Some interesting links that caught my eye this week.
Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever
Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex?
“It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don’t know the answer.”
With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation
This is the vision I have been asking for from our governments. This vision is the one that would get me on board with using our existing oil and gas resources to manufacture and fund and infrastructure to accelerate this future for my kids. The cost of increasing fossil fuel use is so high, it needs to be accompanied by a commitment to faster transition to this kind of world. Read the whole thing.
Why we suck at ‘solving wicked problems”
Sonja Blignault is one of the people in the world with whom I share the greatest overlap of theory and practice curiosities regarding complexity. I know this, because whenever she posts something on her blog I almost always find myself wishing I had written that! Here’s a great post of five things we can do to disrupt thinking about problem solving to enable us to work much better with complexity.
Money and technology are hugely valuable resources: they are certaintly necessary but they are not sufficient. Simply throwing more money and/or more advanced technology at a problem will not make it go away. We need to fundamentally change our thinking paradigm and approach things in context-appropriate ways, otherwise we will never move the needle on these so-called wicked problems.
rock/paper/scissors and beyond
I miss Bernie DeKoven. Since he died earlier this year I’ve missed seeing his poetic and playful blog posts about games and fun. Here is one from his archives about variations on rock/paper/scissors
The relationship between the two players is both playful and intimate. The contest is both strategic and arbitrary. There are rumors that some strategies actually work. Unless, of course, the players know what those strategies are. Sometimes, choosing a symbol at random, without logic or forethought, is strategically brilliant. Other times, it’s just plain silly.
So they play, nevertheless. Believing whatever it is that they want or need to believe about the efficacy of their strategies, knowing that there is no way to know.
The longer they play together, the more mystical the game becomes.
They play between mind and mindlessness. For the duration of the game, they occupy both worlds. The fun may not feel special, certainly not mystical. But the reality they are sharing is most definitely something that can only be found in play.
How Evaluation Supports Systems Change
An unassuming little article that outlines five key practices that could be the basis of a five-day deep dive into complexity and evaluation. I found this article earlier in the year, and notice that my own practice and attention has come back to these five points over and over.
While evaluation is often conducted as a means to learn about the progress or impact of an initiative, evaluative thinking and continuous learning can be particularly important when working on complex issues in a constantly evolving system. And, when evaluation goes hand in hand with strategy, it helps organizations challenge their assumptions, gather information on the progress, effects, and influence of their work, and see new opportunities for adaptation and change.
I was always a social justice minded kid. But on December 6, 1989, when I was 21, my lifelong support for the feminist struggle was cemented.
Every year I publish the list of women who died that day and whose deaths changed the lives of so many of us.
Never forgotten are:
• Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), mechanical engineering student
• Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
• Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
• Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
• Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
• Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
• Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
• Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
• Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
• Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
• Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
• Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
• Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
• Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
Thinking of resuming a weekly round up of links that have come through my feed in one way or another. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about these links, but I’m sure my readers would be interested in some of them. I’ll post a few each week, on Sunday evening, if that works for you all. Let me know if you’d welcome this as a little repeated pattern.
Developing Human Capital: Moving from Extraction to Reciprocity in Our Organizational Relationships
Careful about the terms you use and the metaphors that drive our thinking about “resources.”
“Environmentalists and systems thinkers underscore the fundamental distinction between extractive and interdependent modes of interacting with one another and the natural world. They warn us that the extractive economy we are attempting to sustain now is, by very definition of its continuous mining of natural and human resources, unsustainable. As the writer and farmer Wendell Berry has written:
The expert assumption appears to be that the products of the soil are not included in the economy until after they have been taken at the lowest possible cost from those who did the actual work of production, at which time they enter the economy as raw materials for the food, fiber, timber, and lately the fuel industries. The result is inevitable: the industrial system is disconnected from, is unconcerned about, and takes no responsibility for, its natural and human sources. The further result is that these sources are not maintained but merely used and thus are made as exhaustible as the fossil fuels.
This ecological framework should give us pause as we consider notions of “human resource” and “human capital” in nonprofit organizations.”
A reflection on Zadie Smith’s “On Optimism and Despair.”
A beautifully annotated reflection on Zadie Smith’s 2016 speech:
Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror. No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighbourhood, such incremental change feels enormous.”
There is no middle ground for deep disagreements about facts
I think it’s high time to be clear that willful ignorance cannot be equated with subjective truth.
“Examining how deep disagreements arise will demonstrate the gravity of the issue. Why do we disagree with valid, knowable facts when we all live in the same world, we have roughly the same cognitive abilities and, in the Western world at least, most people have fairly easy access to roughly the same information?
It is because we use our cognition to support factual beliefs or value commitments that are central to our identity, particularly in situations where we feel that our identity is threatened.”
What do we expect from Innovation? Mostly disappointment
Let’s get good at handling the emotional component of innovation and creativity:
“Much of the innovation discovery journey is a disappointing one. A hunch or insight becomes a dead end. A promising idea did not foresee a roadblock that cannot be resolved. Resources constantly “churn” and get depleted, waiting for others to be brought up to speed. Those not involved directly within the innovation project constantly remain skeptical or require more proof. The status quo of the existing places an increasing drag on the forces of change.”
Building an Innovation Strategy from Cultural Insights
“Ethnographic thinking is a powerful approach that organizations and innovation teams can use to strategically guide how they innovate. Ethnography has grown in popularity as a research method, but as I’ve argued, it is more than just a tool. Ethnographic thinking operates at a strategic level,”
A very detailed and interesting account of how ethnographic research helps organizations see the complexity they are immersed in, and make decisions about what to do next.
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