Tom Graves / Tetradian

Most of the Yabbies novel is made up of story-fragments that in principle could come together in any sequence: we make sense of them in whatever way we choose.

What follows is perhaps my favourite story-fragment, “Mishie’. (A gentle reminder that it’s fiction? ) A bit of context first, though. The fragment takes place perhaps thirty or forty years from now, some decades after one country has shifted from a ‘conventional’ possession-based economy to a responsibility-based (‘no-money’) economy. The latter is that ‘world’ that Mishie inhabits, has grown up in – and wants, very much, to see more of the world. A few terms: ‘vizzie’ is a ‘visitor’, someone from a different country; ‘GA’ and ‘garda’ are police, ‘tucker’ is a standard current Australianism for ‘food’; the language is basic English with a fair few adaptations over time, and a lot of local slang. The reference at the end to ‘that book we did in Year Nine’ is Ursula le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Dispossessed. What happens in the story-fragment is a simple contrast of before, and after…

Over to you after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway: have fun, I hope?

Read more…

All right, I admit it: my novel Yabbies doesn’t say much about real-life yabbies. In fact they only put in one cameo appearance in the whole book:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

The real yabby is a small Australian crayfish, a kind of miniature freshwater lobster. They’re common all over Australia, particularly in the south-east, and can frequently be found burrowing into the sides of a farm dam – hence their Latin name cherax destructor. They seem to come in all kinds of colours, from muddy brown to red to white to a really startling blue, such as this fairly large one at something close to actual size:

Yet what’s the connection to the book? Uh.. not much, to be honest. What’s now come out as the book first started out more than a dozen years ago as an idea about sustainability: namely, that we won’t be able to achieve any kind of sustainable economy unless we have a system of law that supports it – which we certainly don’t have at present. The working-title for the project was ‘Yet Another Book Idea’ – hence the acronym YABI. Which had a nice ring to it, and hence kind of stayed in the mind as ‘Yabbies’. Which is what the project has been called ever since. A bit unfair on real yabbies, and yabby-farmers and the like, perhaps, but there ’tis.

The idea of story-fragments that could assembled in any order came on quite early in project – in fact the first form in which it surfaced was as an interactive website in which people could make up their own story and add their own story-fragments to build a richer picture of the YABI ‘world’. (This was in the days before social-media, so it never really went anywhere: perhaps it might be worth-while having another go at recreating that website somewhen soon?) Later on, I tried doing it as a screenplay: it worked quite well as a story, but with so many characters in so many cameos it would almost certainly be too complicated an expensive to produce as a conventional film-type story. (But it might work well with current transmedia – another avenue to explore, perhaps.) All sorts of other frames I’ve tried out over the years: one version had technical notes attached to each story-fragment, another split it into separate story-streams for distinct audiences, and so on. But this version will do for now? – enough to get the story-ideas out there, anyway.

Its real aim, I guess, is to get some pretty challenging ideas out there in a more palatable form – hence packaging it as fiction. The ideas behind it, though, are not fiction at all: they’re real issues that somehow, collectively, we must all face, and definitely sooner rather than later. Make of it what you will, perhaps?

And the yabbies themselves? Yes, they’re strange little creatures, “all in their own world at the bottom of the dam”. Feeding on whatever falls down from the surface, making sense as best they can. Linking that across to my more usual ‘world’ of enterprise-architectures and the like, that’s kind of what we do every day, isn’t it? So I kind of like yabbies as a metaphor for ourselves…

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

One of the practical problems of the innovator’s lifestyle is that, by definition, we tend to work a long way away (metaphorically speaking) from the mainstream. It’s true that there are some real advantages to playing the Outsider role – for example, it’s one of the few ways to bypass the ‘groupthink’ trap. Yet the catch is that there’s often real barriers between creating a new idea and its subsequent adoption in the mainstream – and that matters a lot, not least because mainstream adoption is also the point where we actually get paid for all that previous development-effort…

Classically, this follows the ‘diffusion of innovations‘ pattern described by Everett Rogers and others:

• Innovators – venturesome, educated, multiple info sources;
• Early adopters – social leaders, popular, educated;
• Early majority – deliberate, many informal social contacts;
• Late majority – skeptical, traditional, lower socio-economic status;
• Laggards – neighbours and friends are main info sources, fear of debt.

But the catch, as documented by Geoffrey Moore in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, is that there’s that chasm of (lack of) understanding that sits somewhere in the ‘early adopters’ range, blocking the path between innovation and the mainstream – the gap between the people who’ll try anything new, and the people who won’t. Something we need to explore…

Read more…

Juxtaposition of two different themes this morning.

One was a Tweet that caught my attention:

RT @oscarberg: RT @hnauheimer: When leadership takes risk and opens space, vision emerges and people come together in dialogue. Then, things take care of themselves.

The other was how well this dovetailed with what happened yesterday in this town where I’m working at the moment, Tepoztlan in central Mexico. (I’ll admit my Spanish is best described as rudimentary, so I’ll have to describe the background as I understand it, which may be some distance from the actual detail.)

In some ways this town is a spiritual heart for Mexico. (If you’re British, think of a combination of King Arthur and Glastonbury; if you’re American, perhaps the Alamo and Sedona combined; for Australians, think of the Eureka Stockade with Nimbin.) It’s a stunning place, ringed all round by vertical cliffs, on one of which stands the Tepozteco pyramid, clear air, birdsong, hummingbirds darting around (I’ve just been watching one as I wrote this). It’s also little more than an hour’s drive or bus-ride from the sprawling smog of Mexico City. So, as can be imagined, it’s a key tourist town: and, in turn, tourism is a key part of its economy, as city-folk swarm up here on the weekends for the market and the ‘traditional’ Mexican atmosphere – especially on this weekend, the key sort-of-religious festival of Dia del Muerte, the Day of the Dead, that actually lasts for several days and is assigned its own long public holiday.

All of which should, I hope, explain why it’s definitely non-trivial that the town was all but blocked off yesterday – by the townsfolk themselves.

Two separate but related concerns seem to have been the trigger. The taxis are a lifeline here, omnipresent, rattling round the cobbled backstreets, ferrying the elderly, the young and just about everyone and everything else – including my colleague’s drum-kit – up and down the steep hills of the town. Yet recently two taxi-drivers have been murdered – I don’t know how or why, though perhaps by small-time narcos. (Not it seems, by the serious big-time narcos, who apparently regard such attacks against ‘civilians’ as anathema.) The other trigger was the abduction of a young girl: just in time, the perpetrator was caught in the act near a cemetery by a funeral party, who dealt out their own rough justice. Yet in each of these cases, I was told, the police had done nothing: not interested.

Policing here is a political hot-potato, to say the least. There’d been a reshuffle a couple of years back – perhaps as part of the government’s ‘war against drugs’? – and a new police-chief imposed from outside. Whatever the cause, the reputation of the police amongst the local populace had been falling steadily ever since – and now it hit rock-bottom, with a bang.

So as in that Tweet above, “When leadership takes risk and opens space, vision emerges and people come together in dialogue. Then, things take care of themselves.” And yes, they certainly did.

Somewhat before midday yesterday, on what would probably have been the busiest tourist weekend of the year, all of the streets into and out of the centre of the town were suddenly blocked by taxis. No-one could get in by car, and no-one could get out – entrapping a few annoyed tourists in the resultant mess (and also a woman in labour, which was not such a good idea…). The usually-thronging main market-space was almost empty; instead, there was a huge crowd outside the town hall, audibly angry. Off to one side, I saw a couple of people in bright yellow uniform, who turned out to be paramedics; also with them was a member of the ‘Policia Preventiva’ with an assault rifle, which was not the worry that it sounds because I’d seen him often around town on other days, including giving first aid to an elderly woman who’d fallen in the market, with the rifle at that time slung awkwardly across his back. Other than that, there were no police to be seen: which was probably wise, as they were the all-too-overt focus of the townsfolks’ anger.

The crowd demanded the immediate resignation of the police-chief: they got it. They presented a list of ten other police officers that they demanded should be fired at once: they got that promise too. They also got the promise that the police would be responsible to the people of the town – not the other way round – and that the people themselves would determine the priorities of the police. But the promise alone was not enough: they didn’t move from in front of the town hall until, some four or five hours later, they not only had the official order in writing from the mayor, but that the mayor had signed it in front of them as well.

As my colleague here put it, “Like most places, most of the time people will keep their heads down and ignore the everyday injustices, out of fear perhaps, ‘nothing to do with me’. But underneath that surface indifference is real strength, real commitment: so when they do reach that point of ‘enough is enough’, this town will move.” A bit like that well-known quote by Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Yet here this wasn’t “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens”: this was almost the entire town. Interesting indeed…

One of the Tweets last week was a pointer to a post by Andrew Johnston of Questa Computing, somewhen back in June this year, on his Agile Architect blog, titled ‘Architects: Masters of Order and Unorder?‘.

For enterprise-architects, it’s well worth a look: quite a good summary of how standard Cynefin concepts – such as Cynthia Kurtz’s distinction between ‘order and ‘unorder’ – can be used in an enterprise-architecture context. I remembered that I’d read it when it first came out, so I scrolled down to see if there were any comments that had been added since then.

There were. The first was a typically astute question by Richard Veryard, asking for practical examples, because “it would be good to have some practical examples of how Cynefin makes a real difference to what architects can achieve” – which is something that we do all need. The second comment was a reply from Andrew, in essence saying ‘yes, we do have examples, please watch this space’. But the third comment, again from Andrew, a couple of weeks later, and with no apparent connection to anything anyone else had said, was this:

My paper is a straightforward application and extension of Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz’s 2004 work, and properly credits that work. Dave has indicated that he is happy with this.

Tom Graves has recently referred to this paper, I believe mainly as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave. Tom has not contacted me in any way, or sought my permission to re-use the diagrams in his article. I do not in any way endorse his views, or have any relationship to this derivative work.

I will admit that I did what just about anyone else would do under these circumstances: I blinked. Followed by a “Wha…? – where the heck did that come from?” – because it frankly makes no sense at all.

Looking back through my weblog, I can’t find a post of mine from that period that references Johnston’s paper. I do remember reTweeting someone’s link to it, though. I haven’t found any reference of mine to that specific diagram – i.e. “as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave” – and Tweets don’t carry graphics, of course. So I really don’t know what this frankly bizarre rant of Johnston’s is all about… I’ve no idea what’s going on there.

I posted a reply-comment, which duly went into the “Your comment is awaiting moderation” state, from which it has never emerged: I’ll have to assume that Andrew deleted it. Which is disappointing, but there ’tis: he’s entitled to do so if he wishes. Yet in the interests of setting the record straight, this is the comment that would have appeared there if he had allowed it.

Andrew: re: “Tom Graves has recently referred to this paper, I believe mainly as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave.”

I referred to this paper because I thought it was good work. The assertion that I referred to this paper “mainly as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave” is both insulting and absurd – not least because the Cynefin diagram is explicitly in the public domain anyway (see Snowden’s licensing notice on the Wikipedia page on Cynefin).

In the past I have done very extensive work on ‘the Cynefin categorisation’, in particular on attempting to integrate the Chaotic domain, which is barely addressed in Snowden’s work (though it is addressed in some depth in Kurtz’s more recent work). The methods and approaches I used in that work are most certainly not ‘derivative’ – a fact which seems to be the main source of Snowden’s very public ire (including an extraordinary out-of-context misuse of two of my diagrams in his ‘History of Cynefin’, seemingly for the sole purpose of mockery, and certainly without any apparent understanding of their proper context or use). It is certainly true that most of my work around ‘the Cynefin categorisation’ has a different practical and theoretical base – for example, Snowden concentrates on complexity-science, whereas my work leverages iterative/recursive techniques from the futures disciplines (such as Causal layered analysis) and enterprise-architectures (such as TOGAF ADM, as also extended beyond IT). At Snowden’s request, I have explicitly and publicly separated my work from his, although you might note that Kurtz does explicitly acknowledge some of my ideas and material in her current work on ‘Confluence’.

Richard Veryard above asks “it would be good to have some practical examples of how Cynefin makes a real difference to what architects can achieve”, to which you replied “Yes, I do have some real, current examples where complexity is forcing me to say to the client ‘you can’t analyse this’: watch out for a follow-on ‘examples’ piece sometime soon”. However, it is now three months later: would you give us a timeline as to when you publish these examples? (In the meantime, if anyone is interested, there are many examples of real-life usages of a ‘Cynefin-like categorisation’ linked to proven enterprise-architecture methodologies available in my books – see TetradianBooks – and on my weblog.)

I do acknowledge that Snowden and I have disagreed strongly in the past over our significantly different approaches to theory and practice in the ‘unorder’ space, and I appreciate that people may sometimes choose to ‘take sides’ in such cases of ‘conflict of ideas’. However, ‘taking sides’ does not actually further the progress in the field. You might also note that Snowden’s work is not designed to work directly with and in enterprise-architectures, whereas mine is. In that sense, might I request that you at least consider my work properly in its proper context, rather than dismissing it outright on the say-so of someone from a largely unrelated field of enquiry?

If I were of a more paranoid frame of mind, I could almost believe that someone might grant permission to use their material only on condition that specific other people and their work are to be publicly denigrated. There are plenty of examples of that happening throughout the history of science and elsewhere, after all, where jealousy or fear takes precedence over honesty or sense. Fortunately I’m not that paranoid: yet it would be disappointing – to say the least – if that were to turn out to be so in this case, wouldn’t it?

Oh well.

Over on the long-running LinkedIn thread about enterprise-architecture as a bridge between strategy and execution, there was a bit of discussion about trusted advisors and a potential role for Pat Ferdinandi‘s parrot (Scarlet – the star of Pat’s enterprise-architecture how-to book Parrotology). In other words, we’re back on the always-fraught theme of where – if anywhere – is the proper place in the organisation for enterprise-architects.

Most of the conventional EA frameworks (TOGAF, FEAF, Gartner, CapGemini and the like) are all quite strongly IT-centric, and hence tend to place the EA role as either a direct or indirect report of the CIO (Chief Information Officer). But as EA becomes more business-oriented, as a discipline, and begins to break out of the IT box, it’s clear that that reporting-relationship wouldn’t really work any more: the role needs to have a wider scope. So, where does it fit?

Given the hierarchical nature of so many organisations, it strikes me that there’s a rather nice analogy here with a mediaeval court.

There’s the King, or perhaps the Queen (the CEO): the one at the top of the tree, the one who makes all the final decisions. (‘Execution’ can have a rather different meaning here than the one we’re used to these days in business… )

The monarch is surrounded by an array of courtiers, all jostling for position.

Some of them are just sycophants, and most of us would get sick of them quite quickly: but they’ll find some way to hang around, whether they’re wanted or not. (Yes, we find plenty of those in present-day organisations too, unfortunately… )

Some of them are various officials (aka managers) of varying rank, pushing and shoving to get heard, to get their specific issues addressed, their achievements noticed, their bonus, their reward, their promotion. They’ll drag us down right into the dust and the detail if we’re not very careful indeed.

There are the priests and the generals and the judges (aka governance and audit), and the ambassadors from other realms (aka government, senior lobbyists, potential partners). They probably need more attention than we might like, but they do indeed matter.

Then there are the monarch’s advisors: wise men and women all (the specialists and subject-matter experts). Very senior, of course, all wearing fine robes and raiments. Sometimes nodding sagely, more often arguing intensely with each other – sometimes so much so that they fail to notice the monarch’s original question.

And then, to put it bluntly, there’s the mob. Hoi polloi, ‘below the salt’, kept well apart from ‘the persons of quality’, their opinion and experience is usually deemed not to matter not at all – even though they’re often the only ones who know what’s really going on. Which is an interesting problem, and one that’s often reflected in present-day corporations, too…

Yet there’s one other person that we’ve probably missed, so visible that he’s almost invisible: the court-jester. Unlike all those advisors, he’s not a specialist of anything, really: he’s a generalist, such that some might dismiss him as ‘a jack of all trades and master of none’. And again unlike those advisors, there’s often only the one jester – yet he’s also the one that the monarch may listen to most of all.

The jester has no real pride: he’ll talk with anyone – which means that he can find information from everywhere, including those firmly-forbidden, carefully-forgotten places. He can make a joke out of anything, see the mythquake in the making; anarchic, unexpected, sideways from the predictable paradigm, or the suspect certainties of the usual worldview – and yet every jest has its bite, its deeper contrast, its deeper meaning. It may not be comfortable for the monarch, and even less so for the advisors – but often the jester is the only one who will truly speak the truth.

Seems to me sometimes that that’s the real role of the enterprise-architect: the confusing court-jester, one of those strange ones who links everything to everything else, talks with everyone, coordinates, connects across the whole enterprise.

So bring on the enterprise-architects, as the quiet clowns of the corporation – because they’re often the only ones who make sense.

[Update] One of the items I wrote this post for, and then promptly forgot, was this quote from the Wikipedia page on Morris dance, about the role of the jester or ‘fool’:

Many sides [troupes] have one or more fools. A fool will usually be extravagantly dressed, and communicate directly with the audience in speech or mime. The fool will often dance around and even through a dance without appearing really to be a part of it, but it takes a talented dancer to pull off such fooling while actually adding to and not distracting from the main dance set.

The Morris fool will usually be the best dancer by far in the side – yet to many people watching, he won’t appear to to be much of a dancer at all. It’s also a teaching role: I’ve seen a Morris fool gently highlight yet brilliantly parody every one of the mistakes of each of the other dancers, whilst weaving in and out and through the rest of the dance in seemingly-drunken abandon. (Given that these are often stick-dances, each dancer wildly wielding a thick cudgel perhaps two or three feet long, that’s not a task for the faint-hearted. ) The parallel with much of enterprise-architecture should be clear: we weave in and out of the dance of change, connecting everyone, keeping everything moving, keeping everything pointing towards the overall vision. Which in the Morris-dancers’ case would usually be the vision of a very large jug of ale, together with a dance in which no-one’s actually been bashed over the head with a club… most enterprise-architecture won’t offer quite the same level of excitement, but close at times, perhaps?

Whilst working on a previous post on rights and responsibilities, I needed to hunt out the original of a phrase attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, that “motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a social fiction”. A quick search brought me to Jone Johnston Lewis’ ‘Women’s History‘ site, which showed me that the correct quote is “mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention”. What I’d written was close enough, I guess – especially as I was only paraphrasing it anyway.

But what then caught my eye was this longer quote:

The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist — a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the most engrossing, delightful care of young children — a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person.

The anthropologist’s eye indeed – perceptive, insightful, yet also respectful of ‘the Other’. Almost the exact antithesis, in fact, of so many of the self-styled advocates of ‘gender-liberation’ that I’ve had the misfortune to deal with for most of my adult life. Where Margaret Mead had argued that the core principle would have to be that “every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man”, instead far too many feminists and self-styled ‘pro-feminist’ men both then and since have patently believed that the only way to ‘liberate’ a woman was to enslave a man – and preferably via as much pain and prejudice as was practicably possible. In short, their method for reducing gender-violence was to increase it as much as they could: and then, when that didn’t work – because it doesn’t, and can’t – keep on ratchetting up the pain in the relentless pursuit of Other-blame.

This mistake affects different countries in different ways. Australia is perhaps one of the worst: for example, for the first ten years that I was there, the Melbourne newspaper The Age never published a single piece that was overtly respectful of men as a gender; and for the next decade, although such items did occasionally appear, they would each invariably be juxtaposed with another much larger article stridently reaffirming the ‘truth’ of the inherent evils of men. As I discovered whilst I was helping two of my lesbian friends recover after they’d ended their relationship in a knife-fight, the domestic-violence agencies defined violence as inherently ‘male’: there was no support available for lesbians (unless they blamed a man – my friends didn’t and wouldn’t, and were firmly told to go away because they were ‘rocking the boat’…!), and certainly no help for any man at all – even though the unlaundered hard-data showed that men were (and still are) the majority of domestic-violence victims in that country. And in my home state it was (and I believe still is) not merely a dismissable but criminal offence for a male primary-school teacher to comfort a crying child. All of this in the name of so-called ‘gender equality’…

Again in Australia, it was clear that many if not most of the ‘pro-feminist’ men I came across were not pro-women at all – in fact far from it, in several cases I personally knew. Instead, they were either lost in a vaguely-Marxist delusion that “it is impossible for one to have more without others having less” – and hence attacked men-as-a-gender (or all men other than themselves and their co-religionists, to be precise) under the mistaken belief that this would somehow automatically make things better for women (it doesn’t) – or else were still obsessively trying to hurt men-in-general as ‘payback’ for childhood hurts from other boys (which is a seriously dangerous form of self-dishonesty). It’s true that I did meet a few ‘pro-feminist’ men who genuinely were pro-women – but in every case they understood exactly Mead’s point that to be ‘pro-women’ we must also be ‘pro-men’. The blunt fact is that the only way that works is to create a frame in which everyone wins – otherwise everyone loses.

It’s not much better in Britain – there’s still the same massive dishonesty about domestic-violence, for example. In so many ‘Western’ countries, the main result of so-called ‘equal opportunity’ in employment has been to re-entrap women back in the same paid-workforce mess as men – a feminist tragedy of epic proportions, given that the main aim of the women’s movement for much of the previous century was to get women out of the paid-workforce, and free up at least some part of the community to repair the ongoing damage created the myopic self-centredness of the ‘money-economy’. (The real need, then and now, is to challenge the inanity and insanity of that economic model – not merely argue about who should or should not have the ‘right’ to not be enslaved in it!)

The Latin countries – for all their complexity and chaos – seem somehow to have a much better understanding of what gender-equality really means in practice, and to me seem much more human overall. In Portugal, for example, it was a huge relief to find it was considered normal for me to play mime-games and visual jokes with small children in their family and social settings; by contrast, back in Australia it was frequently assumed that, as a middle-aged man, I must be some kind of dangerous sexual-pervert if I merely smiled at a child in the street. Which hurts, a lot, that aggressive, pointless, baseless “exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in … the most engrossing, delightful care of young children”: a human, natural smile is merely an expression of the human need to be in and part of – rather than enforced apart from – the society that I’m in. In other words, as Mead put it, ”a man … who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person”.

The sad tragedy is that so much of feminism started out from a drive towards a true equality, but somehow lost its way in a paediarchal flight into a blame-filled fantasy, an increasingly-desperate addiction to ‘Other-blame’ as a means to evade responsibility in any form. Even now, forty or fifty years later, so much of it is still rampantly and obsessively anti-male, even rabidly sexist at times in the worst possible way. Yet it doesn’t work: and the reason why it doesn’t work is that too many feminists have forgotten the simple fact that, just like women, men are human too. Equality cannot truly exist for anyone unless all of us are considered equally human – with all that that implies.

Margaret Mead never forgot that fact: it’s one of the reason I value her work and life so much – and likewise those other rare, amazing and courageous women alongside whom it’s sometimes been my great privilege to work. Yet what strikes me most about Mead, I suppose, is her simple humanity:

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

Contrast that brief sentence, perhaps, with Margaret Thatcher’s inane assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. I don’t think anyone but Mead could have described the human condition and the true nature of society any better or more poignantly than that.

Interesting insights indeed.

Any competent observer of economics would acknowledge that the money-based model on which most current economics is based is in deep trouble right now: somewhere between seriously-dysfunctional and completely broken. Many of the purported key-metrics such as GDP and GNP don’t really tell us anything useful at all about the actual functioning of the economy: all they describe, really, is the potential tax-base, in monetary terms – and the distortions that this introduces into the economic picture are the direct cause of many economic problems. Banking and, especially, finance have moved so far from their functional roots that they’re now little more than engines for embezzlement on an almost unimaginable scale. And the preferred ‘solution’ to the fact that many, many things cannot be meaningfully described in monetary terms is simply to declare that such things do not exist or, if they do, they cannot conceivably matter within the overall economy.

(I won’t give links for any of those assertions above: we’d be here all day. They’re all well-known and long-proven problems, as a few hours’ worth of careful web-searches will demonstrate all too clearly. Just take it as read for the moment that that’s so, because the details as such aren’t that relevant right here.)

Given that there’s a perceived problem with the ‘money-economy’, what can we do about it? Well, the usual ‘solution’ – and I use that term advisedly – is to rush out and devise some form of alternative-currency. I’ve seen dozens of these so far, and apparently there are actually thousands of these projects, across a whole spectrum from simple barter to community-based currencies to time-based currencies. But they all have one thing in common: they won’t work.

Not just ‘won’t work’: they actually can’t work. They can’t solve the problems that we face.

No form of currency will satisfy all of the requirements for managing an economy, without requiring distortions to the economy itself that will render that economy non-viable or non-sustainable, especially over the longer term.

And there’s no way round that fact.

My apologies if that fact offends anyone, but it is indeed a fact. And refusing to face that fact is not going to help anyone. Sorry.

Read more…

Self-doubt.

It can be a real killer – in many different senses. A killer of ideas. Of motivation. Of hope, or joy. In extreme cases, even of people themselves.

For once, I’m very glad to say, it’s not me that’s in the throes of self-doubt here. But I’ve been watching several other colleagues go through it this week, in several different domains: narrative-enquiry, archaeology and enterprise-architecture, to name just a few of their respective work-contexts.

Not fun at all, for any of them. Not easy to help them, either: almost by definition, self-doubt is a very personal struggle…

Yet in some ways it seems an oddly necessary stage in the development of new ideas, or whatever: in the labyrinth, it’s the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ (also known as the ‘”Oh, sod it…” point’ ), where we either have to face the darkness or throw away everything that we’ve gained.

It’s called the ‘dark night’ for a very good reason, because it can be real dark in there, real lonely… Oftentimes in ideas-development we’re assailed by others’ doubts, others’ over-certainties, but here it’s our own doubts that assail us:

• Is this idea any good?
• Will it ever be useful?
• Will it ever make sense to anyone else?
• Will it ever make sense to me?
• Am I just wasting everyone’s time with this?
• Am I just wasting my time with this?
• Am I just a waste of time?

…at which point it tends to go darker still… Yes, not fun…

What’s interesting here is that those who never have to face this space – or who shy away from it – are unlikely to ever create anything new. The ‘best’ that they can do is prevent others from creating anything, developing anything – a ‘skill’ that’s of questionable value in the broader scheme of things, perhaps?

So yes, sure, there are plenty of people who are always certain of themselves (or who are careful, perhaps, never to show their uncertainty in public…). Yet in many ways that certainty can perhaps be best understood as a peculiar kind of cowardice, because it takes real courage to face the unknown; it takes real courage to face the dark pain of self-doubt, and keep going through to the other side.

One way to deal with those doubts is to note that often it’s not about us at all: it’s about the idea that we’re working on, trying to find some means to express that idea in a meaningful way. What the labyrinth-model tells us is that that ‘dark night’ is a normal part of the process – an unavoidable stage that we must pass through in order to bring that idea to fruition. The way to break out of the ‘dark night’ is to care for the idea for its own sake – not for what it might bring us. The more we focus on ourselves in the ‘dark night’, the longer we’ll be stuck there.

Self-doubt is an occupational hazard for anyone creating anything new, whether for ourselves alone – such as in development of new understanding, or a new skill – or to be shared with others – such as a new product or process. For those of us whose work revolves around innovation, chronic self-doubt is often our common condition. It’s often made worse by a concomitant feeling that we’re ‘the Outsider’ – yet that ‘Outsider’ is exactly what we are whenever we’re developing something new. But that’s the nature of the work: painful as it is, there’s nothing wrong with self-doubt – in fact if we don’t experience self-doubt in this kind of work, that’s when the alarm-bells should sound.

What helps most, perhaps, is knowing that everyone who creates anything will suffer the same pangs, the same pain, the same inner struggles against a seemingly all-pervasive inner panic. That’s why and where a supportive peer-group will help so much: not just with whom to explore and test ideas, but to remind us that we’re not alone in this.

Self-doubt is hard; yet self-doubt is also good. We need self-doubt in order to create well. When the doubt hits hard again – as it always does, from time to time – it can help a lot to remember this!

[Update: a friend reminded me about Derek Sivers' great TED video, Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy, which seems particularly pertinent here. (The full transcript is on that link, too: well worth reading.) The 'lone nut' who started dancing on the hill-slope probably suffered a few pangs of self-doubt (if perhaps masked for a while by a sufficient overload of alcohol? ) - but kept on dancing anyway, for the joy of the dance itself. Sometimes - as in this example - we gain a 'first follower' who helps us past the self-doubt, sometimes even moving on, as here, to a landslide of response; but sometimes it doesn't - sometimes (often?) there's no response at all. Either way is fine, in the larger scheme of  things: after all, once the dance ends, we're right back where we started (though perhaps a little happier, we'd hope? ). And since either way is fine, self-doubt is fine too - it's a necessary part of doing anything in depth, doing anything worthwhile. Rather than trying to fight against self-doubt, learning to work with it will certainly prove more useful - and probably less painful, too. Enjoy the dance! ]