More on the Mythquake book-project – a book I’ll probably never have time to finish, so here I’m handing it over to whoever might like to take it up.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…‘, we moved into the level of mythquakes that most people would probably notice within their everyday lives, with politics as the given example. Note, though, that most politics is only a level-4 or thereabouts: despite all of the pretensions of importance, most of it is really little more than arguing about the position of a single deckchair on the Titanic, and for most people, not much – if anything – of real significance will change with each change of government. But here at MQ-5 we do start to get into realms of significant damage, and that do start to affect most people whenever there’s some kind of breakdown – a catastrophic collapse of over-extended assumptions. The example I’ve used here is the comfortably-complacent ‘certainties’ of current economics – and particularly the notion that ‘economics’ is solely synonymous with money.

(Another general aside: yes, we’re currently in the midst of yet another ‘Global Financial Crisis’, and for some countries – and certainly for many individuals – the impacts are occasionally rippling upward in impacts to what might seem like MQ-6 or even MQ-7 levels. But in practice, much of the talk of ‘crisis’ is little more than arguing about what to do about a single broken deckchair on the Titanic: it still doesn’t address any of the deeper issues, and history makes it plain that this is merely the current expression of a regular boom/bust cycle – a repeated pattern of mythquakes that point to much deeper and much more serious fault-lines in the structure of our everyday reality.)

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Managing the household
• A monetary mismatch
• Back to barter?

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?

Richter 5: Moderate earthquake. May cause slight damage to well-constructed buildings, but can cause major damage to poorly-constructed buildings. Equivalent to around thirty kilotons of TNT (Nagasaki atomic bomb). Around two to three per day.

Mercalli V: Doors swing open or closed; small objects move; liquid may spill from open containers; almost everyone feels movement; sleepers awake.

Mercalli VI: People have trouble walking; everyone feels movement; objects fall from shelves; furniture moves; trees and bushes shake; windows break, plaster walls may crack, other non-structural damage in poorly-constructed buildings.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project. As mentioned in previous posts, this is a book that I’ve been trying to write for more than ten years, but it’s time to accept it ain’t gonna happen – not from me, anyway. So I’m placing these ideas up in the blogosphere in the hope that someone else can use them: attribution would be nice, but it’s not essential.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-3: I am what I do‘, we’ve started to move beyond mythquakes that have only a small localised impacts, and into contexts where the mythic breakdown hits a lot more people – and hurts a lot more, too. So when we get to the next level, MQ-4, people in general will definitely begin to notice when this kind of mythquake comes to town – and will often complain about it as a group rather than solely as individuals. Which brings us into the realm of politics – or rather, what is most commonly described as ‘politics’, because in a sense everything is political.

(Note for Brits at this time: yes, this happens to be posted in the midst of the aftermath of a particularly mythquake-full general election – a ‘hung parliament’ and all that. [There are some who would say that all parliaments should be hung, in one sense or another, but given the inanity of the times, the detail of that is perhaps best left unsaid. ] Consider this juxtaposition to be no more than an amusing coincidence: there’s always somewhere in the world that’s dealing with this specific type of mythquake at any given time.)

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …the government got in
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee
• The structure of power

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…

Richter 4: Light earthquake. Noticeable shaking of indoor items; rattling noises; significant damage unlikely. Equivalent to one kiloton of TNT (smallest nuclear bombs). Around fifteen to twenty per day.

Mercalli IV: Dishes, windows and doors rattle; parked cars rock; trees may shake; most people indoors feel movement, as do some outdoors.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project. This is a book that I’ve been brewing for perhaps a decade, but accept that I will probably never have time to write, so I’m placing these ideas up in the blogosphere in the hope that someone else will pick ‘em up and run with them.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-2: The Centre of the Universe‘, we looked at some relatively-minor everyday mythquakes whose impact is usually localised and transitory – such as a two-year-old’s temper-tantrum at broken expectations, and the perhaps even more bizarre emotion associated with expectations around competitive sports. But here we move up into territory where the mythquakes are rather more noticeable, becoming less localised, with impacts that are less transitory and often quite a bit more severe. This levels seems typified by a whole class of mythquakes that can arise whenever we confuse “who I am” with “what I do”.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Doing life
• The end of the world

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-3: I am what I do

Richter 3: Minor earthquake. Often felt but rarely causes damage. Equivalent to around thirty tonnes of TNT (largest conventional bombs). Around one to two hundred per day.

Mercalli III: Shaking felt indoors, though often not outdoors; hanging objects swing back and forth.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-1: Everyday Upsets‘, introduced the basic idea of mythquakes as a mismatch between our expectations and the actual reality. Here we start to explore what happens when we say that it’s reality, and not our expectations, that are ‘wrong’. The first place (or perhaps most obvious place) where this begins to happen is in early childhood – the dreaded stage of the ‘terrible twos’. But that’s only the beginning… and some dangerous habits can also be instilled at this stage, which cause much more serious problems later in life, for everyone.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• The terrible twos [mostly complete]
• Winners and losers [notes only]
• Sibling rivalry [notes only]

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-2: The centre of the universe

Richter 2: Very minor earthquake. Recorded but rarely felt. Equivalent to around one tonne of TNT. Around one thousand per day.

Mercalli II: A few people notice movement, if they are at rest or in the upper floors of tall buildings.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project. This and the next few posts in this series will work their way up the scale of mythquake severity, from MQ-1 (trivial everyday stuff) to MQ-9 (total destruction).

My last attempt to get restarted on Mythquake was way back in January 2007. This chapter was complete back then, so I’ll post it here in its entirety. This version of the book was aimed at the self-development market, so again it’s deliberately personalised (in fictional form, I ought to add), and with questions to invite self-reflection and self-challenge. If someone else wants to take over the project, a more formal/conventional approach might work better these days.

There’s only one section in this chapter:

• The litany of complaint

The term ‘litany’ is adapted from Sohail Inayatullah’s futures/foresight tool Causal Layered Analysis (“poststructuralism as method”): ‘the litany’ is the topmost of the four layers in scope for futures-assessment.

As you’d expect, this chapter is several pages long, so I’ll start with the intro here, and then put in a ‘Read more…’ link before the rest of the text.

MQ-1: Everyday upsets

Richter 1: Microearthquake. Background ‘noise’; barely identifiable. Equivalent to around ten to thirty kilograms of TNT (typical quarry explosives). Tens of thousands per day.

Mercalli I: Vibrations are recorded by instruments; people do not feel any earth-movement.

Read more…

Mythquake is a book I’ve been trying to write for well over a decade, and I guess it’s time I accepted that I probably never will: I’ve kinda moved on from there onto other things, and my heart just isn’t in it any more.

Yet the underlying ideas seem, if anything, to be even more urgent today than they were back then. So it seems worthwhile to summarise those ideas in a short blog-series – will be either 11 or 12 posts in all, including this one. (I’ll add cross-references between the posts when they’re all up on this site.)

A quick bit of history first, then back to the core theme.

Way back in the late-1980s, I was asked by one of my publishers to write a book for the then very-active self-development field: the exact brief was “we want a book for the self-help market that doesn’t insult the intelligence”. The end-result was Positively Wyrd, which used the old Nordic concept of wyrd to explore the core theme of “there’s always a choice, but there’s always a twist”. It even sold quite well, for a while, and still has a fair spread of fans – all of them happily wyrd, of course.

That book focussed on the personal layer; there was a sequel – Wyrd Allies – which came out in the early 1990s and which explored the interpersonal layer; and there was supposed to be a third in the series, called Wyrd World, which should have looked at the transpersonal layer, but courtesy of the usual life-chaos I never did get round to writing it.

One very good friend, Linda Moore Gentile, continued to badger me for years about this gap in the trilogy, until I literally woke up one morning with the word mythquake ringing through my mind.

There’s a direct analogy between what happens physically when the earth moves beneath our feet, and what happens socially when the fabric of stories that underlies our society and milieu undergoes any kind of change. Hence the metaphor of a mythquake, as a personal or societal equivalent of an earthquake.

The idea worked well, but the writing didn’t, and each time I tried to make it work, I quickly found that I was writing myself into a corner. Trying to force-fit one new idea with an older one probably didn’t help, either. I’ve probably made half a dozen attempts to get restarted, but it’s time to accept that it ain’t gonna happen. I can’t write it: but perhaps someone else can. That’s my hope here, anyway.

So here it is.

(I wrote this particular version of the text to line up with the Wyrd series, so in part it’s still somewhat written for that market, with direct questions and the like – but that’s just detail. I’d much prefer you to look at the ideas behind the surface text, because I believe they’ll be very useful as we head into what are clearly going to be turbulent times.)

The current chapters are as follows:

• Mythquake [this post]
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

The following is the full content of the first chapter, which introduces the idea of ‘mythquakes’. The subsequent posts in the series will describe or summarise some example sources of mythquakes, each of increasing intensity; the final post will discuss the need and the options for ‘mythquake preparedness’.

More after the ‘Read more…’ link here, anyway: the text starts with the ‘Fractured stories’ heading.

Read more…

The headline article in The Independent caught my attention this morning: ‘Head of bomb detector company arrested in fraud investigation‘. “This is an act of terrible betrayal”, wrote the Independent’s defence  journalist Kim Sengupta in a parallel piece – clearly an accurate comment given that the detectors in question failed to detect literally tons of explosives that were used to kill and maim hundreds in Iraq in a single suicide-bomb event, and all too many others like it.

As I read the article, my heart sank still further – though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the ‘bomb-detector’ has proved to be unreliable: there are huge problems on that score, without doubt. But to me the ‘betrayal’ turns out to be much more complex than it seems on the surface – because despite the ‘military-hardware’ packaging of the device in question, and its impressive-looking dials and cables and the rest, the underlying technology of the ‘bomb detector’ is a plain old ordinary everyday dowsing-rod.

Dowsing has been a serious interest of mine for several decades: over the years I’ve written what are now some of the best-known books on dowsing, in fact. Hence – unlike many of the critics – I do have some solid understanding of what’s going on in this case. And because of that longstanding background in the field, I’ll freely admit that I have few fundamental doubts about the use of dowsing in this context, not least because there’s plenty of long-documented, long-proven military practice in dowsing for land-mines and the like (contact the British Society of Dowsers for case-studies in Aden, for example, or the American Society of Dowsers for US use in Vietnam).  Like most people, I would much prefer a predictable and reliable machine to do the job, if there’s one available and it actually does work – which many don’t. But when lives are on the line and you don’t have anything else, a dowsing-rod in experienced hands can work wonders: so at least that part of this sad, messy story is no fraud. Yet that point about ‘experienced hands’ is extremely important: in unskilled hands a dowsing-rod can easily be worse than useless – as those on the receiving-end of those undetected explosives would have discovered to their cost…

(This is getting very long: better put a ‘Read more… link in here.)

Read more…

(Following up on the furore from my previous post – somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of course, but with a serious point.)

After Dave Snowden started accusing everyone – especially me – of ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘psychobabble’ – I began to worry. What if he’s right? What if everything I do is just pseudoscience, caught up in a cult?

(Oops – another long one: better split it here with a ‘Read more…’ link)

Read more…

It started, as these things so often do, with a Tweet on Twitter.

(This has turned out to be an enormously long post – I’d better put a ‘Read more…’ link in here before continuing.)

Read more…

Spent part of last weekend at the annual conference of the British Society of Dowsers – the folks who do water-divining (‘water-witching’ in the US) and similar skills. I’ve worked with them at various times over the past thirty or more years, and as writer I’m probably best known in that field, with some half-dozen books to my name on various aspects of the subject. But although I do know how to do it, and have done some useful work with it in my time, I wouldn’t describe myself as much of a dowser these days: more a theorist or methodologist, really. My real interest there is that it’s one of the best test-cases for identifying the processes by which people learn judgement and awareness – the key components that are common to every skill.

Being an ‘alternative’ field, dowsing does suffer from more than its fair share of kooks and flakey ‘New Age’ types, but at present there’s a much stronger emphasis on practicality, professionalism and discipline – hence my book on Disciplines of Dowsing that I co-authored last year with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, and a set of related articles (see summary [PDF]) that we wrote for the society’s journal, which was the reason why I was at the conference. An interesting bunch.

So for me it was no surprise to find some innovative ideas there – some of which were definitely relevant to other fields, including business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

One which bridged the gap between dowsing and technical world was a lovely Google Earth ‘mashup’ by Hugo Jenks, linking traditional dowsing techniques to current GIS (geographical information systems) with a purpose-built embedded-controller and an ingenious software hack. One of the standard dowsing techniques uses a single horizontal rod with a vertical handle as a mechanical amplifier to highlight small hand-movements. Hugo had made up a version of this with twin sensors to record the deviation either side of straight-ahead (the dowsing ‘signal’); he then fed this in real-time into a laptop which also had a GPS card to record position. A button on the dowsing-rod handle could also be used to trigger a GPS ‘waypoint’ marker to record specific key points of interest. With this array, he was then able to map the signal – again in real-time, if required – onto Google Earth, as a direct trace of response. A simple grey-scale indicated response-intensity, using a mid-grey as neutral, with white and black as the two extremes. The demonstrator video showed a clear mapping of below-surface structures on an archaeological site. Given the increasing use of dowsing in archaeology as a rapid non-destructive survey technique, this looks to be a really useful addendum to that toolkit – especially as this approach enables us to do away with the cumbersome stick-and-string survey-grid typical of many site-surveys, and also allows arbitrary granularity of search. Interesting.

Somewhat earlier I’d had a lengthy conversation with an engineer (whose name I forgot to record, much to my chagrin) about Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model – one of the cornerstones of systems-theory in organisations, that I reworked into a whole-of-enterprise ‘viable services model’ for my book The Service-Oriented Enterprise. This guy had done his Masters degree with Raul Espejo – Stafford Beer’s right-hand man on the Cybersyn whole-of-nation information-system in Chile in the 1970s – so was able to tell me a lot more about that ground-breaking work on organisational complexity.

Finally, an excellent conversation with an architect (Elizabeth Phillips or Catharine Fortlage, I think?) about physical architecture supporting organisational architecture, and the need to link the organisational silos or ‘tribes’:

Design the floor-plan to be like a wandering path through the jungle; each tribe has its own patch, its own personal space, yet there are shared ‘watering-holes’ – neutral spaces owned by everyone and no-one – where anyone from any tribe may meet any other.

This reminded me of some work we did a few years ago with state-police in Australia, where our brief from the executive was to create a metaphoric ‘totem pole’ to “unify the tribes” within the police-force itself. That conversation pointed me to the burolandschaft (literally ‘office-landscape’) movement of the 1950s; then to a really useful 1993 article – “A Vision of the New Workplace” – on the impact of management-theories such as Business Process Reengineering on office-design; and thence to ‘Origins of the Office’, another useful resource on working environments, office paradigms and interplay between management-theory and workspace, embedded in a website by architects Caruso St John for the Arts Council of Britain.

The moral of this story? Innovation and ideas can arise from anywhere, and the most useful ones often arise from unexpected places. As Louis Pasteur once put it, “in the field of research, chance favours the prepared mind”; if we only allow ideas to come from the expected places, we’re limiting our chances!