Societal Reimagination: Human Scale
In a network, assumptions, in a context of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th order cybernetics, in service to emergent, unfolding, evolving lines of increasingly win^n* inquiry.
Life returning, re-enacting village and community life at human, beautiful scale, learning how to converse really well together.
community at human, beautiful scale
That’s the new paradigm, the more convivial, nature, the narratives that will see ourselves through The Waste Land and seven generations to come. The second part of our human social collective intelligence s-curve.
“When action grows unprofitable, gather information;
when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Card: S-Curves
At an opportune
time, you move
from one thing
to another thing.
Boundary Object: S-Curve Traversal
The core challenge:
behavior > understanding understanding > agency
First, you engage in one thing, and after an initial struggle, there’s a sense of both alignment and renewal, and you’re making progress.
After a while, there’s a decreasing return on engagement, and you start to look for something else to do.
By now, you’ve gotten quite good at doing the first thing, and the new thing is not something you’re sure about yet, nor sufficiently good at.
information processing in a context of signal
processing in service to s-curve traversal
Understanding Goal Achievement
Understanding Understanding is a book by Heinz von Foerster. In it, he outlines feedback, first and second order cybernetics. Cybernetics is to science, what feedback is to experience. Cybernetics is goal achievement. Second order cybernetics is understanding goal achievement.
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
In short, multi-order cybernetics is to 103% about s-curve traversals. Understanding how to gradually, then suddenly divest from the thing you have invested a lot of attention, the thing that is still woven with your current behavior, the way you think about, relate to and do things.
Algorithms of Loving Grace
Social machines, eg fb and twitter, could have been designed to help us and learn how to help each other understand digital interfaces and online information in a context of relational meaning-making. New, different social machines can be designed with this in mind, including intelligence augmentation in service to s-curve traversal.
Patterning: Understanding S-Curves
This pattern can be seen, understood, played and stewarded, as a dynamic adaptive structure, a knowledge grid, to your process of becoming.
1. Gather to further the health of community.
2. Diverge conducive to information processing.
3. Learn into aliveness in service to emergence.
4. Embrace opportunity. Trust, movement; movement, trust.
5. Celebrate synthesis, selfhood and service.
The linear versions, the orderly paths through these five are co-extensive, co-extending and co-evolving with individual skill in a context of social collective intelligence.
In a network, things are rarely linear. Your thinks and how you relate to things and gatherings, needs to adapt and evolve, in response.
S-Curves, Applied to your human becoming human
Five invaluable skills, for every human being.
1. Gather in ways neither obstructing health of community, nor discarding externalities to surrounding bioregions.
2. Diverge at the boundary, in ways conducive to information processing. Divest from consuming only one type of sources.
3. Learn into aliveness. Embrace 4E and 9E cognition, patterns of relationship and play^n, in ways conducive to emergence.
4. Converge. Obey any and all opportunities that are not insulting your soul. Your reach, slightly exceeding your grasp, until close enough to preferable outcomes.
S-Curves, Applied to Entrepreneurship
5. Conclude. Celebrate the synthesis that cultivates selfhood and forms a good enough premise for you being of service to something larger than yourself.
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?
Our human social collective intelligence s-curve revisited:
Small Is Beautiful
“If greed were not the master of modern man — ably assisted by envy — how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher “standards of living” are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness?
How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies — where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines — to work towards the humanisation of work?
It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the “standard of living” and every debate is instantly closed.”
— E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Conversations that Mind and Matter
Conversations that mind and matter, is an invitation to a different place, leveling up our game to game^n, from one path, to another.
game > social social media > game^n
Conversations that mind, cultivate and matter, is an attempt at becoming increasingly aware of how our intentions, perspectives, languages, tools and practices, shape our re-aligning around centers. Conversations that mind, cultivate, steward and matter, is to 103% about how our re-enactment of experienced worlds shape us in return and in kind. Our conversations can be seen and understood as forming a sustained, sustaining journey where we learn how to shape what futures we imagine, reverse imagineer and leave as legacy, seven generations to follow.
“That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done — these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence — because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
— E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
futures where human beings mind and matter
Futures Literacy
A capability that allows you to imagine multiple futures, for different purposes and different contexts.
Conversational Intelligence, Literacy and Ability
Conversations that Mind and Matter: Phase transitions, systems intelligence transitions, meta-system transitions.
Phases and transitions: Post-It Notes
Systems intelligence transitions: Cards
Autopoiesis
Metasystem transitions: Create higher levels of organizing and organization, the meta-levels in relation to the level of organization of the subsystems being integrated and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th order cybernetics of the meta-layer:
- access(schemas)
- awareness(data)
- anticipation(information)
- adaptation(interaction, transitional unfolding wholeness) and
- agency(knowledge, networks)
related to and afforded by the (combinable) artifacts with their meta-layers, including the anatomy of cards, tokens, patterns and schemas.
Self-organization
The outcome of conversations that mind and matter: self-organization.
Card: Participation
Participation is the
organizing principle.
Play
Play is how human individual, small group genius, scenius and social collective intelligence frames activities in ways conducive to constructing identity in light of experienced reality.
Cards for Insight: Card Sessions
Cards considered in light of questions.
Leveling up your game to game^n.
Helping you reflect, reframe and rethink.
Card Sessions: Generative Closure
Card sessions end when there’s insight, actionable insight, alignment
around cards and center question(s), and agreement on next steps.
Card Sessions: Forming Superset Possibility Spaces
- *Play^n: Instigating movement, augmenting intelligence and agency.
- *Game^n: Engagement and immersion conducive to and co-evolving with structures, processes and flows, in between Play^n (instigation) and Win^n (outcomes).
- *Win^n: Aviating, navigating, engaging in metalogue and communicating in a context of a requisite variety of paths with preferable outcomes in mind.
flow = structure x process
“x” = patterning
Card: Perception
A dynamic, evolving
patterning, re-aligning
between how we and
others think and how
we work with nature.
Self and Self-organizing: Synthesis, Selfhood and Service
An emerging, unfolding and evolving synthesis of
- orchestrating
- pivoting, and
- connecting
purposes.
Evolution: Awareness, Anticipation, Adaptation & Agency
Information ecologies, purposes and (knowledge) ecosystems, purposes forming autopoietic systems capable of augmenting and becoming augmented by other autocatalytic, autopoietic systems. (cf hypercycle)
Whereto?
To what purposes are we turning our conversations? What options, what emerging, unfolding and evolving lines of inquiry? What futures?
“…in order to find the edge you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles.”
— Alan Watts
Value Evolution as a function of Knowledge Navigation
In a network, our knowledge navigation is a function of how we weave our spiritual, creative, cognitive and ecosystemic abilities, in service to individual and collective value evolution.
“I argued in Essay 7 that capitalism and democracy are uneasy bedfellows, that if the former is to survive it must be seen to benefit all not just a favoured few.
This is perhaps the most urgent problem facing us today, to restore a proper justice to the creation and distribution of wealth. Wealth has to be spread around more widely without destroying the motivation to create it in the first place.
We could always call their bluff, the bluff of those who assert that high rewards are needed to retain their talent. Many would be happy to work for less if that became the norm. If they didn’t, there must be others equally talented who would.
distribution of wealth
The pool of potential senior executives is neither as small nor as exclusive as those inside it consider it to be. The problem is to create the norm. The European Commission has tried to limit bonuses to some multiple of the annual salary. In response the organisations just bump up the salaries.
Many of the Swiss wanted to restrict top pay to 12 times the pay of the lowest-paid worker. It narrowly failed in the following referendum. Maybe if the multiple had been 30 it would have passed, although in many large American businesses the multiple is now over 400.
Plato suggested four as the ideal but organisations were much smaller then. I once sat on the board of a company owned by the workforce where the multiple was seven.”
— Charles Handy, The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
