One of the tenets of tae kwon do is “Indomitable Spirit” The practice of a martial art makes use of that spirit to sustain survival under life threatening circumstances.
Indomitable spirit marks the small and almost forgotten community of Brainerd, Kansas on the American Great Plains. Offering an almost ethnographic example of indomitable spirit in the life of a community, Time, Place and Memory on the Prairie Plains looks at how a small settlement has sustained itself through waves of change.
Although most of the town’s landmarks have long since been abandoned or demolished, they exist as powerfully in the memories of these Brainerdites as if they had just visited them yesterday, despite the fact that few photographic records exist of these structures aside from those included in this study. The memories of a Brainerd gone by have become so strongly embedded in these residents’ present-day conceptions of the community that the current townscape exists in a sort of time/space limbo — the past is always present.
Like a community quilt, the memories of the Brainerdites I encountered patch the fragmented townscape together, keeping it alive in the face of both the elements and the forces of economic and demographic change. A Prairie Plains townscape may, indeed, be more durable than even the landscape from which it was forged.
This is one of those stories where the learning keeps coming.
Thanks to consumptive.org for the link
If you scroll back through this archive of architectural Eyesores of the Month you will find many of them are fronted by flags. The author, in his cynical wisdom, will say things like “Note the large American flag, planted in front of the mall to ward off criticism.”
Goring the sacred cow is a necessary evil if we are to bore down to the truth behind the things that are slowly crushing us. Not just the soul-stealing architecture of suburbia, by the equally draining toil of going to work in places like hospitals, where doctors and nurses are expected to put in shifts sometimes lasting 36 hours. Depriving a person of sleep for this long and placing life and death decisions in their hands would be outrageous except for the culture that has sprung up around medicine, the tough-as-nails, nothing’s-gonna-knock-me-down machismo that infects generation after generation of young interns. It’s impossible to criticize, because the work of saving lives demands this kind of commitment, or so the story goes. Allegorical flags wave over the whole situation. To take a bead on the absurdity of it all is to demonstrate terminal disloyalty.
If we want people to care about their work and their communities, we have to ask them what kind of work they really want to do. It’s no good insisting that they get passionate about what we want them to do. That requires all sorts of traps, like putting flags in front of big box stores, somehow channeling patriotic fervour into shopping at Wal-Mart. No, we have to step back and remove these inane devices and clearly ask two questions:
- What do you really want to do? and
- Why don’t you take care of it?
Passion will magically appear. Responsibility will suddenly blossom. Authenticity arises and everything works better.
With thanks to Harrison Owen, for the questions.
One of the 2% of Bowen Islanders who blog just sent me an email with a really crisp late summer definition of blogging vs. traditional website maintenance:
BLOGs are like ferry conversations – just happens, a website is like a barbecue – gotta organize it.
Thanks to Markus Roemer at Stinky Cat.
Fused glass button
From a collection of glass buttons, this one stood out. Buttons as fastners, connectors, things that draw two other things together and hold them there echoed in the plug and wire, the implied connection, the plugging into power.
Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons, a collection of still life sketches, tiny portraits of objects, food and rooms, which critic Norman Weinstein called “a mirror for our nonsense, a dictionary for our daily distraction�.”
Buttons as connectors, tender buttons as blogs.
From an email from the Plexus Institute, comes this piece, an interview with Birute Regine and Roger Lewin on complexity in organizations:
Complexity theorists argue that managers should allow creativity and efficiency to emerge naturally within organizations rather than imposing their own solutions on their employees. They can do this by setting some basic ground rules and then encouraging interactions or relationships among their employees so that solutions emerge from the bottom up. Managers can’t predict what the solutions will be. But just as a flock of birds can achieve more than a bird flying solo, it’s likely that the energy and enthusiasm that are unleashed when employees are working together will yield successful results.
This is a fantastic article on the application of complexity theory to organization issues, and it jives really nicely with a practice of Open Space Technology. For example Regin says:
Take the property of emergence, for instance. In computer models based on complexity theory, when autonomous agents interact and mutually affect one another, patterns will emerge–an intrinsic order just waiting to unfold. But it comes about in a nonlinear way, so the order can’t be predicted. When we translate computer models into human terms, the autonomous agents are people and the interactions among them are relationships. Complexity theory underscores the importance of relationships. How people relate to one another affects what emerges in the organization–the culture, the creativity, the productivity.
So if you want a culture that is intrinsically creative, growing and learning, you have to look at the relational level: Can people be real with one another? Is there trust? Do people acknowledge each other and the good work they do? In organizations that have relationships as their bottom line, a culture of care and connection emerges–and it is palpable. In this context, people are more willing to change and are more adaptable because they feel they’re not alone and that together they can manage most anything.
The piece contains good advice on working with a relational, complexity-based model both for consultants (facilitate conversations and invite people to establish real connections with each other) and leaders (“give up the illusion of control and concentrate instead on setting a larger vision for their organizations so that the creativity of their people can emerge.”)
I’ll post the entire article at the Deeper Open Space wiki as well for more conversation, should you wish to join me there.