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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

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

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.

On Path-dependence and Foresight

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October 31, 2015

In my previous posts I had focused on understanding the nature of value, the ecosystems that create that value with the participation of a multitude of stakeholders, and how these ecosystems and the contexts in which they live are dynamic and co-evolving.

I also touched upon the enterprise as a participant in the ecosystem, though the extent to which it co-creates and is completely integral to the value creation act is a strategic choice, something that it must consider in the evolving world.

Thinking of value ecosystems and the platforms that inform it, one is naturally led to thinking in terms of economies – not just economies of exchange (see Bill Sharpe – Economies of Life), but in the broader sense of all dimensions of value. The core challenge an enterprise that has an intent to make the ecosystem better faces, is to understand the economics of value – ‘what is the currency that makes meaning for all the stakeholders in the system?’.

That understanding then becomes the basis of creating context, content, community and commerce.

In my last post I talked about a continuum of time from the past into the future on which value ecosystems and enterprises find themselves. One of the concepts I find useful in this context is the notion of path-dependence.

Manuel de Landa in his excellent book – A thousand years of non=linear history, opened my eyes to the notion, that the history we are most comfortable with, is mostly a linear narrative. A sequence of events that neatly fit together into a storyline, something we construct to give meaning to our own lives, as much as we do collectively as enterprises and societies.

De Landa vividly explains how that is far from the truth. All histories are replete with chance events, some externally driven, some the result of deliberate choices. (There is much literature on the idea of path-dependence and path-creation other than de Landa).

Out of this complex interplay of forces and actions, and of course the complexity increases the higher up one goes into the systems hierarchy, paths are created that are neither foreordained nor obvious. In the process of creating neat explanations, we often leave out these contingencies, things that could have been different if only some other conditions had been present or we had acted differently.

This realization is extremely crucial from the point of view of how we see the future. Extrapolating our preferred narratives into the future can be very misleading if it ignores path-dependence. The future too just like history will result from a confluence and collision of many drivers and vectors of change, and as much as we are students of history, we must be students of the future in order to act meaningfully now – in order to create the paths that will lead to desired outcomes for all.

Our purpose after all is to make an enduring impact, and we must guide our coevolution along the paths that open up or we actively create.

I will elaborate further in other posts on ideas I believe are relevant to this practice of foresight, but for now, I will mention a couple of key concepts that guide me.

Firstly, the practice of foresight is not some isolated thing one does, but integral to the practice of being that seamlessly integrates histories, the many futures, and the now into one seamless whole.

I like the concept of time horizons – every entity requires time to re-architect itself to be on a different path – the more radically different it is, the more challenging the change and the time it will take to respond. Every enterprise must therefore have a sense of how much into the future it must be able to anticipate if it should be able to respond in a timely fashion when conditions demand so.

Accommodating the future and its many possibilities is fundamentally an architectural challenge, one of knowing possible, plausible and preferred variations that one must accommodate in one’s being.

One response to this need to accommodate variation is agile and lean thinking, and the notion of discovery-driven planning etc., but one can easily be blinded to that many paths that run alongside the one you are on. A foresight practice must inform all these approaches, or one might not realize that a radically different future is coming to birth that might eventually invalidate one’s designs.

Finally, a foresight practice is first and foremost a cognitive practice. It is about opening up one’s mind – traveling into the future like a stranger on an adventure in unknown lands. If all you come back with are familiar stories one might say you have not experienced the future.

That then brings us back to frames – the one we discussed in my previous post. If you carried your frames into explorations of the future, you probably saw only one part of the proverbial elephant. As extensive as the exploration of the outside world is, as deep must be the inquiry into one’s own deeper truths – one’s architecture, in order to develop meaningful foresight.

Strategic Latency – Foresight to Avert Disruption

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July 24, 2014

Over the years as I have thought about strategic foresight, I have often coupled the idea with the notion of latency. To me latency implied the time it took for an enterprise to respond to a contextual shift or event. Built into that idea was the notion that the concept of latency differs from enterprise to enterprise and that enterprises can be designed reduce their latency to foreseen events and contexts.

Military Image of Ukraine

I came across an article this morning in the Diplomatic Courier, that talks about China’s efforts to reduce its strategic latency, particularly with respect to defence technologies, and its drive to innovate.

Indeed when it comes to responding to threats, it is absolutely critical to reduce the latency if in fact you cannot anticipate.

However, I wonder if today there is a specific technology that you can innovate for in preparation. It is no longer a technology by itself that is a source of a security risk. Each technology brings with it a certain complement of capabilities and these can combine in myriad ways. Individually each technology can be applied for positive or negative outcomes. One can easily understand and prepare for negative outcomes, intentional or inadvertant.

The task of anticipation however becomes onerous when these technologies are used in combination with others and uniquely in particular contexts. Sometimes the technologies used for such purposes are in themselves not particularly sophisticated, but combinations can be devastating as we have seen in recent experiences.

The road to reducing strategic latency therefore is as much a task of systematically practiciing Technology Foresight as is it is one of practicing Strategic Foresight, imagining potential scenarios and plausible misuses leading to potential security threats. If one must innovate, it must be in the domain of responding to potential negative or inadvertant uses of extant or future technology developments.

Even when the context is not one of assessing for and preparing against security threats, every enterprise must strive to reduce its strategic latency. The term has a very reactive connotation – often it is very hard to respond to a disruptive innovation after the fact. While it seems commonsense, it bears repeating, that the ideal response is only possible when one has anticipated adequately.

Disruptive innovations are around us for a long time in a form we might term ‘weak signals’, and they have not yet become significant enough to show up on our radars. It is our task to sharpen our senses so we can notice them through the noise and give ourselves the time to react – a systemic challenge that requires time.

Better still is to imagine disruptive possibilities, and shift the challenge of reducing strategic latency to the other.

Crowdfunding Platforms – Foresight for Business Model Innovation

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2014

As we continuously seek to make sense of the world around us, seeking patterns that might indicate something, the one most frequent source we rely on is trends. In the world of technology, not a day goes by without some article or post on trends.

I came across this interesting post on the trends to follow in the coming year. The post suggests that funding patterns for successful projects on Kickstarter provide guidance on trends to follow.

The chart below shows the 100 most successful projects – The analysts (at SimplyZesty) used various measures such as total value of pledges, average pledge size, number of pledges received and so on (see original post for more details).

Categories of 100 most successful technology projects

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Fig 1: 100 most successful technology projects on Kisckstarter

The following chart shows the projects with the highest number of individual backers.

Most backed projects

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Fig 2: Top five projects with the highest number of individual backers

People who fund projects on Kickstarter are a combination of entrepreneurs and consumers. They like a product idea, understand the risk that even though they have seen some evidence, the idea might eventually not make it or work.

Some of the projects on Kickstarter are there because conventional methods of raising money did not work, and others because they consciously chose this crowdsourced funding channel.

In any case, the people that fund these projects are pioneers or early adopters in marketing parlance. If we trust their judgment, and we have to look at this information somewhat differently from the situation than if these graphs had showed projects that had received funding through formal financing channels such as VCs.

The questions this analysis raises are: who then benefits from looking at this information and following these trends? What sort of action should one take as a result of this analysis? Is this a test for the formal financiers to step in? As an individual, does this give me some confidence in investing in upcoming firms? Should these trends be triggers for examining how something might impact a business model that you are invested in?

The answer is of course yes, depending on what your interests are. The key insight is that indirect sources such as Kickstarter and other similar crowdfunding platforms are crucibles for emerging interests and an important new resource for developing foresight, understanding implications for business models and anticipating opportunities for disruptive innovation.