Message found in a bottle of snake oil, in the Sargasso sea…

A friend of mine said, in a lovely,erudite presentation to some very smart folk:

“a weakness of my current thinking is a lack of explicitly encompassing the group, the social.”

Totally agree, we all lack this.

Re-examine page 49 of ‘Navigating Complexity: the essential guide to complexity theory in business and management’, written by myself.

Then think about that botanical nostrum – Early Years textbooks teach that there are three kinds of play in young humans and many mammals: 

• individual play
• parallel play
• social play

Know that this is botany – classifying plants by the shape of their leaves. We observe the spots of a leopard, but what is the mechanism that creates them?

What are the primitives, the atomic irreducible processes that underly the phenomena?

We do not have a language to describe phenomena in groups. I  suspect they are incommensurable, like weather prediction after Lorenz.

We do not have a language to describe phenomena in groups.

This has hamstrung playwork, education, professional football, orchestral performance, NASA budgetary oversight inquiries, Air Accident Investigation, Corporate Fraud Investigation, etcetera etcetera.

There are clues in the Miles Davis approach to group play.

There are clues in Taoism, and Zen.

But as Sapir, Whof and Wittgenstein, and probably Gibson (JJ not W) would tell you, language shapes thought and we do not have the language. 

Try explaining how to put oil into a car without using any car-related, or engine-related words. Go on, try it. Write it down, now go through it and strike out any car-related and engine-related words that crept in. We don’t have a big enough RAM, our short-term memory, to hold even one sentence of the resulting tedious arm-waving stuttering verbiage.

Why doesn’t the world move when I shake my head?

~~~~~~

M’learned friend also said:

“This has many implications, but that main one is that we should judge education by the value created for stakeholders (laudate Tom) – this is fittingly complex and circular. 

NO NO NO, NO!

Very pleased that you rate teecha Tom.

Not stakeholders, feck stakeholders. Leave that to the Tory Goovey Gradgrindians.

I  think you might mean participants? If so then I‘ll semi-agree.

How would you judge a Beth Chatto garden? Answer that and you’ll know how to judge education .

~~~

Read Seedstock by Frank Herbert… full text here… https://momentoftime.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/seed-stock-frank-herbert/

I  cannot link to that story without rereading it, and when I  reread it, I  cannot help but be moved to tears.

~~~

Koan for you: “how can we value things without judging them?” asked the abbot.

Answers on a postcard to my fastness by Ruabon mountain, please, or via ‘e-mail’.

~~~

Push for order… Lock in the chaos…Report: Side effect of Apple’s increasing garden walls is better hiding places for elite hackers – 9to5Mac

Report: Side effect of Apple’s increasing garden walls is better hiding places for elite hackers – 9to5Mac
— Read on 9to5mac.com/2021/03/01/report-apple-security-can-help-hackers-hide/

This is hilarious.

I’ve been waiting for this for years. Walled garden security theatre, and incidentally a hollywood BDAM trope for years. Once we’re in, etcetera.

As a system is tightly controlled to impose order, so the chaos breaks through. Systems become brittle.

Thanks to computers, we can now develop brittle systems much faster than before, that fail harder. Hello Texas, is the water back on yet? The leccy? Technological progress.

The Magic beneath Food Truck Location

Back in 2012, the U.S. food truck industry for the first time blew past the $1 billion revenue mark (it in fact reached $1.5 billion that year), making it one of the fastest-growing sectors of the national food and restaurant market. Still, food trucks are often seen as the enemy of local restaurants. Just as cab drivers have taken to protesting Uber and other ride-hailing services, brick-and-mortar restaurant groups have rallied in cities across the nation to ban or limit food trucks.

But what do food trucks actually mean for urban economies? What impact do they have on local restaurants, food industries, and our choices as consumers?

A recent study from Elliot Anenberg of the Washington, D.C. Federal Reserve System and Edward Kung of UCLA takes a detailed look at the economy and geography of food trucks in our nation’s cities. To get at this, the study uses unique data on food trucks from the U.S. Census Bureau and a dataset of daily Washington, D.C. food truck locations, as well as social media data from Twitter and Google Trends. The study is particularly interested in the connection between food trucks and new digital technologies—especially social media—and how food trucks make use of them. Here are its five big takeaways.

via The Secrets to Food Truck Location – CityLab.

1. Twitter is a big factor in food truck location.

Food-seeking flocking behaviour.

2. The connection between food trucks and digital technology is greater in big, dense cities.

Network effect, more nodes, and more importantly, more connections. Check out Valdis Krebs.

3. When it comes to location, variety matters a lot.

We, birds, humans, weasels, get bored eating the same stuff. And to maintain health we need to eat different stuff. Variety matters. Duh.

4. Food truck location is spiky.

Even normal economics understands this power law effect.

5. Food trucks cause households to spend more money on eating out.

See 3 and 2.

___________________________

Complexity fans will have spotted the lack of underpinning theory in the otherwise excellent CityLab piece. So I provided it, in bold italics. You’re welcome.

 

 

Edgeofchaos is not an edge and it’s not about chaos, and it’s not about order: World Problematique

Some people appear to misunderstand, says the arrogant author, that part of my work/thinking which they describe as being about ‘chaos’.

I feel moved to attempt, vainly*, to counter that misunderstanding. (*both senses)

It has to be said: I’m largely to blame for this misunderstanding.

So…

My work is widely understood as being about chaos. It isn’t, it’s about the edgeofchaos.

Let’s say that we are talking about two things: order and chaos. Think of it like this: we have black and white, like a chessboard. We can see only black and white: is that a black square or a white square? Not sure.

We keep seeing squares which sort of look black and sometimes maybe look sort of white. Some of us aren’t too bothered by this, we take a quick look, decide whether a square is black or white and get on with our lives.

Until this Greek bloke, ex-follower of Aristotle,  pops up and starts eurekaring. There is another colour, he shouts! There’s loads of it about!  I’ve given it a name! I’m calling it ‘blackywhitishwhiteyblackish’. It’s not black! But it’s not white either! It’s sort of in-between. There aren’t just two shades, there are loads!

Weeks later his wife decides that blackywhitishwhiteyblackish is a stupid name. She decides to call it grey instead. She writes a book about the profound implications of her husband’s discovery: ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey Instead’.

He forms a band called ‘Aristotle’s Error’. They have a minor hit with a cover version of Steve Strange’s song ‘Fade To Grey’, which had been a number one hit for him and his band, Strange Attractor.

It’s not about chaos.
It’s not about order.
It’s not black and white.
It’s complicated.

To be precise: it’s complex.

This thing in between order and chaos is ‘neither one nor t’other’ it is a thing in its own right. You can call it the edgeofchaos or you can call it the edgeoforder or you can call it complexity.

The world is not black.
The world is not white.
The world is grey.

The world is not order.
The world is not chaos.
The world is many complex adaptive systems at the ‘edge of chaos’.
The world is complexity.

When things are really connected, that’s order.
When things are really disconnected that’s chaos.
In between is complexity.

It’s about the connections between things. In an NK network, it’s about the K not the N. Would that we could relabel them KN networks.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_network

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._H._Waddington

Waddington, C. H. (1977) (published posthumously). Tools for Thought. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.

http://www.amazon.com/Navigating-Complexity-Essential-Business-Management/dp/1858358701

When I wrote my little book ‘Navigating Complexity’ I had the immense ‘Tools for Thought’ as my lodestone:

” At the deeper level, we find that most aspects of life and its interactions with its surroundings are interconnected into complexes. No powerful action can be expected to have only one consequence, confined to the thing it was primarily directed at. It is almost bound to affect lots of other things as well […] We need nowadays to be able to think not just about simple processes but about complex systems… We have found ourselves faced by a series of problems- atomic warfare, the population explosion, the food problem, energy, natrural resources, pollution and so on- each complex enough in itself, but then it turns out that each of these is only one aspect of, as it were, a Total Problem, in which all aspects of the world’s workings are inter-related. This Total Problem is sometimes called the World Problematique.”

The world is not order.
The world is not chaos.
The world is complexity.

JANE JACOBS! How New York Became New York: A Love Letter to Jane Jacobs, Tucked Inside a Graphic Biography of Robert Moses | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/18/robert-moses-master-builder-new-york-nobrow/

By that point, Moses has developed “such arrogance that he started to think himself irreplaceable.” Jacobs, on the other hand, operates with equal determination but from a deep place of humility and compassion for the citizen’s experience. The two titans of urban planning soon clash over their differences, exposing the disquieting fact that no ideal is without its tradeoffs and that what is most effective, more often than not, comes at the expense of what is most ennobling.

OUR BOYS ARE NOW AT GREATER RISK THAN GIRLS. By Dottie Lamm

http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/boys-now-greater-risk-girls/

Sobering, eye-opening article. Also, of course, true of the UK. Here is an edited summary of the data:

” • EDUCATION: This is the first generation of boys in U.S. history who will have less education than their dads.

Yet male teachers are scarce. Recess and vocational education are being curtailed.

Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, drop out of school or be expelled than girls.///

• FATHERLESSNESS: A third of boys are raised in fatherless homes. This lack of a dad leads to poorer academic and behavioral results for them than it does for girls. A recent study of boys revealed that by the third grade, boys with absent fathers scored lower on every achievement test.

Most gang members come from homes without dads.

• EMOTIONAL HEALTH: Depression remains hidden in boys because of the male taboo against the showing of feelings.

Boys’ risky, anti-social or violent behavior often serve as a mask for depression. Usually that behavior is punished but the underlying depression not treated.

Between the ages of 13 and 20, BOYS’ SUICIDE RATES SOAR TO FOUR TIMES THAT of girls of the same age.”

Love affairs with clients

Anyone remember the arthouse French movie “The Man Who Loved Women”? (Please ignore the vile US remake starring Burt Reynolds).

I’m the man who loved clients. Each freelance assignment feels like like a brief and bitter-sweet love affair.

How was it for you?

provocation #3 ‘Why oh why did this happen, can you see what it is yet?’ (file under: contentious and and half-baked) | LinkedIn

An occasional series of provocations for management thinkers.

May contain elements of offense.

(File under: contentious and and half-baked)

provocation #3

 

 

WHY OH WHY DID THIS HAPPEN, CAN YOU SEE WHAT IT IS YET?

NB: My target here is managerialism, not committed, ethical, hard-working public sector employees and elected representatives.

Rearrange these into the correct order:

1. Give police targets determined by politicians, and managers subservient to them

2. Import managerialism into the public sector

3. Destroy the multi use approach to city and town street life – thanks planners, abandoning the streets after 8pm to ne’er-do-wells, clubbers, drunks, and the poor and desperate.

4. Think it clever to save social services budgets a few quid by buying cheap places in care homes for vulnerable kids in depressed towns like Rochdale.

5. Close your children’s homes and allow the market to create cheap children’s homes in low cost areas.

6. Send vulnerable kids half-way across the country

7. Don’t see children and youth as valid members of society with needs, rights, and AGENCY, so don’t cater for their leisure and affiliation needs

8. Rack up business rates so that only poverty-level wages for fast-food work are viable in town centres.

9. Prioritise car theft, based on public complaint, over missing children who don’t complain because they don’t matter (“scrubbers” anonymous policeman, BBC Radio 4 Friday, September 12, 2014 13:37).

 

That was a trick question: there isn’t an order only a pattern.

Then wonder why the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal.

Discuss. Use both sides of the argument and the brain.

 

_____________Footnote

if you find this offensive is it less or more offensive than the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal?

via provocation #3 ‘Why oh why did this happen, can you see what it is yet?’ (file under: contentious and and half-baked) | LinkedIn.

INTRODUCING: musings|half-baked… ‘who should run the world and why’

Introducing ‘musings: half-baked

This is a new category, in some ways going back to my original idea of a scrapbook in the form of a blog. So half-baked musings are scraps of thinking, that I might do something with, or might pique my or someone else’s interest.

So here is the first one, file under ‘who should run the world and why’.

Very cool lady judge presiding over the Pistorius case. I’m going to extend the ‘the world should be run by 8 year old girls’ to include ‘successful black women of pensionable age’ (context: where black is an oppressed group within the dominant societies on this planet. Your culture may vary. May contain traces of nuts).

Despite being jovially couched, this is a serious notion. Its about experiences and perspectives. Its an idea emerging, slowly.

The idea is to specify, in a quasi-scientific manner, the ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ for a thing. In this case ‘running the world nicely’. It’s like a concept car for management systems thinkers.

Article is from yesterday's 'i'

Security Theatre

Schneier is brilliant, and unpronounceable and difficult to spell. Coined the term  ‘Security Theatre’. I was an unwilling participant in one when making an internal flight from a city in the UK to a city in the UK to speak at an event. On the return leg I spent a hours waiting in the departure lounge in Inverness with Tim Gill, another speaker. I had bought two bottles of scotch and hadn’t realised they needed to checked in. Eventually it transpired that these dangerous bottles containing possible explosives could be kept in the office for up to 7 days. [pause for the absurdity of keeping ‘bombs’ in an office in the centre of an airport to sink in] I was told they would be destroyed if not collected. Like I believe that in Scotland. I rang the mom and pop taxi firm I’d used and they agreed to store them for me until I could collect them. Which turned out to be never as I have not been back. But a mate was flyfishing nearby and collected them for me, a year later. Thank you, old chap.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/08/irrational_fear.html

Notice how human kindness has to work overtime to fill the gaps? One thing security theatre smashed effectively was trust, another is compassion. But humans, on a one to one basis, will always help. It’s a primate thing.

Footnote: my public school educated friend tipped them a tenner. That jarred. Been worrying at it for years. I think this is why, and it relates to the notion of ‘conviviality’ as described by Illich (googlim): it’s a class thing. Posh people, and don’t get me wrong, my friend has been a staunch supporter and had put plenty of work my way, do the tipping thing, working-class people don’t. Our expectation is that we help each other out without thought of reward. (There are exceptions and you can guess what they might be). I suspect that Hamish and Marie were bemused by his gesture and might have quietly donated the ten quid to charity. Having said all that, I wish I was half as gentlemanly as my posh friend.

KIND THINKER OUT IN THE WORLD: an elegy for Perry Else

KIND THINKER OUT IN THE WORLD

 

Kind thinker, out in

the world, away 

from the white towers; 

down by the riv’r.

Forthright, flexible and firm — 

the three frees.

Living, in the realm

of the possible:

not ‘they should’, only

‘well, maybe we can…’ 

Else we forget, the

value of play

and the value of

his playful life.

Arthur Battram

10:26 AM, Thursday, June 12, 2014, revised 2:02 PM  Friday, September 5, 2014 , and again so the scansion is better Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 2:04 PM.

A fitting obituary is here:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/people/obituaries/perry-else-1959-2014/2013792.article

REGENERATING THE PUBLIC REALM: Blenders, babysitters and burglars! – connecting neighbours in unexpected ways – Playing Out

“For my street – and the others who have shared their experiences – new and rich connections have grown from sharing time and fun on the street during playing out sessions. And they have changed the way I feel about living here for the better.”

We know more about regenerating a rainforest or a prairie than we do about regenerating the public realm.

We really need to get out more.

And we really need to study more.

PlayingOut, is one neccesary, but—of course—of itself, insufficient condition for this regeneration of  the public realm to take place. Pun placed intentionally!

Read and follow their excellent bloggery.

via Blenders, babysitters and burglars! – connecting neighbours in unexpected ways – Playing Out.

Give them all ASBOs! This is what advocacy for play looks like

What follows is the (obviously) unofficial view of a senior police officer on the subject of ASBOs, ABCs and other legal attempts to control the nuisance of children.

The officer is commenting on a report, which you can read by following the link below.

———————————————-

The officer said:

“I am writing in a non official capacity – my role is that of *** in ***
(Force).

If I can take the opportunity to comment on your ABC report. I thought it
was spot on and I will ensure it will be sent to my officers responsible for
delivering and working with those who deliver ABCs.

I do see a use for ABCs but as you point out, when the system is vague
and threatening it does nothing to inspire me that this is a tool that will
be of any merit or worth.

Surely children who may be experiencing problems in their lives require
support and should not be growing up in an authoritarian environment?

Thank you for a thought provoking report.”

The report he or she is commenting on is this one:

Report re: The Compatibility of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts with
Article 6.1 of the European Convention on Human Rights

By Jan Cosgrove and Matthew Cosgrove

Have any of our noble play-related university lecturers done any work in this area? I would love to see it.

 

You can find out more about FPFC here:

 

http://www.fairplayforchildren.net/what.htm

Evidence you say? What is that? Away with you and your ‘evidence’! (NAMED AND SHAMED: GPs who miss cancer diagnoses)

Read this blog, please. If you value any of my bloggage, read this other bloke’s blog. We need to bring as much as we can of this level of surgical precision to management.

If psychology can be a science, (a claim I find dubious having obtained a degree in it from an excellent college ranked number 3 or 4 in the UK, Hindustani).

(Hindustani? How could this idiotphone think I meant that when I wrote incidentally? This is why the robots well not take over just yurt)

As I was saying, if psychology can be a science then so can management.

There was a brief kerfuffle in the business schools about why they didn’t see the crash coming and why they failed to teach ethics to MBAs. Six months later all forgotten. Gary Wossname would have put on a conference or earned a big fee for meaculpaing, or both. Business school profs make admen look shamefaced and moral.

I’m not advocating Taylor’s Scientific Management. We have some better science now. And proper true facts are harder to come by in management consultancy. But we could work a lot harder than we do to seek truth amid opinion and cant.

Please read the wise words of the junior doctor.

juniordoctorblog.com

If you saw the Mail on Sunday today you would have seen the above headline.

According to Wikiquotes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 4-time US senator and academic, once said “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts”. Rather than writing an extensive counter-diatribe of rhetoric on the ridiculousness of the article, the irresponsible attitude to health reporting and Jeremy Hunt in general, I have decided to try a new form of discussion. I call it ‘The Facts’.

Fact #1
Here are the National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines for referring patients to a specialist with the suspicion of cancer. http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG27*

Fact #2
This is how common bowel cancer is: there are 47.2 new cases per 100,000 people per year (crude). This equals around 40,000 new cases nationally, which means nearly 1 case per UK GP per year.

This is how common breast cancer is: there are 155…

View original post 978 more words

A Real Step To Fix Democracy – Atlantic Mobile

http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/a-real-step-to-fix-democracy/371898/

The rules which govern the changing of the rules of the game may be the most important rules of all. Nature knows this.

If anyone asks me nicely, I can attempt to explicate this conviction…