The Disappearing Jobs

In 2014, new technologies continue to automate work. But it is no longer manual or semi-skilled workers whose jobs are disappearing but also the brain-power jobs of professionals and specialists.

The knowledge density is astounding. So much incredible capability packed into a device that fits in the palm of your hand.

In many of the villages, towns and cities the visible signs of failure to adapt are everywhere. Many of the mills of the 18th century and the factories of the 19th and 20th are still standing but either empty or used for less valuable purposes such as storage. Many chemical impregnated Brownfields remain untouched as they are more expensive to redevelop than to develop Greenfields sites on the outskirts of towns.

Offices that proliferated in the 70s, 80s and 90s, are starting to empty as people increasingly work from home. Large factories that produced goods for which America was famous are now shuttered, their work performed in far off China and Bangladesh. Big box stores, shopping centers, book and computer stores under threat from on-line retailers who deliver to your door in just two days are joining the queue to oblivion.

We were promised high-end knowledge work jobs, especially those in the STEM fields, for which we were urged to get a degree. But many employers report they are unable to find people with the skills they need, especially in the mid-range technical jobs that support the higher-level jobs. Many of these jobs also require maths, science and people skills that the education system does not seem able to produce in adequate numbers.

Take a look at this list of the Top 10 disappearing jobs in 2012. We are the cause of many of the job losses. We the customer now have the tools to be our own computer operator, typist, word processor, print layout person or typesetter. Advertising and promotions managers getting the chop, as social media and distributed capacity in organizations eats into what was a centralized function. Some of the losses are due to companies shipping jobs to Asia in the textiles, knitwear, clothing and computer chip making sectors. In the depressed US housing and infrastructure sector, many of the jobs are due to a downturn in capital investment. But some of the work of carpenters, brick and stone mason helpers as well as plasterers is also being displaced by factory-produced components rather than raw materials.

Now take a look at the Top 10 new jobs that are emerging. The most significant growth is in energy, especially the oil/gas sector which in the USA is booming thanks to new technological developments that enable fracking. Personal services is also big, with massage, skin care, personal care and coaching figuring prominently. There has been a big uptick in interpreters reflecting the globalization of everything and the music industry is replete (but not necessarily flush) with a generation of self-published Internet music entrepreneurs.

Here's some questions to think about:

1. What are some of the major changes that are occurring in your world?
2. Thinking about children growing up today, what kind of skills will they need to be successful in a world where accelerating change is normal?
3. What changes have occurred in your world? For the BETTER? That are CHALLENGING?
4. What skills do you have that help you deal with accelerating change?
5. What skills would you like to have that would ensure you could adapt more successfully?
6. If you could partner with other people who have complementary skills to you, who would that be, what would you do together and why would you do that?
7. Abraham Lincoln said the best way to predict the future is to create it. If you had a magic wand, what would you do to revitalize the villages and towns in which you and your children will live in tomorrow?

The language of leadership

As an outside observer of the US Presidential elections, I am amazed that anyone in their right mind would want to try out for president. It can get quite nasty.

It raises the question: what should we expect from our leaders? Do we want people who put others down to boost themselves up, or leaders who acknowledge the contributions of their opponents? Do we want leaders who push a narrow agenda or those who seek to embrace their opponents interests in some way? And do we want leaders who blame others for their mistakes, or those who are prepared to take responsibility for their actions, and when they make mistakes, admit to them and vow to act differently?

In the USA, you need the hide of an elephant or rhinoceros, a Teflon coated ego, the morals of a saint, about a billion dollars, and a past business or public life that is in some way heroic. You also need to be really likable and have offended as few people as possible.

It also seems you have to be born in the USA (which means Arnie can never be president, even though he was allowed to be the Governor of California).

But it is the process of selecting this super-human which seems so daunting, no matter which side of politics you favor.

You begin the sorting process by expecting the candidates to fly incessantly (or, as in the case of Rick Santorum, drive) around the country giving speeches, attending fund raisers, shaking people's hands and kissing babies for about six to 12 months making promises you can never keep, to a punishing schedule, not for just one election season, but for at least two, until you give up altogether.

During this time you appear about ten or 12 times in a television game show with the other candidates in a "fight to the death" gladiatorial contest, where the main task is to trash the other candidates' reputations. Your fellow gladiators pick over everything you have ever said or done and challenge you to refute the inference. Fortunately there are some categories of accusations where you do have a defense. For example, if you are correctly accused of smoking marijuana at college, you can say you did not inhale. And you can also change your mind several times about key issues as long as you dont do it within one election cycle, otherwise you will be labelled a "flip-flopper".

Each of the candidates have friends with deep pockets (unions, business and wealthy individuals such as movie moguls, technology whizz-kids, Wall Street types and oil barons) contribute to a SuperPAC which has a licence to further trash your reputation, taking great care to only print or broadcast outrageous lies or distortions. Four Pinocchios in the Washington Post seems to be par for the course.

Along the way pundits from the extreme left and right also assail your reputation, sometimes also trawling through and exposing gossip about your spouse, kids, friends and associates that you would rather not be mentioned (for example, pastors whose services you attend whose rhetoric you have to disavow, or advisors whose personal views clash with your espoused position on critical issues e.g. the Romney adviser that quit this week).

You are mocked on Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live. The trogs on the Internet spout vicious, foul-mouthed bile about you. Some people even make threats against your life.

The last person standing is declared the winner (or the possible winner if you don't stack up enough delegates).

It's such a "baptism of fire", I can't imagine why anyone would bother.

Meanwhile back in Australia, my home country, our leaders are also in the business of trashing each other's reputations, or trashing their own. We have a Prime Minister whose disapproval rating is 60% and the alternative prime minister, the opposition leader, who has a disapproval rating of 56%.

Maybe it's time for a change in how we speak about and with each other. What do you think?

So here are some questions to explore the issue:

1. Who are some great leaders that come immediately to mind and what are they remembered for?

2. What qualities in leaders do you most admire?

3. What do some of our political leaders do that you believe are inappropriate, and if you were in their shoes, what would you do differently, with what result?

4. In these times accelerating change, growing complexity and greater uncertainty, what extra-special qualities or capacities do we need in leaders? e.g. to combine leadership with maths and science skills, to create and operate complex systems effectively.

5. Thinking about how people respond to leaders, how should leaders speak to each other, about each other and to everyone else?

A new "grand bargain"?

The "grand bargain" between government and private enterprise that has helped grow some of the world's most successful democracies and economies is starting to unravel. Political economist Francis Fukuyama, author of "The end of history", argues that the world now needs a new "operating system".

Government provided the infrastructure, education, health, defence, transport, police and fire services that created the conditions in which business could flourish, and with it a large middle class of consumers.

As one leading US politician, currently running for office recently remarked, "no one ever got rich on their own."

The World Economic Forum 2012 Risk Report warns of the emergence of dystopia in the West as the middle class struggles to recover from a mountain of debt, underwater property values, reduced job opportunities, lower wages and salaries, and the inability of pensions funds to meet their commitments.

So why is the partnership in tatters?

A root cause is our collective inability to change the way society works - especially the role of government - in response to social and technological change. The rules for electing and operating governments and corporations are based on concepts that are almost two centuries and three waves of change out of date. We continue to use an operating system design for world where everything was less connected, ran more slowly, where life was far simpler than today.

Many public goods, the "free" services that governments provide, funded by our taxes, are now supplied by the private sector at a price and for a profit, often in direct competition with a government provider.

We keep on inventing new technologies that provide the old services more efficiently, for example, the internet, mobile phone and computer applications, that deliver the knowledge once provided mostly by libraries and schools, and services for which armies of clerks and sales assistants were needed.

Its no wonder government employees are digging in their heels and resisting change. And it also explain why so many are clamoring for less involvement of government in their lives. The livelihoods of civil servants are under threat from a technological revolution that has now intruded on "knowledge" and "wisdom work", in which Governments have always played a major role.

But we need to be careful we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So here is a workshop to explore the issue:

1. What are the big issues in the world today that we seem unable to solve?

2. Who should be responible for solving these problems or creating new opportunities to deal with them more successfully?

3. What's the role of government in the "new economy" that is emerging? How should government work differently to the way it works right now?

4. What existing government services do we need to KEEP that are essential or working well, what do we need to ABANDON that no longer works, and what do we feel we need to RE-INVENT?

5. What is the role of business in the emerging "new economy"? How should business work differently to the way it operates right now?

6. What is the role of not-for-profits in the emerging "new economy"? How should not-for-profits work differently to the way they operate right now?

7. What might a new "grand bargain" look like? What do we need government to do that the private sector or not-for profits can not, and the private sector and not-for-profits do that other sectors do not do as well? What is the new unique interaction between the parts? The new fabric?

Image: Sydney's Circular Quay: the underground railway, the harbour bridge, ferries and opera house, all developed and operated by government.

What sustains your organization?

When we ask people what sustains their organizations they tell us it is an income stream (money) or the people who work there, the shareholders, the leadership or the customers. Some also say it is the process of  transforming some simple lower-value things such as raw materials or steps/actions into more complex products and services. In a way it is all of these things but none of them.

Some of us have begun to study organizations as complex systems so we can help people more successfully navigate accelerating change, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

When we think of organizations this way, we soon discover it's a flow of energy through a system that  sustains the complex order. Simple interactions at a local scale help create the global order. The global order helps organize the local interactions. And if the energy flow declines or disappears - then the system collapses or disperses.

Prigogne and Stengers, whose 1984 book, Order out of Chaos, helped spark a revolution in the way we think about the world, calls these dissipative systems. Think the red spot on Jupiter (click to watch) and hurricanes (typhoons/cyclones).

Hurricanes form near the equator when warm, moist air rises, causing an area of low pressure. Cooler air flows in, which also becomes moist and rises. As the air rises it forms cloud, it starts to spin and becomes more organized. The hurricanes then travel either north or south into cooler water/air or cross over land where they lose their potency, the wind speeds drop and they become tropical depressions. Eventually they just simply "disappear".

Dissipative systems persist out on the edge, in a state of "dynamic stability", remote from thermodynamic equilibrium. Sometimes, these systems also undergo what is called a "phase transition" from one kind of order to another, like the shifts from a solid to a liquid to a gas or even a plasma.

Consider for a moment a social system as a flow of conversation. What might happen if the local rules of interaction shifted from "you must" to "what if we?" rather like the shift from solid to a liquid. How could organizations harness such a change.

In many ways we do. A team can be thought of as a dissipative system. When the players go out on the field their efforts can often be disjointed or poorly coordinated. Or they can somehow magically become better coordinated and develop a new and more powerful structure. When it does, the system taps into a flow of energy. It could be the players collective enthusiasm or new found affinity with each other, or the roar of the crowd. The system becomes sustainable at a higher level of organization and performance, until the crowd goes home!

So here are some questions to think about organizations as dissipative systems:

1. Give some example of dissipative systems, where the flow of energy through the system, sustains it. eg. hurricane.
2. Thinking of your organization as a dissipative system, what flows through your organization to sustain it? And how does this work?
3. What would happen if the flows through your organization was disrupted or stopped?
4. Thinking of your family, organization as a dissipative system, what changes in energy flow through the system might result in a phase-shift to a higher level of order?
5. How could you and your organization capitalize on a phase-transition to a new and higher level of order, closer communication and coordination?

Image of Jupiter Red Spot

A tragedy of the creative knowledge commons?

There's a new kind of tragedy of the commons emerging. But it's not the kind of "commons" we usually think of when too many villagers graze their cows or sheep on the public land.

This one seems to be a superficially good idea, but when you examine the concept closely, you realize it is the value of people's collective brainpower and skill that is being diminished. And our opportunities for earning a living off the resource reduced.

It's called crowd sourced innovation. It is being touted as a fabulous way for big corporations to connect with the creatives in our midst.

It works like this. Big company wants some new ideas/designs for product line. Hundreds of talented people slave away for hours or days, imagining, conceptualizing, designing and contributing (giving away) their ideas and their effort to a corporation in return for what? One of them wins the job. Several win consolation prizes. The rest of us try harder next time and in the meantime starve.

Odds 100-1

Some dole queues are really short. They are the queues where organizations can't find enough people to perform the work. There's 0.25 nurse practitioners queuing up for every job available. Email marketers are also hot, with 0.65 people applying for each job ....which means demand exceeds supply. There's 3.5 million jobs in manufacturing requiring high level maths, science and technology skills which can't be filled. Then there's the Silver Tsunami, the hundreds of thousands of skilled workers such as engineers and nurses who will be retiring in droves over the next decade. Some of them are being hired back as contractors as soon as they retire.

Odds of getting hired: absolute certainty.

Construction worker: It's a tough queue to be in at the moment, with construction in the doldrums. You wait on a dusty street corner with other manual workers for a man in a truck to pull up. The driver offers you a days work.  Here's a reasonable bet (maybe one chance in two or three) you will succeed.

Odds 3-1

Advertising: It's much worse than the handful of advertising agencies that spend a week of their time pitching  for new business. The pitch just cost your firm $4-5 million to be in the game. Which rather limits the field.

Odds: 4-1

RFPs: The Request for Proposals from government agencies for a training, consulting, workforce or economic development job often attracts dozens of potential providers. Each will slave away for several days developing a strategy in advance to win the implementation work.

Odds of 10-1

If this is the way that big corporations and government are going to avoid hiring talented young people and pay fairly for their work, then what can we expect to happen instead?

Perhaps, over time, enough of the creative people will become so tired of being ripped off  they will change the game. Maybe we can expect new highly interconnected forms of creative interactions between talents and customers to emerge. Maybe we will see close, trusted co-committed relationships for the creation of high value added "wise application of knowledge" products and services that make a difference and where the people who design/develop/implement them are really appreciated.

So here's a workshop to help us rethink a strategy for rewarding people in these rapidly change times:

1. Unemployment in the USA is running at 10 per cent. What in your opinion is the value of as many of these people getting back to work as soon as possible?
2. What might be the social/economic consequences of continuing high unemployment (until 2017 according to Government sources)?
3. What would you personally pay, from what you earn, to get someone you know back to work?
4. How should people be remunerated for their work or contribution to the economy or society?
5. How should we remunerate these unpaid workers: housewife or househusband, child minder, community volunteer, crowd sourced worker?
6. How could we resolve the mismatch between the 1 in 5 of people who leave school unable to read write or count properly, and the jobs (vocational, especially in maths, sciences and technology) that are available and remain unfilled?
7. If you were a creative type - designer, inventors, innovator - and you found that crowd sourcing innovation websites were a lottery, how would this change what you do in response to the hit-and-miss aspects?

The bigger picture

The excellent Shift Index Report produced by the Deloitte Center for the Edge, a Silicon Valley based think tank, is useful reading for anyone who wants to better understand why the world is suddenly more complex, uncertain and ambiguous.

There are two significant bumps in the index. One occurs at start of the 21st century. The other bump towards the end of the first decade, which the authors interpret as "the recessions in 2001 and 2008" which "particularly moved the needle, representing much greater pressures on firms, consumers, and talent during those times."

But what if the index is measuring only some of the factors contributing to the accelerating change we are experiencing? What if there are other factors in play which may have a more powerful impact on society than the three indices and 25 metrics the Centre for the Edge used to measure the forces of long-term change in terms of the impact on firms, markets and people. And what might these other factors be?

Here's an explanation of the Shift Index. A copy of the report can be downloaded here.

For markets the index tracks competitive intensity, labor productivity and stock price volatility. For firms it takes into account asset profitability, the return on assets performance gap, the firm topple rate and the shareholder value gap. The aspects of people change are consumer power, brand disloyalty, returns to talent and executive turnover.

The flow index factors in market flows, virtual flows and amplifiers. The virtual flows are shifts in Internet knowledge, wireless activity and internet activity. The physical flow component is made up of the migration of people to creative cities, travel volume and the movement of capital. The flow amplifiers are worker passion and social media activity.

The foundation index looks at changes in technology performance, with a focus on computing, digital storage and bandwidth. It also considers infrastructure penetration in terms of internet users and wireless subscriptions. On the public policy front it factors in economic freedom.

According to our Complexity Theory Model of Socio-technological change each wave of change is about one-fifth shorter than the one before, as many more people become involved in knowledge creation and ever more powerful tools are invented which ratchet up productivity, including knowledge creation productivity.

And according to this model, one of the blips The Edge identified should be the start of the shift from an Information Age world to a Knowledge Age world, and the second blip, the start of the shift from Knowledge Age to Wisdom Age way of performing work, engaging with others, or incorporating new, more powerful theories into products.

The model predicts these changes:

a) tools, technologies and methods automate the work of the previous paradigm and add a higher skill component to earlier periods e.g. currently the work of teachers is being displaced by on-line learning. Internet knowledge repositories and search tools are displacing the work of librarians. Middle-management work is being displaced by group decision support systems, simulators and rich new decision/learning methods from fields outside the world of business.

b) earlier classes of work decline as a percentage of the workforce composition. The latest new class of jobs emerging are "wise-application of knowledge" jobs which may be hard to distinguish from knowledge jobs (but include roles such as certified ethical hacker and global governance director), in the same way that many Knowledge jobs (librarian, teller, teacher) have been hard to separate from Information jobs (clerk, secretary)

b) just before the transition point, the system becomes more volatile, before settling down again to a new pattern of activity, as indicated in this figure from a paper, Beyond the Frontiers of Project Management, by Manfred Saynisch, a thought leader in the field of complex project management.

c) a greater proportion of people become involved in the process of new knowledge creation, which further accelerates the rate at which new technologies, methods etc. are developed and implemented.

d) more stages of socio-technological development remain "in churn", thereby increasing the complexity and volatility of the system.

e) after the fourth bifurcation, the system has many more states of stability (but more critical and hard to tune into). The lines on the logistic curve are dynamically stable states, the shaded areas are chaotic regions.

So here are some questions for any and every organization to consider:

1. What are the big shifts that are taking place in your world, and how are they different to 10, 50, 100 and 200 years ago?
2. In your experience, how is the rate of change changing for you? Gives examples, for example product development cycles are now....x years long compared to y years long in 19XX.
3. Who and how many people in your organization system are involved in the process of knowledge creation, sense making and strategy formulation and how does this compare to 10, 50, 100 and 200 years ago?
4. What kind of change is happening to products and services? How fast are they changing, how many fields/disciplines are products/services dependent upon compared with 10, 20, 100 or 200 years ago. e.g. a motor car mechanic now meeds a knowledge of computers as well as mechanics to be able to perform his/her job.
5. What has happened to relationships? Compare relationships of 10, 50, 100 and 200 years ago and the technologies that influenced them e.g. the letter, the phone, the internet, the jet aircraft.
6. What has happened to infrastructure systems (complexity, connectivity) over the past 10, 50, 100 and 200 years? Think about roads, telecommunications, rail, air, buildings, government, financial transactions).
7. Considering all these trends, what do you think are the factors driving greater complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity?

Man-made tsunamis the new challenge

Back in the days when the world around us changed ever so slowly it was the nasty surprises that nature delivered which caught us off guard.

Although we have built cushions into 21st century living that shield many of us from the most diabolical of what nature has to offer, the hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts, floods, plagues and volcanic eruptions have not gone away, and every so often, a bigger event than we expected wreaks havoc.

As a result of our efforts to smooth out nature's bumps, we have created a new kind of tsunami, that every so often washes through civilization and leaves a trail of destruction. Millions out of work, struggling to feed themselves and their families.

The man-made Tsunamis occur at the transition from one socio-technological age to another, when people and organizations don't realize they need to adapt to the new social, market and economic conditions in order to be successful.

It's the start of a new kind of economy - the Wisdom Economy.

The US Department of Labor (2001) shows that big dislocations occurred during the 20th Century in the 1930s which was the Great Depression where one in three were out of work, and again in the 1980s. We are in the middle of another big upset labelled the GFC or global financial crisis which began in 2008.

These epochs are well known to us. The Industrial Age (1700-1940), the Information Age (1940-1990) and the Knowledge Age (1990-2005). The timing of these dislocations broadly coincides with major shifts in the power of the knowledge we create, how we embed that knowledge in more complex and powerful tools, and the way we organize work.

We know from our history books that farm workers and artisans migrated to the cities in droves when their jobs were automated by machines. They found work in the factories that destroyed their old jobs, but miraculously created many more of the new.

Not only did we survive the extinction of clerical and secretarial work by computers and the automation of knowledge or professional work by expert and control system, but we also managed to upgrade the work, so that unskilled jobs now represent only a small fraction of what's available. It is now becoming more difficult to find adequately trained workers for the new jobs that are being created, especially maths and science trained vocational workers.

The really big dislocations occur just where we would expect, at the intersection between socio-technological paradigms. Each new wave is about one-fifth the length of its' predecessor, a constant which is the reciprocal of the Feigenbaum delta, 4.6669*.

We tend to think these dislocations are caused by some one's financial greed, but there appears to be a more likely culprit. All of us.

Our efforts to create a better life for ourselves and our children create a demand for smarter and better tools, products, services and methods. We then use these tools to create more  knowledge, which we turn into even better products and services to improve our lives. More and better trained people are needed to design and operate these more complex and powerful tools, which speeds up the rate at which we create new knowledge, and the rate at which everything changes.

The waves of change, from Industrial Age onwards, follow this pattern of knowledge use:

* knowledge transmission - experts tell you all you need to know.
* knowledge re-purposing - you get to work out what to do with an expert's knowledge
* knowledge co-creation - you play a role in creating new knowledge so you and your  organization can adapt more quickly to change
* the wise application of knowledge - everyone plays a role in creating new knowledge and applying it wisely by using tools with the wise application of knowledge" or "initial conditions" built in, like "Intel inside".

So paradoxically, our collective desire to reduce the uncertainties in life, creates more uncertainties.

The big question for society is can we continue to adapt to change, or are we sowing the seeds of our own ultimate destruction as a society? And what if those who can't keep up with the change (or don't want to), let the rest of us know they have had enough and forcibly drive us all back to a time when change was slower.

It is tempting to head back to the past when our world changed more slowly. Let's assume a generation is 20 years, about the time it takes for your kids to have your grandchildren. That's about 5 every 100 years, 50 every 1000 years, 500 every 10,000 years.

Since the big migration out of Africa, Hunter Gatherer society remain relatively unchanged for 2,000 generations. Sons and daughters were able to learn all they needed to know about life from their parents, who learned what they knew from their parents with hardly any variation for 40,000 years.

Our Agricultural Age ancestors lived in a world that stayed much the same for 400 generations or 8,000 years, plenty of time to settle down into a regular and reliable pattern.

For the next three stages of society, it is a totally different story. No sooner had the farmers left their farms and started work in factories, their world was turned upside down. Just 5-6 generations to get used to the concept of factory work, before the next 5-6 generations headed towards an Information Age world.

The Information Age came and went in three generations. The Knowledge Age is disappearing from view after one.

So here is a workshop to explore these ideas about the emerging Wisdom Economy:

1. Think back to some of your first memories of the world around you. What kinds of tools (products, services, methods and ways of learning) existed when you first arrived on the planet?

2. Think back over your life. What are some of the changes in technology that you personally have experienced?

3. Choose a technology with which you are familiar e.g. music players and describe the kinds of changes that have occurred.

4. Thinking about how knowledge is incorporated into the products and services that have changed during your lifetime, what shifts have taken place?

5. Give examples of each of the following kinds of knowledge processing (transmission of expert knowledge, repurposing of expert knowledge, co-creation of knowledge, wise application of knowledge)

6. Give an example of a group of people in society who have chosen to remain at an earlier stage of knowledge processing (transmission, repurposing, co-creation) How are they different to the leading edge of society?

7. What might be some of the consequences for human society of accelerating change/accelerating knowledge creation?

8. Describe a product or service for the Wisdom Economy with "the wise application of knowledge" inside"?

9. What might be the economic, social and political consequences of some people being unable/unprepared to adapt (i.e be educated to a higher level) to the societal change, and/or participate in the new kinds of "wise application of knowledge" jobs?

Is the MBA dead?

Is the MBA is dead in the water, as we know it?

Perhaps. But like any successful organism, the MBA is under pressure to evolve to something new, to meet the emerging needs of organizations, and probably will survive in a new form.

I earned my MBA 15 years ago. What I learned is still useful, but many of the central concepts about running a business or organization have been transformed by the changing times.

MBAs fill many management roles, including expert capabilities delivered into an organization;  functions such as change management, innovation, marketing and HR. But many of these roles are being shed and replaced by front line staff, not necessarily in supervisory roles, distributed throughout the organization who have a broad expertise in strategy, improvement, innovation, facilitation/leadership capacities, supported by new kinds of tools in which specialist knowledge is embedded, expert systems, group decision tools, simulators and calculators.

As society makes the shift from the current Knowledge Age paradigm to the emerging Wisdom Age world, the dominant work of the previous period is becoming automated by the newly emergent tools/technologies. The expert procedures/methods that are the jobs of knowledge workers, mostly people with degrees, are becoming embedded in the new tools, e.g. on-line learning (teaching), on-line conveyancing (legal), tools for dealing successfully with conflict (legal/judicial), on-line preventive health (medical) and financial management programs (accounting and share trading) so anyone can do the work, just by using the tool.

At the start of this new economic order, the Wisdom Economy, we are having to change the way we speak about everything we do.

The very name "administration" implies the need for organizations to be rule-based systems,  that are relatively unchanging. The situation for so called Masters of Business "Administration"  is thus complicated by the accelerating rate of change who find themselves operating in increasingly more complex, ambiguous and uncertain environments, where the rules must keep changing. So perhaps the course needs a new name, which  reflects its' future adaptive nature.

Perhaps we could keep the acronym, MBA, which might stand for the superlative, Magnificence of Business Agility, to celebrate our role as a player of infinite games, that we are in awe of the amazing possibilities ahead of us, and we are not the masters in the field, but excited learners, willing to wisely explore future kinds of agility, whatever may emerge.

Some organizations, at the leading edge now realize they ARE complex adaptive systems, to which traditional linear/serial tools derived from algorithmic and serial theories/models do not necessarily apply any more.

The methods that we will find in this new MBA course are being supplemented by (and in some cases displaced) by models/theories outside the world of business, as diverse as ethics, collective play, anthropology, neuroscience, complexity theory, fractal theory, biology, relativity theory, quantum dynamics, the creative arts etc. Although a Master in Fine Arts is now regarded by some as the new MBA, the theoretical repertoire required by a leader in business is more like the range of approaches available on TED and Poptech.

The new Wisdom Economy tools have "the wise application of knowledge inside", like "Intel inside" (decision support/rules systems, expert systems, simulators/simulations, calculators, calculators), and so perform many of the roles of a leader/manager/coordinator/expert. It's a kind of "transcend and include" thing.

Such products are likely to have automatic disposal/recycling of a worn-out/spent./outmoded "thingy" at the end of its' life, or the outputs from the use of the product/service are predesigned inputs to other services so they operate collectively as a sustainable system.

Tools such as the Zing complex adaptive learning go even further and incorporate "people skills" such as high-level thinking and relating skills, an etiquette to provide the norms for a group to quickly form as a team and reliably work together, the question sequences that guide the conversation to a successful conclusion, and the sense making step which results in the group creating new knowledge without having to be guided via the leadership/relating skills of a manager.

But there also seems to be a demand for MBA Lite, a kind of "quick and dirty" introduction to the principles and practice of business administration for those who are not from the world of business, such as managers and supervisors in community services, health and local government, to round out their skills. Think books like MBA in a Day from Professor Steven Stralser of Thunderbird Graduate School in Phoenix. Which bears out the "transcend and include" rule.

Here's a workshop to explore these ideas:

1. Brainstorm a new name for the Master of Business Administration course to reflect the need for the course to be a complex adaptive system in its' own right.
2. Give an example of a Wisdom Economy product or service that has "wise application of knowledge" inside and explain what it does and the value it delivers.
3. What might "wise application of knowledge" mean for organizations? What are some of the essential principles or "initial conditions" that "wise application of knowledge" organizations might adopt in terms of for product and services design, organization structures, relations with stakeholders, etc.?
4. If high-level strategy, planning, change, innovation and other capacities become more distributed how will organizations achieve a common sense of purpose?
5. What are some "transcend and include" strategies you might apply to business methods and processes, so that old "tried and true" methods become reinvented and incorporated in the new complex adaptive learning methods, wherever appropriate.
6. Go to TED, take a look at any video, make some notes about the theory, model, rules or concepts that the speaker describes.
7. Using the notes you have generated in 6, craft a set of rich questions that would allow a group to have a conversation about the consequences for an organization of the theory/concepts presented by the "thought leader".
8. Make a list of some of the critical people skills/principles required for organization success. Now develop an idea for a new product that has these skills or principles in the product.
9. Design a course for the Magnificence of Business agility.

Learning from nature

Sometimes we humans think we are super smart. But compared with nature we have the creative powers of a gnat. Or maybe not, for all we know, gnats may be more creative and intelligent than we have ever noticed or imagined.

Consider the skyscraper.  Tens of stories tall inhabited by hundred or thousands of humans and our fellow travellers. Like cockroaches. Bedbugs. Or rats and mice.

A human invention? Nope.

The craggy river red gum which inhabits river valleys all over Australia must surely be one of the first skyscrapers (Image, Peter Halasz). On average, each tree houses 150 households, in convenient hollows where the wood has rotted. Each hollow is a high rise apartment for possums, birds, insects and other creatures. All courtesy of nature, designed so that what we think of as waste - rotten wood- is recycled for another purpose. The outputs from one life process become the inputs to another, the very same principles of natural capitalism that Amory Lovens, founder of the Rocky Mountains Institute applies to organizations, to achieve greater sustainability.

So here a workshop to explore this powerful natural principle:

1. Describe a system where waste outputs spoil our/your way of life.
2. Choose one of the systems and make a list of all the components and how resources e.g. water, gases, minerals, soil, paper, organic matter flow through the system. How does each component arrive, e.g. as raw materials, where does it flow to, and how does it leave e.g. as finished products in trucks,
3. Thinking about the total system, what components of the system are "waste" or "pollution" and how do we currenly deal with those components?
4. Consider each of the waste outputs, what could we do, so they are inputs to another system, and are re-used or re-purposed?
5. Thinking about what is left over, that can't be re-used, what other way is there to design our system, so this waste is not produced, or produced in a re-usable form, just like nature.
6. What other natural approaches could we ideally adopt, so that the waste can be reprocessed or reclaimed in more natural ways e.g. harvesting heavy metals in water or soil using plants that soak them up, using biomimicry to use H, C or O to peform the save role as more complex/dangerous elements.

Seeing the world through other's eyes

There seem to be as many different ways of seeing the world as there are humans. The potential differences are mindbogglingly huge, an astounding Factorial 6500 million differences (about 10 multiplied by itself 10,000,000,000 times).

Each of us grows up with a unique set of influences that no other person on the planet - past present or future - will ever experience. And although this myriad of unique lenses could lead to ongoing disagreement, misunderstanding and lack of trust, there is equally the opportunity for considerable creative potential for good when we bridge and integrate our differences to create new theories, models, lifestyles, products or services.

There's over 6500 languages, with English currently displacing many others that have been around for thousands of years. We can grow up in the traditions of hundreds of religions including the Christian, Bhuddist, Hindu and Islamic faiths. We can stay within or surf to a new stage of human development, of which there are six, starting with the Hunter Gatherer and ending up with post-Knowledge Age (Wisdom Age or Wisdom Economy) ways of being in the world. Political views stretch from the anarchist, communist and socialist on the left to the conservative and fascist on the right.

Then there are career differences. We have White, Blue and now Green Collar work. We work for organizations that range from the academic, religious, business and community to local, state, federal and international  governments. Jobs are as diverse as soldier, lawyer, policeman, prostitute, airline pilot, fisherman, janitor, farmer, psychiatrist and teacher. Each has its' own unique language and concepts that may not be known to other disciplines....which can complicate communication beyond belief.

There's also a huge array of mental models with which to analyse and understand the world. MBA's frequently see the world through the lense of SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) or McKinsey's 7-S Model (Style, Structure, Systems, Staff, Strategy, Super-ordinate goals). Farmers think about Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. Christians might view the world through the lense of the Ten Commandments, Thou Shalt Not Kill or Thou must not covet thy neighbour's ass. Some have a simplistic view of Right and Wrong. And electricians and plumbers have to be sure the power or water is On or Off before they start work.

So what if we could learn to see the world through other people's viewpoints, to live inside their mental models for a few minutes, or a days or a couple of weeks, a critical skill in the emerging Wisdom Economy. Here's a workshop to begin the process:

1. Beliefs: Brainstorm a list of 10 things you believe.
2. Labels: What's some labels you might use to describe the way you see the world e.g. Christian, Catholc, Bhuddist, Capitalist, Socialist, Accountant.You might be more than one....
3. Mental Models: Brainstorm a list of the 2-10 attributes you use to analyse the world around you....Here are some examples.....SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), The Seasons (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring,
4. Mental Models: Describe a mental model you use to understand the world around you and how you use in your life. e.g. Right-Wrong.
5. Here's a problem...Use your mental model to make a decison about how to solve this problem...give your reasons, and as you do, explain how you mental model/lense helps you understand it better.
6. Now pick another mental model/lense different to yours, and analysis this new problem..., explain how you used the model/lense to arrive at your conclusions.
7. What did you learn from this experience? What did you learn about mental models/lenses?

The language in "things"

It might come as a surprise that all the physical tools and objects we humans use are actually "concretized language".

Things are nothing more than concepts or ideas in a physical form, the results of our actions in response to questions that explore how we might do something or what to do next. Or implemented action in the form of lists of things to do that reorganize nature.

In a very real sense, everything we find in nature is simply organized information. The fundamental forces of nature such as gravity and electromagnetism guide how matter is organized. DNA guides the way organisms are assembled from the raw materials of atoms. We have learned how to manipulate these information processing systems in extraordinary ways. It is what defines us as a species.

The Russian psychologist, A.N. Leont'ev shows that sequences of automatic motor actions - either speech or gesture - eventually become a tool we can use. First a psychological tool or method which is merely a list of steps and eventually the phsyical tool that automates the method. The neurophysiologist A.R. Luria called the neural programs for speech and gesture muscle actions "kinetic melodies". The two are often produced together.

Consider for a moment the software you use to write a story, paint a picture, send an email or reconcile your bank accounts. These seemingly "physical" tools are simply words written by the programmer to tell your computer what to do next. The language is translated from words into mathematical symbols, 0s and 1s that determine how electricity will flow through your computer to actuate switches.

Or consider the pathway from a physical action to a physical tool. The common cup grew out of the gesture of a cupped hand. Before that we drank just like other animals, mouth in the water. Here's how it works. Imagine you are one of your ancestors, the inventor of the cup:

1. Bend down and stick nose in water to drink like other animals.

2. You think: Too hard. But what if I.....

3. Cup hand. Scoop up water and bring to mouth.

4. You think: Much easier. But what if I...

5. Find container like a cup that scoops up water.

6. You think: Very easy. But what if I...want to re-use it

7. Make list of steps to make cup. Make cup.

Conretized language takes many forms. The instructions that drive your computer software to display a character or a word, or print the words and symbols on a page are language. The sculpture that is left after you chisel away the surplus stone to reveal hidden inside the physical representation of an idea is language. Skyscrapers, jumbo jets and electrical power are just the re-organization of our nearby universe using instructions - our most powerfully organized words and concepts, in the most amazing order, made with electro mechanical devices such as metal cutting machines whose internal computer programs control the angle, depth, shape and speed of cutting or polishing or electroplating. There's even a new kind of printer that can print familiar objects such as appliance or car parts, one layer of atoms at a time, assembled in the same way as the printed word. All language.

Language of sorts has been with us a long time. It's not just humans that communicate. It's prairie dogs who warn others about danger, or bees that return to the hive with clear instructions where to find the best pollen, or proteins that help DNA do it's job of creating a new cell. Or light that communicates with matter in a way that re-organizes them both.

When we start to think of language this way it becomes much easier to see the universe as an amazingly rich conversation between the past and the future that has been going on for billions of years. And we are just one small part of this amazing story.

So here's some questions to explore this idea:

1. Give examples of the following different kinds of language: utterances, symbols, signs, conversations, concepts, questions, theories, statements, stories, poetry, lists, plans, methods, narratives, advertising slogans, newsapaper headlines.
2. What kind of extra powers do these forms of language give humans? Choose one and describe it's powers.
3. When humans invented the written word, what did this allow us to do, we could not do before? What did we have to do before? And before that?
4. What is the connection between human action/activity and language/gesture?
5. Imagine you are one of the first humans to speak. What do you imagine you spoke about. What kinds of words, signs, symbols or gesture did you use?
6. Thinking about an object in everyday use in our world, trace the language/gestural function of the tool back to its origins e.g. cup, cupped hand, drinking from water in a river or stream.
7. Make a list of all the parts of a jumbo jet or a motor car. Imagine and describe the journey from the past to the present for each of these parts.

Playing with pataphors

What do infatuation, obsessive compulsive disorder, theories of mind, teamwork, string theory, Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson machines have in common?

They are pataphors, high level abstractions, "wild" assumptions built on "wild" assumptions. It's the "science of imaginary solutions that rests on "the truth of contradictions and exceptions".

Pataphors are like the Second Life of the mind. Much of what is incoherent or impossible in the real world can suddenly be obvious and simple in these worlds of the wildest imagination.

Pataphors can help us solve wicked, unsolvable problems. They are metaphors on steroids. Like when a character in a story invents herself. Koinonia, the Mary Poppins of Imaginary Friends, is a pataphorical creation. She is one of the main characters in a wild romp I'm writing with colleague Abby Straus.

Pataphysics began life as "nonsensical" philosophy invented in 1893 by French writer Alfred Jarry to poke fun at physics and metaphysics, to parody the modern scientific method and all its theories.

physics > metaphysics > pataphysics

Just as metaphors lend new meaning to other words and help us explore new conceptual landscapes, pataphors help us create imagined worlds built upon the foundations or assumptions of the metaphor. 

Take metaphorical landscapes as an example. Imagine for a moment that a world exists in which words have the characteristics of mountains. Rivers. Hillocks. Deserts. Forests. Jungles.

Jungle "word worlds" might be inabited by tropical concepts like succulent mango, or sabre-tooth tiger, or verdant vines so you might "enjoy sex like a succulent mango" or feel so constantly threatened you have "a sabre-tooth tiger of a day" or go "swinging through life like Tarzan, leaping from tree to tree with the aid of a "vine pendulum", to mix metaphors.

Pataphysics is, in essense, a degree of separation from reality. If we see someone we know on the street and believe they are ignoring us (even if it is not true), and then begin to imagine a reason for them doing so, we are essentially thinking pataphorically.

An example of a real-life pataphor is String Theory. Physicists have created this theoretical  explanation of how the universe works on the flimsy foundation of "speculative" mathematical theories of general relativity and quantum mechnanics. String Theory is more in the realm of fantasy than science. What gets me is how the quantum mechanics maths only works when you apply a technique called "renormalization" that eliminates the inconvenient x/0 terms. Which is crazy, since any number divided by zero is infinity. And one of the truths of general relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. David Bohm's spin experiments say otherwise. And the superliminal effects of the Casimir effect and quantum tunneling show light travelling faster than it should. String theory is not in fact physics, but pataphysics.

When teenagers become infatuated with another, they use the tiniest cues or scraps of conversation to build a belief that the other is just as in love with them as they are with the object of their affection. I thought he looked at me (assumption 1), which means he thinks I am attractive (assumption 2)  and wants to sleep with me (assumption 3) and get married (assumption 4).

I know of a woman who was the mistress of the reputation killer pataphor. She began with the speculation "I wonder if Jack is having an affair?" Girlfriend One would reply, equally speculatively "I guess he could be having an affair". Turning to Girlfriend Two my reputation killer tells her "Girlfriend One said in all probability he is having an affair". The next time the story is told, the inconvenient words "in all probability" are left out and the story becomes "Jack is having an affair".  So out of almost nothing, a 'skyhook' or 'bootstrap' forms  and soon there is absolutely no doubt that I'm a cad, a bounder, a low life...and heading for the divorce court.

Pataphors can be our worst fears or cherished dreams run amok. They are whole worlds we create out of wild and wonderful assumption heaped upon wild "assumption assumptions". They are the creatures of a mind that borders on the schizophrenic, because according to the latest brain research from the Karolina Institute, the dopamine systems of the super-creative are similar to those of the victims of the condition we regard as a psychosis. We enjoy the same kinds of good feelings.

The ingenious contraptions invented by Goldberg and Robinson also defy normal physics. Wonderfully exotic and outrageous functions are combined into a complex "machine system" which covers up/brushes over the fatal flaws in logic.

The circular human chair is a physical equivalent of a pataphor. Each person sits on the knee of the person behind them to form a circle. Remove one of the humans in the circular chain and the whole structure falls over.

Here's a workshop to explore pataphorical thinking:

1. Brainstorm some metaphors and apply them to an everyday concept e.g. wolf woman, rocket man, diamond bullet, cave brain, corporate fool.

2. So starting with your metaphor, describe what it could be e.g. a cave brain is empty, dark inside, with a few skeletons, and the ashes of a long dead-fire.

3. Now in your cave brain world, describe how the "elements" you have included in your description come to life, e.g. the skeletons in his cave brain rattled around, looking for a fire to ignite his neurons, but all they could find were ashes.

4. Think of a time when you were madly in love with another person, but they took absolutely no notice of you. Describe how you imagined life would be like with them, and how even the slightest hint of a smile gave you hope.

5. Brainstorm a list of other kinds of "things" that "exist" that are pataphorical e.g. Second Life businesses, science fiction worlds, imaginary numbers i.e. square root of -1.

6. Thinking about the theory of mind concept and how you might imagine what another person might be thinking about what you are saying and doing. Invent two characters and how they think about each other this way. What do they do and say in your imagination?

7. What is your worst fear. Now, take that worst fear and explore at least five worst case scenarios that could happen as a consequence, and then a consequence of that, and then a consequence of that.

8. What is your most cherished dream? Starting with a cherished dream (that does not yet exist) explore at least five wonderful outcomes that could happen as a consequence, and then a consequence of that, and then a consequence of that.

Artist: Allan Lam, Rube Goldberg type machine from Dreams, Memes & Themes software, Zing Technologies, 2002.

Terse verse

Over the past two weeks I have been playing a constrained writing game called Terse Verse with colleague, co-creator and friend Abby Straus from Pittsburgh. We wanted to see what would happen when we collectively wrote poetry constrained by simple rules.

Click on the image to start the animated gif to see how the verse unfolded. 

"Serendipity sucks" unfurled like a beautiful flower, danced from concept to concept, through twists and turns of meaning, springing surprises, posing challenges.  The process engaged our own personal Googles - our right frontal lobes - which searched in unlikely nooks and crannies of our brains for new and richer possibilities.

Although we each had some control, it felt as if the poem developed a life of it's own.

Activity: Terse Verse works like this. On your turn add two words. You can only change words you have written. Punctuation can be added or removed at any time.

An "impossible" feat of self-organization

In his new book, Complex Adaptive Leadership, Nick Obolensky shows how a group can successfully complete a very complex task in just a few minutes, if everyone follows some very simple rules of interaction.

It's a powerful example of how to lead or manage in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.  And offers an alternative to the traditional approaches to the division of labour, co-ordination and managerial control which are often failing us, as the world becomes more complex, uncertain and ambiguous.

I first played this game with Carrie Lobman at the Eastside Institute in New York. It's an Improv game from the book Carrie and Matt Lundquist wrote called Unscripted Learning that helps teachers use improvisation  in the school classroom to help young people learn "playfully".

They use the game to teach kids about triangles....isosceles triangles. Two of the three sides are the same length.

It's an activity for 5-80 people and can be played in a room, but preferably in a space with clear boundaries such as a tennis or basketball court.

Each person selects two people at random and must stay an equal distance from both, for the remainder of the game.

Acording to Nick Obolensky, the group settles into a steady-state pattern in about 1.25 minuutes per 20 people. So if there are 60 people in the group it will take three minutes for everyone to stop moving around.

It's the same kind of simple rule that helps bird flock and fish to shoal without crashing into each other. They maintain the same distance from each other, and as they change direction make tiny adjustments to maintain the rule.

So here's a workshop to explore this emergent phenomenon:

1. Undertake the "simple rules of interaction" experiment for yourselves. Then report back, how did it feel?.
2. Given the range of possible solutions and the number of people involved, how complex was this task and what makes the task complex? Describe what would have happened if one person had been in charge.

3. The group quickly achieved a task that some think impossible or would have taken a long time to complete. What helped the participants perform the task?

4. Explain how each of the following enablers helped you achieve the task. * Clear individual objective * Few simple rules * Continuous feedback * Discretion and freedom of action * Skill/will of participants

5. What are the consequences for traditional models of organization leadership and managership in rapidly changing and more complex times?

6. Describe how you could could get complexity to work for you (rather than against you) for all different kinds of organization problems/issues?
7. Brainstorm a list of outcomes you want e.g. trust each other implicitly, and then describe a "rule of interaction" for each outcome, that could improve your relations or coordination with others?

8. Where might you discover really good examples of rules of interaction?
9. What operating principles have your discovered today about operating in emergent, chaotic situations?

A process of transformational political change

Influencing Governments has never been more difficult and fleeting. Just when you think they are convinced of your arguments, along comes a political opponent with many supporters in their cavalcade and upsets your applecart, your business plans and your life.

This old way of doing business was simple. You go straight to the political leader and ask for special treatment, as shown in the picture on the left. This approach may have had a big short-term effect, but it's unlikely to be sustainable in the long-term.

In a past life I was a political consultant. Not the kind that knocked on doors, and lobbied politicians. But one that created coaltions of common interests among people and organizations who would normally have little to do with each other, or be uncomfortable working for the same cause.

The coalition buildiing approach is based on one of the fundamental laws of complex adaptive systems, when parts of the system connect to other parts. New order emerges seemingly in a quantum leap. The system shifts from one stable energetic state to a new stable state at a more energetic level. Typical of these phase transitions in human system is the transformation of a group into a team. Or the despatch of an old technology by a new technological ecology. Or a bunch of loosely connected ideas that resolve into a  breakthrough decision, theory or concept.

Phase transitions are also a feature of the activity of large social and political systems.

Think of a political system as widely dispersed citizens and their organizations, closely connected Government department and agencies near the centre of power. The Heads of these government organizations serve the current political leaders. In the US it's the Secretary, in the UK and Australia, the Minister. Many of these agencies and their political leaders are in competition with each other, think environment vs mining, so we should not make the mistake of thinking of "the government" as a unified player in the game.

The picture on the right shows how we used to build coalitions of common interests, by progressively connecting up the whole system, which would then shift, autocatalytically, to a new more organized stable state. A kind of Wisdom of Crowds effect, the kind of activity we can expect to see more often in the emerging Wisdom Age, or its' economic equivalent., the Wisdom Economy.

This approach worked by collectively creating/discovering an idea that better served the interests of all of the parties than the narrower goals each previously pursued. Or a new collective ideal which helped people with diverse interests avoid an outcome that all would be unhappy if it happened

The solutions were never cut and dried. Or known in advance. The clients often had to dramatically alter their wish list along the way. Many of the ideas that emerged from engaging the many stakeholders, were often better than the compromises the client had already grown assumed. More often than not, the client had been backed into a corner and was resigned to their fate.

We would start with a client and their needs. Like prosper and live a happy life. We would take note of the problem, like the decision which might dramatically increase their costs, beyond what was sustainable and restrict what they could do. They often faced choices which had adverse impacts on their employees, contractors, suppliers, neighbors, communities and even their competitors. Often all their efforts to negotiate a political settlement had failed and there seemed to be nowhere else to go.

So we would talk to all the stakeholders - everyone who had an interest - and ask what they thought was the issue, and the best solution possible. As we worked our way around the stakeholder network, many of whom had limited contact with the client, we would discover new ways of thinking about the issue, and feed back these ideas and perspectives to the client and to the other stakeholders.

And very soon a new idea would start to emerge, around which all the stakeholders could unite, despite their differences, which would become the "big idea". And we would create tentative pictures/maps/designs and benefit analysis which gave it substance.

We would start at the periphery and work our way towards the centre, acquiring supporters as we went. We would constantly make adjustments to the "big idea" so that we continued to enroll more people and their organizations. We deliberately stayed away from politicians and their public servants who were often locked in resonance with the old "problem maker" and were often not prepared to change their minds until the winds of political change almost blew them away.

When we reached the central political stakeholders we held back, to give the laggards time to comprehend the practicalities of the new political order. If people are strongly committed to a course of action, they need time to mourn the past, and adapt/adjust to the new. Shoving it in their face merely reinforces their determination to stick to their guns, even in the face of reality.

Most wicked problems have solutions. They are only wicked problems because the principal stakeholders have opinions, values, or interests from which they are unprepared to budge. The Middle East conflict between the Isralis and the Palestinians could easily be resolved if both were to adopt less zealous positions. The debate over abortion could be easily resolved if those who oppose it were to accept that it is unfair and unreasonable for their point of view to be imposed on others who do not share their views. The climate change battle has been hard fought because some see themselves as losers. But when we realize that by sticking our heads in the mud, we are all likely to be losers, attitudes change.

We did not have the Zing team meeting system back in those days, but if we had, these are some of the kinds of questions we would have asked:

1. Thinking about the problem/decision [describe it], what impact will it have on you and your organization/community/family?

2. Who else is there in the community which may be affected negatively by problems/decisions and what do you think they might prefer to happen and why?

3. Who do you think is in favour of the decision or will benefit from it and why do you think they are supporting it?

4. If you had complete comtrol/authority, what would you do differently and why would you want to do this?

5. What ideas might other stakeholders have that could be incorporated into a better solution?
6. What ideas could we include in the final solution to serve the interests of those who support the new solution/decision?
7.  How will we ensure what we really want, happens?

How old are we?

When asked how old we are, most of us probably give our chronological age. But there are many other ways to think about our existence:

* As one of the "children of the stars"...I am billions of years old. Most of my heavier atoms such as oxygen, iron, etc - were forged in supernovae.

* In a biological sense I am at least 800 million years old.. Identical aspects of my DNA are present in most other life on this planet.

* As a primate I am 4 million years old. That's when I/we began to diverge from the great apes...we have 98.8% of our DNA in common.

* My modern humanity puts me at 40,000+ years of age. Back to the last out-of-Africa episode. The maximum difference in our DNA is 0.1%. We all have stone-age brains...

* My chronological age is 65 revolutions of our planet around our sun.

* And my present age is about 1 year old, the number of years since I reinvented myself (for about the 10th time so far).

* My spiritual age is 0....because we and the universe are one and the same thing....and all the photons (fast matter) and matter (slow light) are the connection to the past and the emergent future, and the more playful we can be, the more fun/fabulous our local-verse can be."

Question: How old are you and what difference does that make?

Blindsided by our mental models

Many of us myopically peer into the future, blindsided by our out-of-date mental models, believing that the observational tools we have at our disposal provide an accurate picture.

Or just when we think our mental model is the latest and the greatest, we discover the world has morphed into something else and that others have an advantage over us because they have a faster, smarter, more accurate something-scope.

More of us - than ever before - are contributing to new knowledge creation. 

Creative types such as artists, writers and scientists lead the way. They interpret the future for us. Set the scene. Try out new combinations.  They get to do this work simply because they are playful re-arrangers of what has gone before.

However, each of these creative roles is being democratized by the new media and the Internet. Millions get to play at being writers and publishers of blogs and wikis, producer/director/writer/actors in our own YouTube videos or the artist or photographer that sees the world through a new lens.

And as this new knowledge we create is split into ever more "idea spaces",  it becomes harder for any one person to comprehend it all. And so the business of government and the governance of business becomes more difficult and complex.

Knowledge is not only growing exponentially - so that more and more people are more knowledgeable about a tiny part of the "knowledge cosmos" - but each "idea space" comes with it's own complex jargon, that's hard for others outside the field to understand. Languages are now developing, not only through geographical isolation, but also professional isolation. It was always thus, just more so.

For example, many PhDs know more than anyone else in the world about their tiny needle point of knowledge in the knowledge cosmos, a little about adjacent fields, and the kind of generalized knowledge acquired by just living or via the media, the arts or travel.

And so it is more difficult than ever before to reach agreement across the boundaries of what we separately know. Because we can't trust others unless we understand what they mean, and believe what they say. Look at what's happening right now over climate change, nuclear power, abortion, the delivery of health services or economic policy.

Anyone who has ever looked through a microscope or a telescope can tell you there is much hidden from our senses. These extensions to our observational organs help us peer into the world of the very large, or the very small, to see distant stellar objects or micro-organisms that are invisible to the naked eye. Once-upon-a-time at a handful of magnifications. And as the technology improves, at millions of magnifications, all the way to the "edge of time".

I am reminded of the days we presented black tie "thinking theater" type events with Michael, an astrophysicist from the University of New South Wales. We awarded bottles of champagne to the tables who contributed the most inventive, but usually incorrect interpretation of images he had taken of the night sky. His favorite challenge was to show pictures taken at different wavelengths., Like these two. Nothing much at infra-red wavelengths. But a hive of activity in invisible light.

But, as a fisherman will tell you, what you catch depends upon the size of your net. And it is not just the measuring instruments which limit what we perceive, it is also our mental models. How blind is a person, brought up to believe the world is flat to the possibilities that flow from a spherical perspective.

Sadly, some are us are still using the "clockwork universe" perspective of Isaac Newton without realizing it. We see things in terms of cause and effect, people and processes to be controlled and managed, numbers to be crunched in algorithms that produce serial results.

Very few of us yet think in terms of the new sciences of complexity theory, quantum dynamics, fractals, chaos theory, evolutionary psychology or string theory. These ways of seeing the world in all its non-linear glory have been available for decades.

When we think in the ways of the new sciences, we see flows and processes, the deep interconnection between people and nature, self-similarity at every scale, emergent phenomena - new kinds of order - that seems to just pop out of the system, phenomena which are no longer either-or but both, simplicity within the complexity and complexity that follows from simple rules.

But if you are unable to think this way, you might not be able to see a phase shift occurring in market space, as our brains, the tools we use, and the jobs we perform, shift to a higher level of order under pressure from our desire for a better life. Like the current transition from a world focused on Knowledge tools and work, to a world in which Wisdom work, the work of the guru or leader, is being democratized. 

You might miss the shift to new and smarter technologies that help humans do stuff more reliably, with less impact on the planet. Your belief in cause and effect might blind you to the ongoing chaos in world financial markets, where hiccups in one country ricochet around the world, dragging under the local bank upon whom you rely for credit, which you did not realize was so highly connected to the rest of the world. Your conditioning to focus on one thing at a time, might limit your ability to get many projects started, only one of which might generate the attention it deserves or ensure it survives in a world of intense competition for ideas.

So here's a workshop to help discover what is hidden from your view:

1. Describe what it is like to make decisions in market, social and economic conditions of the early 21st century.

2. What is the mental model that you are using to view, manage and control your world? What are your assumptions?

3. Give examples of how managers might see the world in terms of opposing forces, management and control of people and systems, cause and effect and linear algorithms.

4. Describe what you know about quantum dynamics, complex systems, holographic order and chaos theory and how you have applied these concepts to your life, your work or the organizations to which you belong.

5. Quantum dynamics teaches us that phenomena have multiple aspects e.g. light is both a wave and a particle. Use this idea to explain the following concepts group/team, leadership/managership, producer/consumer and how thinking this way might help.

6. Complex systems undergo phase shifts from one level of order to another when catalysts within the system cross-catalyze each other. What kind of catalysts might you find in a marketplace which is undergoing transition from one kind of tool/work to another e.g. horse and buggy to car, CD to flash memory, and how is this relevant to you/your organization?

7. When you cut a hologram up into little pieces and shine laser light on it, you still get a three dimensional image because all the information is distributed throughout the system. Choose one of these terms and explain how/why they might be holographic. Relationships. Organizational knowledge. Resources. Concepts.

8. Explain how you could develop skills/capability holographically so your organization is more flexible and fast moving and why might this be useful today.

9. How could you organize your corporation or agency fractally - self-similarity at every scale - and what might be the benefits?

10. Give examples of how you could measure personal and organization performance in a rapidly changing world using some of the principles of quantum dynamics, complexity theory etc. and how you might disturb the dynamics of the organization, simply by making the measurement 

11. What dramatic changes could you implement in an organization by setting up initial conditions so multifaceted, complex behavior might flow from the adoption of simple rules e.g. servant leadership or dialectical discourse.