Harrison, one of the last times I saw him. I’m on holiday in Portugal about to start a six-day walking trip in the Algarve and I’ve just learned that Harrison Owen died yesterday. His son Barry posted a brief notice on Facebook today. I had a lovely talk with him a couple of weeks ago before I left on this trip. We talked about some things he was reading (he recommended a new edition of “Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature” by Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers) and we talked a bit about family and time of …
Euan Semple points me to a lovely piece by Annie Mueller. Anyway, that’s also the story of the internet, and blogging, at least from my limited, non-techie experience. The big corporate assholes and the big piles of SEO trash: we don’t need them. The internet would exist without them. Would exist, and would be better. Cleaner. More room for cool stuff, connections, learning, sharing, growth. We’ve managed to do that good stuff even as social media became one giant trash pile, and interesting little websites became conglomerate monsters, and the deep, frenetic, and satisfying experience of sliding down curvy twisty …
I’ve been going down a bit of a rabbit hole these past few mornings, looking at some commentary and writing about Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who died in 1947 was a psychologist whose theory and research had a tremendous influence on the modern movements or organizational development, action research, Gestalt theory, change management and group dynamics. To read his writings now is to read a person deeply interested in the complexity of human systems long before there was much language at all available to even discuss complexity. His ideas – or more precisely other people’s ideas about his ideas – have …