futurePRIMITIVE

Welcome to the conversation.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell lists the seven-five most wealthy people in human history.

This list includes the likes of Cleopatra, William II, and Elizabeth I, together with Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Ingvar Kamprad.  (If you wonder who the last person is, any time you buy something at Ikea you are making this person wealthier!)

Gladwell then points to the unusual thing about this list of 75: 14 of them are Americans born within nine years of each other (1831-1840).  What Gladwell is pointing to is a group of people who made their fortunes at a time when the American economy was transforming (which included the emerging of Wall Street).  As Gladwell comments: If you were born in the late 1840s you missed it.  You were too young to take advantage of that moment.  If you were born in the 1820s you were too old: your mind-set was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm.

Armed with this information, Gladwell goes on to consider the breakthrough made in personal computing in the shape of the Altair 8800 kit, costing $397 in January 1975.  He predicts the ages of those who would be best positioned to take advantage of this (I’ll let you buy the book to find out what all the predictors were) and narrows this down to a couple of years: Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955; here are a few of the people and their birthdates that he identified with this computer revolution: Bill Gates (1955), Paul Allen (Microsoft: 1953), Steve Ballmer (co-founder Apple: 1956), and Bill Joy (co-founder Sun Microsystems: 1954).

Each has a story that is not only about being very talented, but also about having the right kind of background, being in the right place at the right time, and having huge amounts of preparation time under their belts (ideally, ten thousand hours).

We might be able to look back over the lives of these people, with Gladwell’s help, and see more of how they got to be successful - which is not about effortlessly succeeding, or, grinding something out without talent - but it also got me wondering just what might emerge if we looked forward through our lives, through all the things our lives have included, to see just what all of this might have been preparing us for.

Many might as if there is any point to this; they think that they have “missed the boat” or there never was a boat in the first place.  But I keep wondering, what might we find?  Has there been something developing in our lives towards a remarkable life, but we do not recognise this - through our childhood, our education, our work, the relationships with others, our experiences good and bad?

I am also wondering if all of this makes sense for such a time as this, that this is a time of opportunity to make a difference, a time of contributing by people like you.

I love exploring with people the extraordinary nature of their lives, their abilities and dreams wrapped around great character; within these I find myself wondering more and more about how the experiences in people’s lives have added up to something, and identifying the something is everything.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi refers to two types of creativity: historical and personal.  This is helpful.  We are not thinking here of historical creativity - where our name is known by many - but we are considering personal creativity, by which we make a difference in the lives of as many as we can: But if creativity with a capital C is largely beyond our control, living a creative personal life is not.  And in terms of ultimate fulfillment, the latter may be the most important accomplishment (Creativity).

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

Crea**vity.

David Bayles and Ted Orland explain why they don’t include the word CREATIVITY in their book Art and Fear in the following note: Readers may wish to note that nowhere in this book does the dreaded C-word appear.  Why should it?  Do only some people have ideas, confront problems, dream, live in the real world and breathe air?

They leave it out for the same reason I keep putting it in.  Every human is made to be creative: that’s my belief and that’s my hope.  A belief because to be human is to be creative, and hope because I want as many as possible to find this out.

Just as I finished reading Art and Fear I began reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (highly recommended after just reading the first 70 pages).  Gladwell begins to unpack the different reasons behind people being successful.  What he discovers is that there’s a lot more to it than talent.  One survey of musicians discovered, amongst many other things, that no one effortlessly succeeded on talent alone and no one succeeding by grinding there way to the top without any talent.  What they found was that it has a lot to do with preparation - indeed 10,000 hours of it (roughly ten years) of preparing and practicing a talent.

I will write more about this soon, but the thing that Gladwell began to uncover was that some have the right kind of encouragement and others don’t; this might make all the difference in some having the opportunity of putting in the many hours and others not having these.  He offers the examples of the Beetles - recognised my many to have been a phenomenal talent.  What people don’t see is how they just happened to be the youngsters in Liverpool, a city with a certain connection to Hamburg, to travel to Germany between 1960-62 (they’d already been together for three years by 1960) to play an estimated 1,200 performances, the shortest of which was five hours long. They soon had to expand their repertoire to cover others and include jazz.  They came back with a huge amount of preparation behind them.

Everybody has talent but not everyone has the same opportunity or encouragement to develop their talent.

Let me know what you think.

Welcome to the conversation.

In their really helpful little book Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland begin a chapter with this little quote:

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.  She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”  (Howard Ikemoto)

I loved this as soon as I read it.

People seem to think there are few creative, special people in the world and they aren’t amongst them.

In truth, they have forgotten that they can draw  (I’ll use this as a euphemism for being amazingly creative in all kinds of ways).  The institutions of the world don’t dispel this myth, but rather reinforce it.

There is a need for a tribe of people who will live and work in helping people to rediscover how to draw again.  These are people who create environments where this rediscovering can happen for people.  Their environments will be away from the familiar centres of people’s lives, as the affect from their familiar institutions upon them is very great indeed.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers when it comes to the people he is identifying that, It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

I was recently sent this youtube link.  I love the video (read some of my blogs on Clay Shirky’s book to see why).

The big question comes at the end: So what does it all mean?

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.  (I’ve rewritten this blog since first posting it.)

I came across a story recently that really caught my attention when it comes to certain environments are more encouraging of creativity than others.

I spotted the story in Mark’s record of the human life of Jesus.

This is how the story unfolds.  Jesus is sharing in a dinner party that he’s been invited to.  Mark tells how a woman breaks into the body of the guests and pours perfume over his head (apparently, it would have taken many years to save up for what was some very expensive perfume).

When some of the other guests begin to criticise the woman for doing this, Jesus says, “She did what she could when she could” (The Message). He then added: “you can be sure that wherever in the whole world the message is preached, what she just did is going to be talked about admiringly.”

What she did was nothing short of remarkable: literally, it would be remarked upon.

I love this detail to the story because it reminds me that we are all meant to live remarkable lives: she knew there was something she MUST do and when the opportunity offered itself, she did it.  Actually, it more accurate to say that she also made the opportunity.  (I am grateful to Alex McManus for the important emphasis on people who MUST.)  I like to think she went on to live a remarkable life.

This story got me to wondering about the many men and women who don’t know just “what they can do” yet - things which are going to be nothing short of remarkable.

Part of the journey that must be taken for this to happen, is that they have to get around the right kind of people, and these people are probably not the ones they are connected with at the moment.  No offence, but, if they haven’t encouraged you by now to identify the thing you MUST do, it probably isn’t going to happen.  (Where do you think the woman’s sense of MUSTNESS had come from?)

“She did what she could do when she could” is all about living to the maximum of who we are.

Here’s the quote I included in my last blog: Certain environments have a greater density of interaction and provide more excitement and a greater effervescence of ideas; therefore they prompt the person who is already inclined to break away from conventions to experiment with novelty more readily than if he or she had stayed in a more conservative, more repressive setting (Creativity).

What do you think?

(By the way, I think this story is another great reason for being a part of the International Mentoring Network event, taking place in the UK later this year (if not the whole week, then maybe the two days at the end). It’s certainly an environment that will help you to do what you can when you can.)

Welcome to the conversation.

I’ve been inviting a number of people I know to look at the International Mentoring Network event due to happen in the UK (Sheffield) in October this year, as I think this would be something they’d really find empowering. A number have asked me about what it entails, including how it differs from other leadership mentoring and development experiences that are already available.

In reply, I have been sharing how extraordinary I have personally found the whole thing to be: the ideas that are explored, the interaction that takes place between participants who are on the same page and dive straight into all that’s explored, and the significant knowledge and encouragement of one-another, but, these words from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describe the IMN experience so very well:

Certain environments have a greater density of interaction and provide more excitement and a greater effervescence of ideas; therefore they prompt the person who is already inclined to break away from conventions to experiment with novelty more readily than if he or she had stayed in a more conservative, more repressive setting (Creativity).

Two things to note: the environment itself, and the people who are drawn into it.  What do you think?

How does such an environment sound to you?

Welcome to the conversation.

(I have been thinking some more about what I put in this blog yesterday, and so have added a few more thoughts.)

I am wondering if demographics are as always as necessary as we sometimes think they are.  The organisation I am a part of will go to great lengths auditing the needs in a community and matching them with what it feels it is able to provide.  But, what if the “needs” don’t want to be met?  What if there are “needs” out there that would like to be met, but didn’t know they could and are maybe off the radar?

This sounded better as an idea before I started to write it down, but, what got me thinking about this was a comment from Clay Shirky: Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best by not trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for one another. […] In a midsize city the potential combinations among people interested in Meetup groups are overwhelming.  The only sensible way to solve this problem is to turn it over to the users (Here Comes Everybody).

One of the things Meetup experiences is a lot of failure - lots of groups that are not sustainable - but there are also really good success stories: All that’s required to take advantage of this sort of market are passionate users and an appetite for repeated public failure (Shirky).

What I am wondering is whether what Meetup does, other organisations and organisms can do, making it possible for those who want to get together to do something, to do just that.

When Jesus was creating a movement there was no income needed for “employees”, no buildings, no infrastructure, and made himself and his message freely available.  This did not encourage the survival of the fittest in society, though they clearly came ino contact with Jesus, but it actually brought together the weakest.  I appreciate that there were costs to this later, but because it was shaped in the way it was, those costs could be directed towards those who needed help most (see Acts 6).

Clay Shirky might well say that this constains aspects of an “open source movement”: The open source movement […] doesn’t have any employees, it doesn’t make investments, it doesn’t even make decisions.  It is not an organization, it is an ecosystem, and one that is remarkably tolerant of failure.

I’m going to have to keep mulling this one over, but what do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

I’ve been getting my head around Clay Shirky’s explanations about “bonding capital” and “bridging capital” as I’ve been reading Here Comes Everybody today.

To put this into some kind of context, Shirky shares how the Six Degrees of  Separation works, how it’s not about everybody knowing lots of people, but about some people knowing lots of people.  It’s more about clusters of people who are connected by some of their members to others clusters of people: what are called Small Worlds network.

Within these clusters its “bonding capital” that is evidenced, but between the clusters it’s “bridging capital” is seen.  Now to the really interesting things out of this for me today.

First of all Shirky makes this assertion: The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support.

So the connectedness of the already connected people is what is most important (because when clusters connect and move together they can change the world).

Then Shirky cites an experiment undertaken into the relationship among social capital, social structure, and good ideas, of which the outcome is what I think its so important to bank.

For those who connected beyond their “cluster” (it happened to be a department in an electronics firm) the result was to produce more good ideas than those, who, although they had good relations with everyone in their cluster (inside connectedness), did not benefit from the stimulus of outside connectedness: Bridging predicted good ideas, lack of bridging predicted bad ones.

What do I make of this?

I need to “bridge” with others (groups, individuals, books, courses, blogs, webs) as much as I can for the kind of ideas that can make the world better.

What do you think?

By the way, one of the things the experimenters stipulated was that no ideas would be accepted that were too local in nature, incomprehensible, vague, or too whiny.   Hopefully, this doesn’t sound familiar to you because you are super-connected. That’s why we’re here, right?

Welcome to the conversation.

Clay Shirky begins a section in Here Comes Everybody with the heading: Replacing Planning with Coordination

As he considers the kind of changes being effected by new social technologies, one of the simple illustrations he uses is the mobile phone replacing planning - “Let’s arrange to meet outside the Art Gallery on Princes Street at one” - with coordination -   “I’ll give you a call when I get into the city and check where you are.”

Does the future belong to coordinators rather than planners?

Many may well think of texting, emailing, Twitter, and Skype as banal and faddish, others see them for what they are, tools of social connection that can make a difference.  Shirky cites cases of child abuse being noticed by the Roman Catholic church, political protesters in Belarus, angry airline passengers and indignant bank accountees, and Egyptian proponents of free speech.

With the possibility comes responsibility, methinks, and we have hardly begun to imagine the possibilities.

Of course, it’s hard for people to get out of the habit of planning rather than coordinating.  I know, only too well, that we can be more inclined to continue to have set times and places for meeting with prearranged agendas.  At best, when we come to the new social tools, we support this with emails, weblogs, messaging, texting, skyping, and the like, but what if, when we’ve arranged to meet up we already know what we’re going to do, rather than talk about it.

Another thought that occurs to me requires a sideways step.

Question: If you believe in and have a relationship with God, would you describe it as more planned or more coordinated?

My feel for what God has in mind is that this relationship has always been meant to more coordinated than planned.  I suggest, he anticipates some form of continual contact with us that we might coordinate our two lives throughout the day, rather than having planned, specific times and places in which we’ll meet up with a predetermined agenda.  It becomes much more about sharing what we are thinking and hoping and doing throughout the day so together we might make a difference.  (This will look different for each of us)

I see Frank Laubach’s experiment through life, turning his thoughts to God in every single moment, as an example of this kind of being in touch at all times.

This form of “technology” has been around forever, but, in the form of new social technologies, it is know ecoming increasingly available between humans: now we are able to coordinate our lives in ways that allow our passions and energies to come together in new ways and make a difference for the sake of humanity.

What do you think?(By the way, I came across a form of social technology being explored in a non-technological context - in the Amish culture.  In Amish Grace I came across something the communities use to coordinate care across states, this in the form of a circuit letter, which would be sent from household to household of those with shared needs, with families adding their personal comments to whole before sending the letter on.)

Welcome to the conversation.

I have mentioned before how I see the internet and new social technologies as being like the Roman road system and common Greek language of the first century.

Yes, I joke and moan about the size of my email inbox, but in truth we are seeing a revolution of life and have to wonder where it might take us; if we only see these as an extension of post and telephone then we may well miss out on the opportunities.

Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material.  When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love (Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody).

Things are possible now that were not possible fifteen years ago.

Not only are people able to distribute information rapidly and at very little cost, but they are also able to coordinate their response to that information at very little cost too.  Just take a look at how Avaaz is able to coordinate action that seriously affects intergovernmental decision making.  Avaaz’s latest petition calls upon  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to make it his personal priority to secure the release of all of Burma’s political prisoners; the petition stands at over 68,000 (follow the link in order to add your name to this?).

Many organisations can only see things happening through the institution, but there has come a time in history when significant movements can occur in better ways and at lower costs than many institutions can deliver - if there’s a will - and best if these be for love and the good of all.  As Shirky has seen: Collective action, where a group acts as a whole […] challenges institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination.

It occurs to me, when I think about my own organisation - a church - that what we are seeing possible is the kind of body of Christ that the institution cannot deliver.  Unless committees - often the place where institutions decide what they can and cannot deliver (often decided by their costs) - embrace the better way of relationships with purpose, they are in danger of being overtaken by those who coordinate themselves around a common passion without the vast overheads of the institution.  (I didn’t question the end of institutions but of institutionalism.)

What do you think?