Glimpses of an emerging paradigm

Our goal is to see the whole

Although we shall not talk about him directly, the elephant in the above ideogram is the main protagonist of our stories. It is a glimpse of him that we want to give by talking about all those people and events. This visual metaphor represents the whole big thing – the Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we will have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And that's what we are about to do.

Recall once again Galilei in house prison, the image which we are using here to point to repressed, or not-yet-heard voices of change. Galilei was not tried for his belief in Heliocentricity; that's just a minor technical detail. The big point was that he dared to state in public that when the reason contradicts the scriptures, it is still legitimate to be open to the possibility that the reason might be right. Today there is no Inquisition, and practically no censorship – and yet (as Italo Calvino observed decades ago, when still only the printed text was competing for our attention) the overabundance of our unorgarnized information will do the censoring just as well. And there are also other factors in play, which we will come back to.

What the visionaries see

It has been said that a visionary is a person who looks at the same things all of us look at, and sees something different. What we here call giants are the people with an uncommon ability. You may call it intuition, or creative imagination. We think of it as soaring intelligence: Where the rest of might be painstakingly trying to fit the pieces together, they appear to somehow see through the pieces, and anticipate how they might fit together in a completely new way.

Some difficulties are, however, inherent in this kind of seeing. Even a visionary can see (metaphorically) only a part of the elephant. This is because paradigm, or the elephant, is so large and complex that anyone can look at it only from a certain angle, which is defined by his or her field of interest and background. And when a visionary tries to explain what he sees to the rest of us, then there's another problem – even suitable words are lacking. So we may hear him talk about a rope, a fan or a hose – when really what he's talking about is the large animal's tail, or ear, or trunk.

Why visionaries fail to communicate

The reasons are complex, and the phenomenon is fascinating. We shall look into deeper reasons as we go along. But the large and obvious reason is that they are trying to show us the elephant, or some of its specific parts. And that our communication, presently, is conceived as fitting things into a (old) paradigm! And so naturally we only hear what fits in, and ignore what doesn't. But (and you will see some quite wonderful examples in a moment) – the real value of the giants' insight is exactly that it changes (improves) the conventional order of things.

And so we undertake to enable us to take advantage of the heritage, the jewels we have – by materializing the elephant sufficiently so that new things can be understood in its context, and fitted in.

You will now easily understand why our primary interest is not to find out what some giant "really saw" (even he would not be able to tell us that). What we are above all interested in is to use their views as signs on the road, and ultimately find and see 'the elephant'.

The substance of our project

Seeing the whole thing is of course fascinating as a spectacle – 'a large exotic animal grazing at our universities, or visiting our lecture halls without being seen'. But the view of it becomes life-changing and essential, when what we are talking about is not really an animal, and not even a finished thing, but something that we need to create together.

So our goal is first of all a liberation from a certain fixed way of looking at things, which we acquired while growing up and through education. And then to – not exactly connect all the dots (which may be something each of us will have to do on our own), but foster this whole art, this capability we have all but lost, of connecting dots in general. We undertake to organize it as an academic, and real-world activity. We undertake to institutionalize it, give it the status of "knowledge creation" – which is what it really is, as we have already seen, and as we are about to see.

The substance of this page

So we are about to see only one small part of 'the elephant'. But this will be a crucial part. It will also be a paradigm in its own right – a paradigm in knowledge work. In the large puzzle we need to put together, there is a piece we need to create and place in first, because it will show us what all the rest is going to look like.

In what follows we will looking at exactly the same 'piece in the puzzle' that we saw in Federation through Images. There we used keywords such as knowledge federation, systemic innovation, and guided evolution of society, and the image of the bus with candle headlights to describe it. But while there our angle of looking and focus was on the foundations or epistemology), here our point of view will be the society's new needs, and the capabilities of new technology. We will then have covered all the three main motivations for knowledge federation that were mentioned on the front page.

We'll tell the stories of two giants – Douglas Engelbart as the icon of knowledge federation, and Erich Jantsch as the icon of systemic innovation. But we'll also put on our map just a couple of the giants on whose shoulders they stood.

The nature of our stories

How to lift up an idea of a giant

How to lift up an idea of a giant from undeserved anonymity? We tell vignettes – engaging, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories, to distill the core ideas of the most daring thinkers from the vocabulary of their field, and to give them the power of impact. We sometimes also join the vignettes together into threads, and threads into patterns and patterns into a gestalt – an overarching view of our situation, which shows how the situation may (need to) be handled – just as we did with ideograms.

Our stories illustrate a larger point

But there is also something else in play here, quite essential. A story can be a parable. Through the concrete, the abstract and the general are revealed. So just as the case was with our ideograms, our vignettes too can be worth one thousand words. They too can condense and vividly display a wealth of insight. Bring to mind again the iconic image of Galilei in house prison, whispering eppur si muove. The story we are about to tell might suggest that also in our own time similar situations and dynamics are at play.

The incredible history of Doug

How the Silicon Valley failed to hear its giant in residence

Before we go into the details of this story, take a moment to see how it works as a parable. The story is about how the Silicon Valley failed to understand and even hear its giant or genius in residence, even after having recognized him as such! This makes the story emblematic: The Silicon Valley is the world's hottest innovation hub. Are those people there smart? Exceptionally so, there can be no doubt about that! So this story will both serve to point to a new direction, that is, to the elephant – which is what Doug was trying to do to the Valley (just look at his photo and you'll see that). The fact that the Valley ignored him will serve as a warning to the rest of us – and an invitation to look deeper into this matter

Engelbart's epiphany

Having decided, as a novice engineer in December of 1950, to direct his career so as to maximize its benefits to the mankind, Douglas Engelbart thought intensely for three months about the best way to do that. Then he had an epiphany.

On a convention of computer professionals in 1968 Engelbart and his SRI-based lab demonstrated the computer technology we are using today – computers linked together into a network, people interacting with computers via video terminals and a mouse and windows – and through them with one another.

In the 1990s it was finally understood (or in any case some people understood) that it was not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who invented the technology, or even the XEROS PARC, from where they took it. Engelbart received all imaginable honors that an inventor can have. Yet he made it clear, and everyone around him knew, that he felt celebrated for a wrong reason. And that the gist of his vision had not yet been understood, or put to use. "Engelbart's unfinished revolution" was coined as the theme for the 1998 Stanford University celebration of his Demo. And it stuck.

The man whose ideas created "the revolution in the Valley" passed away in 2013 – feeling he had failed.

What Engelbart saw

What was it that Engelbart saw in his vision, and pursued so passionately throughout his long career? What was it that people around him could not see? We'll answer by zooming in on one of the many events where Engelbart was celebrated, and when his vision was in the spotlight – a videotaped panel that was organized for him at Google in 2007. This will give us an opportunity to explain his vision – if not in his own words, then at least with his own Powerpoint slides. Here is how his presentation was intended to begin.

Around that time it became clear that Engelbart's long career was coming to an end. By choosing title "A Call to Action!", Engelbart obviously intended make it clear that what he wanted to give to Google, and to the world through Google, was a direction and a call to pursue it.

The first slide pointed to a large and as yet unfulfilled opportunity that is immanent in digital technology. The digital technology can help make this a better world! But to realize this potential of technology, we need to change our way of thinking.

The second slide was meant to explain the nature of this different thinking, and why we needed it. The slide points to a direction. Doug talks about a 'vehicle' we are riding in. You'll notice that part of the message here is the same as in our Modernity ideogram, which we discussed at length in Federation through Images. But there's also more; the vehicle has inadequate "steering and braking controls".

The third slide was there to point to way to remedy this problem. To set the stage for explaining the essence of Doug's vision; for understanding the purpose and the value of his many technical ideas and contributions (which is what the remainder of the slides were about); and ultimately for making his call to action.

But let's wait with this third slide. Before we talk about the solution, let's first make sure we understand what the problem is.

We shall come to this story and continue it in just a moment. But before we do that, we shall do a bit of 'connecting the dots' around Doug's framing of the problem, in his second slide.

Unsustainable by design

Worse than a dictatorship

So let us now look at Doug's second slide from an angle that is familiar to everyone – democracy. In the old ( and still so stubbornly dominant) traditional order of things, democracy is the set of processes and institutions that we associate with this word. As long as we have the constitution and the elections and the press are free, it is assumed, we have democracy. We the people are in control. The nightmare scenario in this order of things is a dictatorship, where a dictator has taken from the people those affordances of control and tokens of freedom.

But what Doug was pointing to is another, much worse nightmare scenario – where nobody has control! Where the "vehicle" in which we are riding into the future lacks the structure (or metaphorically suitable "headlights" and "steering and braking") that would make it controllable. A dictator may come to his senses. His more reasonable son may succeed him. The generals or the people may make a coup. But if the system as a whole is not controllable by design – then we really have a problem!

The science of control

A scientific reader may have noticed that Engelbart's seemingly innocent metaphor in Slide 2 has a technical-scientific interpretation. In cybernetics, which is a scientific study of (the relationship between information and) control, "feedback" and "control" are household terms. Just as the bus must have functioning headlights and steering and braking controls, so must any system have suitable feedback (inflow of suitable information), and suitable control (a way to apply the incoming information to correct its course or functioning or behavior) – if it is to be steerable or viable or "sustainable".

Norbert Wiener might be a suitable iconic giant to represent (the vision that inspired) cybernetics for us. He was recognized as a potential giant already as a child. So he studied mathematics, zoology and philosophy, and finally got his doctorate in mathematical logic from Harvard – when he was only 17! Then he went on to do seminal work in a number of fields – one of which was cybernetics.

We'll represent Wiener here with the final chapter of his 1948 book Cybernetics, titled "Information, Language and Society'." We'll briefly – as briefly as we are able without spoiling the story – highlight two pints from this chapter, two dots to connect, in two brief sections. We'll mention two more giant on whose shoulders he was standing. Here's the first one.

The feedback is broken

The first of the Wiener's two key insights we'll point to is that our communication, or our society's "feedback", is dysfunctional and must be rebuilt.

Wiener cites Vannevar Bush, who was his MIT colleague and twice his boss (first as the MIT dean, and then as the leader of the U.S. WW2 scientific effort), to make this point. And since Bush also inspired Engelbart, and since he's a suitable icon giant for this most central point, it's time that we introduce him here properly with a brief story and a photo. <p>Vannevar Bush was the giant who most vividly and from an authoritative position pointed to the urgent need for (what we are calling) knowledge federation – already in 1945!

A pre-WW2 pioneer of computing machinery, and professor and dean at the MIT, During the war Bush served as the leader of the entire US scientific effort – supervising about 6000 leading scientists, and assuring that the Free World is a step ahead in developing all imaginable weaponry including The Bomb. And so in 1945, the war just barely being finished, Bush wrote an article titled "As We May Think", where the tone is "OK, we've won the great war. But one other problem still remains to which we scientists now need to give the highest priority – and that is to recreate what we do with knowledge after it's been published". He urged the scientists to focus on developing suitable technology and processes.

Engelbart heard him. He read Bush's article in 1947, as a young army recruit, in a Red Cross library in the Philippines, and it helped him 'see the light' a couple of years later. But Bush's article inspired in part also another development – and that's what we'll turn to next.

The market won't give us control

There is an obvious alternative to all this – the market! The free competition. The belief that we don't really need headlights, that we don't really need knowledge federation and systemic innovation – that all we need to do is worry about "our own" interests, and "the invisible hand" of the market will secure that everything is for the better in the best of all worlds. Wiener's second insight is that there is no "invisible hand" to rely on; that we must do the work we were relegating to it ourselves. Listen for a moment to Wiener's tone. Is it suggesting that some deep and power-related prejudices are at play (recall Galilei...):

There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market, the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end of a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor, and has thus earned the great reward with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory.

Wiener made a transition most interesting for us – between the first of the above insights to the second. He did that by pointing to the work of another giant whose essential message was ignored. His point was "See this really central insight that my distinguished colleague found out, and yet he found himself ignored – truly our communication doesn't work!" The giant was John von Neumann, whose many seminal contributions include the design of the first digital computer – and (with Morgenstern) the game theory, which is what Wiener was talking about.

Let's add to Wiener's observation that the research on a specific theme that interests us most here virtually exploded in the 1950s – i.e. after Cybernetics was published, resulting in more than one thousand research articles. The theme is popularly known as "prisoner's dilemma". All we'll need from this research here, however, is once again the most simple fact this research stands for – that it may be the case that rational self-service (exact, mathematical maximization of one's own gains) brings all players to an outcome that is inferior to what they would achieve had they collaborated. The point here is that collaboration may lead to a win-win situation; competition may lead to a lose-lose situation!

We don't need to go into details. Our theme here is perhaps the core belief, which is as germane to our contemporary condition as the unquestionable reliance on the scriptures was five centuries ago – the belief that we don't really need to team up and collaborate and build a better world (or systems); that all we really need is to do is to play competitively within the existing systems. If we agree (make a convention) that religion is the ethical fiber of the society – what binds each of us to a purpose and all of us into a society – then this qualifies as our contemporary religion.

The alternative is what Wiener was establishing, and arguing for – cybernetics. If we cannot trust the market, then what can we trust? We need suitable information to show us how to evolve and steer our systems, and our society or democracy at large. We can develop that information through a scientific study of natural and man-made systems, and abstracting from them to create general insights and rules. That's of course what cybernetics is about. You may now begin to understand knowledge federation / systemic innovation as the next step in the same direction. The details will follow.

Democracy 2.0

Toward an informed approach to contemporary issues

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them," said Einstein. Systemic thinking offers itself as a natural, informed alternative. And if we take this alternative only one step further, if we begin to apply it – as we just did – then Einstein's most famous word of wisdom can be paraphrased as follows: "We cannot solve our problems with the same systems we used when we created them." (If you are still skeptical, ample evidence will be provided; and an invitation to resolve the remaining hesitancies in a conversation.)

If you are ready to embrace this new thinking, then we are ready to reduce all our problems, with all their "wickedness" and complexity, to a single and straight-forward challenge – we must become able to update our systems! And that was precisely our collective capability that Erich Jantsch undertook to foster.

The science behind innovation

Having received his doctorate in astrophysics at the tender age of 22, from the University of Vienna, Erich Jantsch realized that it is here on Earth that his attention is needed. And so he ended up researching, for the OECD in Paris, the theme that animates our initiative (how our ability to create and induce change can be directed far more purposefully and effectively). Jantsch's specific focuse was on the ways in which technology was being developed and introduced in different countries, the OECD members. Jantsch and the OECD called this issue "technological planning". Is it only the market? Or is there some way we can more effectively direct the development and use of the rapidly growing muscles of our technology?

So when The Club of Rome (a global think tank, consisting of 100 selected international and interdisciplinary members, organized to do research on the future prospects of mankind, and if the situation demands it also intervene) was about to be initiated, in 1968, it was natural to invite Jantsch to give the opening keynote.

Immediately after the opening of The Club of Rome Jantsch made himself busy crafting solutions. By following him through three steps of this process, we shall be able to identify three core insights, three pieces in our 'elephant puzzle', which we owe to Jantsch.

But before we do that, let's put on our map Aurelio Peccei, the giant whose keen insight and resolute initiative made The Club of Rome and its various achievements and insights possible.

We must find a way to change course

"The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course", Aurelio Peccei (the co-founder, firs president and the motor power behind The Club of Rome) wrote this in 1980, in One Hundred Pages for the Future, based on this think tank's first decade of research.

Peccei was an unordinary man, and an uncommonly successful industrial leader and humanistic thinker. During the WW2 he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months, without revealing his contacts. He later wrote that he was grateful for this experience because it formed him. As the leader of Fiat's operations in Latin America (where the cars were not only sold but also produced) he established also Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the development of the Third World countries. When the Italian tech giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president and he managed to turn the things around. And yet the question that most intensely preoccupied Peccei was still larger or indeed one of the largest ones – the nature of our civilization's condition, and how this condition was changing.

Here is one of the ways in which Peccei later framed the answer (in 1977, in The Human Quality, his personal reflections on the human condition and his recommendation for handling it):

Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world.

Planning as feedback, systemic innovation as control

With a doctorate in physics, it was not difficult to Jantsch to put two and two together. If our civilization is on a disastrous course, the reason must be that (as Engelbart put it) the "headlights and braking and steering controls) we have inherited from the past no longer serve their most central purpose. So let's then waste no time, let's get busy creating new ones! Right after The Club of Rome meeting Jantsch gathered a group of creative leaders and systemic thinkers and researchers in Bellagio, Italy, to co-create a draft. The result was so basic that Jantsch called it "rational creative action".

Rational creative action begins with forecasting, which explores different future scenario; it ends with an action selected to enhance the likelihood of the desired scenarios. A key role is played by a new social process they called "planning" (notice that this had nothing to do with the kind of planning that was at the time used in the Soviet Union):

[T]he pursuance of orthodox planning is quite insufficient, in that it seldom does more than touch a system through changes of the variables. Planning must be concerned with the structural design of the system itself and involved in the formation of policy.”

Policies, which are the objective of planning (as the authors of the Bellagio Declaration envisioned it) specify both the institutional changes and the norms and value changes that might be necessary to make our goal-oriented action in a true sense rational and creative (Jantsch, 1970):

Policies are the first expressions and guiding images of normative thinking and action. In other words, they are the spiritual agents of change—change not only in the ways and means by which bureaucracies and technocracies operate, but change in the very institutions and norms which form their homes and castles.”

The emerging role of the university

The next question in Jantsch's stream of thought and action was roughly this: If "rational creative action" is a necessary new capability that our systems and our civilization at large now require, then who – that is, what institution – may be the most natural and best qualified to foster this capability? Jantsch concluded that the university (institution) will have to be the answer. And that to be able to fulfill this role, the university itself will need to update its own system.

[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society’s capacity for continuous self-renewal. It may have to become a political institution, interacting with government and industry in the planning and designing of society’s systems, and controlling the outcomes of the introduction of technology into those systems. This new leadership role of the university should provide an integrated approach to world systems, particularly the ‘joint systems’ of society and technology.”

Evolution as strategy

In the 1970s Jantsch lived in Berkeley, wrote prolifically, and taught occasional seminars at the U.C. Berkeley. This period of his life and work was marked by a new insight, which was triggered by his experiences with working on global / systemic change, and some profound scientific insights brought to him, initially, by Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel laureate scientist who visited Berkeley in 1972. Put very briefly, this involves two closely related insights:

• we cannot – that is, nobody can – recreate the large systems including the largest, our civilization, in any way directly; where we can make a difference – and hence where we must focus on – is their evolution;
• the living and evolving systems are governed by an entirely different dynamic than physical systems – which needs to be understood</p> <p>Jantsch was especially interested in understanding the relationship between our that is, people's values and ways of being, and our evolution. He saw us as entering the "evolutionary paradigm". The title of his 1975 book "Design for Evolution" points unequivocally toward the same direction that we tried to frame with our four keywords. Specifically systemic innovation we adopted directly from Jantsch.

Wiener's paradox

Academic publishing had no effect

Ronald Reagan is not presented here as one of the giants, but as a person who none the less can open up our eyes to the nature of our situation, and of the emerging paradigm, perhaps even a lot better than the words of the more visionary people may. In the 1980 – when Erich Jantsch passed away at the tender age of 51 (an obituary mentioned malnutrition as a possible cause...), having just issued two books about the "evolutionary paradigm" in science and in our understanding and handling of systems, Ronald Reagan became the 40th U.S. president on a clear agenda: We can only trust the market! The moment we begin to interfere with its perfect mechanisms, we are asking for trouble.

The point here is not whether he was right or wrong, but the lack of knowledge federation. The words of our giants just simply had no effect on how the votes were cast – and how the world ended up being steered!

What we have is a paradox

"As long as a problem is treated as a paradox, it can never be resolved,...". What we have is not a problem, it's a paradox! To see that, notice that Norbert Wiener etc.

In 2015 we presented an abstract and talk titled "Wiener's paradox – we can resolve it together" to the 59th conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. The point was.

The solution is bootstrapping

The alternative – we must BE the systems! Engelbart - bootstrapping. Jantsch - action! Our design epistemology...

Doug's last wish...

Engelbart's vision and legacy

The new-paradigm counterpart to the printing press

We now have the necessary context to explain Engelbart's vision and call to action – as rendered in the third slide of his intended presentation at Google in 2007. To set the stage, or gestalt, think about the role the printing press played at the point of its arrival. Gutenberg's invention is sometimes pointed at as the major factor that – by making knowledge sharing incomparably more efficient – led to the Enlightenment. If we now ask you to name a contemporary counterpart, you will might be tempted to right away say "that's easy – it's the Internet". But there is a catch (recall Doug's first slide) – we also need to change our way of thinking!

What Engelbart saw

If we now – in the context of what's been told – identify the creation of new 'headlights' (knowledge-work system that can inform us the people properly, and allow us to create and use knowledge in a radically better way), then we are ready for Doug's insight.

THE THIRD SLIDE. POINTS. .... ALL HIS CONTRIBUTIONS MUST BE UNDERSTOOD AS PIECES IN A PUZZLE – technologies ... systemic building blocks...

IT can play THE enabler role in the above process! The point is precisely that something MUCH much... bigger and more beautiful can be made possible with the help of "digital technology" – than what the printing press made possible. BUT the technology is not enough - WE ALSO HAVE TO CHANGE OUR WAY OF THINKING!!!

The second slide explains what exactly the new thinking might be. Yes, as we said, the slide points to all that's just been said, in no ambiguous terms. But there is also a word for this way of thinking – and the word is "systemic".

The third slide then is his, and our, main point. Why is systemic thinking necessary if the digital technology should give us the benefits that it has in store for us?

The slide has three points, explaining his "dream". The first says that "digital technology could greatly augment the human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems". So imagine once again Doug as an idealistic novice engineer, barely 25 years old, thinking about how best to contribute to the world. He has realized that the humanity has problems it doesn't know how to solve, whose "complexity times urgency" factor is growing at an accelerated speed or "exponentially".

The second point links the familiar digital computer infrastructure – the machine, the high-speed network, the interactive interface – with "super new nervous system". We'll come back to that. For now just notice that the "super new nervous system" is precisely what we now do have.

The third point begins again with the word "dream", suggesting that what follows truly remained just a dream. So what was the unfulfilled part of his dream? 'That people could seriously appreciate the potential of harnessing that technological and social nervous system to improve the collective IQ of our various organizations." To Doug "the collective IQ" meant the collective capability to deal with "complexity times urgency".

To see his really central point, imagine the humanity as a large organism. It has lately grown extremely ("exponentially") fast in both size and power. It has also lately gotten a whole new nervous system. The future of this organism, Doug suggested, will crucially depend on his ability to learn to coordinate the actions of his various organs by taking advantage of this nervous system. To see what's missing, imagine the organism going toward a wall. Imagine that the eyes of the organism see that, but are trying to communicate it to the brain by writing academic articles in some specialized academic field of interest.

Doug's big point

The point here, the really big and central one, is that to take advantage of the "technological and social nervous system", the "cells" in that system (namely we, the people) need to specialize and divide our knowledge-work labor in entirely different ways than what was possible without the "nervous system".

However big a disruption it was, the printing press could only vastly speed up the copying of manuscripts, which the monks in the monasteries were already doing.

To understand still more closely what's missing, think of all the cells in the gigantic organism trying to communicate with one another by merely using the "super new nervous system" to merely broadcast messages. When the new technology is applied in that way, the result is, of course what we've been talking all along – the information glut. And ultimately confusion and chaos!

The incredible part

You might what's so incredible in this history of Doug? We didn't really tell you that yet. So here it is.

To see it, think about a brilliant mind saying, in all clarity, "this is what the humanity must do to solve its problems and evolve further!" Imagine him using his best efforts to first of all become able to do that, and then actually producing the enabling technology. Imagine us the people using this technology to only speed up immensely what we were already doing. Think about the Silicon Valley failing to understand, or even hear, its genius in residence – even after having recognized him as that! Think that to really understand Doug's various technical contributions, one really must see them in the context of his larger vision. Imagine that the first four slides, which define this vision, were not even shown at the 2007 presentation at Google! If you Google it, you will find that Doug is introduced as "the inventor of the computer mouse". And that there is no mention, really, of any sort of call to action!

Engelbart's contributions

Must be understood in the light of the above – ALL that he did were building blocks in society's new 'nervous system'. Both the technology he created – especially the principles behind the technology (the mouse and the chorded keyset, and especially the Open Hyperdocument System and all the rest) AND the higher-level ideas such as the DKR, the ABC levels, the NIC etc.).

Bootstrapping

Doug was very clear about that. He called it "bootstrapping". There's just about one way to break the spell of the paradox – and that is to BEGIN self-organization, in a way that can scale.

It was clear to Doug that this was the key...

The future has already begun!

Be the systems you want to see in the world

Fortunately, our story has a happy ending. (...)

Less than two weeks after Douglas Engelbart passed away – on July 2, 2013 – his dream was coming true in an academic community. AND the place could not be more potentially impactful than it was! As the President of the ISSS, on the yearly conference of this largest organization of systems scientists, which was taking place in Haiphong, Vietnam, Alexander Laszlo initiated a self-organization toward collective intelligence.

He really had two pivotal ideas. One was to make the community intelligent. The other one was to make an intelligent system for coordinating change initiatives around the globe. (An extension of).

Alexander was practically born into this way of thinking and working. His father...

We came to build a bridge

We came to Haiphong with the story about Jantsch and Engelbart; and with the proposal "We are here to build a bridge"...

And indeed – the bridge has been built! The two initiatives have federated their activities most beautifully!

Prototypes include LaSI SIG & PHD program, the SIL... And The Lighthouse project, among others.

The meaning of The Lighthouse (although it belongs really to prototypes, and to Applications): It breaks the spell of the Wiener's paradox. It creates a lighthouse, for the systems community, to attract stray ships to their harbor. It employs strategic - political thinking, systemic self-organization in a research community, and contemporary communication design, to create impactful messages about a single issue, and placing them into the orbit: CAN WE TRUST "THE MARKET"? or do we need systemic understanding and innovation and design?

Thinking 2.0

The system

As Doug said – it's just to change our way of thinking!

We gave our design team what might be the challenge of our time – to make this design object palpable and clear to people. The above System ideogram is what they came up with.

We let this ideogram stand for this key challenge – to help people see themselves as parts of larger systems. To see how much those systems influence our lives. And to perceive those systems as our, that is human creations – and see that we can also re-create them!

Changing scales

Polyscopy as a methodology in knowledge creation and use has an interesting counterpart in systemic innovation as we are presenting it here. Yes, we have been focused so much on the details, that we completely neglected the big picture. But information – and also innovation, of course – exist on all levels of detail! Should we not make sure that the big picture is properly in place, that we have the right direction, or that the large system is properly functioning, before we start worrying about the details?

The next industrial revolution?

So forget for a moment all that has been said here. This is not about the global issues, or about information technology. We are talking about something far larger and more fundamental. Think about "the systems in which we live and work", as Bela H. Banathy framed them. Imagine them as gigantic machines, which we are of course part of. Their function is to take our daily work as input, and produce socially useful output. Do they? How well are they constructed? Are they wasting our daily work, or even worse – are they using it against our best interests?

See

Evangelizing systemic innovation.

The emerging societal paradigm is often seen as a result of some specific change, for example to "the spiritual outlook on life", or to "systemic thinking". A down-on-earth, life-changing insight can, however, more easily be reached by observing the stupendous inadequacy of our various institutions and other systems, and understanding it as a consequence of our present values and way of looking at the world. The "evangelizing prototypes" are real-life histories and sometimes fictional stories, whose purpose is to bring this large insight or gestalt across. They point to uncommonly large possibilities for improving our condition by improving the systems. A good place to begin may be the blog post Ode to Self-Organization – Part One, which is a finctional story about how we got sustainable. What started the process was a scientist observing that even though we have all those incredible time-saving and labor-saving gadgets – we seem to be more busy than the people ever were! What happened with all that time we saved? (What do you think...?) Toward a Scientific Understanding and Treatment of Problems is an argument for the systemic approach that uses the metaphor of scientific medicine (which cures the unpleasant symptoms by relying on its understanding of the underlying anatomy and physiology) to point to an analogous approach to our societal ills. The Systemic Innovation Positively recording of a half-hour lecture points to some larger-than-life benefits that may result. The already mentioned introductory part (and Vision Quest) of The Game-Changing Game is a different summary of those benefits. The blog post Information Age Coming of Age is the history of the creation and presentation (at the Bay Area Future Salon) of The Game-Changing Game, which involves Doug Engelbart, Bill and Roberta English and some other key people from the Engelbart's intimate community.

Evangelizing knowledge federation.

The wastefulness and mis-evolution of our financial system is of course notorious. Yet perhaps even more spectacular examples of mis-evolution, and far more readily accessible possibilities for contribution through improvement, may be found in our own system – knowledge-work in general, and academic research, communication and education in particular. (One might say that the bankers are doing a good job making money for the people who have money...) That is what these evangelizing prototypes for knowledge federation are intended to show. On several occasions we began by asking the audience to imagine meeting a fairy and being approached by (the academic variant of) the usual question "Make a wish – for the largest contribution to human knowledge you may be able to imagine!" What would you wish for? We then asked the audience to think about the global knowledge work as a mechanism or algorithm; and to imagine what sort of contribution to knowledge a significant improvement to this algorithm would be. We then re-told the story about the post-war sociology, as told by Pierre Bourdieu, to show that even enormously large, orders-of-magnitude improvements are possible! Hear the beginning of our 2009 evangelizing talk at the Trinity College, Dublin, or read (a milder version) at the beginning of this article.

Knowledge Work Has a Flat Tire is a springboard story we told was the beginning of one of our two 2011 Knowledge Federation introductory talks to Stanford University, Silicon Valley and the world of innovation (see the blog post Knowledge Federation – an Enabler of Systemic Innovation, and the article linked therein). Eight Vignettes to Evangelize a Paradigm is a collection of such stories.

The incredible history of Doug continues

Bring to mind again the image of Galilei in house prison... It is most fascinating to observe how even most useful and natural ideas, when they challenge the prevailing paradigm, are ignored or resisted by even the best among us. The Google doc Completing Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, is our recent proposal to some of the leaders of Stanford University and Google (who knew us and about us from before). Part of the story is about how Doug Engelbart's larger-than-life message, and "call to action" were outright ignored at the presentation of Doug at Google in 2007. And if you can read it between the lines, you'll in it yet another interesting story – showing the inability of the current leaders to allocate the time and attention needed for understanding the emerging paradigm; and pointing to a large opportunity for new, more courageous and more visionary leaders to take the lead.

Unraveling the mystery

... the theory that explains the data... how we've been evolving culturally ... as homo ludens, as turf animals... see it also in this way... huge paradox - homo ludens academicus...

HEY but this is really the whole point!!!

When the above stories are heard and digested, not only the story of Engelbart must seem incredible, but really the entire big thing: How can it be possible that we the people (and so clever people none the less – The Valley!) have ignored insights whose importance literally cannot be overstated? What is really going on? Perhaps there is something we need to understand about ourselves, something very basic, that we haven't seen before? It turns out – and isn't this what the large paradigm changes really are about – that the heart of the matter will be in an entirely different perception of the human condition, with entirely new issues... That is what The Paradigm Strategy poster aims to model, as one of our prototypes. Here is where the vignette are woven together into all those higher-level constructs: threads, patterns, and ultimately to a gestalt, showing what is to be done. The giants here are mostly from the humanities, linguistics, cognitive science – Bauman, Bourdieu, Chomsky, Damasio, Nietzsche... We'll say more about the substance of this conversation piece in Federation through Conversations. For now you may explore The Paradigm Strategy poster on your own.