Care for a tribal workplace

via Robert Paterson's Weblog: Daycare and the Humane Society

I think that we often confuse care with love. We confuse looking after with attention. We confuse professionalism with attachment. We confuse services with empathy.

Community and the tribe - the essence of a healthy society has all but been replaced by institutions. But I have hope. Pressed into a corner by titanic forces, small stirrings of community are emerging. It is I think the change in how we work that gives me the most hope. With a tribal workplace the crazy separation between the economic and the social collapses.

In the tribal workplace, we find again the social and the economic unit that we need. Living a tribal life again enables us to perform both the economic and the social tasks in relationships that mean something.

Breaking old Habits

via Evelyn Rodriguez:
"Routines and habits are the Known, protecting us from the Unknown. Habits are also called home. Habits tame the raw wilderness of existence into the civilized comforts of everyday life. Unfortunately, as we all know, habits gradually domesticate all the wildness and energy out of life. So much energy gets bound up in routines and habituated patterns, keeping them alive, that your life goes dead instead. Thus, if you want to discover again the wild side of life, you have to leave "home"; you have to break or dissolve your habits in order to release the energy locked up inside them." --Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980) (via Rolf Potts' Vagablogging.net)

Help build a sustainable world

To guide you, The Hanover principles written byBill McDonough

1. Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.
2. Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognizing even distant effects.
3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.
4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems, and their right to co-exist.
5. Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance of vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.
6. Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.
7. Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate the energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.
8. Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.
9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long-term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.

Using Talents and Technology to build a better world

via the brilliant Dave Pollard

* We need technologies that will enable us to reduce human numbers without suffering or discrimination: Highly-effective, idiot-proof voluntary birth control technologies with few or no side effects; and, if and when voluntary measures prove insufficient, safe fertility-reducing technologies that do not affect other species, that reduce the fecundity of every human female on the planet equally and that, like pollution, can be disseminated without political process. I know this latter idea terrifies many of my readers, and if it were done in any way that involved political intervention of any kind I too would find it unacceptable, but we must face the reality that our planet simply cannot support billions of humans and that we need to find some painless and non-discriminatory, non-political, non-invasive way to get our numbers back to sustainable levels.

* We need technologies that will enable us to produce and deliver both essential and non-essential goods and services while consuming far fewer resources, far less energy, and producing zero waste in the process. Specifically, we need foods that obtain their proteins and nutrients from recycled or inanimate matter, and clothing and building materials that are durable and reusable, recyclable and/or biodegradable.

* We need technologies that will enable people to find the people with whom they can best, and most happily, live, associate, collaborate, innovate, create, imagine, find meaning and companionship, make a living, and establish natural enterprises and intentional communities. We all want and need more attention and more appreciation, and technology can help us find the audience and love that will give us these things.

* We need technologies that will show us (not tell us) how to do things, and let us practice doing those things that are valuable, meaningful, and help make us more self-sufficient. We have far too much useless information and not enough useful, self-esteem building knowledge and capabilities.

* We need technologies that will help us be more generous -- donating our time, skills, and free and unneeded possessions and wealth, to those who can really get benefit from them.

* We need technologies that will enable greater personal self-expression -- the ability to create works of art, music, film etc., using excellent, unlimited 'virtual' resources at no cost, and then to collaborate, to share them, discuss them, improve them, and propagate them.

* We need technologies that will enable the creation and operation of true free markets where profound human needs can be identified and then met by collaborative, self-forming solution teams, in a socially and environmentally responsible way and at the lowest possible cost. And when that cost is still unaffordable for those in need, these technologies need to enable communities to spontaneously coordinate and aggregate the resources necessary to reduce or finance that cost to the point where it is affordable.

So the answer to this article's question is that technology is potentially a great good for our society. All it would take to realize that good is for the bright underemployed minds to get out from under the suffocating organizations that waste their talents and drain their energies, and learn how to create their own businesses, substantial, networked, adequately-resourced, innovative entrepreneurial businesses that can give us not what the rich think they might want, but what we all really need.

Lessons for 2005

Dave Pollard has a nice summary
What Was the Most Important Lesson You Learned in 2005?

Here are my top 25 in David Letterman Countdown Format. I learned that:

* 25. There is no defence against disruptive innovation.
* 24. The impediments to sharing what we know are mostly cultural, not technological. Dysfunctional 'information behaviours' (office politics, not knowing what you don't know, incompatible learning styles, inadequate or counterproductive reward mechanisms etc.) abound and confound us.
* 23. The customer has all the power in our economy. We just don't realize it yet.
* 22. Small is beautiful. Simpler is better. Less is more.
* 21. The most important step in any innovation or collaboration project is who you invite, and crafting the invitation so that the right people (caring, knowledgeable etc.) will accept and show up.
* 20. You know much more than you can say and you can say much more than you can write down. So if you want to share what you know, forget about writing it down, converse with me, or better still, show me.
* 19. As work gets more complex, more specialized and more networked, we are seeing a World of Ends, and the End of Process.
* 18. Most technology is inexcusably complicated and intolerably dumb. We need to learn that the brain is much more than an information processor and a memory. Technology needs to learn how to learn, to observe, to see patterns, and hence to advise us, connect us, instead of depending on us to spoon feed it. Heuristics: Less matter and more art.
* 17. People learn more from stories than from even the most brilliant analytical discourse.
* 16. Collaboration is much more than just coordination or cooperation.
* 15. Look carefully at the data before you jump to conclusions. The main reason for the recent decline in violent crime in America's cities was Roe v. Wade two decades ago and the increased access to abortion that it allowed. Not law & order, not more prisons and stiffer sentences, not gun control.
* 14. The political system (and to a lesser extent the economic system) is inexorably rigged in favour of the rich and powerful. If you want to change anything, use other levers -- social, educational, technological, entrepreneurial.
* 13. Artists see things the rest of us can't see, but they speak to us of them in a language we often don't really understand. Scientists appreciate that the purpose of science is to develop models that are interesting and sometimes useful. Next to artists, they are our most perceptive citizens.
* 12. We need to find the things that are at the intersection of what we love doing, what we do well, and what is needed -- and then do them.
* 11. Always trust your instincts. When your careful rationalizations or your passionate emotions lead you to do something that instinctively seems questionable, you will probably regret it.
* 10. There's nothing wrong with the education system except for the teachers (we learn best by watching and doing, not by listening), the classrooms (the world is out there, not in here!) and the examinations (they are more likely to tell you what the students already knew than what they learned).
* 9. Complicated 'solutions' don't work if the 'problem' is complex. Forget root cause analysis, systems thinking, and easy answers. Engage a lot of people in conversations, observe, listen, pay attention, be open, and allow possible approaches to such situations to emerge.
* 8. Courage is the difference between merely great ideas and great accomplishments. For most of us, we only get courage when we have no other choice.
* 7. Nature is the best teacher. We just need to re-learn how to learn from her, and how to pay attention. Ask and people will tell you what they think is happening. Watch and you will know.
* 6. If you can't imagine, you can do anything. If you can imagine, you can't not do anything. Many people just can't imagine. We live in a world of great creativity but terrible imaginative poverty.
* 5. Things are the way they are (and happen as they do) for a reason. It's not mystical, but it's rarely obvious. Observe, study and understand that reason well before you try to change the way things are.
* 4. Frames matter. You'll never convince anyone of anything until you understand her frame of reference. And you'll never convince anyone of anything until she's ready to be convinced.
* 3. My Genius is Imagining Possibilities and its Purpose is Provoking Change.
* 2. What most people want, women and men alike, is a little attention and a little appreciation. We need to be much more generous with these things, even more generous than we are with material things, and our knowledge and our love.
* 1. We cannot change what we are, or our species' destiny. The Earth will recover from what we've done to it, and continue just fine after we've gone, with the birds and insects likely the next ascendant species. So we should not be weighed down or depressed by the burden of our species' inhumanity to each other, to our fellow creatures and to the Earth, but instead do what we can to live life to the fullest, create some useful models for others to follow, and make the world better in small, exemplary, noticeable, generous and important ways. Après nous les dragons, mais la vie continue.

The Self Unbound - Roberto Unger

The Brazilian democracy theorist's new book.via The Play Ethic
We do not need to await the transformation of society and of culture to begin our emancipation. We can begin right now. In every area of action and thought, and so long as we do not suffer the extremities of deprivation and infirmity, the question on our lips will be: What should we do next? The most ambitious forms of programmatic thinking and of reconstructive action simply extend the scope of this questioning and broaden the range of our answers.

What allows us to ask at every turn the question -- what should we do next? -- is the marriage of the imagination with an existential attitude: a hopeful and patient availability to novelty and to experience. What enables us to sustain this attitude is in turn the combination of growing confidence in the exercise of our own powers -- security and capability -- with love -- the love of the world and the love of people.

To be if use

dave smith's -of smith and hawken - new book
The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other people. ~~Aristotle

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being… Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide. ~~Carl Jung