Of Degrees of Freedom and dead Cats…

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Using the Schrödinger’s Box lens, we are now mostly populating the World with dead cats, and they are killing us slowly, while entrancing us with their phony, mysterious enigmatic Mona Lisa smiles. (This then we believe is wonderland).

What we put out there in the name of progress and development, mostly, drastically shrinks probability spaces, rather than expand them — reducing broader, non-local degrees of freedom for life and world-making. We are also a topological disaster already, and in the making.

Technological progress and the ‘genius’ of its application in all domains, eagerly accelerates the making of new cats — those that will supposedly live longer, amuse you and not die on you in a hurry, or just need ever larger litter boxes.

The ugliness of the new we birth, lies not in conventional aesthetics, for a building might seem pretty when seen in isolation, as might any shiny gizmo (Musk’s cars), for example, but in the other dimensions of aesthetics (Quality as in Pirsig’s book — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) of living — Material/Real or Virtual/Digital.

We have over time learned to expand the notion of Space — from what just used to be Material and Energy, we now have Information and Knowledge, and everything listed above, penetrate and disturb the Social, Political and Cultural at all layers of society.

Wonder what spaces come next, though when we have exhausted spaces for human worlds on the terrestrial, there is always Mars, and Musk perhaps anticipates that.

Zuckerberg just gave up on Meta — that space was not viable, but I don’t believe he will rest. The Social spaces he created are a schism-producing quagmire, but that is the nature of things — Eyeballs get Glaucoma, and glasses don’t quite work.

In the new economics, spaces we reduce in Nature and Environment and elsewhere are not counted — nor is there particular attention to temporal spaces in the large, past or future — heritage dismissed, futures post-human. When one space runs into constraints, all we need to do is to shift our desires for more degrees of freedom to shiny emerging spaces.

We are in a rush, remember, and the settlers of the new spaces are in a hurry to extract as quickly as possible, exploit the temporary surges in Value and make quick exits (It is in the language of entrepreneurs and the V Capitalists).

The rest of us are left a stock market to speculate which cats should make it using our collective wisdom — if all goes well, we will retire wealthy and purr.

As we move forward, new Spaces and their activities of their settling, dominate economies as old ones recede in relative importance, as these new ones demand infrastructures (think Crypto) and services for their new ecosystems.

These new landscapes are highly fertile grounds for the dysfunctional. Their economies are and will increase, alongside those we need for our world-making.

Ever more will be spent on winning elections for power for example, but how possibly could you ignore the economies of fraud, corruption and general dysfunction in the whole that you must now ‘govern’. Fear not for we will, for example, spend more on Security and Intrusion Detection — those too are collateral economies you just might not have needed otherwise.

Know also that these dark economies are much larger and lucrative than the sops citizens gather from their patrons’ largesse. We do not see these darknesses till the banks collapse, until there is an environmental disaster, or a pandemic. We congratulate ourselves on our resilience and recovery, and resume BAU after the crises.

That there is our traffic congestion, that is failed public health and education or economies — that is anxiety, fear, hopelessness and despondence. That is how all our lives are Occupied, right beneath our noses, and with our innocuous seeming collusion too, and inexorably we cannot take these back — we watch mutely, and mostly deluded.

So then, dead or barely-alive cats are clogging up our Public Spaces and Civic Life, and we only need to open the Boxes of our minds to see them.

Only when we start recognizing dying cats foisted on us as new and progress, or completely reject the allure of those already dead could we take these spaces back for an expansive, alive and enduringly flourishing future for all mankind.

(I am reminded of Vonnegut, not sure which book — The Chinese have become so small that they are particulate and suspended, and if I remember right, people are turning green breathing them in, but do not know why).

Designing For Expanding

Degrees Of Freedom

Flourishing

Rehearsing for theater and Design Research

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A conversation this morning, and this happened between long-time friends from the amateur theater world in Bangalore India, prompted this post. It occurred to me that rehearsals, which often lasted a couple of months or more, provided a direct experience in what it might mean in order to ‘make’ in a design studio for insight.

If a theater group stays with a production, then there is more that happens in terms of learning over time, as the play evolves and matures in its later iterations. I will come to that aspect of learning in some later post.

Here is a little background. Almost forty years ago, I got to become a part of an amateur theater group, Gnatak, in Bangalore, India. Pronounced ‘Natak’ (naa tuck), the Indian word for theater, the ‘G’ in the front of its spelling had many interpretations, left deliberately open. Every now and then, people would wonder and come up with some interpretation of what that letter might stand for —and in the process it seemed to provide a constantly evolving construction of identity.

That is a fascinating thought to explore, perhaps later — how posing an enigma creates a new language and grammar, opening up spaces for conversation and leaving a mystery in its trail for ongoing wonderment and fluid redefinition.

The motley group of college students, professional engineers, activists, artists, journalists, business people — fluidly came together around some sort of a permanent core of maybe eight or ten regulars, to produce on an average three to four plays a year. I happened to be there for almost five years during this intense period, until professional and other personal forces did their centrifugal magic.

At some other time, I will perhaps also write about the amazing productivity of the group’s informal organization, a concept I leveraged in my role as a Business Leader in an American Multinational to great success. It works!

The thought that got me to write this morning has to do with how the rehearsal process, a subset of the totality that was Gnatak for me, was a fascinating creative experience, a process whereby dead scripts and texts were brought to life.

The scripts, often written for a foreign, non-Indian context, (because we were all WAIP — Westernized, Anglo-Indian People), needed to be in English, the language we who came from across the country shared and were fluent in, often were about second hand-experiences.

These narratives were about strange contexts that we only had second-hand information, knowledge or understanding of. We were global citizens in some sense because of our upbringing and schooling, even though most of our knowledge beyond India was second or third-hand. However, we were merely in the face of huge unknowns that we needed to navigate over the course of the rehearsal months.

The not knowing too much about the context perhaps was an interesting prerequisite for our creativity — as we could make whatever meaning we wanted, giving it the accents of our looks, worldviews, ideas, and Indian-English manners of speaking in the process.

Somehow, through a process of initial probatory readings, a play was picked, because it produced some intuitive sense of its potential — it supposedly had ‘ghum’, another fluid word that in essence suggested a kind of radical exciting energy. 

Random contextual conditions would then decide what followed — who was available to act, who had time to direct, what spaces were available for rehearsal etc. 

Amateur theaters did not have permanent rehearsal spaces, which in afterthought is extremely conducive to creativity. All kinds of social networks came to life to find us somewhere we could practice. Often schools would let us use their halls to rehearse after hours, ignoring some of the social life and language that came with what characterized our unique sociality. 

But, when the gates were closed and lights turned off for the evening, there were always the streets lights under which one could go on into the early hours of the morning, timing determined by how late one could find restaurants that served tea. That is another fascinating dimension of an amateur theater ecosystem one must delve into later.

Every day the rehearsals were a revelation. One understood more about some nuance of the author’s intentions, historical context, the particular use of language, strange words that evoked our own made up meanings etc. Sometimes these revelations were radical and surprising. 

But, there was something else that happened that was perhaps more important for me. As we gave birth to these strange worlds as surrogates, who was acting, how they felt that day, and how they felt about each other, changed what happened on a given evening.  And, in that happening, something more opened up in the possibility spaces of the play’s worlds – Way beyond perhaps what the playwright might have had in mind. Every day these inter-personal dynamics changed what the play might have meant and what it meant to us.

This was a unique process of insight generation and it would definitely not have happened without the immersion and its youthful intensity. Some of the best and most interesting performances happened during these evenings and early hours of the morning on a street corner somewhere. 

There is one thing one learns from this process — there are no guarantees, irrespective of how much the idea is to concretize and capture the production of experience in a repeatable manner, that you will see something again. Not even on the day of the performance are you assured of a reproduction of your best rehearsal moments, though there is always the possibility of surprises on the day of the performance itself.

What a gift it is then to witness the evolution of meaning-making during the rehearsal, and not just some notion of a final version on the day of the public performance.

What then does this have to do with design research one might ask.

One watches a public performance of everyday life, in some kind of an ethnographic study sense. One brings back snapshots, and artifacts, and tries to capture and make sense of what those things might mean, looking for some kind of an essence beyond the literality of the spectacle and through that reflection reveal the scripts and the generative, productive processes — that are the ’sutras’ and the ‘mantras’, the signature patterns of the people we observe.

Gnatak too had a signature style — a very distinctive approach to what plays we chose to perform and how we did them. There are stories about how some other groups tried to do the same plays several decades later, and left audiences yearning for the return of the original.

Those signatures are what one is searching for too in society, the purpose of the research. 

It is the human collective that produces the human agents that is the intention of our understanding and quest. What for example, are the scripts in operation and how do we produce our responses to Covid or Climate Change? 

We can uncover the secrets of our improvisations and we could learn something from theater and the rehearsal process in particular about how to go backstage and get to those invisible authors of our lives.

Lessons from Afghanistan – Realizing Better Outcomes

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The Taliban have done horrible things in the past, when they had an opportunity to govern. The things that most stand out as signatures are their brutality, intolerance, misogyny, among other things.

They came in to restore order, and in the midst of institutional failure, delivered on some basic promises of stability and order.

Their vision however cannot create a flourishing, vital society – one that can grow beyond whatever traditional models of world-making they have in mind.

Yet, the models they offered, won against the alternatives that the Western countries had to offer – in Afghanistan as a whole, not just in the pockets of Kabul.

Why? Why did the institutions people abhorred, that created a vacuum into which the Taliban stepped, not create alternative institutions?

That is our learning #1.

The deeper archetypes that inform such structures remained latent and their corruption is also their weakness – they cannot even defend their own pathologies (I mean In Afghanistan. In North Korea, they have mastered that, and in a number of countries that are in between and soon becoming like their polar extremes above).

The Taliban will eventually die, and they will most likely take the society and nation down with them. Because, what they have to offer is not generative – nothing based on their ideology can be generative except in a medieval world.

Accelerating that inner breakdown is a priority for the world – for they cannot become exemplars of failing order elsewhere, but we must also have better alternatives to offer – Not just Visions, but practices for realizing better futures.

What kind of an attractor can the world create that Afghanistan and many others like them will find compelling. Clearly whatever we have is not working.

Strategic Design – Shifting the Locus

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When we think of Strategic Decision-Making in complex social situations, which I think of as synonymous with Strategic Design, we tend to see body of decision makers – people in positions of authority. In the case of civic services, the idea of decision makers, merges with the agencies providing the services.

A post on social media by Benjamin Taylor, who runs a group called ‘Systems Community of Inquiry’ got me thinking about this issue, and in particular the question of where the locus of decision-making should ideally be.

This is his post – Benjamin Taylor Post.

As decision makers, civic agencies are constantly challenged to keep up with evolving needs. These services come in a large variety of forms, and the more complex the society they serve, the more complex the corresponding portfolio. How then should these be designed so that they are in some sense ahead of the needs curve?

I think of the role of these services as creating a design platform for society to engage in its own acts of world-making. The ecosystem of service providers then can include a number of different entities in the Value Creating Ecosystem (VCE), including private and non-governmental agencies. In fact, citizens themselves are also a part of this VCE, in fact central to it. 

When seen in this manner, clearly the VCE exists to serve the Citizens, and it is they then who should be empowered to make strategic choices – the implication of the idea behind the notion of ‘everybody designs’. This is a shift in the locus of strategic decision-making.

Clearly this is non-trivial and not all citizen bodies are capable of making such complex decisions. But, as the complexity of society increases, I believe that this is essential and inevitable. 

This is also the idea perhaps in the notion of a p2p commons, where increasingly citizens would take responsibility for designing and defining what they need for their world-making.

My final thought therefore is the need to separate the idea of governance from that of providing civic services, or ecosystem services in general. The Governance of the VCE has the task of designing the platforms and keeping ahead of the curve. It must therefore also take on the responsibility for building such capabilities and practices that can steer this complex Living Enterprise to realize better futures on an ongoing basis – to shape it evolution.

From the Moribund to the Strategic – an Invitation to Conversations that matter

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How does one understand and grapple with complex intractable issues such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, violence, etc. in order to create better and more enduring outcomes?

These challenges cannot easily be traced to simple causes – and therefore are not amenable to superficial treatments. One needs to go beyond the current world of order, into the deeper layers of society – in order to explore other dimensions of reality, such as the Social and Cultural.

What is your current portfolio of capabilities for understanding spaces beyond your current world of Order? Can you understand the Complex? Is the landscape of your world Complex?

Most of those who deal with Ordered Systems – are either responsible for dysfunction, get less than optimal results for their work, are facing complex intractable challenges, or, are looking to create new Value, but not sure how to do that. All existing avenues have been exhausted. They also anticipate and increase complexity and uncertainty and do not know how to navigate it.

In order to do that, they need to look beyond their worlds of Order – Beyond their current understandings in Healthcare, Finance or Education, for example. They are uncertain about how to do that – there is not much clarity. The emerging world seems very complex and no clear paths are visible. Purely rational models (ways of constructing knowledge)of the modern, industrial era do not work.

Knowing how we know
For this one needs to revisit the way one constructs knowledge of the world in which we propose to intervene – because we have exhausted the potential of what used to be an Ordered World, and this new world that we propose to discover, is unfamiliar and not amenable to conventional ways of knowing and understanding.

Bigger Picture – Divergence – Opening up Strategic Options Spaces:
Having acquired new ways of knowing, more conducive to knowing complex situations, one needs to understand a complex reality – something that includes a complex landscape of possibilities.

The opportunity to create New and Novel value lies beyond the borders of current regimes of order. One then gets an understanding of a new whole, which can be described and a way to speculate possible pathways through that complexity.

This new whole that includes the world beyond the worlds of order is complex, and does not necessarily reduce complexity or uncertainty – if that is what you were trying to get a handle on – it just describes the real nature of the whole world and in some cases the possible reasons why it is so.

It however enables you to have much richer conversations that include several perspectives, or rather, does not ignore or leave out any perspective just in the interest of simplification or reduction. It points to the errors in the current models of the world of order.

Through these expanded and richer conversations it becomes possible to move forward in a better-informed path-finding. The process therefore ends in an Invitation to a strategic conversation, which would include deeper insights and therefore result in more strategic outcomes.

Carve out New Opportunities and Intervene
Now you can carve out opportunities from a richer landscape and develop interventions being guided by a new Strategic Architecture – a new set of Principles.

Acting in Complexity

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What does it mean to say, ’embrace complexity!’. This is something I have been pondering about for a while.

It is the recognition of a new kind if order – something we did not have language for – we also know the grammar of that expression- sometimes it is in visible structures but more often than not the structures are invisible. This is particularly true of human enterprise. It is much like a complex elephant – the kind that six blind men in the Jataka story try to figure out.

The purposeful human enterprise is a special case. When it encounters the real world, it must figure out how to make sense of and respond to this complexity in order to still achieve its purpose.

It needs the grammar and the language so that it can construct an appropriate response. It uses this to construct a model and Cilliers says this model must correspond as closely as possible to the world, but Borges or Foucault say that’s not possible. So, we are somehow condemned to never knowing completely- and yet we must act.

But we are no longer completely ignorant – what we have learnt is rather than command the world and expect it to obey, we invite it to a dance, and through this process, it reveals the balance of its secrets- that is our path to better knowledge. We cannot impose our will but tango and jazz.

The conversation is one that can anticipate and predict how the world will respond to our enquiries and requests.

The world is already engaged in a creative process – our presence must not intervene in its poetry but become co-creative.

The challenge for those that work in the design of new (digital) experiences, is to explore the transformational potential that digitizations harbor. Rather than slap digital onto the enterprise it asks how can one reimagine the enterprise in a fundamentally new way. Maybe develop better responses to some unanswered questions or wicked challenges. What are those?

To begin the process, we must have better knowledge – of what? What are the questions we must have good answers for? What has been worrying us – irrespective of whether a particular design challenge is on our mind. Could we make a strategic difference by considering something beyond the everyday?

Understanding the world is surely necessary, but so is the conception of a response- an enterprise that is a partner in the new creative endeavor- of value, perhaps more strategic!

Design schools do not have a discipline or practice that is analogous to the challenges strategic advisors face. The response is an artifact – the making of design principles.

The world cannot be described in a single way – the creative practitioner engages in a dialog and finds many answers – in that sense the practice is open-ended, but the essence, or the pearls start to reveal and speak the language of complex order. That is something we can learn from creative practitioners – how they pursue for discovery.

You need many probes, and single dives are inadequate- you must probe from many vantages – and many dimensions – like a grid one superimposes to tesselate and construct a whole image (techniques of painting from a photograph) – but it is all in the pursuit of seeking an answer to something – the pursuit of a more important question.

It calls for a deeper persistent engagement- not a one time thing – it is like acupuncture probes, or, constructing a jigsaw puzzle. You cannot do it in one setting.

We need to see new relationships- not the visible ones alone but the invisible ones within their own spaces and across spaces. Structures and flows lead to patterns in outcomes. Both structures and flows are novel.

How do you in your own world probe the unknown? What are your practices? What language and grammar do you use for understanding complexity?

When you see a swarm or beehive – when you see congestion or segregation – what questions arise? Are there analogous situations in your world? A catalog of the wicked.

What practices can you adopt or adapt? How do you construct questions? In the story of the sampling of the elephant in the Indian Jataka fable, and the formation of a fuzzy image. What is fuzzy logic here?

What you will ultimately behold still depends – self reflection and critique will reveal what perspectives inform your pictures of the world. What metaphors are at play? Landscapes and ecosystems.

Others will too. Another conversation- a meta conversation now occurs among our pictures – for we must now together construct yet another meta synthesis – a consensus tempered and informed by our purpose and the pragmatics of its realization. Once again, either we can conquer the landscape and impose on it a path, or invite a living organism to a dance.

Strategic design is about those choices – the degrees of intimacy we want in our relationship with the world – should we continue to act in narrow interests or become custodians of the worlds we inhabit.

The context of the larger Value Creating Complex and our own Value Creating Enterprise within it matter

In the Designed world of new experiences, there is more freedom for the agents – complex phenomena are likely to occur (fluid recombination) – harvesting from those appropriately is what is strategic- to anticipate and be proactive – how does complexity additionally manifest in digital worlds?

I could have used a sub-title for this post – Weaving tapestries – the warp of creative practice and the weft of complex human social worlds

The Formal and the Informal – Together

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When we engage with the world in order to better it, often we end-up primarily studying, engaging with and intervening in formal systems.

The totality however must include informal systems as well, since, depending on the context where we are situated, these informal systems might actually be the ones that predominantly shape or influence the outcomes we see and wish to address.

When, for example, we want to address challenges related to Public Health, the tendency is to look at the Public Health Value Creating Complex consisting of institutions and enterprises that provide services to the Public Health Ecosystem.

A comprehensive systemic analysis of such formal systems might lead us to understand the worldviews, beliefs and values that informed them, that gave rise to the concepts on which the designs are based. These dominant worldviews and conceptual architectures, obscure other forms of value creation, often inadvertently or deliberately creating conditions that lead to their suppression or elimination.

The formal systems however do not adequately fulfill the functions that the informal systems play, for various reasons. Needs they fulfill might be invisible, or poorly understood – some of the reasons why their value is overlooked. There could be others, more pragmatic concerns of viability or feasibility.

I think, when the formal and the informal are seen together, a better integration might be possible, whereby the overall design of the health complex, recognizes the whole and the formal and the informal complement each other.

This process of reconciliation among the stakeholders is critical – so rather than just focus on addressing the conflict and differences within the formal, the perspectives of the informal should also be included in strategic design efforts.

‘Complexification’ – Defying Mortality

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Complexification isn’t a word of course, but as it seems to suggest, a tendency to make or become more complex.

All living enterprises have a need to endure, to survive and thrive, the more varied and diverse, the better. As the enterprise accomodates a larger range of variation in a given moment, or, over time, it must necessarily become more complex. In a sense, the complexity of the enterprise reflects, and to the best extent possible matches, the complexity it finds in its environment. Clearly, this complexity isn’t structural alone.

In some ways, the desire to survive and endure is an act of defiance – against mortality, and the need to become more complex then, originates in that desire.

The more successful enterprises, those that are able to manage a higher degree of such contextual complexity, endure a wider range of challenges and survive longer.

However, this effort turns out also to be a vicious loop. The increase in internal complexity also makes its own environment more complex – a positive feedback relationship ensues, which in turn drives the need for further complexity. Not only do we, the living enterprise, deteriorate the world we draw upon, the complexification is eventually malignant to our own health and well-being.

We justify our acts of increasing complexity as ones that apparently serve our well-being (a kind of aesthetic need), and a transcendent need (spiritual drive), yet, we remain fundamentally, materially bound.

The challenges we then create are often existential, which is what our current struggles have become. And the worse our existential struggles get, the less spare capacity there is for the aesthetic and the transcendental.

One aspect that has enabled us to grow this complexity, is the progress we have made in improving our productivity. The assumption has always been that the surplus capacity we create will enable us to pursue the higher goals and aspiration we have.

I wonder why that has not turned out to be the case. One way to think of it is perhaps that these surpluses we created were not directed towards collective well-being. For all of us involved in this enterprise must cross and rise above the existential thresholds and any barriers to that must be removed. That is the purpose of that surplus.

We must therefore redirect our surpluses and the corresponding coplexification efforts along pathways to better futures. Narrowly driven pursuits that create complexity, without carrying the whole forward, will make that complexity turn on the enterprise itself, savaging and sabotaging, not just the outside world, but also the inner.

An Upside to the Down – systems, foundational to Strategic Impact

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The practice of Strategic Impact Making, particularly in complex contexts, touches on many bodies of knowledge and practices. However, this brief note talks about how Systems Practice is foundational to such work.

Assuming that all such work begins with a certain objective, an issue or challenge that needs addressing, the System/s associated with that issue become the ‘Text’ that one tries to understand and decipher.

The heart of the Systems Impact making task involves understanding the natural evolution of the system in the face of Contextual Forces and the kind of interventions one might or must make to shift the System’s trajectory in a desired direction, towards a better outcome.

In order to understand the impact of any system of forces, whether contemporary, emerging or future, one would need to have an understanding of how the system would behave in its interaction with those forces. It would naturally be impossible, for example, to say anything about the future of such a system, without that foundational understanding.

For complex systems that implies understanding the system in its many dimensions, at many scales – from micro to mega and the interactions among and between them.

It also implies understanding the Context. Now, there is usually much literature, of a generic nature about Contextual issues – such as one might find, the Future of an Industry, a Sector, or some other Social or Environmental issue as an example.

However, most such discourses are of a generic nature. They make claims that are varied, depending on who makes them and they change with time. They have implied in them ideological paradigms, worldviews etc., which might be worth examining critically.

However, they serve a limited purpose. The issue that you might be working on or interested in is often a specific issue, located in a specific local context. Understanding such an issue might benefit from the Generic descriptions mentioned above, but basing your actions purely on these would mot certainly be problematic and likely sources of serious error.

This is why an investment in discovering and understanding the systems you are engaged with is crucial. A deliberate attempt should be made in this process to correct for any errors in understanding by going broad and deep.

When dealiing with complex challenges, the discovery process leads to the uncovering of a complex reality, and an ecology of systems – wide in variety.

This uncovering turns your world upside down, but to borrow from an eponymous title of a book (Homer-Dixon – The Upside of Down), there is great strategic advantage in this process – An Upside to the Down.

Charting the Corporate Mind – What’s in the book

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In my last post I had mentioned my rediscovery of the book, “Charting the Corporate Mind” by Charles Hampden-Turner (CHT), and how I find the whole topic of dilemmas particularly relevant to my practice of Strategic Impact Making.

I am documenting here some of the key points that I see as pertinent and noteworthy. While this is not a book-review, I will also make observations about how I see dilemmas playing a role in complex situations where leaders have to make strategic choices.

The Introduction by Ronnie Lessem in an interesting read in itself. Most people might not know of him, but during the 90’s when this book was written, he too was considered a Mangement Guru.

The author CHT is taking on an ‘existential’ challenge most managers face – having to make difficult choices from among myriad complex alternatives. CHT has separately written about his vision of the Radical Man.

A manager is a social being in relationships with others – their capacity for synthesizing, symbolizing and exploring frees them from being ‘stimulus bound’. Such capacity permits them to rebel against the absurdity of atrophying cultures and empty forms and enables them to create new meaning and renew themselves in their environment.

He goes on to list other qualities about this ‘Radical Man’ manager, such as quality of perception, self-awareness etc., but the one I found interesting was something about ‘suspending their cognitive structures, permitting their own structures to crumble in the face of contradiction.

This is a quality that will be pertinent to the issue of reconciling and resolving dilemmas. This is the idea in Strategic Design – one discovers the complexity that underlies a seemingly simple situation, that it has many dimensions and scales – and often issues that do not seem to reconcile easily. These dimensions then must be brought into a dialectical process – perhaps that is the process of making/prototypiing – that then tries to find a reconciliation between various dilemmas – the only way one can do that is to perhaps transcend.

Another interesting thought goes – ‘When there is no initial dilemma, there is no gain from designing a solution’. This is for me the starting step of the Meta-Design Process, the one I refer to as Q0 – something you must do before you even engage on a Strategic Impact journey – The need to clearly identify the challenge that creates a Case for Action.

In critiquing the use of Profit as a measure, he highlights why it falls short, mostly in systemic terms as not serving the cause of organizational learning, such as, it comes too late for it to help in the learning, it is too narrow in its scope (the system has many more dimensions to pay attention to), there might be other things more important and that it does not deal with societal or environmental issues.

Here is another interesting statement – The hunt for the unicorn is a doomed quest – no pure unambiguous essence of virtue exists.

We are like jugglers he says – the more balls there are the more we are likely to drop them if we get fixated on just one.

CHT, as the book title suggests, uses Charts to make the dilemmas Visible, something people can periodically review to check progress. I have personally used such visualization in managerial group setting and confirm how effective it is for faciliating conversations about contentious complex topics.

The journey of resolving dilemmas has a direction – towards an ever richer synthesis of values, towards mounting complexity, towards packages of knowledge more intensely and aesthetically organized, and towards the expansion of the mind itself.

In essence, dilemmas are an existential reality, resolving them requires a certain mindset – the kind a ‘Radical Man’ possesses, particularly in the sense of being willing to set aside cognitive structures, recognizing the need to use devices to facilitate conversations among diverse stakeholders and finally to see the whole proces of resolution and reconciliation as a learning journey.