The Cynefin framework is helpful in making a distinction between the worlds of complicated problems and the worlds of complex ones. One simple distinction between these two worlds is the extent to which they can be known. In a complicated domain, the parameters of the problem can be known and several good practices can be hammered out, with largely knowable results. In the complex domain, the initial conditions are unknown and the results are unknown which is why small experiments designed to tell us more about what is going are very useful for creating emergent practice.
Financial markets are famously complex beasts. To the extent that you can manipulate them, you can externalize the unknowable parameters and create equations that tell you what will happen if you create and sell certain things. This interesting article by Ian Stewart in the Guardian is the story of an equations, the Black-Scholes equation – that is responsible for much of the large profits that derivitives traders are able to make. In the article, the author talks about how pure markets work, and how any financial models have to necessarily modify the complexity out of the market’s dynamics:
Any mathematical model of reality relies on simplifications and assumptions. The Black-Scholes equation was based on arbitrage pricing theory, in which both drift and volatility are constant. This assumption is common in financial theory, but it is often false for real markets. The equation also assumes that there are no transaction costs, no limits on short-selling and that money can always be lent and borrowed at a known, fixed, risk-free interest rate. Again, reality is often very different.
In other words, for the sake of profit, people using this equation just made stuff up that was more often probable than not and proceeded with their blindners on. They received substantial awards for this behaviour, because in our world at the moment we are addicted to knowledge. If you can show that you can make an unknowable system knowable, you will become a hero in this culture. We are so afraid of not knowing, so afraid of emergence that we are willing to bet trillions of dollars on a contrived view of reality. The consequences of this action are that fatal mistakes are amde when the true complexity of the world creates an emergent situation.
In these times, we need more honest leadership. Not leadership based on clever imaginings about how the world works, but leadership based on a collaborative approach to being in the emergent messiness of the world in every time. Of course there is a time and a place for models, but when we become addicted to them such they they take us into a complexity domain without the right thinking, we set ourselves up for catastrophic failure.
Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork. The stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere. The system is too complex to be run on error-strewn hunches and gut feelings, but current mathematical models don’t represent reality adequately. The entire system is poorly understood and dangerously unstable. The world economy desperately needs a radical overhaul and that requires more mathematics, not less. It may be rocket science, but magic it’s not.
To which I would add it probably needs a healthy dose of tolerance for emergence as well.
by gautsch
In a little conversation this morning on the art and practice of harvesting we got into a conversation about the pattern of distilling. We talked about what it takes to lay a table with a meal for a group of six friends. How no one can creat a meal from scratch, and that everything from the food to the table, to the machines that transported the food, to the people that sold the chairs and built the factory that created the plates all contributed to that meal. That a single meal with friends is a distillation of thousands of person years of work.
The whole field of the harvest is a field of potential. When we distill from that we make choices about what the highest and best use of that field might be, for that very moment, in the domain in which we have influence. This isn’t always easy, and sometimes people are attached to pieces of the harvest that are left behind in the distillation, feeling unappreciated or unseen. Eating mindfully means being aware of and honouring everything that goes in to the food, and being grateful that we can be present at the nourishing end of the process.
A lovely day of design with friends in Lindon Utah. In most Art of Hosting type events, the substantive design work happens in the days just before the event, when the hosting team can finally be physically together, when we can read over the “getting to know you” answers from participants and when we can sink into a deeper space of good working relationship and creative planning. We work until we get to a design that is good enough to hold the bones of what we are trying to do, and then we rest and let it sink in so that we can refine it further the next day. Beautiful designs emerge this way, especially when we have deep practitioners on the team who understand the DNA of the process. Often we are joined by friends and colleagues in the work who push us and inquire and help create from their perspectives. Today was no different, and in the process Erin Gilmore, one of our design team colleagues referred to a Neruda poem today which captures for me the spirit of the design processes that often produce really sweet results.
POETRY
And it was at that age…Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.— Pablo Neruda
Off to Salt Lake City Utah to work with Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony on another Art of Hosting. Taking an inquiry into this one about the dynamics and the work of co-hosting. I take for a given the relationships I have with my closest colleagues, and the ease with which we are able to work together. There is a magic to it born out of deep friendship for one another (we have a saying that friendship is the new organizational form). There is also something about sharing an inquiry together and living deeply in a community of practice where the language and ideas are shared and understood at an intuitive level. Within that we bring very different capacities and capabilities and inquiries, but there is a powerful centre that holds us together. It is not something we set out to work on…not a centre that arises from a deliberate scoping out…it is deeper, one that lives at the heart of all good teams, an ineffable and powerful but unspoken togetherness. Trying to do our best without this would be impossible, but it is also not something that, so far, I feel like I can bottle up and talk.
So as I go into this Art of Hosting, I’m going to do a little harvest on what working together is like, and try to take that to others. Chris Chapman – my Ireland based colleague – and I are looking to create something more descriptive about the practices of co-hosting, and so we have a little bit of a harvest plan going forward.
And if you are coming to Utah to be with us, you may well find yourself wrapped in this inquiry as well!
Beautiful.
“A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement – and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.”
– Alan Watts
via whiskey river.