Certainty and mystery

Want a quick answer to a problem? Go to WolframAlpha.com and use this "computational knowledge engine" to give a unique/definite/correct answer to a closed, finite, factual question. What's the wavelength of blue light? How far from earth to the sun? What's the probability of a Royal Flush in poker?

It will save you stretching the neurons, going to the library or rummaging through Wikipedia. And probably ruin Trivia Nights at the pub.


Despite its' fancy new name, this kind of technology has been around for yonks. It's call an expert system, a carefully cultivated database of factual information, computational rules and questions framed in natural language, rather than the more formal language of computer programming. In this case, the designers have created a web portal to access the software that drives the system instead of a software application resident on a stand-alone computer.

But there's a problem with this kind of knowing. It's totally boring. And in the same way that any lengthy bout of conservative or radical politics often leads to its polar opposite it's likely that an era of absolute certainty will lead to a thirst for mystery. And where do you find more mystery? By expanding the range of possibilities. By inventing new worlds, new denizens of these worlds, and new relationships between the participants, no matter what the species.

Our brains are designed to deal with uncertainty, to struggle to make sense out of what we don't know and what we don't know we don't know. New concepts and new ways of seeing the world.

When danger lurks or a new problem presents for which we don't have an instinctive or automatic response the right frontal lobes take control. Our own personal Google helps to find stuff from all over the brain, as well as the latest updates from our senses. And it very helpfully creates brand new solutions.

Once we get it right the left frontal lobes take control and play automatic routines for us so we don't "go bananas" and live a groundhog day every day. Routinely dealing with the same complex problems over and over again. Like WolframAlpha.com.

Curiosity about mysteries may well be what drives human cultural evolution. Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi argues that humans have evolved from ancestors who survived because they became skilled at inventing and exploring and were thus able to deal more successfully with the unpredictable. The discovery of novelty engages the brain and evokes a pleasurable experience and that without the motivation for enjoyment there would be no evolution of culture.

So here is a workshop to explore the mysterious?

1. Describe what for you is a mystery?
2. When you discover a mystery what do you feel? What do you want to do?
3. What happens when you start exploring the mystery and get stuck? When it becomes too hard to solve?
4. How do you feel when you solve a mystery? Immediately? A few minutes later? The next couple of hours? The following day?
5. How could you re-invigorate your life using mysteries just a bit out of reach?
6. How could you tackle the really obtuse/remote/complex mysteries, the ones that cause you to become frustrated/bored the first time around?

Mirror neurons, leadership and play

Great Kung Fu masters, virtuoso musicians, impressive orators and talented opera singers become brilliant by practicing ‘the moves” so what they do and say is fluent and automatic.

Why then do we expect our corporate leaders and teachers to be able to perform a complex management or teaching role with minimal rehearsal?

Why do we teach the theory of facilitation and leadership but not the "kinaesthetic" practice of orchestrating/organizing others in a live setting? Why do many universities train their teachers on-line or via lectures? How come many teachers go into the classroom to use a new technology after a quick read of the manual?

Orchestrating the mouth, tongue, larynx, cheeks, fingers, hands, legs and other muscles to perform complicated roles can be as complicated as learning to drive a motor car, for which we need a license to drive. In the State where I live, new drivers are required to have 100 hours of practice and keep a log to prove it.

The new routines we learn are what the famed Russian neuropsychologist, A.R. Luria calls “kinetic melodies” - templates for different combinations of speech and motor actions. Like a player piano roll for the human brain. And it takes time to sequence, orchestrate and automate complex speech and motor actions associated with each new role we choose to perform.

The key to success is considerable rehearsal, in front of a full length mirror, before a small and supportive audience or through the reflective eye of a video camera.


Much of this has to do with “mirror neurons”. These same neurons fire off in the brains of humans and monkeys when they watch an action and when they perform the same action.

This part of the brain helps you form a theory of mind about what the other person might say or do in response to what you say or do. So when you are dealing with a class of 20 or 30 young people or an audience of 50, it can become a very complex "hall of mirrors".

Mirror neurons are located in Broca’s area of the brain. They are adjacent to the motor neuron area where, says David McNeil, author of Gesture and Thought, "inputs from the right hemisphere, the frontal areas and the posterior regions of the left hemisphere...converge”. McNeil says “mirror neurons complete Mead’s loop in the part of the brain where action sequences are organized – the two kinds of sequential actions, speech and gesture, converging... It is damage to this part of the brain that makes it difficult to sequence actions into a new kinetic melody for the “orchestration of movement”.

This same part of the brain may also be involved in the orchestration of collective play, where children imitate or play at being mothers and fathers, cops and robbers or doctors and nurses, and as Vygotsky shows, perform as if they were “a head taller”. We now know that mirror neurons have a role in empathy and may also be implicated in autism. If a person is unable to form a strong or memorable image of another person’s actions as they perform a new role (how they deal with conflicts, help each other, develop good relationships, etc) they may be unable to imagine how their actions will impact on the other person.

So here’s a workshop to practice a new role.

1. Working in pairs, choose a new role to perform e.g. policeman, orchestra conductor. Watch your partner perform in their new role. Report back. What did they do and say?
2. A new role for you. Thinking about a new role that you wish to perform in your organization, community etc, describe in detail the “language game” for that role (words, phrases, concepts, theoretical relationships/connections between concepts)?
3. Thinking about a new role that you wish to perform, describe in detail the “gestural language game” for that role (movement, gestures, demeanour, stance, actions)?
4. Describe a situation in which you will perform your new role. What will you say and do?
5. Now each person will perform their role for a buddy. The other person makes notes about the performance and identifies the types of errors that the person makes (Think about previously learned speech/gestural routines, inner speech to guide your activity, the ideal speech/gesture) .
6. Write a new performance script using inner speech as the basis for guiding what you need to say and do.
7. Practise the speech/moves repeatedly until the motor/speech routines (“kinetic melodies”) become easy to do and you don’t have to consiously think about performing the role.

Connecting the silos

Creating new knowledge is now critical to organization success. It's about getting our different parts of the jigsaw to fit together as a single unified whole, so what we do is perfectly attuned with the market/technological/social trends.

The issue is that many of our organizations still think success goes to the winners of the competition for resources, power and influence. So we fight to make sure our idea wins, even though it's not the complete story. We try to treat pneumonia as if it was a head cold.

Some of us find it hard to make the switch to new ways of working/thinking, particularly if the new world that is emerging looks very different to the one we know so well. New words and concepts. New technologies. New methods. New kinds of relationships.

Like the transition from water to ice, the shift from dinosaurs to mammals, or the demise of the horse and buggy and its' replacement by the motor car, freeways, shopping malls and service stations.

Complexity theory offers a rich explanation of how these changes occur. We now know that not only do physical, chemical and biological systems undergo periodic transformations to a more organised state through a process of auto-catalysis, but laws of complexity even apply to human social systems, how groups become teams, relationships develop and the human brain learns.

So what if we used this knowledge about transformational change to design better meetings, corporate retreats and organization-wide conferences?

Biologist Stuart Kauffman uses the example of random graphs to show how systems change the way they are organised at critical moments. Random graphs are vertices or nodes (“buttons”) connected by links or edges (“threads). He asks you to imagine a large number of buttons, say 10,000 lying on a floor. The buttons are randomly connected in pairs, two at a time. Pick up any thread when there are few threads connected and you are likely to pick up a new pair of buttons every time. Pick up any threads or buttons near the transition point and you are likely to pick up most of the buttons, in a complete assemblage. The system changes state when half the buttons are connected.


As the diversity of people and their separate goals in the system increases, the ratio of reactions also increases. But only if they are in the same "test tube". The number of catalysts in the system rises above a threshold at which time the likelihood of collectively autocatalytic sets in the system becomes almost guaranteed. The organization begins to act as a single athletic entity rather than a motley collection of warring tribes or fiefdoms.

We now have the tools to do it, to increase the adjacency between people so the contagion can spread. Web2.0 technologies allow everyone in a meeting room to give instant feedback to a presentation. The corporate retreat is no longer a one-way series of presentations by divisional teams. Instead it can be a lively real-time conversation between hundreds of people. People who rarely get together. People who even more rarely have input to each other's work. People who only discover what others are doing via their manager, a very old and inefficient co-ordination mechanism from the days of Taylorist scientific management.


Now we can instantly share our thoughts and feelings about ways to take advantage of our respective strengths and resources. We explore how we can do more together than by acting alone. We help each other iron out the bugs in projects. We minimise the distrust and suspicion about what others are doing and how it impacts on our work. We achieve greater organization flexibility. All at the same time.

Imagine 50-100 or so people at such an event. Perhaps 5-10 teams. It is an approach we use to help coordinate and orchestrate the activities of cross-boundary teams. Each team has responsibility for some aspect of the organization's activities. We use it with marketing/sales teams responsible for different, but vaguely related products, sometimes with overlapping customers, so they help each other make more sales, more strategically. We use it to help teams that deliver different aspects of a major construction, defence or information systems project to integrate complex systems that must work perfectly together. And we use the method to help the functional divisions of an organization - finance, marketing, sales, production, distribution and services - bring every piece of information to bear on an issue.

It's similar to what the great systems thinker Stafford Beer conceptualized as "syntegration", the simultaneous synthesis and integration of ideas and interests.

Here's how it works:

After each team presents, we ask the audience to discuss and capture their comments via a large screen that makes the ideas instantly visible to everyone. Just one-minute per question:

1. What was great about the plan/proposal/project?
2. What improvements/enhancements could be made to the plan/proposal/project?
3. What could we contribute to the plan/proposal/project?

At the conclusion of all the presentations, we brainstorm a list of the top 10-15 REALLY BIG issues/opportunities. We spend just one minute brainstorming ideas to deal with each issue. Just 20 minutes in total. The most effective meeting the organization will hold this year. By the time we return to our hotel rooms there's a copy of what we said in our mailbox. And on Monday morning we have new relationships to explore and a plan to continue what we started.

4. Describe an issue/opportunity that needs to be/could be addressed.
5. What ideas do we have for dealing with this issue/opportunity.

Build it and they will come

It's a living advertisement for the Industrial Age. The bridge at Ironbridge was built in 1779, just west of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, to prove to the world that iron could be safely used for bridge building instead of timber. Some say this is where the industrial revolution began.


Customers came from near and far to marvel at the miracle metal and the amazingly strong design. Back then the bridge straddled a river poisoned by the sulfurous sludge of industry that despoiled what was once a beautiful valley. Today, with the polluters gone, the valley has become a tourist destination, a combination of recovered natural beauty and the artistry of human endeavour.

After Ironbridge, the idea of steel bridges spread like a contagious disease, a cognitive retrovirus that evolved with each new infection, creating not only more of itself, but variations on a theme.....the arch, suspension, cantilever and beam. My favourite is the Verrazano Narrows bridge, a double deck 4,260 single span monster that guards the entrance to New York Harbour. But I also have a soft spot for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, that graces the city where I live, a soaring symphony of metal which sits astride one of the most beautiful harbours in the world.

Iconic concepts when turned into objects, such as Ironbridge, are like the attractors in complex systems. A set of solutions occupies a well defined mathematical space to which other related concepts gravitate. Such ideas spawned other steel structures such as the Eiffel tower, the skyscraper and the elevated freeways that form a network around the city of New York.  

So what living advertisement can you create around such a powerful concept that people travel from near and far to gaze in wonder and become disciples for the idea?

Here's a workshop to begin the process:

1. What's your big idea? What gets people excited by your product, service, concept or theory and how it could transform/improve/add value to their world?
2. What iconic symbol could you create/design/make/build/assemble that expresses your big idea in such a richly symbolic and powerful way that people come from all over the world to see it?
3. When people come to see your big idea, what can you give them to take back home to other people so they will immediately understand what it means, and will want to join your crusade/movement/new way of being?

Closely connected experiences

Imagine your hand is connected wirelessly to another hand in another body, perhaps your partner or best friend. You unconsciously decide to point your index finger. Two fingers point, yours and theirs.

Then, without warning your hand makes a "V for victory" sign or gives a "thumbs up", without receiving a command from your brain. Two hands separated in space perform the same command in unison. Great for synchronized swimming, amazing ballroom dancing or singing in perfect harmony with others.

To you it seems like your unconscious left frontal lobes have taken control. It's like those involuntary movements you sometimes make without planning to. But the controller is outside your body.

It could become a huge problem. A mess of conflicting activities, a tragedy of the commons, where no one takes responsibility and soon the resources of the commons are depleted, damaged or destroyed.

In some ways, it's a bit like connecting multiple keyboards to a computer with a Microsoft operating system and every keyboard is able to type letters. Each of us has some control, but because control is shared, what you get is gobbledegook, unless you decide upon a protocol, that allows turn taking or you each have your own space on the screen and can do your own thing within the group context.

Seem far fetched? Not at all. A UK husband and wife scientific team have already connected their arms to each other in a kind of soma-kinetic experiment.

Perhaps sometime during the 21st century you will be able to choose whether to be alone with your own thoughts or allow others to invade your brain and play synaptic pinball with your neurons. And you with theirs. Perhaps physical sex will be a thing of the past and be replaced with synaptic sex. You might even be able to host a party in your head.

It is these kinds of "behind the eyelids", closely connected experiences, that human must now be prepared for.

Some of us have already learned how to simulate this kind of world, because we are able to empathise with others. We have learned to imagine and often correctly guess what they are thinking in response to what we are saying and doing. Even without the wireless implants.

Here's one way to practise this skill.

We use an Improv routine called The Mirror to perform this joint activity, and afterwards share our cognitive experiences with each other so we have a better understanding of the connections between our inner and outer worlds:

1. Working with a partner, one person moves their hand and the other follows as if one hand is the mirror image of the other. Do this for 30-60 seconds. Then ask each other what did you see, hear and feel as we did that together? Record what you each learned.

2. Reverse roles. The other person moves their hand and the other person follows, as if their hand is a mirror image. Do this for 30-60 seconds. Then ask each other what did you see, hear and feel as we did that together? Record what you each learned.

3. Working with a partner, imagine yourselves performing a task together, such as writing a book, climbing a hill, shopping. Ask the other person: What did you see, hear or feel? Record what your learned from each other.

4. What happens when we ask people about their internal experiences of the world, rather than just respond to what they say or do?

5. What new rules of etiquette might we need to put in place to ensure we care for each other in these kinds of interactions?

Talking your way out of trouble

In this era of accelerating change, organizations need to to be able to change direction in a moment. Agility depends on many factors. But the most critical is the speed with which we create new knowledge together.

It all depends on how people talk to each other, and whether the bad news delivered by the marketplace and from the production and distribution people about the gaps/bugs in your systems is heard, understood and acted upon.

Most forms of discourse are of little help in creating new knowledge. They weakly connect and analyse information. It is only when you use dialectical discourse, which I call Dialogue plus, that you get to talk with any clear purpose.

Here is a model that I use to understand the nature of human activity, ranging from our powerlessness in the face of nature to the more equal power relationships of groups whose interests have converged and are served by each other. It explains the relationship between the exercise of power and how we communicate. It helps to think of language as having both motor/physical and voice components. For example, unilateral action is the equivalent of monologue. Discussion is ships passing in the night. Dialogue is a warm embrace. Dialectical discourse is great sex.


Many organizations continue to employ Monologue to manage their daily operations in a highly directive manner. Monologue is a weak form of discourse and ensures a significant power differential is maintained between the manager and the stakeholders. It is usually employed by teachers in the form of a lecture, oppressors in the form of incarceration, and leaders when they wish to be directive and ignore other opinions, such as occurs with invasions of one country by another. When the corporate "shit hits the fan", people who are treated badly are often too afraid to change, unless the man with the gun, unbridled authority or sarcastic voice says it's OK.

Discussion is also a weak form of discourse, but is more powerful than monologue. Although all participants in a knowledge-creating activity may have permission to speak, some remain silent, or have little to say. The more articulate or powerful in the group often ignore/reject the views of minorities whose views are often the first sign of the errors/mismatches that will eventually doom the organization. Such treatments breeds discontent and disloyalty.

Although Dialogue is a moderately powerful form of discourse where people listen carefully to each other, to understand other viewpoints, and where possible/practical incorporate those viewpoints into a group decision, it's a “hit and miss” process of knowledge creation. Despite our best efforts, dialogue often fails to resolve organizational conflicts, simpy because it lacks a great purpose. The politiciking and discontent often persists, when people fail to reach agreement about what to do together, that could resolve their differences.

Dialectical discourse (Dialogue Plus), which is a formal knowledge creation process, sets out to resolve the ideas/information contributed by the members of the team into one or more unifying/overarching concepts/decisions that satisfy the needs of all the participants, and either creates the new external trend, or is a good fit with the trend. Dialectical discourse results in highly effective models of leadership, not merely at the senior management level of an organization, but when applied throughout an organization. Dialectical discourse is an essential skill for rapidly changing times, where the ability to reliably and speedily transform the organization’s structure, processes and strategy is critical to success.

So here's a workshop to help you get started:

1. How do people in your organization converse with each other and what are the consequences?
2. What kinds of knowledge creating processes does your organization use and how effectively does it resolve the conflict between different information streams/sources?
3. What would you have to do to get your organization to implement Dialogue Plus as a daily way of working/learning?

Getting started

Have you ever been to one of those company retreats where you generated and agreed upon some fantastic new ideas but when you all returned to work Monday nothing happened?

It's a common outcome. The old patterns of work, with which we are familiar, seem to overwhelm the new. The handful of steps to get started are soon forgotten. The new ideas quickly fade from memory.

But there is a way forward. It's the law of two feet. You need to get started, and set aside some time every day for the new project to take root, so it becomes part of your normal routine.

A few quick action steps is insufficient. First you must translate the kernel of an idea into all its rich variety, that gives it substance. You must then richly connect the idea and its consequences to people and their interests (or passions) and what they do.

It's a process of right brain to left brain transfer. You use your right brain to create the rich new world that surround the idea, then solve all the aspects of the project in all its complexity, and turn these into automatic left brain routines.

Here's a way workshop to help you on your way. It's from the Zing collaborative title for business, Dreams, Memes & Themes, a quick brain dump that takes 30 minutes:

1. Craft a tentative name for the project (5 words or less)
2. Describe the project (25 words or less)
3. What is the theory, knowledge base or best-in-class method we should use to help make this a great project?
4. What new or existing technology or equipment should we use or investigate for the project?
5. What are the first five steps: to get started. Respond like this 1... 2... 3... etc.
6. What are the major milestones including target start and completion dates? Respond like this event 1: date, event 2: date...etc.
7. What resources are required for the project? (Funds, equipment, materials, buildings, etc. x quantities)
8. Estimate the likely cost of the project including people time x dollars, equipment x dollars and consumables x dollars
9. What are the benefits of this project?
10. What are the risks or likely problems to be encountered with the project and how should they be overcome?
11. How will we know if the project is successful? How and when will we measure it?
12. Who should be on the team and why?
13. What are we likely to learn from the project?
14. Craft a new name for the project (5 words or less)