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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

Is the Corporation at odds with the Future?

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2014

It is common knowledge that the horizon beyond which the fundamentals of the context in which any entity, business or otherwise, operates is shrinking in an accelerated manner. The Future, the one that you did not design the organization for, comes closer every day. Note how I define the future here – it is just past the boundary of what you know with certainty.

To a large extent the pieces and fragments of what will be the future are public knowledge. The contextualization of those pieces to one’s own situation and filling in the few gaps that remain, is what corporations do not do well enough. The surprises are mostly always context-specific; such as the invalidation of a business model. The business model in fact is an excellent framework with which to understand and evaluate implication of developments.

The challenge then is firstly one of cognition, the well-known reluctance to override or get around the filters that define prevalent business models and prevent one from seeing the implications of an emerging future.

Secondly, there is the reluctance to take the specific steps required to contextualize the knowledge in one’s own domain of interest.

Finally, the real challenge is the lack of motivation to mobilize action that requires stepping into a reality of ongoing paradox.

I came across this article by Grant McCracken that exhorts organizations to become future-sensitive being as he says, at odds with the future. (The language quite borders on the poetic.)

In a nutshell, I recommend that organizations develop a systematic foresight practice. But that alone is not enough.

The enterprise must also develop a number of other capabilities that form the platform for living with accelerated change. Without some competence in that space, the enterprise is paralyzed into inaction. It tends to procrastinate and delays action till a point when the only course has to be drastic and radical.

There are a lot of developments happening today that would enable the increasingly fluid and liquid enterprise architectures that the future demands. These designs are on the horizon today.

With the focus on developing the required capabilities and competencies required the enterprise will give itself a better shot at longevity.

Innovation, Collaboration and Design – together for a distinct Future

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2014

There is an article in CoDesign (Fastcompany) on the topic of Innovation, Collaboration and Design, terms which are used together very frequently in business literature these days.

Innovation and Collaboration have been around for a while I think. Design is the newcomer to the lexicon, even though the concept itself is not new. The article does a good job of placing the concepts in an easy-to-understand framework.

To quote:

Innovation is about finding a new way forward. Collaboration is the way to get to innovation. And design is about mapping out a distinct future.

In the context of an enterprise, innovation is necessarily a collective effort. Non-trivial innovation usually requires contribution from diverse entities, who therefore need to collaborate for success.

Much has been written about how to create the conditions for collaboration, but when they do exist, proximity in action spaces and ‘friction’ lead to creativity and in turn innovation.

One aspect of design is indeed mapping a distinct future as the author mentions. However, design, just as in the case of innovation and collaboration is a practice. It is an approach to how one builds solutions, whether they be products, services or businesses. It is something you hone and get better at over time. It alone does not create a distinct future. It is the combination of all three practices that result in a distinct future.

Design in my mind then is the process that is woven into the innovation and collaboration efforts, indistinguishable once mastered. Like they say in Jazz about drumming – you may not hear it, but you can feel its presence.