This is a link to a list from a thread, talk about social media, even my software is networked. I've tried 4 times to sir up some discontentment and failed miserably, with nothing but complements. It's a long post but as I'm being told well worth the ten minutes of reading. So here goes, a flighty run through existentialism, a touch of empiricism and and general curmudgeonly rant. Enjoy or preferably try arguing the toss or joining the blather.
I recently gave an opening keynote (do lots of that stuff) for a small local conference of experts looking to solve some intractable problems. My normal contract is somewhere along the lines of 'will dance for food' and so I joined in their morning workshops. Moving around several tables, I kept hearing various knowitalls espousing their own corner of the world and the various moral dangers facing their favoured corner. Trouble is if you ignored the title of their corner and their epistemantic vocabulary, the issues were in fact all the same.
Everybody was talking and nobody was listening. So I lost my temper and started spouting about the bloody obvious coherence initially to an indignant hush. Followed in an equally sudden switch to a resounding guffaw. In a sort of "I've started so I may as well finish" moment, I went for it and improvised a metaphor, with all my usual shouting and bouncing and a big fat dollop of exaggerated melodrama. The following day I got this message:
... sincere thanks once again, for your contributions yesterday. We abandoned the option appraisal and scrapped the agenda in the afternoon in favour of your 'everyman's land' advice. You're impromptu rant was astonishing and we pretty much used the metaphor to navigate the issues for the rest of the day. Simple words with a complex meaning and as usual, I expect that you can't remember what you said. It sounded like poetry to me and I had a go at writing down what you were saying. It was all too fast for my scribbling, but I hope I captured the essence:
My life is full of caves and curiosity And the first steps of explorers, magnificent I will not fear the dark and pursue Beware seekers of the light Not fooled by the shadowy salesman Fearless I turn from comfort I shall see for myself without obsession Stepping through grey gape Holding my own mind New words draw me deeper The cave constrains, narrower, narrower Echoing words twisting turns ever deeper Eyes dark and mystery made manifest The deep wizard dressed in eminence A man no less reborn from darkness Word wizardry, myths and symbols Once an explorer turned prophet To protect the precious "They don't understand You're not like the outsiders You seek the light in the dark You have earned the truth" Another twist a final turn Anticipated rewards so clear now Why couldn't I see this before? A final corner presents the light My eyes bite at sharp focus Wincing yes, I see, oh my god You were right and I see it now Here in your cave resides the light I must touch my new god Weakly slowly towards the pin of light Mouth dry hands trembling fearful Something stands inside the light It's a body, a person, beckoning to me Eye's fixated, the light piercing A face comes into focus The face of my own mother I am reborn and she says ... "What the fuck were you doing in there. Go in and have a look around, by all means, but come out before you turn into Gollum. The light is not in there, it's out here ... protect the precious ... my arse!"
I've been properly admonished and instructed to explain myself and apologise. In doing so, I shall be playing the "yes and" game not the "no but" game and therefore already there are too many "ands".
The cause of my fall from grace was picking on the lovely Dave Snowden during last week's System's Thinking Summit in Cardiff. Yes and at a time when Dave was at a low ebb, rugby blues, in more than one sense!
In my defence and for those of you who don't know Dave, that wasn't what either of us would call picking on. I bet I barely even scratched the surface of someone who's been tempering his philosophical armour since before the Romans arrived. Ethnographically speaking, it's why he's not distracted by the intervening millennia of man made religio-political social control fantasies. So, he doesn't need you to protect him from me. Anyway it wasn't me, it was your own fault, Briany! Doesn't sound much like an apology yet, oops!
By the way, Briany is not their real name, like me they enjoy their multiple identities and this, by the way, is only one of mine. Why should you have to spend your life stuck in the box you fell into as a child, when you can be anybody you want to be and not be awkward, eccentric, insane or any one of those other labels someone else slaps on the outside of your damned box. How many identities do you have ... answer is many, you simply don't allow most of them any agency. How can the hierarchical bastards keep control, if people go about with lots of identities? Oh sorry, rant for another day!
Back to the point, it was Briany who first showed me Dave's little boxes of magic. Now I'm going into dangerous territory, because I have to give you some Briany context or you won't get the synthesis and Briany is going to undoubtedly read this. Briany has a secret, oh shit, her we go! Briany has an IQ of 187 (personal best some years ago) and has spent most of their life trying to hide it, or as I prefer to say, hiding from it. For what it's worth some of you may understand our relationship better if I say that I was Briany's mentor. Over the years, however, that has become a wholly inadequate and inappropriate word. I may well be a touch more worldly wise, but Briany is my intellectual soul mate or to use the label they hate the most, my muse. Like a pretty little medieval thing that hangs around me while I'm working. Oh fuck, I'm now in real trouble! This apology is going to hell in a hand cart.
Yes and talking of hell, the only thing that I ever learnt from Richard Dawkins is: be careful what you focus on. He's spending a lifetime, trying to replace Religion (a word used for a list of righteous traits that allow an omnipotent one to sit above an unrighteous many) with Science (a word used for a list of qualified traits that allow an omnipotent one to sit above an unqualified many) in the hope that the world will be a better place. I don't like mystical religious dogma either, but also don't want to live in a world run by rationalist scientific dogma. General Systems Rule Number 4: you will get more of whatever you focus on, not better nor worse, just more.
Yes and that's the scratchy brain malarkey that sits, quite literally, at the heart of the Cynefin Framework. What's Dave focussing on? He'd probably say it's all about periphery not focus and I do apologise profusely for setting him up to tweet an answer that won me a free pass on the drinks round.
Some years ago Briany went to a couple of days with Cognitive Edge and came back all enthused with, "new words to explain the stuff I kind of knew but couldn't articulate". As you can imagine, from a statement like that - pens, paper, wine and several hours later we couldn't remember where the conversation started.
Briany is a very highly qualified designer of sorts and was intrigued by Dave's explanation of a 2 by 2 matrix, with extra fuzzy bits that enabled the explainer to explain that it wasn't a 2 by 2 matrix. Now something it took me many years to understand, is that Briany sees the world differently, it's the IQ multiplied by the designer inside. At one glimpse, Briany can see a thing, anything, from an apple to a cathedral in a splendid three dimensional thingamajig that can be spun around and manipulated in real time. Briany sees the whole form in the mind, almost like an entity in itself. Prompted by the right question Briany can then explode that entity in the mind and move through it in glorious Hollywood blockbuster style SciFi magic. The first time I saw this in action, CGI hadn't even been invented, so I couldn't understand what, how or even why bother, when I could just as easily walk into the Cathedral and see it for myself?
So there's Dave, intellectually dancing in his favourite pyjamas and Briany quietly exploring an imaginary three dimensional reconstruction. Later that night amidst some brown beer and blather, Briany redrew Cynefin on a napkin in that special Briany way and showed it around.
Now Briany (I'm in so much trouble I may as well go for it), has a tattoo of the word 'Bertalanffy' on the right buttock, just as a slightly weird drunken homage to the fact that wherever you happen to be, there's always a system just beneath it. Briany and I also both enjoy Ackoff's splendid analogy that we are in the midst of a change in age. My tattoo would say 'Boltzmann' or perhaps 'embrace uncertainty'!
Anyway for the best part of two millennia, the world has been subjected to the rise of mass religious order. No matter which book you read and I've waded through most of them, they are the same, based on a list of traits that are good, goodness is good and therefore in our ethic and badness is bad and therefore out. Context is inconvenient and absent. Ethical people abide by the traits in the authentic belief that it is, for the good of goodness. Unethical people game the traits for their own advantage and therefore, perpetually rewrite the ethics to remain ethical, as anything unethical is bad and therefore outside our dogma = aesthetic proselytism. Was that about religion or science?
Either way when you have a mostly uneducated population the best way to keep them ploughing their fields and paying their taxes is to say "don't worry about all those scary big unexplainable things; that's god's business he'll deal with that; you just keep ploughing; god likes ploughing; here's a list of other righteous things god likes; if you behave like this you too can be righteous; you will be rewarded; no not in this life; in the next one ... keep ploughing!"
When the enlightenment kicked off, rediscovering all the splendid human stuff that was around before the religions turned up, Locke and his contemporaries started to replace the mysticism with human reasoning. Trouble is, they didn't actually change the paradigm, they just started replacing the words and redrew a few of the lines on the same old hierarchy diagram. Important righteous stuff at the top and nice straight lines through tiers to lots more less righteous stuff at the bottom, like ploughing. But whereas those lines had previously been ideologically convenient, the enlightenment boys, most notably (in my head) Kant, demanded some empirical evidence. Leibniz actually believed that to understand the science of machines was to understand god: I rest my case your honour!
Whenever humans are involved, there does tend to be a touch of trouble with rewriting all this ethical malarkey leading to a kind of unstable short-termism. I think it's called Politics! But this is the key point of that last ramble, essentially replacing god with bod. It's the human component that makes the difference. Briany could see that in the mind when looking at Cynefin for the first time, there is a human in the middle, on the inside, constructing it in real time.
The explanation of Cynefin on a sheet of paper is a Cartesian two dimensional chart. Yes and, producing each unique evolution of the framework in context, in the real world, requires a bod in the centre ground. Sorry "bod" a colloquialism for a random ordinary person, a body. Briany noticed that the disorder element even in Dave's own description was a bit off-hand, kind of lazily dismissed compared to the intricate descriptions of the other domains. Interestingly, over the years we've noticed Dave pay more attention to disorder, with more detailed analogies and now the Cynefin diagram even has a new fuzzy smudge inside disorder!
This observation creates a classic system paradox. Because if there's a bod in the centre working out in real time how the agents and agency relate, there is a real transition from embracing uncertainty to deriving greater understanding (Boltzmann-esque). To produce the framework you engage in a cycle of emergent knowing attracted by uncertain stuff, a classic complex adaptive system. You use CAS to understand and produce CAS, even Dave says the Cynefin Framework is partially constrained and therefore belongs in its own Complex domain! So why isn't Cynefin a self fulling prophecy just like any of the other ethicalness dogma?
Briany believes that Dave himself represents the cognitive edge to the method, yes and that needs an explanation! Briany says that there is a fifth domain, as indicated, but it's not disorder, it's cognition. Remember, you don't actually own knowledge as an entity, you are perpetually immersed in the act of knowing.
The cognitive domain is different to the other domains, because there is a conscious brain in it and so it has it's own conditions. Now before anyone gets all arsey about natural systems or man made ones, get a grip: all systems are natural, whether we make them or not. So people can be in a system without cognisance of it and in fact, this is the normal human position and it keeps Dave and me, in a job. However, when you are attempting to consciously understand and more importantly deliberately nudge that system, it's different from one that has no consciousness of itself. Without active cognition, Cynefin is a 2x2 categorisation matrix, like a million other versions of teleological four quadrant business bollox (best ever wikipedia page). With cognition Cynefin becomes 3 dimensional and profoundly connected to everything from apples to cathedrals. Consequently, some of the phenomena Dave attributes to the Complex domain is probably more accurately described in the cognitive domain for example, experimentation: preparing to enact ideas when in proximity to favourable conditions. This has caused me and Briany loads of booze and braincells as we all agree there's a fifth domain, but I see the landscape of Cynefin slightly differently to Dave and Briany.
I believe complex systems are always in real time, loosely akin to Husserl's bracketing, the complex system is the emergent live one, inside the brackets. Therefore the cognitive bod is always stood in the complex space making sense of the landscape, there and then, emerging in real time. Subsequently on Cynefin, what Dave calls Complex is what Briany calls cognitive, or my favourite word, tactical. It's a degree of entropy more than complex, or in other words more disordered than complex, so is not in the centre as disorder it sits as an expanding boundary between complex and chaotic. Hence complex goes to the centre where the bod is and the tactical domain is top left. Tactics (unlike cognition which exists in all domains), are about casting forward in time to multiple possibilities that simply do not yet exist: 'apple flavoured' - while complex is now: 'tasting the apple'. In the past when sculpting a new Cynefin Framework and learning more about the dynamical boundaries and shallow dives into chaos and learning cycles, it became increasingly more apparent that there's a phenomenological component. Hence the Entspace model that Briany and I now use. Noema is not the right phrase, but there is certainly something about the 'reaching out of consciousness within Cynefin', reinforcing the systems axiom that agency is more vital than the characteristics of the agent, or the domain.
Cynefin is complete but not in the way Dave tells everyone and this was the inspiration for the taunting tweets. What Briany and I do agree on is Cynefin, or more accurately Dave is wrong, so far wrong, that he is in fact, right again! Yes and profoundly right! So by way of apology, I humbly offer a 5 domain framework of the inspiring man that is Dave Snowden. Yes and for fuck's sake, please don't tell him about this piss poor apology that he won't be looking for anyway!
https://sites.google.com/site/nosapience/Posts/wisdom Hooray, another question triggered by the previous ramble, I do like the way this stuff is emerging. Amongst that long winded post, a couple of you spotted the phrase “relational corroboration” and in various expletives said WTF? So take a deep breathe, here’s an even longer post, but worth it just for the punchline.
I few years ago, I was working for a collection of professional bodies who couldn't figure out why their training programmes were not delivering the people they wanted. We developed a conversation around what they described as their own longstanding tensions between theory and practice. I made the pitch that it's never either or, it's always both and! Then in true systems style I decided to concentrate on the final "and", to see if the whole is more than the sum of it's parts. Either brilliantly, or stupidly, I plumped for the whole being equivalent to wisdom. So what is wisdom?
After skimming a few old favorites and lots of phoning a friend, I mustered the courage to surf around the scholarly cyberspace and politico-professional repositories. I must be sad, but what a laugh it turned out to be.
There's loads of absolute cobblers out there, with arbitrary lists of stuff that seem to have popped into people's heads while they were writing the book. Of course I did come across several well thought out gems and a couple of moments of delightful genius, but more interestingly, I found a plethora of fantastic double barreled phrases. Most of them seemed to emanate from legitimate people and places, so I started to gather them up. I excluded the boring ones with little meaning and amalgamated the good ones that had similar definitions. I ended up with a splendid hybrid list of intellectual gobshite which I named 'epistemantics', reproduced below alongside my own less intellectual interpretations:
Fundamental Ontology – an oxymoron for "there it is", the existence of a thing (theory)
Relational Corroboration - someone else also says "there it is" (proven)
Contextual Differentiation – awareness that you are experiencing a thing (reality)
Reconstructive Analysis – being able to explain the experience (perceived)
Intrinsic Evaluation - I think it's pretty and that's good enough for me (belief)
Aesthetic Proselytism - here are my rules for prettiness (promised)
Structural Contrivance - sociopolitical permission to be exposed to the thing (place)
Expositional Alignment - social recognition for doing the thing (expertise)
Situational Application - doing the thing in the right place and time (purpose)
Autoletic Adroitness - doing lots of the thing without hurting yourself (talent)
Compositional Innateness - having long arms and good depth perception (person)
Proprietary Advantage - looking for things that are just out of other people's reach (potential)
In Douglas Adams’ immortal words, don’t panic! This is just a random list of stuff that emerged while I did it. It seemed no more or less scientific a process than most of the stuff I was finding. But the order in which they are printed above is not random, I reorganised it, after trying to make sense of all the epistemantics, using the little words in (brackets).
I started by thinking how can I illustrate the relationships between all these things and set about designing a suitable representation. I used all sorts of shapes and sizes and pathways and taxonomies but it was just too clunky and ugly. One of the rules of design that I learned a long time ago says, if it’s too hard, design isn’t the right approach!
So instead of designing, I tried playing and after a few failures, had a go at Liang-Hwang Chiu’s cow-chicken-grass game? Nice opener for any session with lots of people. Just ask them to choose the odd one out. In general those with a monist mindset will choose grass as a different category of thing to the animals. While those with a more pluralist mindset will choose chicken as there's a strong relationship between the other two. The story below is an example of where your brain goes when the answer is cow!
Prologue
To paraphrase an earlier post, there are infinitely more things that make stuff the same than there are things that make stuff different, despite the innumerable and ever more granular distinctions people create to tell one thing from another (epistemantics). When you look at the individual things, then no, they are not the same, but that’s more about your perspective or mindset.
Whether or not you’re grass, a chicken, or even a burning star you are in essence made of the same stuff, it is called chemistry. More than that, at some point in the past the molecules that you’re now made of were, most certainly, once in grass, or a chicken, or a burning star! The most interesting symbol of this idea and one which I see increasingly often, is the image of Ouroboros – the serpent eating its own tail, a symbol of the eternal return. Martin Rees refers to it a few years ago courtesy of TED while banging on about people and the universe.
Yes, all very cosmologically interesting, but what’s that got to do with the cow? Well, brain says that Ouroboros is the same basic premise as General Systems Theory, that ultimately in this universe, everything is connected and therefore, there might be a common description of the way everything works from atoms to galaxies. GST is not meant to be a theory of everything, it’s more of an interdisciplinary conundrum trying to explain why the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
I don’t believe that the universe can be, or even should be reduced to a single perfect equation, although there are enough clever people and billions of euros devoted to trying to do the maths. What do you think the LHC is for, apart from of course replacing medieval religious dogma with some equally righteous omnipotence? However, I do like the idea that there are some simple common building blocks that you can combine in any number of ways to do any number of things. After all that imagery is now fairly common place thanks to the geneticists.
And that links nicely back to Martin who, in his talk suggests that people are just about the most complex things that the universe has come up with so far ... as far as we know so far! In that case are we, people that is, just the same as everything else?
Well there’s no doubt that we absolutely love a dose of anthropomorphism, transferring the traits that we like in us, to other things. Even more, we recreate things in our own image from everyday objects to notions of God. Even our homes are made like us with brick walls (skin), beams and columns (bones), windows (eyes), wiring (nerves) and plumbing (I’m sure you’ve got the idea by now).So it’s not much of a leap to think that the way we are, is the same as the way we see things. An interesting concept in systems and cybernetics, sometimes referred to as the peephole problem. Are we able to objectively observe the universe from some kind of peephole in super-space, or are we in fact always a part of the observation? I'm sure there's an LHC joke in there somewhere.
Anyway, as we are yet to find super-space, let's go for; we are always part of the observation. In which case, you've got to ask the question: which bit of the observation is us? Well, by our own definition we are Homo Sapiens, the wise ape. At this point I'll wave a flag for Homo Narrans, but that's for another day. So perhaps, our wisdom is the basic block with which we build everything else?
I work amongst lovely people every day who confuse and abuse a few apparently interchangeable words like talent, expertise, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom and their various synonyms. A sad state of affairs and wisdom in particular, seems to be abused by people at the top of hierarchies, who assume that it’s somehow their gift to bestow. So here we are again, what is wisdom?
Let’s start in the middle with a little epistemology (study of knowledge), whose proponents generally agree that knowledge is made up of three broad things: Firstly the idea, a snippet of fact, a truth or series of truths called a theory. Secondly the experience, a conscious encounter that demonstrates the truth in reality. Thirdly, an intrinsic validation that the truth and the reality are somehow right, a belief. Just like the cow-chicken-grass game, this is a classic Venn Diagram.
So this is the shape of knowledge and there are many words that describe the intersections for example; truth + reality = proof; reality + belief = perception; and belief + truth is sort of like a promise because you haven't done it yet. Knowledge is the gold dust in the middle when all the bits combine and this diagram is sufficient to explain most knowledge based issues.
Belief is the real kettle of fish here and has a more significant role in knowledge than the other two components put together. Mainly but not exclusively because a belief is an argument that you can hold to be true without any evidence, or in fact, can hold to be true in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is why Aesthetic Proselytism can be so dangerous, like a self-regulating trap against wisdom, no rational argument is going to beat an intrinsic belief!
So there are three bits to knowledge that we can rub together in any number of ways to know something. That is, if the three circles of the Venn diagram completely overlap, you have one beautiful lump of pure knowledge and that is wisdom. No it isn’t! This pretty much covers off epistemantics 1 to 6, but there is another contextual element to consider, the observer issue.
The observer is stood in the real space and time, experiencing all that splendid knowledge, but unless they’ve literally just been born, they come with a line of experiences already in the circle. So in reality the observer is inevitably dominated by two very ordinary things. Who they are and where they’ve been. In a more practical sense what they happen to be good at and their place in the world, its history and mores. The ‘good at’ bit is particularly interesting in it’s purest sense, as a person's innate strengths or capabilities, which if exposed to the world favourably, are expressed over time as talent. When I meet people who are lucky enough, to use their talent for a living, they often describe it as their purpose in life.
When originally wrapped in this train of thought, I made myself giggle, thinking about all the purposeless leadership types I’ve met who preen in public, having learnt the words to something that they are no bloody good at. And that really is the point, like a sort of karaoke wisdom there's a disconnection between the knowing and the doing! The opposite of karaoke of course is actually being the consummate performer, an ability beyond personal characteristics, that generates real social value and recognition.
Now let's connect them up and similarly to knowing, it would seem that doing has three overlapping components. Firstly, the thing I can do because of who I am, my innate properties that underpin the person I become. Secondly a conscious encounter that demonstrates my talent in the real world, my purpose. Thirdly, the opportunity that society provides me, recognising my value and validating my place in the world. Just like the cow-chicken-grass game, this is a classic Venn Diagram. So this is the shape of doing and there are many words that describe the intersections: person + purpose = talent; purpose + place = expertise and place + person is like a sort of potential because you haven't done it yet. So doing is the gold dust in the middle when all the bits combine and this diagram is sufficient to explain most doing based issues.
Person is the real kettle of fish here and has a more significant role in doing than the other two components put together. Mainly but not exclusively because we are fickle, do things that we never meant to or do something amazing without actually knowing how we did it. We are full of worthwhile and necessary, deceit and self deception and what’s more, at any moment we can up and change, moving between the simplest physical action and the grandest ethereal goal almost imperceptibly. This is why Proprietary Advantage can be so dangerous, like a self-regulating trap against wisdom, no contrived authority is going to beat an intrinsic ability!
So there are three bits to doing that we can rub together in any number of ways to do something. That is, if the three circles of the Venn diagram completely overlap, you have one beautiful lump of pure doing and that is wisdom. No it isn’t! This pretty much covers off epistemantics 6 to 12 but there is another contextual element to consider, the observer issue.
The performer, stood in the real space and time, doesn't just make it up as he goes along each time, doing it all on pure instinct. Unless he was literally just born, he brings with him a whole brain full of knowledge about doing it before. Whether this is in the form of mental models of possibilities, or theories of what works and what doesn't, or heuristics to guide judgement in times of pressure and uncertainty. What's more the observer's own personal motivations, moral purpose and intrinsic beliefs can overwhelm any conceptual construct and push performance beyond their boundaries to a moment of magic! Hearts and minds, arms and legs emerging in real time in a unique chaotic moment of perfection.
There's a pattern unfolding in these posts, giving the same explanation twice, except it’s even worse this time, using the same sentences. As you would expect there’s a good reason for it. Doing and knowing aren’t two completely separate entities, like the two diagrams would initially suggest. Bloody obvious when you know, but the connecting factor was sat there in the epistemantics all along; two bits are in fact, the same:
Contextual Differentiation – awareness that you are experiencing a thing (reality)
Situational Application - doing the thing in the right place and time (purpose)
The bottom one is an evaluation or affect of the top one switching your brain on and knowing the purpose to the doing, or vice versa. So I went with Situational Differentiation (sounds more epistemantic than the possibly more accurate Contextual Application) and now the two Venn Diagrams slot together neatly around performance. Unfortunately brain does not like neat or convenient especially in diagrams, so I went back to complexity and thought what do the dynamics look like. A little mental modelling and some arguments and wine and this abstract story emerged:
Constructing theories from truth and building societies from a sense of place are similar functional activities, they attract each other, like magnets and overlap so that the society authorises or validates the proof. Intrinsic beliefs and innate purposes are similarly attracted as the talent for nuances in perception become almost autonomic and simple action turns to flourishing with explanations like, see it was meant to be like this! On the other hand life can end up, not quite so rosy! That’s because there’s a tension, between proprietary advantage and aesthetic proselytism they repel each other, twisting the basic diagram and putting all the relationships in tension.
If the tension spins to the left and aesthetic proselytism breaks, the people, their society, their ideas and their values are swamped by proprietary advantage. The dominant force will be Dogma: rules that perpetuate advantage in the few. Similarly, if the tension spins everything to the right, aesthetic proselytism rises up. The dominant force will be Faith: rules that perpetuate naivety in the many. Perhaps it’s why both religion and politics keep getting muddled up and spend most of their time fighting with themselves.
Take another breathe ... this will be no surprise to regular readers!! Well what would you know, there seem to be five components in this story, but do they come together to create wisdom? As the wise ape, these five things must represent the forms and functions that we have at our disposal to create, build, deploy, deduce or simply be, wise. The physical attributes of me and the thing, plus the relationships of me and the thing, plus an interaction with me and the thing, plus my mental interpretation of the thing, all put together in the context of my own convenient view of the thing, in my world.
Which brings me to the story about the tree, a horse and a convenient ape? If you recognise the players, please don’t worry about any religious gobshite, despite the millennia of intervening worship, the story is a philosophical one.
So a very long time ago, this splendid ape happened to be touring the countryside in the pursuit of enlightenment, he stopped under a tree to meditate, or more likely to go for a dump. It’s one of those rare moments in life when the fickle front brain and huge back brain are perfectly aligned for thinking. Anyway, while seated, he realised that if his body was “deposited” amongst the roots of the tree, his body would be absorbed by the tree, if the tree bore fruit and was eaten by the horse, he would become the horse and if the tree fell, it and he could become the cart behind the horse. He also realised that he was the only part of this eternal system that knew it and therefore he bore a responsibility for the tree, the horse and the cart.
The result was an idea that has endured almost unchanged as the five aggregates of form, discrimination, sensation, mental formations and consciousness. The bloke is obviously Gautama Buddha and the official literature describes the aggregates as arising in a progressive fashion, not a classification of the human being, rather aspects of his manifestation?
When I first saw Talcot Parson's AGIL heuristic for analysing systems, I thought he’s a flaming Buddhist! He wasn’t, but still says a system must, to some degree survive, adapt to the environment, integrate its components, attain its goals and maintain its latent pattern. He called it a thinking scheme and no better than the quality of those theories and explanations by which it is processed.Brain says it’s the same as the stuff under the tree. Then, bloody hell I can remember thinking, I bet Ludwig von Bertalanffy knew all about Gautama and Parsons. It all smells like a sort of general systems theory of people and albeit with different vocabulary, uncannily similar to the components of knowing and doing in the long list of hilarious epistemantics!
So if we are the wise ape, then we are wisdom and our view of things is also made of the same stuff. After all eventually everything is the same as everything else. Consequently, everything we think, all the things we say, and everything we do is similarly constructed with the same five components and even each of the individual components is made up the same five bits. Like Ouroboros we are the things we consume and produce.The more times you put all five together, the better you get at it (physical skill); the more connected it seems (social relevance); the more sensitive you are to the conditions (emotional acuity); the more coherent your analysis (mental efficacy); and the more complete your view of the landscape every time you look at it (moral clarity).
Perhaps one could say that wisdom is not leaving out one of the five for convenience, but that's a fairly miserable way of describing something so fabulous. Let's do a better description, starting with a mature cut of Piaget, rub in a good handful of Kahneman, a soupcon of Decarte, remove the Jung and finish with Kant to taste. Bake for several hours in an old Greek pot and it's fairly bloody obvious that these five things are our developmental intelligences; physical, social, emotional, mental and moral. I will explain this lot another time, if anyone is interested, as underestimating the complexity of all this intelligence stuff is the root cause of all sorts of cock ups!
However, back to the question of wisdom and the conundrum of the whole being greater than the sum it of it's parts. Well to start with, this phrase is actually a common misinterpretation, Bertalanffy actually said that the whole is 'different' to the sum of it's parts and this story of theory versus practice is quite a good demonstration of the difference. Despite the common parlance the two things don’t actually directly compete and are a fairly poor, or incomplete description of the relationship between knowing and doing, (which is what the professional splendid people I was working for, said that they actually meant).
In that beautiful chaotic moment of perfect performance in the zone, you can get a lot more out while reducing the amount you put in, so the outcome can end up using less resources than you would have used, by deploying them all individually. Surely, achieving what you intended with less effort has got to be wise?
Now before any process monkeys start preening, and misinterpreting this as 'lean' or 'flow' or any of the other mechanically constructed dogma, I hope that it's now bloody obvious why trying to change or improve something just by buying in a load of proprietary advantage just doesn't work. In every single organisation I've worked in, they already had everything they needed, so in fact, the whole can be less than the sum of it's parts and not in a good way?
Oh yes, more lovely epistemantics that really mean the same thing: more bang for your buck, or your bang for less bucks. Well either way, what would you know, all five components end up nested, in a perpetual disequilibrium, just like some sort of complex system!
Epilogue
There was a blind man and a deaf man trying the find their way home. The blind man led the deaf man and they got hopelessly lost. The blind man couldn’t see the advice from behind. They changed places with the deaf man leading the blind man and they got even more lost. The deaf man couldn’t hear the advice from behind. Then they met a friendly lady who explained where they were. Their predicament was nothing to do with being deaf or blind, it was simply that neither of them knew where they were.
Wisdom comes from being lost … as often as possible … it’s a gap waiting to be filled!
I set up this website as an experiment a couple of months ago and haven’t really taken it seriously, generating very little content or interest. But nevertheless, a kindred spirit has just been in touch having correctly interpreted the vague existential description of entspace on the home page. Of course that doesn't mean that entspace is correct, but it does mean that the idea has now reached stage two in the pursuit of knowledge, namely relational corroboration. Which proves nothing more than my train of thought isn't completely barking.
So in answer to your fabulous question; yes, entspace is a representation of wholeness as a nested system and I like your language, very Bertalanffy. Now apart from Bob, who asked the question that may not mean much to anyone else? So in true existential style I’d better explain some language about representations. There are broadly five means of representation:
Firstly, there’s an illustration. This is a picture of something, a snapshot of words or pictures in any medium, that demonstrates nothing more than the existence of the illustration or the illustrated or the illustrator or, in its most authentic sense; all three. Used a lot in Physics!
Also firstly, there’s a diagram. This is a collection of illustrations with or without connections, demonstrating the differences and relationships of the things being illustrated. This is a pathway, or a strategy, or a map of things in a territory, the most sophisticated of which is more commonly seen as a scaled up or down, replica of the real thing. Used a lot in Chemistry!
Secondly, there’s a story. In a sort of arse-backwards sense, this is a description or experience of a diagram in real space and time. It can be expressed in words or pictures or mimicry. Most of us struggle with narratives that have no meaning, hence stories often encompass diagrams that are used as a mechanism to structure, or try to explain aspects of the plot in retrospect. In a modern sense this could be a film of real events however; a story is much, much more than a retrospective composition! A story unfolds in fragments of real time more like a live television transmission of events as they happen. Even if you are sat in a chair reading a work of fiction, you are in fact experiencing a real story in your own real time. The illustrations, diagrams and story will emerge in ways that were uncertain in advance, but explainable in hindsight. Unless of course it’s a boring story! Hence, you create your own story in real time, every time you experience something in life, even if you don’t realise it at the time and therefore, you have to be in it to win it. Used a lot in Biology!
Thirdly, there’s a model. This is notoriously easy to get wrong as the word is used for all sorts of things, but it’s probably most useful to think of a model as an experimental story. A model projects forward the effects of illustrations and diagrams and stories extrapolating, across space and time anything from a weak possibility to a foreseeable probability. Akin to tactics, models are mental constructs and cannot and do not define a future state (that’s a diagram), but may contain a number of alternative stories, related to each other in complementary non-linear or irreversible networks. Most things in modern society labelled model are more accurately described using one of the other words. You’ve only got to critique any ‘strategic leadership document’ or ‘organisational visionary mission’ full of models, to see that the cause and effect relationships are all linear and dependent on stuff that’s ignored. Therefore, the vast majority of socio-political models are no more than convenient ideological illustrations. Modelling is uncomfortable, indeterminate, experimental, innovative, bloody marvellous and extraordinarily satisfying when it works and hence, prone to more than a little reporting bias. Used a lot in Maths!
Fifthly, there’s art. He stands back and covers his ears as the intellectual buckharck rings out! The word has been classically and popularly kicked to death, but it’s merely a word, it’s the meaning it conveys that is important (got to love the quote Mrs Midgley). This is where the nested nature of entspace comes to life as a representation of wholeness. It is certainly not a hierarchy as the top is not the most important or sophisticated. Think of the nest as essential at the centre and delicate at the edge; without someone to wipe the poorly bottom the most advanced brain surgery would not take place. Art can for example be subtle and small, but still contain the potential for deep interpretive analysis (poncing about), intuitive and empirical experience (telling stories), structural understanding (explaining things) and in the end it exists in its own right (hanging on the wall). In art like in chaos, the future can be completely independent or not, from the past and the present. So, back up the nest, art goes beyond a description of the thing; and the comparison of the thing to other things; and experiences around the thing; and the intellectual interpretations of the thing; to an intrinsic evaluation of its aesthetic meaning, to me. Used a lot in Philosophy!
So what’s all that got to do with entspace? Well the heuristic that is most meaningful to me (or perhaps is the least inaccurate), is that entspace is a gap; within which you can build a picture, or a map, or a narrative, or a projection, or a distillation of all of that. It’s much more important that you choose the words that convey the meaning, than I insist on my favourites.
Existential stuff over, I’ll now do exactly the same explanation with my favourite complex human systems language. There are lots of recognisable cognoscenti in here! Anyway, there are five nested systems each one made up of and producing all of the others, but for shorthand and a touch of irony, I’ll describe them as Orders!
The starting point is zero, the background conditions. Unless you’re at the moment of the big bang there is always background stuff. In fact even at the big bang there had to be a gap, into which it all went boom! Therefore, we start with background stuff which is not in itself a system but has a direct effect on the resulting 1st Order, unless of course the background is conceptually discounted by people who like a bit of Newtonian splendidness:
The 1st Order is a Resilient System: in intellectual terms it is an illustration of order itself, with simple predictable outcomes affected by the existence or physical formation of things. In a social sense it relates to essential (not basic) needs, skills, data and linear predictable work completed by practitioners with a purpose. Decisions are factual do it or don’t do it. In pure change terms it is an invention, the creation of a new idea. Doing stuff = B(R1)
The other 1st Order is a Socient System: the resilient is nested within it and intellectually it is a special case of diagrammatic order. The outcomes are a function of the mechanical properties of a thing and its relationships. In a social sense it is manifest in teleological structures that require expertise, to navigate to, a limited range of predictable outcomes and the tools of the trade are processes, projects and strategies (one in the same). Decisions are optional, picking from a limited range of predetermined choices. In pure change terms it is a revolution, more commonly prescribed as the implementation of a different idea. Organising and doing stuff = B(S1+R1)
The 2nd Order is a Sentient System: it involves 1st order systems but now in an animated or live form. Intellectually an open system in real time with a complex emerging story, that is sensitive to, but not exclusively determined by, the background conditions. Socially this is work in progress where experience is gained through intuition, heuristics and successive limited comparisons. Decisions are situational, so you have to be in it to experience the self-regulating feedback and determine which if any, 1st Order systems to deploy. This represents the meso system, from where an observer can see the micro and the macro, so no matter how clever you happen to be, you cannot do this stuff from a distance. In pure change terms this is evolution, fine tuning the idea you’ve already got. Experiencing and organising and doing stuff = S2+S1+R1
The 3rd Order is a Salient System: again nested in the previous this is the quintessential intellectual system, dependent upon a conscious brain to draw on the 1st and 2nd Order systems in an attempt to predict their effect. Socially the critical requirements for saliency are direct experience of 2nd Order judgement together with understanding the predictable effects of 1st Order process. Decisions are preferential and all about the future, for example, preparing a range of resources as tactics available when approaching a point of preference. Saliency is a function of proximity to favourable conditions, and timing, spotting the important thing and enacting relatively small experiments at the edge of practice. Systems in this Order can be foreseeable but not controlled and therefore, impossible to institutionalise without transforming into 1st Order. This is typically misunderstood by people in hierarchies entrained with a 1st Order mindset. In pure change terms this is innovation, doing something new with an old idea. Understanding and experiencing and organising = S3+S2+S1
The 5th Order is a Sapient System: as the fully nested order it is a form of wholeness and its maturity or wisdom, dependent on the completeness of the nested system. Or, at least never, deliberately ignoring an Order for the convenience of ideology! Socially this is pushing your luck, a crisis where action comes first, directed by a very small number of aesthetically pleasing essential principles, like “save the life”. Rules initially go out the window and depending on the proximity of the social control mechanisms, (eg the boss) resources are unconsciously redirected to solve the problem or create the disturbance. If the same problem fails routinely by surprise, the boss’s principle is often “save me”. Decisions are providential, which is little more than gambling at first; just do something see if it works; if it doesn’t work do something else; but if it worked last time it’s unlikely to work next time. A fantastic impromptu party goes here, but please never try to repeat it, as boredom and embarrassment inevitably ensue. This sort of chaos is not necessarily all bad as it’s a fabulous place to start a shit load of learning very quickly and so, some of the best experiences are here. In human terms this system does have a habit of beating you up and disproportionately wearing you out. In change terms this is exploration, suddenly finding out that you already had the idea.Seeking and understanding and experiencing = S5+S3+S2
Now for the mathematically minded, you will have noticed the annoying numerical sequence, so here’s an existential summary of entspace, pretending to be an equation:
Wholeness ≥ B((+[R1)+{S1)]+{S2]}+S3}}+S5}
Please feel free to send me the proper mathematical logic that describes the pattern of two steps forward and one step back. Both of these five part explanations are in fact, exactly the same so now hopefully, the representation on the home page will make more sense. But to really cook your noggin, at the point when you make sense of something in the 5th Order, the whole nest can become the background conditions. Ha Ha! To quote Bob, “this is like a sort of tacit general systems theory; it needs more science, but feels uncomfortably right”.
In my own experience, I keep finding this pattern in all sorts of places and it has become incredibly useful in relearning stuff that I do understand and quickly picking up stuff that I don’t. The most interesting bit to me is that the practitioners I work with every day, recognise all five Orders, are exposed to them regularly and readily understand the differing impact on life and work. Meanwhile, their employers are almost inevitably trapped in the 1st Order mechanics.
