Phil Cubeta poses a set of very good questions about the language we use to think about organizational worlds. He challenges us to see the living systems view with these questions: Questions When we adopt the language of social enterprise, or social investing, or a social capital markets do we embrace metaphors more sterile than those of the fox, loam, carrion, the crop, and the harvest? What is lost when our master metaphors are commercial? Can we engineer solutions to our ills, or can we only be cured? Might the cure be organic, from within, from sources that lie deep …
Chewing on these: Performing the world is a conference in New York this fall. Teaching social media to environmental activists. Lianne Raymond gives the gift of words for International Women’s Day. Rob Paterson on new careers in sustainability. Andre Hardin posts an outstanding video of a Rube Goldberg machine from the band OK Go. Jordon Cooper with a nice find: a video about the photographer BlueJake of New York City.
Jack Ricchiuto on simplifying strategy: Every organization, and community, I work with on strategy is very relieved when I liberate them from the inane practice of traditional academic language in the process. I refuse to allow them to waste valuable time debating over the distinctions of: goal, objective, strategy, tactic, and night maneuvers. (I throw in the military reference to “night maneuvers” to inject humor into what is usually a very humorless and uninspired process – and it works.) What do we do instead? We replace these never-agreed-upon jargon with complex words like: where, why, how, and what. To be …
A nice indictment – chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov on the submission of creativity to the dull incrementalisim of logic models: With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a …