“The bird does not sing because it has answers. It sings because it has a song.”
— Chinese proverb quoted by Margaret Somerville in the first of her lectures on The Ethical Imagination.
CBC Ideas is rebroadcasting the 2006 Massey Lectures given by ethicist Margaret Somerville entitle “The Ethical Imagination.” I lay in bed last night battling a fever and a six hour flu listening to her wonderful cadence as she delivered her argument that finding and conversing about a human ethics has much to do with imagination, story and poetry. It’s a wonderful listen, on all week on CBC Radio (which you can stream) and you can catch the first part on the Massey Lectures webpage.
As they do with all the lectures in the series, the CBC and House of Anasi Press has published Somerville’s five talks. If last night’s lecture was any indication, the book will make an excellent addition to my library.
[tags]CBC, Ideas, Margaret Somerville, ethics[/tags]
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Review from the persepctive of how this book is also about change management
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Ring cylces as structure and what they mean
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Rogers loses over $2 million dollars on a comma.
Don’t ask how I found this, just set aside 22 minutes and spend it with Lookwell, the retired TV detective whose mind can’t stop deducing.
This early nineties pilot was a creation of Conan O’Brien before he landed his gig replacing Letterman. It stars Adam West as a retired 1970s TV detective who just has to keep solving crimes. There isn’t a bad line in the whole thing.
My friend Jon Husband is alive for the signs that new organizational forms are upon us. He found one today that really rang out for me. It seems that Amerian bloggers having been using distributed networks of readers to find the patterns of organization in a government conspiracy.
This is not tin-foil hat stuff. It’s the real deal, with an alarming plan to engineer the firing a number of United States Attorneys for political reasons. The bigest challenge for the bloggers who are following the story is to stay on top of the thousands of documents a day that are being released, almost in an effort to flood the public with disclosure. How do you find the gems? Well, if every reader of these well read blogs were to pick a couple of pages and harvets the nuggets, they could almost discover the actual plan pretty quickly, in theory anyway. And in practice, that is what’s happening. Within hours, the bloggers had begun to make some serious findings.
I’m quite interested in this, and thinking about how it might be a model for building things as well as taking them down. For example, I’m wondering how we might use a community of stakeholders/readers to sift through harvests from an engagement process to find the meaning that points the way forward. It would be a collective harvest of people’s own work, fed back into the system so that it may be developed further. From that, an emergent, collective set of patterns can be made visible, upon which something new can be designed.
As I think about this, and how the process would work both for uncovering a gpovernment conspiracy and building a new approach to social services for example, I am left with the following principles of practice:
- Agree collectively as to the purpose of the joint inquiry (uncover a government plan, build a new community-based approach to child and youth mental health, etc.)
- Conduct getherings to collect a lot of diverse wisdom and thinking about the inquiry.
- Harvest detailed notes from initial conversations, but don’t make meaning from them right away.
- Invite anyone to read whatever they want of the documents and select the pieces that seem to have the most relvance and benefit to the inquiry at hand. It would seem to be a good idea to have a large and diverse number of people to do this, especially if you had a substantial and complex inquiry and body of thought.
- Make this second level harvest visible and begin pattern finding within what is emerging, all the while feeding that back to the system to both show progress and te help people go back and find additional meaning and wisdom to support what is emerging.
- Have a further inquiry to tap creativity to fill the gaps that are being noticed.
Just a sketch at this point, but I have a place where I might be able to try it on a smaller scale. One could use this anywhere one had a large number of people that were contributing to a project that affected them. Wirearchy changes public engagement and makes it more democratic.
Very cool indeed. Thanks for the heads up Jon!
[tags]wirearchy, governance, public engagement[/tags]