Here is a case of getting seduced by the numbers and sucked into the wrong thinking. This article is looking for interesting ways to measure the growth of the global middle class. It does a generally poor job of it. The whole article is a bit of a dodge. Using made up numbers to render a quantifiable mark for an abstract concept, concluding in a blithe statement about a billion car pile up.
But the money quote I think is in the conclusion, about what this materialist and upwardly mobile trend in the world says:
The people of this burgeoning middle class also expect their governments to be representative and accountable, and they are sure to put increased pressure on the nondemocratic systems in many developing countries. Seen in this light, the rising incidence of protests and dissent in China, Russia, Thailand, and the Arab world is not surprising.
Which is actually interesting. And a little understated. Because I think one of the implications of the growing “middle class” is the fact that the world can become much more connected through alternatively mediated means. You have power and water, a mobile phone and an internet connection and you join a very interesting club, globally speaking. Furthermore, people can not only demand accountability from their own governments but from governments whose foreign policies affect them. I mean, look at the famous photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl running scared and naked from her village, which had just been napalmed. 40 years ago no one could do anything about this situation. These days, photos like that could provoke a massive decentralized response of outraged middle class people. Such people might learn how to fly planes, for example. Or leak documents. Or go all Anonymous.
On a smaller scale, the growing middle class can use its material wealth to do things other than buy cars. For example, a newly middle class Egyptian could buy food to support an occupation of a park in New York. The new models of philanthropy can be many to many, inverting the idea of “giving to the poor.”
The article has a pretty narrow and outdated view of its own subject (“First World” – really?) and it ignores the deeper, dare I say, foreign policy implications of a middle class that may yet reach the critical mass needed to slow the 1% and redirect that serious wealth to needier parts the rest of the 99%.
In the rest of the world, I wonder if this is what the new middle class is doing. In North America we do a whole lot of “I’ve got mine.” Class mobility in this continent is woeful, and class nobility, especially among the local 85% (of which I am a member) even worse.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many of us there are. It matters what we do with these numbers.
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At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting:
- on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own,
- participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something
- the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold.
- the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, opportunities and knowledge.
- as we move through the four fold practice we evolve from a learner to a community of learners to a community that learns. This last shift is often the hardest.
- at the core of this practice is intention. To come to the practice with intention is to activate it.
- it is surprising how quickly we can move to co-creation when we have practiced together once, we did a signing exercise that took the group through two rounds of co-creation and we quickly moved to creating music together that was unimaginable 10 minutes before.
I love how groups just spark insights. You can teach this stuff dozens of dozens of times and there is always something new to learn.
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First of all there is no such thing.
Second, a friend asked me the question “What is the idea group size for collaborative process?” and in trying to answert the question I emailed him the following (please note that this is all off the top of my head, and in practice I usually go with intuition, relying more on patterns than rules):
Innovation generally starts with individuals, so I like to build time into to processes for people to just be quiet and think for a bit. Small groups can help refine and test good ideas, and large groups can help propagate ideas and connect them to larger patterns. In small group work, in general, working with an odd number is helpful because it creates an instability that keeps the group moving. If you want solidity, you work with even numbers. So it goes like something this:
1 = innovation, idea generation, inspiration and commitment
2 = Pairs are good for long and exploratory conversations, interviews, and partnering
3 = Good number for a small team to rapidly prototype a new idea
4 = A good number for a deep exploration. You benefit from having two pairs together, and from having a little more diversity in the group than in two.
5 = good number for a design team; there is always an instability in a group of five and good diversity, but the group is not so large that people get left out.
6 = Good for noticing patterns, and summing up. A group of six can be entered from three pairs coming together as well, allowing for insights gathered in pairs to be rolled up.
7 = At this scale we are losing the intimacy we need for conversation, and so generally I will work a group of seven into 3 and 4 if we need to break up.
8 = is too big. And it is no coincidence that big conferences are boring, because most hotels have tables that can accomodate 8, 9, or 10 people which is too many for real conversation. At these scales, people start to be able to dominate and introverts dry right up.
It is a good practice to use a huge group (like in the dozens or hundreds) to source the diversity that is needed for good dynamic small groups, and then to find ways to propagate ideas from the very small to the very large.
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Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
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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.