I'm reading The Devil in the White City - a wonderful book about the 1893 Exposition in Chicago that reads like a murder mystery novel threaded into a business fiction book - and yet all of it is true. Along with Larson's incredible research and writing, what strikes me is the breadth of vision for the men behind this Exposition. They wanted a profit - but more than that, they wanted to create something amazing. Olmsted, the man who was the "landscape architect" for this Exposition, created New York's Central Park and determined not to worry about any results less than 40 years into the future when designing Central Park. At the Exhibition, "a single exhibit hall had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul's Cathedral, all at the same time." These guys were intent on creating something amazing.
Peter Drucker once wrote that profit to a firm was what oxygen is to a man. (And recovering from my wretched cold, I've come to appreciate anew the importance of oxygen.) Vital but by no means the purpose. The purpose of business is something grander than just profit. These guys understood that. They weren't focused on pushing the limits of profits - they were focused on pushing the limits of architecture, imagination, and the human experience.
Could you even imagine - in today's world of technology and information exchange and population what we could do with that kind of an approach? It boggles the mind.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Showing posts with label vision. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vision. Show all posts
25 August 2009
09 July 2008
Enlightenment, Pragmatism, Deconstruction & The Future as Context
It is not enough for the next generation of politicians to give up on old ideas. It is time to give up on old ways of thinking.
Enlightenment thinking, perhaps best characterized by the ideas of friends Isaac Newton and John Locke, suggested that one could rely on universal laws, or principles.
Pragmatism, pioneered in part by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, emerged about two hundred years later and suggested that the broad universality of general principles might be over-stated. Specific problems needed to be solved within a specific context. The specialists of the last century pride themselves on being pragmatists.
It might seem odd to put deconstruction within this tradition. Comparatively speaking, deconstruction is a minor philosophy and generally thought of in regards to text. But deconstruction, it seems to me, takes pragmatism a step further, pointing to the importance of context in determining veracity. But context can easily be arbitrary: the psychologist might see the relevant context as one's childhood, the sociologist as one's community, the economist as the one's labor market, etc.
Deconstruction proved unsatisfying to most because it pointed out two things: context is key and context is arbitrary.
To me, it seems as though the relevant context for policy is a shared vision. Typically this will take the form of a desired future, but it need not. (Some really powerful exercises in vision can imagine a different now – not just a different later.) A shared context can create the cohesion of enlightenment thinking's universal principles (and it is worth remembering that it was Enlightenment thinking that brought us the modern nation-state, perhaps the defining community for most people living in the West). A shared vision can suggest goals for pragmatists who will necessarily be working on specific problems.
In the world of politics, we generally hear policy framed in Enlightenment terms: in vague generalities that suggest little in the way of specific solutions. Meanwhile, specialists - pragmatists - are busily working within corporations to solve specific problems and are making progress. So within the public arena, universal truths of little relevance are espoused (e.g., "Education is vital." "We must not let greedy executives rob us." "We must not unnecessarily burden businesses." "We should engage only in just wars."). Within the private sector, a thousand separate and conflicting goals are pursued.
Conflict will always define communities, but a measure of cohesion allows alignment of resources and effort. And ultimately, the public arena is defined by what is common, not individual. It seems to me that our politicians and policy makers need to move beyond Enlightenment era platitudes to the point of providing context for specialists, for pragmatists, in the form of a shared vision.
This vision need not - indeed, will not - be monolithic. It is probably more useful to think of visions than a vision. Visions that could provide a context for specialists might include such things as
• Reliance on alternative, or renewable energy, or a world where the cost of energy drops every year just as information processing and storage has.
• Transforming massive swaths of education into digital and interactive content - eliminating the need for teachers to duplicate efforts across the globe. Using teachers liberated from such rote tasks to do things now ignored (e.g., setting the context for learning with individual life goals for each student, making the definition of a career an iterative process that unfolds over years).
• Creating community centers that enhance feelings of engagement and purpose, dramatically mitigating levels of anomie, depression, and alienation (that is, taking the pursuit of happiness seriously).
• Institutions that enable individuals to realize goals that matter deeply to them rather than goals that simply matter to the leaders of those institutions - or even matter simply to the masses.
Ultimately, this role of creating a context by vision is one that calls for something other than Enlightenment, Pragmatism or even Deconstruction. It requires systems thinking - the leader in a role of facilitator and connector rather than dictator (even if by popular consent). Realizing a future vision generally requires the creation of a new system rather than modification of the old one.
We are acutely aware of the importance of changing technology like trains or cars or planes. We are generally less aware of the importance of changing technology like how we frame problems, model our world, or define possibility. Yet these kinds of technologies, too, have to be changed. How we think about the world sets the context for what is possible, even in the world of technology like planes and cars. It is, sadly, hard to see the glasses one sees through. Yet I can think of no technology change more important than a change in how we think. I would argue that just as this country's founding fathers could not have defined this democracy had they clung to Renaissance-era thinking, so will our generation be unable to create what is next by clinging to Pragmatism or Enlightenment thinking.
Enlightenment thinking, perhaps best characterized by the ideas of friends Isaac Newton and John Locke, suggested that one could rely on universal laws, or principles.
Pragmatism, pioneered in part by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, emerged about two hundred years later and suggested that the broad universality of general principles might be over-stated. Specific problems needed to be solved within a specific context. The specialists of the last century pride themselves on being pragmatists.
It might seem odd to put deconstruction within this tradition. Comparatively speaking, deconstruction is a minor philosophy and generally thought of in regards to text. But deconstruction, it seems to me, takes pragmatism a step further, pointing to the importance of context in determining veracity. But context can easily be arbitrary: the psychologist might see the relevant context as one's childhood, the sociologist as one's community, the economist as the one's labor market, etc.
Deconstruction proved unsatisfying to most because it pointed out two things: context is key and context is arbitrary.
To me, it seems as though the relevant context for policy is a shared vision. Typically this will take the form of a desired future, but it need not. (Some really powerful exercises in vision can imagine a different now – not just a different later.) A shared context can create the cohesion of enlightenment thinking's universal principles (and it is worth remembering that it was Enlightenment thinking that brought us the modern nation-state, perhaps the defining community for most people living in the West). A shared vision can suggest goals for pragmatists who will necessarily be working on specific problems.
In the world of politics, we generally hear policy framed in Enlightenment terms: in vague generalities that suggest little in the way of specific solutions. Meanwhile, specialists - pragmatists - are busily working within corporations to solve specific problems and are making progress. So within the public arena, universal truths of little relevance are espoused (e.g., "Education is vital." "We must not let greedy executives rob us." "We must not unnecessarily burden businesses." "We should engage only in just wars."). Within the private sector, a thousand separate and conflicting goals are pursued.
Conflict will always define communities, but a measure of cohesion allows alignment of resources and effort. And ultimately, the public arena is defined by what is common, not individual. It seems to me that our politicians and policy makers need to move beyond Enlightenment era platitudes to the point of providing context for specialists, for pragmatists, in the form of a shared vision.
This vision need not - indeed, will not - be monolithic. It is probably more useful to think of visions than a vision. Visions that could provide a context for specialists might include such things as
• Reliance on alternative, or renewable energy, or a world where the cost of energy drops every year just as information processing and storage has.
• Transforming massive swaths of education into digital and interactive content - eliminating the need for teachers to duplicate efforts across the globe. Using teachers liberated from such rote tasks to do things now ignored (e.g., setting the context for learning with individual life goals for each student, making the definition of a career an iterative process that unfolds over years).
• Creating community centers that enhance feelings of engagement and purpose, dramatically mitigating levels of anomie, depression, and alienation (that is, taking the pursuit of happiness seriously).
• Institutions that enable individuals to realize goals that matter deeply to them rather than goals that simply matter to the leaders of those institutions - or even matter simply to the masses.
Ultimately, this role of creating a context by vision is one that calls for something other than Enlightenment, Pragmatism or even Deconstruction. It requires systems thinking - the leader in a role of facilitator and connector rather than dictator (even if by popular consent). Realizing a future vision generally requires the creation of a new system rather than modification of the old one.
We are acutely aware of the importance of changing technology like trains or cars or planes. We are generally less aware of the importance of changing technology like how we frame problems, model our world, or define possibility. Yet these kinds of technologies, too, have to be changed. How we think about the world sets the context for what is possible, even in the world of technology like planes and cars. It is, sadly, hard to see the glasses one sees through. Yet I can think of no technology change more important than a change in how we think. I would argue that just as this country's founding fathers could not have defined this democracy had they clung to Renaissance-era thinking, so will our generation be unable to create what is next by clinging to Pragmatism or Enlightenment thinking.
12 April 2008
Whole System Change
“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction out of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
- Martin Luther King
- Martin Luther King
The only effective way to change a piece of a system is to change the whole system it is part of.
Imagine you've been asked to "change" the missing piece of the puzzle in this picture. You have complete freedom to change this piece but you need to know two things about this change effort. One, no matter what you do, you still have to fit in with the pieces around you. Two, those pieces are not changing.
We live in a world of inter-locking pieces. What you can do with your second grade class (Sandi) is severely constrained by what is done in first and third grade. Further, all that is limited by what your society thinks is important, what they expect of education.
What you can do with your engineering design group is limited by marketing and manufacturing. What they do is, in turn, limited by what senior management thinks - or even what your customers think - is important, what they expect of your product and your company.
Given that we live in a world of inter-locking systems, change is evasive. It is nearly impossible. Once pieces are in place, they tend to prop one another up. Our education system creates a particular way of thinking and a particular kind of graduate who goes out into the world to work in companies that, among other things, have a particular kind of expectation about who to hire out of the education system. Government is shaped by business and education and religion - all these pieces shape and mold each other. And all of these pieces have to fit together. In any coherent and functioning society, that is.
If you want to make sweeping changes in design, you'll involve manufacturing and marketing. Any real change is, by definition, inclusive. And it does not begin with efficiency or improvement. Rather, it begins with a vision of what could be. And this vision doesn't know functional pigeonholes or fit neatly within a particular expertise. Rather, it gives all that a new context.
Of all the candidates, Barack Obama has become most closely associated with change. Given the approach and instincts (I cannot bring myself to call it a philosophy) of the current administration, one can only applaud a call for change. But if he is serious, it suggests a larger vision than an idea about how to change the presidency.
A real change to the presidency will involve far more than just the presidency. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt were the last two presidents to transform the presidency. They did not initiate change, really, so much as display a genius for exploiting times of great upheaval. The changes they made to the presidency and government were almost incidental to the change they made to how Americans saw the world and America's role in it.
If Barack Obama can offer a compelling vision of the world and America's role in it, he can deliver the change he promises. If he shrinks from that - if he limits himself to defining the presidency and government only - he'll fail to change the very piece on which he focuses.
Whole system change always sweeps up the pieces with it. Piece-meal change always gets overwhelmed by un-moving, un-responsive, and larger systems. To effect change, you have to speak over the head of the what you want to change. A change in vision means a change in context. When the context changes, the pieces of the system respond. Given that systems reject pieces that don't support its functioning, the only real way to change a piece is to change the system. We need a conversation about the society we want to create.
[And thanks to Jordan for the conversation that provoked this today.]
22 August 2007
The Lie That's True
Attitude is everything. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or think you cannot, you are right." Your life is what you create in your own mind, in your own beliefs.
I think that the above is utter nonsense. I also think that people who are very successful believe this. So, this is a lie that is nonetheless continually made true. I'm not entirely sure whether that makes it a profound truth or the worst kind of lie.
I think that the above is utter nonsense. I also think that people who are very successful believe this. So, this is a lie that is nonetheless continually made true. I'm not entirely sure whether that makes it a profound truth or the worst kind of lie.
21 August 2007
I Don't See Any Vision
“I don’t see any vision,” Bernard said over the top of his newspaper.
“What?” I asked.
“No vision,” Bernard repeated obstinately. “I can’t see it.”
“Bernard,” I sighed, “you’re not making any sense. Eat your bagel. It'll raise your blood sugar.”
“These candidates,” Bernard says, thrusting his bony finger at the paper. “These presidential candidates don’t offer me a vision of anything. They’re all auditioning to be repairmen.”
“They have visions,” I told him. “The Republicans want a world with only reasonable and peaceful Muslims.”
“Ha!” exploded Bernard. “They think that they’re the only people on this planet entitled to violence? The only ones who can thumb their nose at science? Those Republicans!” he snorted. “They’re all monopolists at heart.”
“But it’s a vision,” I persisted.
“It’s not a vision. It’s a fix. They want the world the way they thought it was in the 70’s or 80’s, back when they had hair. They’re reactionary, not visionary.”
“What about the Democrats?” I said. “They want out of Iraq and they want universal healthcare.”
“Out of Iraq,” he said contemptuously. “That’s not a vision. They’re just fixing something that's broken. It’s a repair job.”
“Okay,” I said, now completely distracted from my scone, “but you have to admit that universal health care is visionary.”
“It’s not a vision if you tell your wife she should look more like your neighbor. That’s just imitation. They’re looking at every other developed nation and saying, ‘Why can’t we be like that?’ They’re not creating anything. They’re just trying to fix things, add what's missing.”
“So do you think that Bush has a vision?”
“Sure,” said Bernard as he sipped his coffee. “Bush’s vision for Iraq is that it’ll someday be a democracy, like Switzerland but without skiing.”
“What?”
“Don’t be a schmuck! Bush has hallucinations – not vision,” Bernard said. “Vision is painting a picture of a new possibility. Who’s doing that?”
“Like what?”
“Like an education system that creates human beings and not test takers! Like an economy that works with our environment like mulch works with your garden. Like every government selling off its defense equipment and consolidating the bombs and tanks into a central, global rental facility. Like a government that is its own profit center – a government that is financed without taxing income or investments. Like me dancing with this bad hip.”
“That would be a vision alright,” I said, returning to my scone, trying to find my place on the comics page.
“What?” I asked.
“No vision,” Bernard repeated obstinately. “I can’t see it.”
“Bernard,” I sighed, “you’re not making any sense. Eat your bagel. It'll raise your blood sugar.”
“These candidates,” Bernard says, thrusting his bony finger at the paper. “These presidential candidates don’t offer me a vision of anything. They’re all auditioning to be repairmen.”
“They have visions,” I told him. “The Republicans want a world with only reasonable and peaceful Muslims.”
“Ha!” exploded Bernard. “They think that they’re the only people on this planet entitled to violence? The only ones who can thumb their nose at science? Those Republicans!” he snorted. “They’re all monopolists at heart.”
“But it’s a vision,” I persisted.
“It’s not a vision. It’s a fix. They want the world the way they thought it was in the 70’s or 80’s, back when they had hair. They’re reactionary, not visionary.”
“What about the Democrats?” I said. “They want out of Iraq and they want universal healthcare.”
“Out of Iraq,” he said contemptuously. “That’s not a vision. They’re just fixing something that's broken. It’s a repair job.”
“Okay,” I said, now completely distracted from my scone, “but you have to admit that universal health care is visionary.”
“It’s not a vision if you tell your wife she should look more like your neighbor. That’s just imitation. They’re looking at every other developed nation and saying, ‘Why can’t we be like that?’ They’re not creating anything. They’re just trying to fix things, add what's missing.”
“So do you think that Bush has a vision?”
“Sure,” said Bernard as he sipped his coffee. “Bush’s vision for Iraq is that it’ll someday be a democracy, like Switzerland but without skiing.”
“What?”
“Don’t be a schmuck! Bush has hallucinations – not vision,” Bernard said. “Vision is painting a picture of a new possibility. Who’s doing that?”
“Like what?”
“Like an education system that creates human beings and not test takers! Like an economy that works with our environment like mulch works with your garden. Like every government selling off its defense equipment and consolidating the bombs and tanks into a central, global rental facility. Like a government that is its own profit center – a government that is financed without taxing income or investments. Like me dancing with this bad hip.”
“That would be a vision alright,” I said, returning to my scone, trying to find my place on the comics page.
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