Ri.
Lab = How people think
- the bad: a near complete unwillingness to coordinate labs at scale
- the good: a whole smorgasbord of labs, providing a requisite variety of approaches, small group genius constellations and configurations of problems, stories and solutions
Strategies = How nature works
Patterns of Relationship, Interaction, Play
and Play^n = Intersects of think and work
Card: Lab^n
How people think, how
nature works and how
people think differently,
from understanding
how nature works.
Hi there! How are we for time? Excellent. [ important things here ]
What comes next? Well, what do you think? Is what we are currently
doing working? Great! Are we getting there? Any good measure?
Where are we gathering? At a forest? In a small village? Or, in one of the one thousand eco-cities under construction?
Planting one trillion trees makes sense even in the old paradigm (gamed, rigged) economy.
Homesteading one million villages, makes perfect sense in our current economies as well.
One thousand eco-cities, would provide all the societal innovation we need, and then some — although these eco-cities would obviously have to serve as large-scale labs, bridging between old and new paradigm.
Cities are paradigm transition affordances. There’s nothing quite like Viennese Coffee Shops, once city dwellers rediscover
Zen and the Art of Coffee Shop Conversations that Mind, Cultivate and Matter Maintenance.
Ok, you here? Welcome!
Gatherings = f(thinks, things, workflows, outcomes)
- Are we here?
- Do we have instructions?
- Can we add our own ways of working to the instructions?
- Our small group genius ambiance, is it scaffolded by the instructions and enriched by our own individual ways of working?
- Is there necessary and sufficient intelligence available (facts and humans) — and if not, are there ways to access it and them?
- Can we align around review, story, tasks and generative reviews?
- Do we have a set of rules for how to connect workflows with preferable outcomes — and if not, can we design rules accordingly?
Note that these seven points are agnostic with regards to tools.
Shu: How Nature Works
School of Hard Knocks, or, as Hobbes saw it: Nasty, Brutish and Short.
Like care and financial aid to plebs during the Covid-19 event.
Biosemiosis furthers?
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference
between how nature works and the way people think.”
— Gregory Bateson
Ha: How People Think
Quiet desperation: Users, temporarily embarrassed millionaires, anxiously, feverishly following any which kind of social stigmergy desire paths inside social cognition abattoir prefab narratives. Prefab programming and like button clicking ordained by grand theft data, proprietary platform programming sense-giving overlords.
Are we having flow yet? Impact? Bracing for impact?
Ri: Mind, The Glitch
No, seriously. Mind. Do mind. Notice what glitches there are, between how nature works and how people think. Claim your own unique pattern of play^n, making a difference for the weaving, for the emerging, evolving tapestry of unfolding wholeness.
Conversations that Mind, Cultivate and Matter
Online conversations in a context of social computing in service to one trillion trees, one million villages, one thousand eco-cities and seven generations.
Social Machines that Cultivate and Matter
Holding generative space between digitally augmented situational awareness, transition pathways and preferable outcomes.
…platforms, places, playgrounds and wise playgrounds…
Quite a few platform builders are still advocating information processing as almost THE thing. It’s not.
Information processing, serves only one thing really well, getting collectively clear on the (platform f(protocols, governance)) intersects of muddling through and anticipation. (see diagram).
FB and twitter are already doing this better, although they are keeping most of the aggregated goodness to themselves.
No, what we need is Lab.
Lab > MMMMOSPG > Lab^n
Lab is three things:
1. Information processing
2. Insight
3. Signal processing
A requisite variety # of boundary objects (cards, card decks, card sessions, events, interactive podcasts, projects, startups) *around* an epistemic/ontic knowledge commons.
Boundary Objects: Projects
The Shu Ha Ri of Project Management
1. Shu: School of Hard Knocks
Doing things. Surveys and Gantt Charts as blunt instruments. Managing as taking hostages in order to getting things done.
2. Ha: Projects as if by Design
Doing gatherings. Although Jorge Luis Borges applies, more often than most of us think. Managing as systems governance.
3. Ri: The Art of the Possible
Doing thinks. The Pursuit of the Adjacent Possible Possibility Space. Managing as understanding preferable outcomes.
Preferable Outcomes
All project managers are conditioned into believing in their own myopia.
The part of this self-induced myopia that brings convergence towards preferable outcomes, is a good thing.
The part of this willful, deliberate ignorance that near automatically discounts divergence when divergence is needed, less of a good thing.
A five-fold dialectic and generative sequence to the rescue:
1. Gathering
Are we bringing our authentic, generative selves to the table?
2. Divergence
Are we holding a generative enough space for a requisite variety of paths, lines of inquiry, joint sauntering, exploring any and all corners of the possibility space, avoiding the “Lost Keys, Searching Only Under the Streetlight” fallacy?
3. Emergence
What magic, slightly outside our comfort zones?
4. Convergence
Boundary management in service to…
5. Preferable Outcomes
…outcomes management.
How people think as they relate to their environments
“However, this transition will not happen while the disconnected and divisive dominion thinking that created these system failures prevails. Instead, we urgently need a
to flip the script on this maladaptive worldview and build a new one that restores our relationships to the environment and to each other.”
How People Think
Consider different options than going all in on Entitled, Personal Sturm und Drang, aka “Opinion” yet neatly, obediently remaining inside small text-boxes.
Reframing Things: Everything, Sorted
In a network, everyone and everything in its perfect place.
(kinda, sorta)
The Shu Ha Ri of Punching Small Holes In Things
- Obey your proprietary platform programming prefab punch-happy, data extractive overlords:
Click that like button! - Buy your own hole puncher(code) and an abundance of digital ink:
Roam west along the wagon trails of annotation, young human! - Enact intelligent grids, forming departure zones for hybrid assemblages:
One rhizome to unrule them all, one assemblage to find them, one small blue-green corner of the universe binder to keep them all, and in the enkinaesthesia invite them.
The Binder = The Code Underneath The Proprietary Small Text Boxes
The Casino Wins.
The Binder Owner Wins.
In Swedish, this is called
Storm i ett vattenglas.
Storm in a glass of water.
Won’t really make all that much of a difference, your sturm und drang.
How People Have Been Thinking For A Long Time
1962: Silent Spring
2022: One Gazillion Texts Later, How Are We Doing?
Lab: Trust Movement
Lab: How People Think
Attention, will, intelligence, events and behavior. Circles and cycles of experience. A confluence of situational awareness, requisite variety paths, small group genius, adjacent possible options and preferable outcomes.
Lab Boundary: Contextual Intelligence
Circles of concern, influence, confluence, consilience, considered, considerate, convivial conversations conducive to co-creating co-agency aligning with concrescence.
“Few realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”
— Joseph Conrad
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. Systems where
intelligence and practical wisdom combine,
form, co-extend and co-evolve. A place and
premise in which to invite, hold and address
inquiry, complexity, emergence, structures,
complex responsive processes and flows.
Making a point. Connecting points, forming lines. Lines turned arcs. Arcs turned circles and s-curves. S-curves turned cycles. Cycles turned spirals. Spirals turned spheroid spirals. Spheroid spirals turned hopf fibrations.
Social Machines: Social Learning and Machine Learning
“The things that feel natural to us are not natural at all. They are the result of long processes of inculcation, exposure, and training that fall under the broad concept of “socialization” or “social learning.” Because the term “social learning” helps us better draw the parallel with “machine learning,” we use it here to refer to the range of processes by which societies and their constituent elements (individuals, institutions, and so on) iteratively and interactively take on certain characteristics, and exhibit change — or not — over time.”
Information scaffolding and knowledge spiraling, shaping a requisite variety of paths between situational awareness and preferable outcomes.
Lab Environment: How Nature Works
Box^n. Think outside. Have flesh-suit, will move.
- Attention turned situational awareness(doomscrolling)
- Will turned flow(hasn’t really taken off yet)
- Intelligence turned ability (see Alfred North Whitehead)
- Events turned networked practical wisdom(one can hope)
- Behavior turned play^n, game^n and win^n (generator functions)
Life and signs, co-extensive(biosemiotics), co-extending(human evolution), cultivating(stewardship) and co-evolving(enkinaesthesia).
Understanding What Comes Next?
“To fully understand the biodiversity crisis and explore what comes next, it is necessary to address this mind-virus at the heart of our modern civilization and land and its resource use.”
Card: Understanding
What if understanding is our ability
to hold space for the possibility of
knowledge, as it emerges, unfolds,
directs and discloses its relevance to
unexplored aspects of things known?
Mind The Glitch
Let me tweak the above quite, to situate this our mind-virus, where it is residing, where it is alive and well, our mind:
To fully understand the biodiversity crisis and explore what comes next, it is necessary to address this mind-virus at the heart of our individual, small group genius and collective intelligence glitches, the imaginal, imagination, imagineering and reverse imagineering possibility space between how people think and how nature works.
How Nature Works
There you go. If we address that, we’ll be weaving an emerging and evolving unfolding wholeness into being, in no time.
Card: Synkinaesthesia
Mind evolving, with our thoughts and felts turning increasingly proprioceptive, with phronesis guiding our performance, virtues turned paths, lines of emergent, unfolding, cultivating, extending and evolving participatory inquiry, with life and signs, co-extensive, inviting and co-arising: embracing, enacting and stewarding the dialogical nature of the pervasive thinking, feeling, gathering and enacting of being, in service to the immanent and regenerative co-agency of evolution.
Going through the Synkinaesthesia Card, outlining its constituent parts.
The Only Challenge: Behavior x Agency
Behavioral change -> Social, Networked, Ecosystemic Agency
In time? What comes next? Well, what do you think?
Is what we are currently doing working? Are we getting there?
And, in the end
the enkinaesthesia
we experience,
is equal to the
life, we enact
