Take a look at these two passages. The first written recently by a couple of anime fan/bloggers, Kiki and Lala, and the second written by the physicist/philosopher, Fritjof Capra, in his book The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975. 
The human experience has many faces, is described from many perspectives, in many languages, but it is ultimately the same story. There is no one in this world you can meet, no animal you eat, no plant you grow, no product you use, no adversity you encounter, no interaction of any kind you can have, of which it cannot be said, “We are in this together.”
Archive for the ‘Networked World’ Category
Kiki, Lala and Fritjof
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010Over Under Sideways Down
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010One of the characteristics of networks is their flexibility. What our communication channels looked like yesterday may not be what they look like today. This, of course, can be an asset or a liability. The net that allows us to build new relationships, discover markets and expand our potential for taking productive action is the same one that swallows channels and markets like a singularity sucking down solar systems in nanoseconds. The global financial system, guaranteed, is right now teetering on the edge of such a debt-and-greed-spun vortex. Call it The Bank Hole.
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.
What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks. These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless. They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.
One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision. And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’ This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks. So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:
Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.
Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation. Respect roots. Dig deep.
Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’ A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.
Look down. Who needs a helping hand? Some days, this the only question worth answering.
Cyberhouse Rules
Monday, February 8th, 2010I speak occasionally to Steven Lisberger, who directed the landmark motion picture, TRON. Naturally enough, the conversation usually comes around to cyberspace and how, as Steven puts it, “TRON came true.” Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about the role of story and storytellers in the networked world. Steven has a way of boiling things down to their essence. Sometimes I call him Obi-Wan. Here’s some Jedi from our most recent conversation:
Lisberger and Me
“For most of mankind’s existence, our subconscious mind has been hidden. Now it’s on full display in the network. Everything you can dream of is there and accessible instantly. And the question is, what are we going to do with it?”
“People need a new way in.”
“If one aspect of work, access to information, has gotten infinitely easier, the laws of physics tell us that another aspect, one that maybe we don’t recognize yet, has gotten infinitely harder. We expect things to always get easier, but that’s not necessarily true.”
“On one side of the equation you have the swarm, the hive mind, whatever you want to call it. And on the other, you have all these tools, and this demand for productivity. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it will get revealed quicker. So you have to really know what you’re doing. The swarm has to be grounded in capability.”
“The network and the tools are amazing. If people learn how to use the network and the tools, they’ll be amazing, too.”
“One result of networks is the democratization of quality. When all content is pumped out and made accessible, it creates a kind of middling format. It leads to a common denominator effect. This is why elitism matters. Not just anyone can tell a good story, or create a good design.”
“Intellectual bullying perpetuates the wrong argument.”
“With improvisation, you can do a scene where one person plays the landlord and the other person plays the tenant who’s behind on the rent. Then those two people reverse roles, and from that process, you learn how to go about resolving the problem. In business, that never happens. No one switches sides or changes roles. If you play for the Blue Team, that’s the team you stay on. If you’re on the Yellow Team, you stay on that team, and you argue for that side. And you just keep on having the same argument, and it’s terrible, because nothing changes, and nothing ever gets resolved.”
“What you’re doing with GameChangers is fracturing and realigning the sides of the argument so that problems can get solved.”
“The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize time. It exists in a permanent state of ‘now.’ In this sense the subconscious mind is like a child, who doesn’t know anything but ‘right now.’ When the subconscious mind makes itself visible and instantly accessible in the network, and everything exists in a state of now, it breeds immaturity. We begin operating at the level of awareness of an 11 year old. Maturity is something you can only get to over time. It’s linear in that sense. The ethics and perspective that come with time and maturity are what’s missing in this environment.”
“Maturity comes from mastery in the physical realm.”
Mix Mills and Grain Bins
Monday, January 25th, 2010
I grew up on a farm. My father spent a lot of time away from our farm selling and installing systems for other farmers that gave them more opportunity at what was, quite literally, the grass roots level.
One of these systems was called a Mix Mill. It was a processing machine about the size of a small refrigerator that ground grains like corn and soybeans into livestock feed. Using a series of black dials on the front of a cool-looking and very loud mint green machine connected to a set of augers, a farmer could dial in mixtures of grains and nutrients, and control the blend and texture of the feed. This saved the farmer all the time and labor of loading grain into a truck, hauling it to a centralized grain mill, grinding and mixing the grain there in one big batch, then loading it into 100 lb bags and hauling it back to the farm.
Another product, a Grain Bin, was a big silvery cylinder with drying fans installed around its perimeter that allowed the farmer to store and dry grain until the market presented the best selling opportunity. No longer did a farmer necessarily have to sell his grain at harvest time, when the market was glutted. The Grain Bin gave farmers more flexibility by giving them a much larger window through which to move their product.
After breakfast this morning with Scott Walker, the founder of BrainCandy LLC, whose Runes of Gallidon explores production using a networked model, I can see more clearly than ever that we are in an analogous scenario today. The ’small farmers’ of our time are Independent Media Producers (IMPs) such as app developers, gamers, bloggers, filmmakers and storytellers of all stripes.
The Mix Mills and Grain Bins of new media–some of them even sporting agri-names like FinalCut, Feedburner, FeedRoom, FeedCompany, Mailbeans and Sprouter–are abundant, and give an IMP almost unlimited ways to intersect with market vectors. (In fact, anyone thinking of launching a media app would be well advised to take a look at this first. All 67 pages of it. It should be mandatory.)
Like Mix Mills and Grain Bins did for farmers, these apps give the IMP much more say in the supply chain. A say in when the feed gets ground. How long it gets stored. What goes into it.
The apps also hold down the IMP’s expenses. Costs of fuel, labor and transportation are all lowered. What was once produced at the centralized grain mill (e.g. a large post production facility with heavy-duty Avid machines and 24-track consoles) can now be produced using laptops in someone’s home studio.
With all these ‘Mix Mills and Grain Bins’ and the unlimited spectrum of mashups and market entry points they make possible, we IMPs– we tillers of the cybersoil, farmers of the fractal, growers of the game–are left with only two questions that have no off-the-shelf answer: What are we planting? and Why?
The Beautiful Game
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Sports is a recurring subject for GameChangers. How can it not be, with our work so tightly bound to the playing of games? All you have to do is thread back through this blog to see how many times sports and their players produce a ‘learnable moment’ that can be applied to business. Most sports provide a useful model for how structure (e.g. the rules, roles, environment and objectives that constitute the game) liberate performance, creativity and innovation.
Sports is also a recurring theme for the culture and politics of the times. There is a lot of meta meaning bound up in sports. For example…
Jackie Robinson’s is the story of de-segregation, and of breaking through any significant barrier in your chosen profession.
Rudy is the story of anyone who has to overcome long odds to achieve a dream.
Esther Williams‘ and Johnny Weismuller’s stories are about the marriage of sports and entertainment.
The recent film, Invictus, starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, is about a visionary who sees a way to resolve a serious conflict via the playing of a game.
The Invictus theme is more or less mirrors what The Ball is all about: Beginning this Sunday, January 24, three football (soccer for us Yanks) enthusiasts, Christian Wach, Phillip Wake and Andrew Aris, will kick a football from Battersea Park in London, the site where modern soc– er, football began in 1864, to Johannesburg, South Africa, site of this year’s World Cup, the first ever held on the African continent. Their trip will take five months, and will run through 25 countries and 10,000 miles.
GameChangers: On The Ball
The Ball is sponsored by DHL-Africa, Special Olympics-Africa, the Freestyle Football Federation (think of them as the Harlem Globetrotters of football), and Alive and Kicking, which distributes footballs to kids in poor villages around the world. Alive and Kicking is donating 1,000 balls for the guys to distribute on their trip. DHL is handling logistics, including ground transpo, express mail, visa approvals, border crossings and internet and mobile phone connectivity. Africa 10, a documentary produced by Julian Cautherly and Will.I.Am of the Blackeyed Peas, has donated an HD camera and flash memory cards, and is co-hosting The Ball content on its website for the duration of the trip. GameChangers is a patron, too. Our role is to support the The Ball narrative.
At the January 24 kickoff, ‘The Beautiful Game’ will be played with ‘no rules’ (pre-1864 version of mayhem in the streets with a ball); ‘old rules’ (c. 1864 genteel and casual, if it strikes your fancy, smoke a pipe while you play); and ‘modern rules’ (the athletic, free-flowing game of today). Following the kickoff event, Dan Magess of the Freestyle Football Federation will attempt to set a world record for ‘keepy-uppy’, keeping a football in the air without touching it with your hands. Current record is over 23 hours. And with that, The Ball will begin its journey to Jo-burg for the World Cup.
This will be the third and most ambitious World Cup journey for the group, which operates under a non-profit organization, Spirit of Football. Wach and Wake kicked The Ball from London to Seoul in 2002 and London to Munich in 2006. This is Aris’ first year with the group.
The meta story of The Ball is how a simple idea can sweep aside our differences, and lead the way toward a shared sense of purpose, and the pitch on which all can play.
Kick away, lads, kick away!
We Will Be Brilliant
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
There is a terrible rip in the fabric of the planet. The Earth has buckled under Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead, suffering, homeless, hungry, helpless in the streets. The alarm ripples across networks in waves of emotion produced by a billion links and images knitted together by tens of thousands of stories. The global disaster relief game is on. We will play it brilliantly.
We will give money via mobile phones. We will send medical help and heavy equipment and food and tents and fuel. Some of us will catch a plane or a boat there ourselves. We will take time off from helping in New Orleans to give Haiti a hand. We will triage this awful wound that anyone who is truly attuned cannot help but feel. It is nature of networks that when people anywhere are hurting, we hurt, too. And so in helping the people of Port-au-Prince, we are also helping ourselves.
Disasters bring out the best in us. Neighborliness. Empathy. Selflessness. Soul. We will be focused and energetic. We will be purposeful. We will honor our instincts. Our differences will vanish, our collaborative natures take over, our shared destiny will be made, for a time, more clear.
And after the rubble no longer echoes with the cries of those it has buried alive, after those who have been hurt have been treated and those who are hungry have been fed and those on the streets have been sheltered…after the aid and energy we’ve sent toward the stricken parts have exhausted themselves and the survivors have settled into a freshly impoverished routine…we must remember this:
Our brilliance is always with us, and does not require a disaster like this one to make its presence known.
The Darwin-win Game
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009David Brooks’ piece in today’s NY Times talks about the protocol (as in software instructions) as being the most valuable asset in the Networked World economy. He writes things like:
The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols.
and
Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too.
and sums up with
When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.
My comment:
There is a technique for cultures to absorb new protocols. It’s called improvisation. The fundamentals of its practice were developed in the 1930s by a couple of schoolteachers in Chicago, Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin, whose objective was to create a way for children from diverse cultural backgrounds to collaborate productively (sounds like today’s economy, doesn’t it?). The underlying construct is ‘the game,’ which is defined by rules, roles, environment and objectives. The game transcends the cosmetic boundaries of language and culture to create the shared focus that is essential to progress.
Organizationally, economically, linguistically, and even biologically, it is the ability to improvise — to continuously adapt by making pragmatic and productive choices in a changing environment — that allows any culture to evolve. For the past two hundred years, no nation’s culture has been better at improvising than America’s, and more than anything else, it is our ability to improvise that is being tested today. As Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
Poster for The Origin of Species, a play with music written by Lizzie Mitchell that debuted at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Fest
GameChanger of the Month, November 2009
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009The GameChanger of the Month for November goes to Jimmy Biblarz, Mimi Rodriguez, David Kamins and Maya Festinger of Hamilton High School and the teacher, Christina Gutierrez, whose job they saved. By organizing a campaign that included (administration approved) student protests, stories in the media, a letter-writing campaign, and a formal presentation to the School Board, they were able to keep ‘Miss G’ at their school.
It is evident from reading the story in the L.A. Times that Gutierrez is the kind of player anyone would want on their team. It was not the loss of a teacher that stirred the students to action, as much as it was the threat of losing someone who genuinely cares about them. Biblarz felt extra heartache when he heard Gutierrez was getting laid off (because she lacked seniority). When his younger sister, Veronica, was out of school for two months with an illness, Miss G made sure she got her homework assignments, and that she was all caught up when she returned to the classroom. “She just actually cares,” Veronica Biblarz says in the Times article. “Not like the fake pretending to care. . . . She takes it seriously.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that the student calls out ‘fake pretend caring?’ A fact of which every brand should be aware: the b.s. detectors of the networked audience are fine-tuned. And there is no substitute for authenticity.
One of my improvisation teachers, Scot Robinson, said one day in class, “I hate people who generalize.” He delivered it with such deadpan perfect timing that it got a laugh, but getting a laugh was not the point, the point was this: Give the gift of specificity. Don’t be a generalizer generalizing. To hold your audience’s interest, be unique, be remarkable, buck stereotypes. You cannot accomplish this if you are ‘general’ about your role, your character, or your game. You cannot accomplish it if you limit yourself to what’s in the script, the employee manual or the teacher’s guide. If the people in your audience feel they already know you, you will fail to hold their attention. It’s when they do not know you, but rather, want to know more about you, that you win them over. It is when they see the the world a little differently because of you, that you create value, and make a difference in their lives.
Happy Fish Swim Day
Monday, November 30th, 2009(A RE-POST, SLIGHTLY EDITED, FROM A YEAR AGO ON THE DATE OF THE FIRST-EVER ‘CYBER MONDAY’)
I only had to glance at the feed headlines this morning to see that ‘Cyber Monday’ is getting pushed as the big online holiday shopping day by the mainstream media like some kind of suspicious-smelling Santa whose lap our parents are insisting we sit on.
Well, peeps, here’s what The Ol’ GameChanger has to say about that…
First of all, Monday will unfold as it gets performed for the first time ever, not according to a script written by someone we’ve never met, into which we have had zero input. It is going to be a day you and I create together, collaboratively. We do not have to shop today to make today a success. And if we do shop today, will that be the measure of our success? Today there are a lot of people trying to convince the marketplace that the metric of our success is one particular number or set of parameters they expect to be generated over a designated 24-hour period. Maybe this is true for you, maybe it’s not. Chances are, it’s not. So the idea of marking to market on a so-called Cyber-Monday is, in fact, pure fabrication. It’s a one-way ticket on the train to Crazy Town. Whether the headlines tomorrow about Cyber Monday are good or bad, they will most assuredly be bullshit.
Second, asking the cyberculture to shop on Monday is ludicrous, because a netizen has the ability to shop anytime, anywhere. We can shop (or work or communicate or whatever) when we’re in line for coffee, we can shop on Cape Cod while we’re sunning ourselves in Capri, we can shop for Lakers-Celtics tickets while we’re at a Spurs-Mavericks game, we can even shop while we’re taking a piss, an experience for which there is no brick-and-mortar equivalent, except maybe for the super-rich. You can probably get a cappucino in the restrooms at Goldman Sachs. I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that asking a netizen to transact on Monday is kind of like asking a fish to swim. We transact every day. When the fish swims, it’s news because..?
My friend Tricky Kid, one of the most on-the-pulse people I know, tweeted me Thanksgiving evening from his car after driving past a store where people were camping out overnight so they could get in there the instant it opened on Friday morning. “Pathetic,” wrote Tricky. The reason Tricky Kid found the overnight line pathetic is that the whole concept of the line — and the linear in general — is an Industrial Age design, and we are living in a non-linear world. Always have been, really.
The architects of Cyber Monday might as well push headlines that say ‘Online Merchants Promote Cyber Whatever’ or ‘Fish Expected to Swim on Monday’.
A GameChanger names the day after the fact, by what has been created on that day, not ahead of time, as advertising for whatever he or she is expected to consume.
Applied Improvisation, Part Six: Belina on Biomimicry
Sunday, November 29th, 2009I attend a session on Improvisation and Biomimicry conducted by Belina Raffy from the U.K. As if there’s any doubt that improvisation is the most natural thing in the world, consider these points from one of Belina’s slides:
1) Nature creates freedom within structure;
2) Nature recycles everything;
3) Nature rewards cooperation;
4) Nature demands local expertise;
5) Nature curbs excesses from within.
Yet how many organizations and brands attempt to circumvent biology? The new organizational model, as we point out at GameChangers, is more biological than mechanical. Only by embracing what is natural and biological can a networked organization stay in sync and in tune with its environment. Humans, are, after all, biological organisms, and participants in the Ecosystem, Gaia, God’s Plan, The Grand Experiment, or whatever you want to call it. It is our obligation to play along. Thank you Belina!