Petervan’s Delicacies – 5 Nov 2019

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There is a new edition of Delicacies out. You can read it here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan/issues/petervan-s-delicacies-issue-126-205279

I believe the file-rouge of this edition’s collection is the challenging of “traditional” internet critics. Forget what you know, unlearn, and develop your own new insights.

As a teaser, check out Utopian Overreach, a great counter-narrative to the narrative of staying human by being disconnected.

The digital-wellness movement, though it seems to counter the grandiose schemes of the tech industry, shares a similar aspiration of fixing people for their own good, prescribing a specific one-size-fits all relationship with technology as a way to build an ideal society. This movement is typified by former Google employee Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology, books like Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Catharine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, and software such as the Before Launcher and Google’s new suite of experiments aimed at “balancing life and tech,” including a counter that tells you how many times you’ve unlocked your phone in a day.

What these interventions all have in common is how they frame our problems with technology as a matter between the individual and a specific device or app rather than the social, moral, and infrastructural relations that ultimately bind them together.

 

Ebb and Flow

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I am still reflecting on some feedback regarding an event that I recently designed and facilitated. One of the comments was that “there was too much ebb and flow”, and that we should create more “pressure” to keep the highs at maximum volume at all times.

But is ebb and flow such a bad thing? I don’t think so. On the contrary, the tension between ebb and flow is a requirement for growth and creativity. Adding more pressure will not keep the flow on, it could create exhaustion and fractures and breakages.

Instead of pressure, I believe we need to design opportunities for expansion, probably in the form of silence or more in general, reflection moments in the absence of inputs and triggers.

Like in Jan Chipchase’s expeditions: “Long trekking days were spent in meditative solitude or long conversations depending on personal preference, as energies ebbed and flowed”

Breaking Hierarchies

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Following my post “Who is the composer?”, I got the opportunity to have a conversation with the man himself: Ozark. He told me the story of what happened when he tried to conduct a philharmonic orchestra for a film soundtrack he had written. I did not know he wrote a score for a film, but he did. It is the score for the film Crusade in Jeans and the music is performed by with the Metropole Orchestra from The Netherlands. All professional musicians used to work with artists in residence.

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There is some real classical music stuff going on here

As a composer, he knew exactly what needed to be played when and how. He could as well conduct the orchestra himself, no? Or so he thought… But he learned the hard way that doing so was breaking hierarchies. He stepped out of his role as the composer when he tried to be the conductor of the orchestra.

An orchestra is like a ministry. Every unit has a role. The conductor does not communicate directly with the violist, no he/she speaks to the lead of the violin ensemble who speaks to the violist. Ozark brought also copies of the score with him, ignoring that copying the score was the job of somebody from the orchestra team. He could as well have said: “You know what? I found this great tribe of horn players, so they will play the horns this time.” Basically putting the original team in unemployment.

In a reaction of self-defense, the orchestra started playing – well-intentioned – games, sabotaging what Ozark tried to achieve. These games were well-intentioned because the intention was the care of the team.

In Dutch, there is a word “bezorgdheid” usually translated into “concern”, mostly an anxious type of concern. In my sense of Dutch language (my mother tongue), there is also an almost “mother-care” type of concern encapsulated in that word. A team-mother-care about what the orchestra is concerned about, the cohesion they wish to protect. This is not about care for the team, but care/bezorgheid of the team.

I often think back to the old Innotribe days, where we had a fantastic team. In my 2013 post Breaking and Making Teams, I described with quite some cynicism the recipe for breaking successful teams successfully. Remember: cynicism is a knot in the heart.

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It is a paradox: to innovate, one must have the courage to challenge the status quo, the existing processes, and hierarchies. But on the other hand, a team and a hierarchy have a built-in DNA-like patrimony of craftmanship and care-manship. Breaking that patrimony is a recipe for failure.

One can cut-and-paste the breaking hierarchies metaphor straight into corporate mergers and acquisition scenarios, for example when a successful team is acquired into a new company. Instead of looking how the strengths of an acquired team and its internal language, proceedings, and patrimony can help to imagine new worlds – in other words, making the team even more successful in its new environment – in many cases the CEO is only interested in how that team can help him/her be more successful.

In such cases, we wonder why the team is not willing to share its secrets, wondering why the best folks leave, wondering why there is no team left at all after 1-2 years. We shouldn’t be surprised: we just broke the team hierarchies.

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Who is the composer? Who wrote the score?

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Sometimes, the orchestra metaphor is used in leadership contexts, representing the leader as the conductor, steering/leading the orchestra. I believe the asymmetric relationship of the “leader” with his/her “followers” is a flawed metaphor. 

Orchestra conductor

The more interesting and critical question is “Who wrote the score?”. In other words, “Who is the composer?”. I already alluded to this in my good/bad-change-post.

"Heroes" and others by Ozark Henry and National Orchestra of Belgium

Quote by Robert Fritz

“In an orchestra, it is not the conductor or individual musicians who are in control.  It is the composer.  The composer’s job is to make sure that the parts fit together. Too often, no one is actually composing the organisation, and it leaves one of two bad choices: command and control or organising systems. Much has been made in the last 20 years, glorifying organising systems, but, what happens over time is that these systems self-organise into structural conflicts, which lead to oscillating patterns.”

“That’s why a “composed” system can lead to advancement and forward movement toward building the company but the other alternatives do not live up to their promise.”

The composer creates an immersion. A good example in music is Ozark Henry, who now spends his days creating immersive soundscapes. He got into this 360° sound experience when setting the bar for his immersive album “Paramount”, recorded with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Belgium. The full documentary of the making of this album also shows Ozark Henry in his role as “Composer” working with the Orchestra.

Ozark is NOT the conductor. He hired the conductor. He hired the director. He hired the musicians. He is the composer.

What are the qualities of the composer? Also here, Ian Cheng comes to our help.

Emissary

Ian Cheng - from the book "Emissary's Guide to Worlding"

As can be seen from the diagrams above, the stretch for most artists is to become “composers” rather than problem solvers or conductors. The composer is an artist/alchemist, trying to create harmony between four internal forces/roles:

  • The Director at work, focused on “What is the story/narrative?”
  • The Emissary at work, focused on “A future you can believe in”
  • The Cartoonist at work, focused on a uniting Cartoon/Mascot metaphor
  • The Hacker at work, focused on iterating hacks “It might not be science but it works”

All roles need to be present in the composer. In my opinion, this model does not only apply to artistic endeavors but works very well in a business context. Most businesses struggle to get to the right side of the graphic; in seeking surprise and going into unknown territory, and imagining alive worlds that they believe in. That’s where the future innovative opportunities are.

I suggest the composer is the ideal archetype for dealing with ambiguity. 

Have a great day!

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Imagining worlds you believe in

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As mentioned in my August 2019 update, I am helping a client with an immersive leadership offsite. I am starting to label this sort of work “Artistic interventions, interruptions, and provocations that lead to higher states of alertness and aliveness.”

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Coincidently, Sarah Perry just posted her swan song essay on “Meaning as Ambiguity”, referring to the work of Christopher Alexander (one of my all-time heroes) and coiner of “The Quality Without a Name” and “The Fifteen Geometric Properties of Wholeness” from Chapter-22 of his fantastic book “The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth”

beauty

Back to meaning and ambiguity. In the design of this off-site, we confront the participants with increasing levels of ambiguity in the BANI world. In their responses, we expect the participants to progress from learning into problem-solving into “Worlding”. See also my post on “The Tyranny of the Problem Solver”.

I first came across the term “Worlding” in the book “Emissary’s Guide to Worlding” by Artist Ian Cheng http://iancheng.com/. 

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It is one of those books where one makes annotations on every page, a big eye-opener and page-turner. Highly recommended.

Worlding is about imagining a future world you can believe in.

Some inspirational quotes from Ian Cheng’s book:

A World is a future you can believe in: One that promises to survive its creator, and continue generating drama.  

A World is a future you can believe in by promising to become an infinite game

A World evokes a place. 

A World has borders.

A World has laws. 

A World has values. 

A World has a language. 

A World can grow. 

A World can collapse. 

A World has mythic figures. 

A World has visitors. 

A World has members who live in it. 

A World looks arbitrary to a person outside of it. 

A World satisfies both the selfish and collective interests of its members. 

A World grants magic powers, especially the power to filter what matters to it. 

A World gives permission to live differently than the wild outside. 

A World creates an agreement about what is relevant. 

A World counts certain actions inside it as meaningful. 

A World undergoes reformations and disruptions. 

A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive. 

A World is a container for stories of itself. 

A World expresses itself in many forms, but is always something more.

For us humans, life is filled with the familiar contests of finite games: Deadlines. Deals. Rankings. Dating. Elections. Sports. College. War. Poker. Lotteries. 

When our finite games are won and done, what is strange is that we don’t exit back into base Reality. We wake up in a field of infinite games that perpetually mediate our contact with base Reality. 

We choose to live in these infinite games because they give us leverage, structure, and meaning over a base Reality that is indifferent to our physical or psychological health. 

We have many names for these infinite games: Families, Institutions, Religions, Nations, Subcultures, Cultures, Social Realities 

Let’s call them WORLDS

When a World can “survive its creator,” that means it has achieved sufficient stability to regulate and safeguard its potentiality without authorial intervention. 

This is a World’s requirement for Autonomy. 

When a World can “continue generating drama,” a World is sufficiently interesting for people to care about and want to explore. 

This is a World’s requirement for Aliveness. 

When a World is keeping its promise, it continues to be a future you can believe in

All the credits for the quotes above go of course to Ian Cheng. Great book.

Hope you enjoy it too!

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Petervan’s Delicacies – 11 Aug 2019

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There is a new edition of Petervan’s Delicacies. Number 124. An irregular, unpredictable, incoherent, unfocused set of mind-sparks that got me thinking.

As an appetizer, the last one on this edition is about Nakatomi Space, the tower that McClane explores in Die Hard via elevator shafts and air ducts, crashing through windows from the outside-in and shooting open the locks of rooftop doorways.

This is about “A ghostlike military fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean.” The physical walking-through-walls is a strong metaphor for radical innovation

Check-out issue #124 here. And if you like it, subscribe to future (unplanned, unguaranteed, unfocused) edition here.