BACKGROUND NOTES
Opportunities for Entrepreneurs in a Wisdom Age World
Although scientists, academics and the R&D departments of big corporations are creating new knowledge at an exponential rate, we planetary citizens are increasingly frustrated by the slow speed at which we collectively deal with the world’s most wicked problems.
There is now an expectation we must learn to live more lightly on the planet, to reduce our impact on other species, to care more for our fellow citizens and to resolve the issues that divide us. To act more wisely.
John Findlay and Lawrence will present a workshop to explore the business opportunities for entrepreneurs from the emerging Wisdom Age world.
John and Lawrence will offer up evidence via a new theory of human activity – Interactivity theory – that there is a pattern to human and technological development which predicts that the next wave of change is based on creation of jobs and tools for “the wise application of knowledge”, and that the current chaos in world markets is a transition to this new kind of order.
Interactivity Theory is an amalgam of complexity theory and Cultural Historical Activity Theory, which has a lineage back to the famed Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and eminent brain scientist, A.R. Luria. The theory shows that humans and brains are symbiotic and co-develop the other according to a mathematical pattern known as the Feigenbaum number. And Wisdom is at the top of the data hierarchy used by computer programmer to design systems, but which is often overlooked because, Wisdom is a hard category to understand.
Activity > Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom
Wise application of knowledge” jobs are blossoming. Here are some new-to-the-world careers advertised in November 2009. Corporate governance work such as Corporate Ethics Officer, Certified Ethical Hacker and Business Continuity Managers. “Green collar” wisdom jobs such as Environment Compliance Consultant, Energy Efficiency Engineers, Renewable Energy Coordinators and Ecological Footprint
Accountants.
The big questions are what are the new products and services that “Wisdom Age” entrepreneurs will pioneer, what are their features and market prospects, and what comes after that?
References
Findlay, J. (2009). Our Feigenbaum brains. Wingwams: A collection of comments about seemingly useless objects, activities and ideas and the questions they provoke. Explored through the lens of Interactivity Theory. Retrieved, 13 November 2009 from http://wingwams.blogspot.com/2009/09/our-feigenbaum-minds.html
Christiansen, M.H., & Chater, N. (2007). Language as shaped by the brain. SFI Working Paper, Retrieved April 13, 2008 from the Santa Fe Institute website, http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/workingpapers/07-01-001.pdf
John Findlay
John Findlay, is a director of Zing that develops decision and learning processes and makes electronic meetings systems and team creativity tools to help people and organizations quickly and easily adapt to accelerating change. He lives in Sydney, Australia but is away from home for seven months of the year working with the 130 boutique consultancy firms in 22 countries around the world that are partners in the Zing network.
John is a skilled facilitator and strategy consultant with over 30 years experience in futures forecasting, organization transformation, politics, community consultation, infrastructure and new business development. He has undertaken many large-scale community wide change programs including several city and industry-wide programs. In the 1980s and 1990s he was one of Australia’s leading organization change consultants in the coal, construction, gaming, hotel, local government, telecommunications and water sectors.
He also leads the Maverick & Boutique consultancy group, a network of 150 consultants in 22 countries who use the Zing team meeting and learning system as part of their consulting practice.
John is a Ph.D. from the School of Economics at Wollongong University and was recently appointed a Visiting Senior Fellow. His doctoral dissertation presents a new model of learning based on the idea that cultural and cognitive change occurs according to the laws of complexity through a symbiotic partnership between tools and the brain. He has an MBA from Southern Cross University, where he completed a research thesis that explored how organizations can learn faster using teamwork technologies. His other research interests include large-scale cultural change, group development, discourse models, multiplayer games, improvisation, transformational learning and the automation and democratization of high-level thinking and relating skills.
John has written and published numerous team learning, decision making and meeting titles including Dreams, Memes & Themes, 50 meetings to transform organizations, Children Matter, a whole of community approach to child development, Relating Well, 100 workshops for young people to explore growing up and Improv+zing, which integrates improvisation with higher level thinking skills. He is currently writing a novel, Imaginary Friends, in collaboration with a New York colleague, and two business books, Becoming Brilliant and Glowing Together due for publication in 2010.
Innovation blog: wingwams.blogspot.com
Education blog: learninginteams.blogspot.com
Consulting network blog: maverickandboutique.blogspot.com
TED Talks blog: colorfulconversations.blogspot.com
Zing website: anyzing.com
School education website: learninginteams.com
Trial software download: anyzing.com/DreamsMemesThemes
Lawrence Dayan
Lawrence Dayan is an investor in new opportunities that cross the boundaries between the arts, particularly the world of entertainment, the technological, the spiritual and business.
After a 20 year career in the apparel industry, which involved licensing popular movie and TV icons for unique clothing lines, Lawrence is re-investing the capital from the sale of his two businesses in “thought leader” edutainment.
He works with Zing as a packager of new talent, identifying the business opportunities, designing the “product”, developing the business model, creating the website and collateral and marketing the new approach through non-traditional channels.
Current projects include packaging up fun workshops for women as a new edutainment sales method for a direct sales cosmetics company, productizing a business book as a series of business decision methods for the health care and not-for profit sector managers who need to understand business methods but do not have the time or need to study for a business degree, and a leadership game for the military that teaches “collective knowledge creation”, “sensemaking” and “the wise application of knowledge”.
He is on the look-out for authors, academics, business leaders, gurus and entertainers with a thinking, learning or decision method that can be packaged up and licensed to others.
Lawrence is regarded as a master salesman, not only of products but also of ideas. He is the epitome of the Wisdom Age entrepreneur, who can bridge creativity and flair with practical ethics, as well as the ability to integrate worlds that previously were separate. He is a master of the art of improvisation and is currently developing his skills as a stand-up comedian. He volunteers for organizations in the not-for-profit sector and serves as the executive director of the private day school his children attend. He is an alumnus of the City University of New York.
Where did my old job go?
Ever wonder where your old job went? And why you can’t get a new job with the same skill set? And you have to go back to college to learn new stuff at 30, 40 or 50.
It’ not entirely the fault of Wall Street as Michael Moore suggests in his latest movie, Capitalism: A love story.
Sure, many companies outsourced jobs to Mexico and India, and the banking sector probably wiped out millions of jobs by scaring the daylights of each other so no one was willing to lend any money for anything anymore. And like Moore said, they placed bets on top of bets using our money, until “values” soared 40% above the trend-line. So they created a recession on the back of a fake boom.
But the underlying cause is mostly YOU and ME. And the other 6,000 million people on planet earth who constantly choose to purchase new fangled gadgets and enjoy enhanced experiences like go-anywhere tourism, instant cuisine experiences from every corner of the globe, wireless commuting, multi-channel entertainment from your desktop and interactive everything.
All the instant personalized services we enjoy come at a high cost. The much simpler, easier to perform job you used to have compared to the ones you can’t apply for any more are being designed into new technology that automates what you used to do.
Remember the Luddites, the British textile workers who protested against the advent of looms that automated their jobs as craftsmen in the early 19th Century. Or the farmers who flocked to the cities whose jobs were displaced by the tractor and the combine harvester at the start of the 18th Century. Or the acres of secretaries and typists whose work was wiped out by a whole bunch of do-it-yourself tools during the 1970s and 1980s. The work we now do using the computer, the photocopier and software such as word processing, spread sheets, databases presentation or artistic tools which are such an important part of all over lives used to someone’s job.
In between paradigms our jobs seems relatively safe as incremental changes are made to our tools. But every so often comes a new wave of technology, which not only sweeps aside the jobs of the previous paradigm, but also further automates the work of earlier eras. Each new technology is a new combination of several earlier fields that eventually displaces both the ancestor tools in all of those fields and the expert skills needed to use them.
The new methods and technologies are hidden under the hood. The extra knowledge is built into the way they make the product or deliver the service, with fewer steps, using less or smarter materials, or knowledge in the form of circuits and mechanisms.
Much of our hedonism is made possible by a rapidly growing number of bright sparks from a country you thought was under-developed and a city whose name you can’t spell. These kids possess a masters or doctoral degree or technical qualification in a field you have never heard about before. Our situation in the West is becoming more precarious economically simply because our kids are choosing easier subjects instead of the science and maths needed for this kind of work, and we are giving these jobs away to kids in China and India who are prepared to do the hard yards.
And although some of the places we thought were under-developed and may have religious and cultural rules that frighten the daylights out of the more liberal-minded citizens amongst us, and although their neighbors may live constantly with the fear of death from diseases the West mostly eradicated a century ago and the microbe infested water they have no choice but to drink, or may die from the fighting over some remote drought-ridden sandy/rocky wasteland for some obscure political reason. Many have TV, mobile phones, the Internet, cars and the latest wireless technology just like we do.
The signs of an emerging Wisdom Age are already apparent. New jobs are being created daily to more wisely apply our knowledge to deal with climate change, energy production and consumption, the safety of foods and pharmaceuticals, fresh water and a good lifestyle for all.
It’s no wonder we see the tools as both our salvation and the cause of our existential angst. Here’s a few emerging fields to think about. Nano-technology, bio-materials, systems theory, complexity theory, bio-mimicry, cybernetics, expert systems, robotics, knowledge creation systems, neuroscience, machine-machine communication, spiritual and ethical reasoning.
So here is a workshop to explore what might be emerging?
1. What could we mean by the “wise application of knowledge” and what this could help us do?
2. How could we use “old knowledge” more wisely, or be sure the “new knowledge” we are creating is really useful or reliable?
3. Brainstorm a list of emerging fields and how they could help humans work and learn faster, smarter or more wisely. e.g. neuroscience – design new methods to help people make better decisions faster and more reliably with greater trust between them.
4. Describe a new product/service that could be created by combining one or more of these fields with either each other or an existing technology. Nano-technology, bio-materials, systems theory, complexity theory, bio-mimicry, cybernetics, expert systems, robotics, knowledge creation systems, neuroscience, machine-machine communication, spiritual and ethical reasoning and serve our needs for the “wise application” of knowledge.
5. Brainstorm a list of new tools, technologies and methods that you might like for to support what you want to do in a “wise application of knowledge” world.
6. Brainstorm a list of new jobs/careers that you might want for yourself or your children in a “wise application of knowledge” world.
7. Thinking about earlier job and tool paradigms, how could “wise application of knowledge” tools further enhance tools used in hunter-gathering, agriculture, manufacturing, information and knowledge work.
8. What’s a project you should start today to reinvent your products or services or business, community or government agency for a Wisdom Age world? (5 word snazzy title, 25 word description).
Boardroom and battlefield “wisdom workers”
There are some uncanny parallels between the skills we now require from chief executives and the modern soldier. In a sense, both are wisdom workers.
The CEOs job is hear all the information coming in from all the parts of the organization and work out how all the bits of the jigsaw fit together. Then to act wisely and decisively, in the interests of the organization and its’ stakeholders. Not just once, but thousands of times in a career.
The task is a process of dialectical integration, to fashion from the stream of inputs a model of reality that is as close to the “truth” as possible, to reach a new strategic position which embraces and is a good fit with all the data, not just some of the data that suits your politics or world view. This kind of reasoning is often a “game changer” because you discover how to embrace the cultural lens through which competing interests view the world into a single, unified system of thought. It’s how knowledge is created and evolves.
Get it wrong as the CEO and your organization is a dinosaur, like Lehman Bros, or the corporate “walking wounded” like some motor car and banking giants that are 80% owned by the US government.
The modern soldier’s job is to do the same as the CEO, to create new knowledge “on the fly” and to apply that knowledge wisely. In dangerous terrain or a suburban war zone, there’s a stream of contradictory data coming into your brain from many sources at the same time. Your own eyes and ears. Your colleagues and an array of powerful sensors. You assess the data against a backdrop of “cognitive templates” learned over several years of rehearsal for this very moment. Except the reality is much worse, more intense, and more complex, by many factors.
Your lookout is giving you his or her opinion about the rapidly evolving situation. A stream of visual data may be arriving in real time from a predator drone operating overhead but the operator could be 10,000 miles away in a suburban operations center. And culturally out of tune with your situation. On the road ahead it’s hard to tell whether you are about to be a Good Samaritan come to save a life or the target of another “insurgent” offensive.
Your instant decision will determine whether you and your buddies live or die, if your high-value target will be captured or escape or if his fellow house guests – mostly women and children – will die in his stead. If you make the wrong decision you and your unit could be featured on prime time news on CNN and Al Jazeera, the subject of an in-depth Commission of Inquiry about what goes wrong in war, the subject of a feature article by the New Yorker, the focus of a Presidential war-room briefing, or infamy.
Sometimes the “bad guys” look like you, or your grandmother or your girlfriend. Sometimes they wear friendly uniforms. Sometimes they change their mind. What if the guy who delivers the mail today delivers a bomb tomorrow? What if the nice girl you were chatting up at the bar really hates your guts, because you are an American or an Australian or a Brit? Often the “bad guys” are “good guys” who don’t believe what you believe. They are merely fighting to protect their families or their countries from you, the invader.
So here’s a workshop that will help you build the kind of high-level cognitive templates required to make sense out of chaotic situations. It helps to have a collective voting tool to rate each possible outcome by probability (0 = will never happen, 1 = certain) and (0 = no damage to 10 = total catastrophe). Begin the session by describing the situation/scenario.
1. What do we know about the situation?
2. What don’t we know about the situation?
3. How does all the data fit together? What overarching concept embraces all of the data, so every bit of the jigsaw fits?
4. What are all the possible outcomes from the situation?
5. What could we do to avoid/overcome the dangers/risks presented by each outcome?
6. What are the consequences of each course of action to minimize/avoid the dangers/risks?
7. How could we re-frame “the game” so we see the issue from a higher level and we act unexpectedly but wisely?
8. What are the probabilities of each possible outcome?
9. What should we do? And do as the next best alternatives?
10. How will we know if we made the best decision?
Crazy new world
In late 2009 British futurist Rohit Talwar published a list of tomorrow’s jobs and asked colleagues and clients for comments.
Among the list were vertical farmers to grow hydroponic crops in cities. Personal entertainment programmers to develop highly targeted/personalized news and entertainment services. Baby designers to personalize the characteristics and features of your unfertilized “child”. And nano-medics to help repair worn-out cells with atomic scale replacement devices.
Sounds like science fiction? Not really. Just think back one hundred years. Eighty percent of farm production fed horses for transportation, electricity powered only 5% of factories and 10% of homes, the first “computers” were not due for another 40 years, and the Internet was incomprensible. At the start of the 21st century, electricity, the motor car, the computer and the Internet have totally transformed our lives.
U.S. labor statistic for the past 100 years tell the dramatic story of economic and social change. Hunter-gatherer jobs are now non-existent. Agricultural jobs have plummeted from 36% to 3%. Industrial jobs have slumped from 31% to 19%. At the same time, services work has climbed from 21% to 42%, and knowledge careers from 10% to 36%.
Yet one in six Americans will leave school this year unable to get a job because they can not read, write or count, use a computer or work in a team with others. And armies of highly qualified engineers, scientists and technicians in what were some of the world’s poorest countries are starting to create and implement new theories and ideas at a faster rate than the “more advanced” Western powers.
The world is changing so fast, that radical new ways are now necessary to make sense of what is happening. Newly created knowledge, powerful new technologies and ways of connecting people are driving many of our largest and most respected firms to extinction, along with a raft of familiar products, services and jobs.
The current chaos, is not just an economic problem, but is symptomatic of a major transformation of society that is underway.
Over the past 10,000 years since we were hunter-gatherers, human society has been transformed at least four times, as a result of a powerful partnership between the tools we create and the human brain. During this time, our genes – and our brain design – has changed less than 0.1 per cent but our tools have become an evolutionary juggernaut….from grunts, flints and spears to a myriad of languages, jumbo jets, movies, television, global corporations and the internet.
Four big waves of change are crashing down on top of us in quick succession. The last remnants of the Industrial Age. The recent Information Age. The newly emerging Knowledge Age. And a new era characterized by the wise application of knowledge. Most organizations are able to handle incremental change, which occurs between the major transitions. But few have developed the necessary skills to navigate the chaotic transitions.
With each new wave of change, we use our new knowledge to create new tools that are more powerful and knowledge intensive that ever before. The new tools automate the work of the previous period AND further automate the work of earlier cultural/tool periods. It works as a kind of knowledge multiplier effect that ricochets all the way back through the system.
Here’s a workshop to explore the possibilities:
1. Choose one of these new technologies. Nano-machines and atomic/molecular level manufacturing systems. Connected machines. Brain-machine interfaces. Direct genetic manipulation of all kinds of life. Replacement body parts. Personalized experiences delivery. Biologically manufactured foods. In what ways could you imagine/foresee how these technologies will change the way we work/learn/live?
2. Describe a new kind of job/career that the new technologies will make possible/necessary?
3. Who will be the new haves and the have nots? Who will be unemployable/no longer useful?
4. Which old kinds of jobs will the new tools and jobs make redundant.
5. What are the possible alternative consequences for society as it is currently organized? Its structure, way it makes decisions,
6. What kinds of changes do we need to make to education/learning in order to prepare people for this new kind of world?
7. What kinds of changes will we need to make to the political/administrative/judicial system to govern our new ways of living and interacting?
8. What kinds of changes will need to make to business, government and community production/delivery systems that feed, clothe, entertain and generally sustain/enrich human life?
9. What will be the biggest threat to human society?
The wise organization
In times of accelerating change, the old top-down, command-and-control organization model is looking more and more like a dinosaur.
Change too slowly and new, faster moving competitors will wipe you from the face of the earth. Think what’s happening to some of our biggest and most “blue chip” organizations like banks, airlines and motor car companies.
We’ve had all kinds of organization designs. The Matrix. The Entrepreneurial. The Machine Bureaucracy. The Professional. The Missionary. The Learning Organization. Even the Playful Organization, which I personally favor, simply because work should be fun.
But what about a wise organization design? It could be an organization that not only creates new knowledge constantly but also wisely applies it in the interests of the entire community and not just the business or government agency.
And what if the strategic capacity was distributed throughout the organization so that all stakeholders -staff, suppliers and customers – were each responsible in some way for creating new knowledge, and the same people who make the decisions were responsible for implementing them? Not the flawed model where management decides the “what” and everyone else decides “the how”. That’s just command-and-control in disguise.
Instead it’s like the connected knowing model of Parker Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach, where teachers and learners are equal participants in the process of creating new knowledge or refreshing old knowledge and making it relevant to day’s new circumstances, helping to create the new wave of change rather than passively following the wave created by others.
The wise organization model distributes leadership and strategic and operational capacity throughout the entire organism. So leaders at every level knows how to do strategy, innovation, process redesign, quality improvement, marketing, sales, project management, stakeholder engagement, risk assessment and so on…and over time so does anyone/everyone.
It’s an organization version of “the wisdom of crowds”. Capability and knowledge creating capacity is like DNA – distributed throughout every cell, able to be acted upon, anytime, anywhere.
It’s a design that closely approximates Mintzberg’s missionary model, where people co-ordinate on the basis of belief, like a Kibbutz, a seminary or al Quaida. Anyone can and does step in to provide leadership as and when required.
So the organization can be incredibly flexible and is “able to turn on a dime”, like a shoal of fish or a flock of birds.
So here is a workshop to try this out:
1. How might a “wise organization” operate differently from other organization forms? e.g. the machine bureaucracy, the entrepreneurial.
2. What roles/functions would a leader of a wise organization play?
3. How might strategy emerge and be shaped in an organization in which capacity was distributed?
4. What kinds of products/services might a wise organization offer and how could these be different to the present, mass market or custom-mass market products/services we have everywhere today?
5. What kinds of activities would be the best fit with the wise organization model?
6. What kinds of activities would be the worst fit with the wise organization model and why?
7. Make a list of some of the features of a “wise organization”. What kinds of communication would you employ? How would you pay people? How would you involve the customers, the suppliers etc?
8. How would you start? What are the first 10 steps?
Our Feigenbaum minds
Recent research suggests there may be a pattern to how our brains are becoming smarter in a partnership with the tools we have created over the past 50,000 years since our species migrated out of Africa. That’s the good news.
The bad news (which could also be good news) is we may all be rushing headlong towards a chaotic stage of human development during which our brains, bodies and our tools will become transformed in startling new ways and faster than some of us can manage.
There have been five to six waves of revolutionary change that are reflected in the employment statistics. Right now agricultural jobs have almost disappeared and knowledge jobs are soaring. The changes have occurred as a result of a switcheroo to new kinds of technologies that automate the work of the previous cultural-technological period. It all began with the transition from the Hunter-Gatherer Era to the early agricultural societies around 10,000 BC.
Think technologies as whole ecologies with each new kind of tool being dependent on other technologies and human capabilities. For example, the motor car depends on the widespread and instant availability of gas, freeways and roads, services stations, traffic lights, mechanics and highway patrolmen and comes to serve shopping malls, drive-in restaurants and tourist destinations
The waves of change are arriving in ever-shorter cycles, a typical period doubling cascade. It took 30-40,000 years for hunter-gatherers to become farmers, miners and builders. It was during this period that two human revolutions occurred simultaneously, the shift to growing crops and a shift to the processing and use of minerals to construct buildings and implements. It was to take another 8,000 years for human to become manufacturers, and 200-300 years to switch to a society dominated by the computer, and just 30-40 years to raise the bar to a knowledge-creation society.
Except for an Agricultural period anomaly, the ratio of the length of each successive new cultural period to the previous period is remarkably close to the Feigenbaum number, 4.669. An explanation for this inconsistency is that two great waves occurred in parallel – agricultural and mineral processing/construction – whereas all the others occurred serially. On the other hand, time may not be the main factor, but something that changes over time. Three possible candidates are the rate at which language propagates or
the rate at which “body parts” from ancestor tools are acquired, copied or adapted or
both.
The Agricultural era disparity can be resolved if we think of the Agricultural Era as two simultaneous tool-brain-work paradigms. If the mining of minerals such as clay, iron and copper and its processing and use in the construction of buildings is separated out from agricultural activities – tilling, planting, reaping – then there is much closer agreement between ratio of the length of the eras as measured in years and the Feigenbaum number. Compare 4.669 with the actual average of 4.9.
Other research points to the power of the tool-brain-work hypothesis to explain human and brain development. Chater and Christiansen# show there is a symbiotic relationship between tools and our brains, simply because brains and tools develop each other. Language co-evolves with brains as a “complex and interdependent ‘organism’ under selectional pressures” due to the survival of those members of the human species who use language to adapt to new circumstances.
They also show how words we invent to describe the functions of new tools also spread along with the adoption of the tools. When we learn to drive motor cars, we also learn about engines and tires, steering wheels and bonnets, fenders, speedometers, gear sticks and clutches. Which are so much different from buggy, sulky, reins, bridle, shaft and spokes.
Here are some words that entered the English language during 2009. They are associated with the environment, medicine, publishing, warfare and psychology. Some are instantly recognizable. Others are not. If the technology becomes widely adopted, so do the words. If the technology lives in a niche, the words rarely become popular.
The kinds of words we use, also determines how our brains work. It’s hard to be a plastic surgeon using the language of an accountant. It’s almost impossible to become a facilitator when you have learned to be a lecturer. But there is hope. Some horse and buggy drivers did learn to drive cabs, managers learned to do their own typing and most of us can operate a photocopier.
And even though human brains are plastic and we strengthen the most used synapses and prune the least used connections, it is difficult to make the switch to a new way of working or learning. This has huge implications for rapidly changing times, where each new wave of technology demands new kinds of words and new ways of organizing your brain.
If you were born 30-40,000 years ago your brain would have been programmed for an hunter-gatherer world which is a quite different to the way kids brains work today. Kids arrive Knowledge Age-ready, simply because the tools, the language and the ways they are used just happen to permeate the environment into which they are born. The computer. The Internet. iPods. Facebook. Games. And global connectivity.
That’s why Industrial Age teachers are boring Knowledge Age-ready kids with lectures, no conversation and limited or no access to the tools they use in their home lives. Their brains are stuck in the language and methods of a bygone era.
The problem is that new waves of technological change are arriving in cycles that are shorter than a human lifetime (or working life). We are having to reinvent ourselves several times to continue to earn a living. And we could now be headed for really serious trouble. Because in complexity theory terms, when you get to the fourth or fifth bifurcation in a period doubling cascade, the system becomes totally chaotic.
On the other hand, we might be able to discover how to navigate our way through the chaos to a new kind of order and develop a new dynamic between our brains and our tools. Perhaps we might join forces with our tools and become a single species, a process that has already begun with the invention/creation of synthetic body parts and the manipulation of genetics to create quasi-cellular life.
So here’s a workshop to explore how this process happens and what might be coming next:
1. Here’s a bunch of words that appeared in the dictionary in 2009. Explain the origins of one or two words that you recognize and guess the origins of one-or two words you have never heard before. Carbon footprint, cardioprotective, earmark, fan fiction, flash mob, frenemy, goji, green-collar, haram, locavore, memory foam, missalette, naproxen, neuroprotective, pharmacogenetics, physiatry, reggaeton, shawarma, sock puppet, staycation, vlog, waterboarding, webisode, zip line.
2. Why do you think some words have spread and are recognizable and others have not spread and we don’t know what they mean?
3. Here’s a list of technologies that were invented during earlier periods of human development. e.g. horse and buggy, gramaphone, sailing ship, terrace house, castle, book, newspaper, typewriter. Choose one of these words and brainstorm words associated with that technology. e.g. book – cover, page, typeface, preface, contents, read
4. Here’s a list of recent inventions. Choose one and brainstorm words associated with that new tool. Twitter, mobile phone, computer, global positioning system, condominium, skyscraper, submarine, jumbo jet.
5. What technologies did you grow up with and what did you do for entertainment/fun?
6. What technologies do our children grow up with and what do they do for entertainment/fun?
7. What technologies did our grandparents grow up with and what did they do for entertainment/fun?
8. What kinds of things do our grandparents have difficulty doing or understanding in today’s world?
9. If there is a pattern to our brain development that parallels the changes in our tools, what might be coming next?
10. Here are three choices to discuss/analyze. The waves get shorter and human society becomes chaotic and disintegrates. A new higher-level kind of order emerges from the human-tool system. Human society spins its wheels and stays where we are right now. What do you think will happen and why?
11. What can we do to help prepare society for tomorrow’s world, especially to change the way we learn and what we learn?
A bumpy, wild ride?
“A better life” for ourselves, but especially for our children. That’s what humans seem to want most of all. Not fame, not fortune, but happiness and contentment. Strangely, the definition of what makes a better life, and how we attain it, seems to be constantly changing.
It’s all because of a partnership between our brains and the tools we have invented. We create new tools that give us greater powers and automate more of what we do, which helps us create ever more powerful tools. Wheels and portable fuel to drive to places where it is too far to walk. Electricity to cook our food and light and heat our homes. Instantly accessible libraries of knowledge at everyone’s fingertips. Electronics to connect us to other people anywhere on the planet. Planes to fly us half-way round the globe in less than a day. Powers that would seem “god-like” to our ancestors.
Our tools begin as “automatic” mental operations, which are cognitive routines that allow us to perform complex actions unconsciously. No more pushing the porridge up the nose. No more stalling the car. No more living a Groundhog day every day. Our left frontal lobes, which are good at successive processing, do the job for us.
Then one day, some of us discover a way to convert what we do into a “labor saving” device or method. We automate our automatic operations! And when we have invented a complex web of these tools, the tool ecologies and human society undergo a transformation to a higher level of organization. The old tool ecologies and ways of doing things (work) become extinct (think horse and buggy, farriers, saddlers, village scale living), and the new species of tools become widely adopted (think motor cars, freeways, service stations, shopping malls, mechanics).
We don’t plan the change, it just happens, simply because humans and our tools are just another complex system that obeys the laws of complexity theory.
Several social and technological revolutions have occurred at regular intervals over the past 10,000 years since we were nomadic Hunter Gatherers. First we made the shift to an Agricultural society of villagers that domesticated plants and animals. We then progressed to an Industrial Age culture when we created machines to do the work of people and animals. Next we happened upon an Information Age world in which electricity and electronic devices allowed us to build and control highly complex organizational systems that spanned the world.
Soon thereafter we switched to a Knowledge Age society, where the power to store and create new knowledge became widespread and available to most humans on the planet. The latest change is to a Wisdom Age world in which some of us are acquiring new powers to apply new and existing knowledge wisely.
These changes, or abrupt discontinuities, follow the pattern of a period doubling cascade. Each wave of change is about 1/5 the length of the previous system, and approaches the Feigenbaum constant, 4.669…which is as fundamental as Pi.
We are now at a critical stage of human development. Culturally we have passed through the fourth bifurcation, where systems wide chaos emerges in complex systems. This means we could be in for a wild ride. Each new period, between transitions, is now so short that the dramatic upheavals that used to arrive every few thousand or few hundred years are now likely to appear in just a handful of years.
The big question is what’s next? Is it a series of new cultural waves, but at a higher cognitive level? Or do our tools become part of us and we co-evolve together as a new species? Or does society disintegrate and we reset the clock, like Pol Pot tried to do in Cambodia?
Perhaps we are simply in the process of becoming something more amazing…yet to be imagined and automated. The thinking that we automate then becomes a tool which takes its place in the physical universe alongside or instead of natural organisms or objects, and joins with other tools and our brains in an ever cleverer web of tools that feeds back into the system to generate yet another cycle of period doubling, tool and job extinctions and speciations.
If only we can learn to deal with the blindingly accelerating speed of change. If we can, then the universe might just become a “physical” instantiation of our best past, present and future collective imaginations. The possibilities are both enticing and frightening. But symbiotically frighteningly fantastic, for which the frontal lobes of our “stone-age” brains are perfectly designed.
Some questions:
1. Describe some of the major changes that are taking place in the world today.
2. Thinking about these changes, describe a scenario that you think accounts for the way humans and tools have developed over the past 10,000 years.
3. Describe a scenario that might extrapolate from our past to the future.
4. Looking back over the past, what have we done that has ensured our success/survival?
5. What must we now do to ensure we survive the next few waves of change?
The dawning of the Wisdom Age
What if the explosion in the economic activity and knowledge work we regard as the Knowledge Age (1980-2010) was almost over and a new economic imperative was suddenly upon us? The Wisdom Age (2010-)?
The weak signals from the future point this way.
How might such a trend affect the way we think about the world and the new kinds of products and services that people want? And the new kinds of jobs people will do?
There have always been wisdom workers. Community and business leaders, ethicists, judges, mediators and spiritual gurus. But the focus on wisdom work has reached a new intensity. There’s a whole bunch of new positions being advertised such as Corporate Ethics Officers, Certified Ethical Hacker, Business Continuity Managers as well as “green collar” work such as Environment Compliance Consultants, Energy Efficiency Engineers, Renewable Energy Coordinators and Ecological Footprint Accountants.
Although our scientists, academics and the R&D departments of big corporations are creating new knowledge at an exponential rate, we planetary citizens are increasingly frustrated by the slow speed at which we collectively deal with the world’s most wicked problems.
There is now an expectation we must learn to live more lightly on the planet, to reduce our impact on other species, to care more for our fellow citizens, to resolve the issues that divide us.
To do this, more and more jobs will be created to wisely apply our knowledge. Paradoxically, we are also creating the tools that will help to automate/democratize this kind of work, so that ordinary people are able to make use of the same kinds of methods that were previously used only by experts.
A pioneer in this field is Linda Newman, Associate Professor of Education at Newcastle University in Australia (pictured). Linda is the joint creator of a process for resolving ethical dilemmas known as the Ethical Response Cycle.
A version of her method is included in her own electronic meeting title Working Wisely that can be used by anyone with less than a day’s facilitator training to explore and resolve complex ethical issues with greater certainty.
Linda uses her method to help early childhood teachers and carers develop professionally.
Participants learn about the ethics by observing and sharing their own reactions to a hypothetical dilemma and making sense of the patterns in the group’s responses. The dilemmas are presented as a series of “guided discovery questions” that take participants on a learning journey. Each step of a complex case study is followed by a more impossible dilemma or unexpected scenario that needs to be resolved.
Participants engage in a type of high level discussion which Linda calls Ethical Dialectical discourse, which must not only resolve the conflict’s between individual opinions, but must also satisfy a personal, professional ethical standard or legal requirement.
Here’s an example of a workshop from Working Wisely. It’s called the Automatic Teller Machine Fairy dilemma:
1. A friend comes to tell you that they have discovered that the automatic teller machine in your town is somehow making errors in calculation. Every withdrawal is receiving $20 too much without the client’s balance showing it. What do you do and why?
2. The “Automatic Teller Fairy” has been helping out many people in your town for a week now. Word has spread. The error has been discovered and rectified. The Daily Bugle reports the names of everyone who used the teller and how often. Your mother (or someone you respect) calls you to talk about it. How do you feel about what you decided to do and why?
3. How do you feel when your employer raises the issue the next day, and why?
4. What does this story have to do with ethics, and why?
5. Some people returned to the teller many times. Write 25 words about how they were thinking.
6. Some people reported the mistake and returned the money. Write 25 words about the type of thinking they used to inform their decision to return the money.
7. Some people who had very little money used the machine only on days where they really needed it. Write 25 words about the type of thinking they used to decide when to, and when not to, access the machine.
8. We have been talking about ethical perspectives that have theories to explain them. Sum up the ethical issues in this story.