STORIES

Federation through Stories

Even when we don't mention him explicitly, this elephant is the hero of all our stories.

What the giants have been telling us

The paradigm as invisible elephant

It has been said that a visionary is a person who can look at what we all are looking at, and see something different. The distinguishing characteristic of the people we are calling giants is that they have an uncommon mind – which allows them to "see through" the details, and anticipate the bigger picture that wants to or needs to emerge.

The most impactful, powerful and interesting ideas are without doubt those that are challenging or changing our very "order of things". But then a most interesting communication problem results, because the large thing they are wanting to point to and contribute to is not yet there; and hence is not yet visible. And so they get ignored.

The giants are like those blind or blind-folded men touching the elephant. The giants are of course not blind – they are the visionaries! It's just that the elephant is invisible, because it's not yet there. And the giants don't yet have a common language to describe it. And so we hear them talk about "the fan" and "the hoze" and "the rope" – the kind of things that don't even remotely fit together; while it's really the ear and the trunk and the tail of the big thing they want to point to.

So our basic strategy, how we want to handle this situation, is to "connect the dots". Initially just enough for the basic shape of the large animal to become discernible. As soon as that is in place, we'll organize the connecting of the dots as a collective activity, a large-scale social game. We'll then have lots of fun discovering or creating all the details together.

And isn't this – our collective capability of connecting the dots – the very core purpose of our initiative?

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These stories are vignettes

New thinking made easy

Of course, thinking in a new way has always been a challenge. The technique we are using here – the vignettes – is what the journalists have been using all the time to make highly relevant or even complex ideas widely accessible. They tell them through a story.

If suitably chosen, these stories will allow us to "step into the shoes" of giants, "see through their eyeglasses", be able to see and experience as they did, be moved by the insight that motivated them to make great designs, or theories.

By connecting the vignettes into threads, we compose a whole that is larger (more moving, and effective) than any of them alone. The threads add a dramatic effect, they let the ideas of giants enhance one another. They allow us to see how harmoniously their ideas fit together. We begin to be able to discern the elephant.

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Modern physics had a gift for humanity

Unraveling the rigid frame

(T)he nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people.

Werner Heisenberg got a Nobel Prize in 1932, "for the creation of quantum mechanics" which he did while he was still in his twenties. As a mature scientist he realized, however, that modern physics had an invaluable gift for humanity that we the people had not yet received, or even understood. To remedy that, in 1958 he published "Physics and Philosophy" (subtitled "the revolution in modern science"), from which the above excerpt was taken.

In this manuscript Heisenberg explained how science rose to prominence based on its fascinating successes in deciphering the secrets of nature. And how, as a side effect, the specific way of looking at the world and speaking that led to those successes in the specialized domains of science became dominant or also in general culture – although it was obviously so narrow and rigid that

it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul or of life.

Werner Heisenberg

Since "the concept of reality applied to the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided", whatever failed to fit this reality picture got to be considered unreal. This in particular applied to traditional religion, on which much of humanity's ethical tradition had been based, and which "seemed now more or less only imaginary". The result was that "(C)onfidence in the scientific method and in rational thinking replaced all other safeguards of the human mind."

Heisenberg then explained how modern physics disproved this "narrow frame"; and concluded that

one may say that the most important change brought about by its results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century.

What exactly happened

The key to understanding how exactly this "dissolution of the rigid frame" happened is the so-called double-slit experiment.

So imagine a source of electrons shooting electrons toward a screen - which, like the old-fashioned TV screen, remains illuminated at the place where the electron hit the screen. Imagine that between the source of electrons and the screen is a plate pierced by two parallel slits, so that the only way an electron can reach the screen is to pass through one of those slits.

It is possible to observe, when an electron is emitted, which slit it passed through. And when this is done, the electron passes through one of the slits and lands on the corresponding spot on the screen.

When, however, this observation is not done, then the electrons behave just as the waves would – they pass through both slits and create an interference pattern on the screen.

The question may naturally be asked, whether the electrons are waves or particles. The correct answer is that they are neither. "Waves" and "particles" are concepts and corresponding behavioral patterns that we have acquired through experience with common objects, such as the surface of water and the pebbles. The simple fact of life is that the electrons are just something else – that they behave unlike anything we have in experience.

In his monograph Heisenberg talks about the physicists unable to describe the behavior of small particles of matter in conventional language. The language of mathematics still works – but the common logic doesn't!

What Heisenberg didn't tell us

In "Uncommon Sense" Robert Oppenheimer – Heisenberg's Nobel laureate colleague and the leader of the WW2 Manhattan project – observed that even our common sense, however solidly objective it may appear to us, is really derived from our experience with common objects. And that it happens to no longer work when we meet some of the things that we don't have in experience, such as small particles of matter.

In "Metaphors We Live By" George Lakoff – a leading researcher in cognitive linguistics – showed through studying language how our abstract reasoning is shaped through experience with simple physical objects and relationships. Jean Piaget – a leading researcher in cognitive psychology – shoed that in another way, by studying how the children develop their conception of reality. In the sociology classics "Social Construction of Reality" Berger and Luckmann explained how reality pictures are socially constructed. And how they have a tendency to acquire independence by becoming "universal theories", and then be used to legitimize the existing social order (recall Galilei in house arrest).

We turn the above findings into a big picture with the help of this brief excerpt from Benjamin Lee Whorf's essay – which was (remarkably!) written already in the 1940s, and published as part of the book "Language, Thought and Reality" a decade later.

It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammelled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton’s expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past."

Benjamin Lee Whorf

What Heisenberg did tell us

In his book Heisenberg does not give us this transdisciplinary view of his theme. Modern physics turns out to be sufficient to bring his main point home.

Heisenberg describes how a certain (rational-mechanistics) way of looking at the world enabled the scientists to construct experimental machinery and look at small bits of matter. And how when they did that, they found out that they behave in ways that contradict that very way of looking at the world. Hence the whole affaire has the structure of a proof by contradiction – which, according to that same way of looking at the world, is a rigorous way to prove things wrong.

We are at a turning point

The Enlightenment empowered the human reason to rebel against the tradition and freely explore the world. As we have seen, several centuries of exploration brought us to a turning point in this process – where our reason has become capable of self-reflecting; of seeing its own limitations, and blind spots.

What we are still lacking – and which should logically follow as the next step in this age-old evolutionary process – is the capability to correct those blind spots, by creating the way we are looking at the world.

But isn't that what we've been talking about all along?

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The incredible history of Doug

To be useful, information technology requires new thinking

Digital technology could help make this a better world. But we've also got to change our way of thinking.

These two sentences were intended to frame Douglas Engelbart's message to the world – which was to be delivered at a panel organized and filmed at Google in 2007.

An epiphany

In December of 1950 Engelbart was a young engineer just out of college, engaged to be married, and freshly employed. His life appeared to him as a straight path to retirement. And he did not like what he saw.

So there and then he made a decision – to direct his life's work in a way that will maximize its benefits to the mankind.

Facing now an interesting optimization problem, this young engineer spent three months thinking intensely how exactly to go about solving it. Then he had an epiphany: The computer had just been invented. And the humanity had all those problems that it didn't know how to solve. What if...

To be able to pursue his vision, Engelbart quit his job and enrolled in the doctoral program in computer science at U.C. Berkeley.

Douglas Engelbart

Silicon Valley failed to hear its giant in residence

It took awhile for the people in Silicon Valley to realize that the core technologies that led to "the revolution in the Valley" were neither developed by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, nor at the XEROX research center where where they took them from – but by Douglas Engelbart and his SRI-based research team. On December 9, 1998 a large conference was organized at Stanford University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Engelbart's Demo, where the networked interactive digital media technology – which is today common – was first shown to the public. Engelbart received the highest honors an inventor could have, including the Presidental award and the Turing prize (a computer science equivalent to Nobel Prize). Allen Kay (a Silicon Valley personal computing pioneer, and a member of the original XEROX team) remarked "What will the Silicon Valley do when they run out of Doug's ideas?".

And yet it was clear to Doug – and he also made it clear to others – that the core of his vision was neither implemented nor understood. Doug felt celebrated for wrong reasons. He was notorious for telling people "You just don't get it!" The slogan "Douglas Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution" was coined as the title of the 1998 Stanford University event, and it stuck.

On July 2, 2013 Doug passed away, celebrated and honored – yet feeling he had failed.

There was an elephant in the room

What is it that Engelbart saw, but was unable to communicate to all those famously smart people?

If we now tell you that the solution to this riddle is precisely the elephant we've been talking all along, you probably won't believe us.

So consider the following excerpt (from an interview that Doug gave as a part of a Stanford University research project), where he is recalling the thought process that led him to his project – where you'll see that the core of his vision was systemic change in the way knowledge is "created and integrated and applied" (to use Doug's exact words):

I remember reading about the people that would go in and lick malaria in an area, and then the population would grow so fast and the people didn't take care of the ecology, and so pretty soon they were starving again, because they not only couldn't feed themselves, but the soil was eroding so fast that the productivity of the land was going to go down. Sol it's a case that the side effects didn't produce what you thought the direct benefits would. I began to realize it's a very complex world. I began to realize it's a very complex world. (...) Someplace along there, I just had this flash that, hey, what that really says is that the complexity of a lot of the problems and the means for solving thyem are just getting to be too much. So the urgency goes up. So then I put it together that the product of these two factors, complexity and urgency, are the measure for human organizations or institutions. The complexity/urgency factor had transcended what humans can cope with. It suddenly flashed tthat if you could do something to improve human capability to deal with that, then you'd realy contribute something basic. That just resonated. Then it unfolded rapidly. I think it was just within an hour that I had the image of sitting at a big CRT screen with all kinds of symbols, new and different symbols, not restricted to our old ones. The computer could be manipulating, and you could be operating all kinds of things to drive the computer. The engineering was easy to do; you could harness any kind of a lever or knob, or buttons, or switches, you wanted to, and the computer could sense them, and do something with it.

And if you are still in doubt – consider these first four slides of Engelbart's "A Call to Action" presentation at Google in 2007.

The title and the first three slides that were prepared for Engelbart's "A Call to Action" panel at Google in 2007.

You will notice that Doug's call to action had to do with changing our way of thinking. And that Doug introduced the new thinking with a variant of the bus with candle headlights metaphor we used to introduce knowledge federation and systemic innovation.

And then there's the third slide, which introduces a whole new metaphor – a "nervous system". This was meant to explain Doug's specific intended gift to the emerging new paradigm in knowledge work – which we'll turn to next.

But you might be wondering what happened with Engelbart's call to action? How did it fare? If you now google Engelbart's 2007 presentation at Google, you'll find a Youtube recording which will show that these four slides were not even shown at the event (the slide presentation began with slide four); that no call to action was mentioned; and that Engelbart is introduced in the subtitle to the video as "the inventor of the computer mouse".

The 21st century enlightenment's printing press

What was really Engelbart's intended gift to humanity? What was it that he saw, which the Silicon Valley "just didn't get"?

The printing press is a fitting metaphor in the context of our larger vision, because the printing press was the key technical invention that led to the Enlightenment, by making knowledge accessible.

If we now ask what technology might play a similar role in the next enlightenment, you will probably answer "the Web" or "the network-interconnected interactive digital media". And your answer will of course be correct.

But there's a catch!

While there can be no doubt that the printing press led to a revolution in knowledge work, this revolution was only a revolution in quantity. The printing press could only do what the scribes were doing – albeit incomparably faster! To communicate, people still needed to write and publish books, and hope that the people who needed what they wrote would find their book on a shelf.

The network-interconnected interactive digital media, however, is a disruptive technology of a completely new kind. It is not a broadcasting device, but in a truest sense a "nervous system" connecting people together!

There are two very different ways in which this sort of technology can be put to use.

One of them is as the printing press has been used – to increase the efficiency of what the people were already doing. To help them write and publish faster, and more. In the language of our metaphor, we characterize this way as using the new technology to re-implement the candle.

</p>The other way is to reconfigure the document types, and the institutionalized patterns of knowledge development, integration and application, interaction and even the institutions to suit the capabilities – and the very nature – of the new technology. Or in other words, to develop the new kind of division, specialization and coordination of knowledge work that the cells in your own body have developed, to take proper advantage of the nervous system that connects them together. </p>

To see the difference between those two ways of using the new technology, to see their practical consequences, imagine if your cells used your nervous system to merely broadcast data to your brain. Think about how this would impact your sanity!

You'll then have no difficulty seeing how our present way of using the technology has affected our collective intelligence!

In 1990 – just before the Web, and well before the mobile phone – Neil Postman would observe:

The tie between information and action has been severed. ...It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.

Engelbart's legacy

As we have just seen, whenever Engelbart was speaking or being celebrated, an invisible elephant was present in the room. A huge, spectacular animal in the midst of a university lecture hall – should that not be a front-page sensation and the talk of the town (you may imagine an elephant in a room at the inception of the last Enlightenment, where some people may have heard that the huge animal existed but nobody had yet seen one)?

Engelbart wanted to show us, and to help materialize, the elephant; but since we couldn't see it – he ended up with only a little mouse in his hand (to his credit)!

So if we would now undertake to give him proper credit – what is it that Engelbart must be credited for?

As we speak, please notice how systematically this unusual mind was putting together all the necessary vital pieces or building blocks – so that the elephant may come into being.

One of them we've already mentioned – the "nervous system", for which Doug's technical keyword was CoDIAK (for Concurrent Development, Integration and Application of Knowledge). It's the 'nervous system'. That – and not "the technology" – is what Engelbart and his team showed on their 1968 famous demo. The demo showed people interacting directly with computers, and through computers – via a network by which the computers were connected – with each other. Doug and his team experimented to make this interaction as direct as possible; with a "chorded keyset" under his left hand, a mouse with three buttons under his right hand, and a computer screen before his eyes, a knowledge worker became able to "develop. integrate and apply knowledge" in collaboration, and concurrently with others – without ever even moving his body!

To get an idea of the importance of this contribution, think about what a functioning "collective nervous system" could do to our collective capability to deal with complexity and urgency. Imagine yourself walking toward a wall, and that your eyes see that – but they are trying to communicate it to your brain by writing academic articles in some specialized field of knowledge.

The second key Engelbart's contribution – which is, as we have just seen, necessary if we should take advantage of the first one – was what we've been calling systemic innovation. Engelbart created (to our knowledge) the very first methodology for systemic innovation – already in 1962, six years before the systems scientists met in Bellagio to develop their own approach to it (which will be part of our next story). Engelbart called his method "augmentation", and conceived as a way to "augment human capabilities", individual and collective, by combining elements of the "human system" and the "tool system". Systemic innovation he called "human system – tool system co-evolution", or more simply "bootstrapping".

We leave the rest – to see how the "open hyperdocument system", the "networked improvement community", the "dynamic knowledge repository" and numerous other Engelbart's inventions were essential building blocks in a new order of things, or knowledge work paradigm, or vital organs of our metaphorical elephant.

And we conclude that while Engelbart was recognized, and celebrated, as a technology developer – his contribution was to human knowledge – and hence in the proper sense academic.

Bootstrapping – the unfinished part

In a similar vein, there can hardly be any doubt about what exactly it was that, Doug felt, he was leaving unfinished. It's what he called "bootstrapping" – which we've adopted as one of our keyword.

Bootstrapping was so central to Doug's thinking, that when he and his daughter Christina created an institute to realize his vision, they called it "Bootstrap Institute" – and later changed the name to "Bootstrap Alliance" because, as we shall see in a moment, an alliance rather than an institute is what's needed to bring bootstrapping to fruition. Engelbart would begin the "Bootstrap Seminar" (which he taught through he Stanford University to explain his vision and create an alliance around it) by sharing his portfolio of vignettes – which were illustrating the wonderful and paradoxical challenge of people to see an emerging paradigm. Then he would have the participants discuss their own experiences with paradigm shifts in pairs. Then he would talk more about the paradigms.

When it became clear that Engelbart's long career was coming to an end, "Bootstrap Dialogs" were recorded in the Stanford University's film studio as a last record of his message to the world. Jeff Rulifson and Christina Engelbart – his two closest collaborators in the later part of his career – were conversing with Doug, or indeed mostly explaining his vision in his presence, with Doug nodding his head. And when they would turn to him and ask "So what do you say about this, Doug?" he would invariably say something like "Oh boy, I think somebody should really make this happen. I wonder who that might be?" We made an examle, {https://youtu.be/cRdRSWDefgw this three-minute excerpt], available on Youtube – where Doug also talks about the meaning of "bootstrapping".

The word itself should remind you of "lifting yourself up by pulling your bootstraps" – which is of course in physical sense impossible, yet the magic works as a metaphor. The idea is to use your intelligence to boost your intelligence. Or applied to systemic innovation – to recreate one's own system, and thus become able to recreate other systems.

To Engelbart "bootstrapping" meant several related things.

First of all – and this is the succinct way to understand the core of his vision – Engelbart, as a systemic thinker, clearly saw that the most effective way one can invest his creative capabilities (and make "the largest contribution to humanity") is by applying them to creativity itself – and improving everyone's creative capabilities, and our ability to make good use of the results thereof.

Furthermore, Doug the systemic thinker knew that positive feedback leads to exponential growth. And so he saw bootstrapping as the only way our capabilities to cope with the accelerated growth of the "complexity times urgency" of our problems.

And finally – Doug saw that talking about how to "solve our problems" or "improve our systems", or writing academic articles about that, is just not good enough. (He saw, in other words, what we've been calling the Wiener's paradox.) So bootstrapping then emerges as what we must do if we really want to make a difference.

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Reflection

The future of innovation

It has been observed that the future is no longer what it used to be. But what is it then, really? In what way will it be different?

We've already answered this question, by talking about the guided evolution of society. The steering, however, the key new capability we need to be able to do that – is the capability at which Engelbart also stopped, which constitutes the essence of his "unfinished revolution". What we are talking about is our ability to change the actual real-life institutionalized patterns or thought and action, or in a word – systems.

If you allow yourself to spend a few moments with this reflection about the future of innovation, we expect that the result will be amazement: How can it be possible that a creative frontier of such a paramount importance has been ignored for so long – at this advanced stage of our civilization; and in spite of what the giants have been telling us (see Federation through Stories).

A partial explanation can be found on our front page, by which we introduced our initiative: Owing to the kind of knowledge we've created and prioritized, we ended up being a people lost among the trees and not seeing the forest. You may now imagine that the forest is on a mountain, and that this mountain – however paramount its size and importance may be – has of course remained ignored.

To show this mountain will be our purpose in Federation through Applications. By showing a collage of prototypes, which have been designed strategically to cover the space of the 'mountain', we undertake to make what's been ignored visible and open to co-creative engagements.

But this explanation is still insufficient to do justice to a paradox of this magnitude. And indeed – it will turn out – it is really just half the story. The other half will be the theme of Federation through Conversations, where we will see that our ignorance of systems has really been the consequence of the nature of our socialization – and on a deeper level of the way in which we have been evolving as culture, and as society. We shall see that to be able to intervene in this evolution is the core of our present historical task – and the true departure point of our next paradigm.

The question we turn to now is who – that is, what institution, and in what way, will enable us to develop this most central capability, of steering, of changing course, of guiding our future – by correcting our systems.

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Democracy for the third millennium

What our ability to resolve global issues now depends on

The task is nothing less than to build a new society and new institutions for it. With technology having become the most powerful change agent in our society, decisive battles will be won or lost by the measure of how seriously we take the challenge of restructuring the “joint systems” of society and technology.

A half-century ago, Erich Jantsch the above answer to the question we asked in the subtitle.

First things first

Jantsch got his doctorate in astrophysics in 1951, when he was only 22 years old. But having recognized that our society had more urgent problems, which astrophysics would not solve, he soon got engaged in a study (for the OECD in Paris) of what different countries (the OECD members) were doing to orient technological innovation. You will easily notice that this question is most intimately related with the basic question we have taken up here, and which we pointed to by the metaphorical relationships between the bus and its headlights.

So it was natural – when The Club of Rome to be initiated, as an international think tank whose goal was to produce, or be, those very 'headlights' (study and intervene in humanity's ride into the future) – that Jantsch would be chosen to put the ball in play, by giving a keynote lecture.

Erich Jantsch

How systemic innovation got conceived

With a doctorate in physics, it was not difficult to Jantsch to put two and two together and see what needed to be done. If our civilization is on a disastrous course, and if it lacks suitable "headlights and braking and steering controls) or (to use a cybernetician's more scientific tone) "feedback and control" – then there's a single capability that we as society are lacking, which can correct this problem – the capability to look into the future and steer.

So right after The Club of Rome's first meeting, Jantsch gathered a group of creative leaders and researchers, mostly from the systems community, in Bellagio, Italy, to put together necessary insights and methods. The result was so basic that Jantsch called it "rational creative action". The message is obvious and central to our interest: Certainly there are many ways in which we can be creative. But if our creative action is to be rational – then certain essential ingredients must surely be present.

Rational creative action begins with forecasting, which explores different future scenario; it ends with an action selected to enhance the likelihood of the desired scenario or scenarios. What they called "planning" 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.”

Our steering into the future, in other words, is done by (what we called) systemic innovation and knowledge federation (as the provider of direction or "policy"). (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.”

Steering a viable course into the future means changing our institutions, which organize our efforts in the production of that future.

</p>We are living in a world of change, voluntary change as well as the change brought about by mounting pressures outside our control. Gradually, we are learning to distinguish between them. We engineer change voluntarily by pursuing growth targets along lines of policy and action which tend to ridgidify and thereby preserve the structures inherent in our social systems and their institutions. We do not, in general, really try to change the systems themselves. However, the very nature of our conservative, linear action for change puts increasing pressure for structural change on the systems, and in particular, on institutional patterns.</p>

The emerging role of the university

The next question in Jantsch's stream of thought and action was roughly this: If systemic innovation is a necessary new capability that our systems and our civilization at large now require, to be able to steer a viable course into the future – 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.”

In 1969 Jantsch spent a semester at the MIT, writing a 150-page report about the future of the university, from which the above excerpt was taken, and lobbying with the faculty and the administration to begin to develop this new way of thinking and working in academic practice.

Evolution is the key

Jantsch spent the last decade of his life living in Berkeley, teaching sporadic seminars at U.C. Berkeley and writing prolifically. Ironically, the man who with such passion and insight wrote about how the university would need to change to help us master our future, and lobbied for such change – never found a home and sustenance for his work at the university.

In 1980 Jantsch published two books with a wealth of insights on "evolutionary paradigm" – whose purpose was to inform the evolutionary path of our society; he passed away after a short illness, only 51 years old. An obituarist commented that his unstable income and inadequate nutrition might have been a factor. In his will Jantsch asked that his ashes be tossed into the ocean, "the cradle of evolution".

In that same year Ronald Reagan became the 40th U.S. president on the agenda that the market, or the free competition, is the only thing we can rely on. That same "simple-minded theory", as Norbert Wiener called it, marks our political life still today. It is also what directs our technological innovation and creative work in general, and hence also our travel into the future.

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The future of humanity

Just another hero

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 global think tank's first decade of research.

Peccei was an unordinary man. In 1944, as a member of Italian Resistance, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months without revealing his contacts. Here is how he commented his imprisonment only 30 days upon being released:

My 11 months of captivity were one of the most enriching periods of my life, and I regard myself truly fortunate that it all happened. Being strong as a bull, I resisted very rough treatment for many days. The most vivid lesson in dignity I ever learned was that given in such extreme strains by the humblest and simplest among us who had no friends outside the prison gates to help them, nothing to rely on but their own convictions and humanity. I began to be convinced that lying latent in man is a great force for good, which awaits liberation. I had a confirmation that one can remain a free man in jail; that people can be chained but that ideas cannot.

Aurelio Peccei

Peccei was also an unordinarily able business leader. While serving as the director of Fiat's operations in Latin America (and securing that the cars were there not only sold but also produced) Peccei established Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the developing countries catch up with the rest. When the Italian technology giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president, and he managed to turn its fortunes around. And yet the question that most occupied Peccei was a much larger one – the condition of our civilization as a whole; and what we may need to do to take charge of this condition.

How to change course

In 1977, in "The Human Quality", Peccei formulated his answer as follows:

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.

On the morning of the last day of his life (March 14, 1984), while dictating "The Club of Rome: Agenda for the End of the Century" to his secretary from a hospital bed, Peccei identified "human development" as "the most important goal".

Peccei's and Club of Rome's insights and proposals (to focus not on problems but on the condition or the "problematique" as a whole, and to handle it through systemic and evolutionary strategies and agendas) have not been ignored only by "climate deniers", but also by activists and believers.

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Reflection

Connecting the dots

Let's now look at the big picture that the above vignettes compose together.

Peccei observed that our future depends crucially on our ability to revive culture. Heisenberg observed that the 19th century science developed a rigid way of looking at the world that was destructive of culture. Should we not then take it as our privilege and duty to produce a better one?

Jantsch observed that our very steering into the future, our manner of choosing our way and our destiny, involves an ability to change our institutions and other systems. Engelbart's gift to the world was a technology that on the one hand enabled social-systemic change (as humanities new "nervous system" indeed naturally should); and on the other hand demanded such a change – or else the best ideas of our best minds would be drowning in glut.

Put those two together and you have our initiative in a nutshell. Our goal is – as we pointed out – to allow for natural solutions to large contemporary issues, by doing what we anyhow have to do, academically and humanly.

We are now at a point where the view of our present evolutionary moment has become very clear. The nervous system metaphor can help! Read our brief vision statement and then reflect about what we must do to respond to the pressing need of this moment – to learn to coordinate the action of our society's organs and organ systems, and in that way take advantage of our society's 'nervous system' we've just acquired.

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Inception of Knowledge Federation

Knowledge Federation was initiated in 2008 by a group of academic knowledge media researchers and developers. At our first meeting, in the Inter University Center Dubrovnik, we realized that the technology that our colleagues were developing could "make this a better world". But that to help realize that potential, we would need to organize ourselves differently. Our second meeting in 2010, whose title was "Self-Organizing Collective Mind", brought together a multidisciplinary community of researchers and professionals. The participants were invited to not see themselves as professionals pursuing a career in a certain field, but as cells in a collective mind – and to begin to self-organize accordingly.

What resulted was Knowledge Federation as a prototype of a transdiscipline and the corresponding way of working. The idea is simple: a trandsdisciplinary community of researchers and other professionals and stakeholders gather to create a systemic prototype – which can be an insight or a systemic solution for knowledge work or in any domain of interest. In this latter case, this community will usually practice what Engelbart called bootstrapping – they themselves are the first instance of the system. This simple idea secures that the knowledge from the participating domain is represented in the prototype and vice-versa – that the challenges that the prototype may present are taken back to the specific communities of interest and resolved. At our third workshop, which was organized at Stanford University within the Triple Helix IX international conference (whose focus was on the collaboration between university, business and government, and specifically on IT innovation as its enabler) – we pointed to systemic innovation as an emerging and necessary new trend; and as (the kind of organization represented by) knowledge federation as its enabler.

At our very next workshop, in Barcelona, media creatives joined the forces with innovators in journalism, to create a prototype for the journalism of the future. The following workshop in Belgrade, still in 2011, focused on broadening the foundations for knowledge creation. A series of events followed – in which the prototypes shown in Federation through Applications were created.

Throughout its existence, and especially in this early period, Knowledge Federation was careful to make close ties with the communities of interest in its own domain, so that our own body of knowledge is not improvised or reinvented but federated. Program for the Future, Global Sensemaking, Debategraph, Induct Software... and multiple other initiatives – became in effect our federation.

After our inception workshop we paid tribute to Doug Engelbart and made close working ties with the Silicon Valley community that grew around him. Engelbart was present in the preparation for our Palo Alto workshops in 2011 and 2012, but not at the event. Bill and Roberta English, however – who were Doug's right and left hand before and during the 1968 Demo days (Bill physically created the demo) – were with us all that time.

The longer story will be told in the book Systemic Innovation (Democracy for the Third Millennium), which will be the second book in Knowledge Federation Trilogy. Meanwhile, we let our portfolio of prototypes presented in Federation through Application tell this story for us.

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Revival of systemic innovation

Engelbart's vision comes true

On the 2nd of July of 2013 Doug Engelbart passed away, celebrated – yet feeling he had failed. Less than two weeks later his ardent desire to see his ideas implemented in a real-life community of interest was starting to become true. And the community of interest where this was happening – the International Society for the Systems Sciences – just couldn't be better chosen! At this society's 57th yearly conference, in Haiphong Vietnam, this research community began to self-organize according to Engelbart's principles – by taking advantage of new media technology to become "collectively intelligent". At the conference Engelbart's name was often heard.

Systemic innovation must grow out of systems science research

There is a reason why Knowledge Federation remained the transdiscipline for knowledge federation – and not for systemic innovation. If it is to be done properly – and especially if we interpret "properly" in an academic sense – then systemic innovation has to grow out of the research in the systems sciences, which alone can tell us how to understand systems, and how to improve them and intervene in them. If we, the knowledge federators should do our systemic innovation right, then we must federate this body of knowledge into our systems, we must not try to reinvent it!

This is why we considered this a fortunate coincidence. We began our presentation at the conference by saying "We came here to build a bridge – between two communities of interest, and two domains of interest."

Jantsch's legacy lives on

Alexander Laszlo was the ISSS President who initiated this development.

Alexander was practically born into systemic innovation. Didn’t his father Ervin, himself a creative leader in the systems community, point out that our choice was “evolution or extinction” in the very title of one of his books? And so evolution naturally became Alexander’s choice (we are here talking, of course, about the evolution of our knowledge-work and other systems, so that they may give a suitable orientation to the technological and cultural and social-systemic and other important aspects of our evolution). Alexander’s PhD advisor, Hasan Özbekhan, wrote the first 150-page systemic innovation theory (as part of a project initiated by Jantsch), at the point (in 1968), when systemic innovation was recognized (by the creative elite) as a necessary step toward the resolution of the global issues (which the same elite already then recognized as urgent). Later Alexander worked closely in the circle of Bela Banathy, who for a period of a couple of decades held the torch of the systemic innovation–related developments in the systems community.

Alexander Laszlo

From the repertoire of prototypes that resulted from this collaboration (see Federation through Applications), we here highlight two.

The Lighthouse

It's really the model of the headlights, applied in a specific key domain.

The initial Lighthouse design team, at the ISSS59 conference in Berlin where it was formed. The light was subsequently added by our communication design team, in compliance with their role.

If you imagine stray ships struggling on the rough seas of the survival of the fittest competition – then The Lighthouse is showing the way to the harbor of a whole new continent, where the way of working and existing together is collaboration, to create new systems and through them a "better world".

In the context of the systems sciences, The Lighthouse extends the conventional repertoire of a research community (conferences, articles, books...) into a whole new domain – distilling a single insight for our society at large, which is on the one hand transformative to the society, and on the other hand explains to the public why the research field is relevant to them, why it has to be given far larger prominence and attention than it has hitherto been the case.

Leadership and Systemic Innovation

Leadership and Systemic Innovation is a doctoral program that Alexander initiated at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology in Argentina. It was later accompanied by a Systemic Innovation Lab. The program – the first of its kind – educates leaders capable of being the guides of (the transition to) systemic innovation.

As we have seen, in 1969 Erich Jantsch made a similar proposal to the MIT, but without result. Now the Argentinian MIT clone has taken the torch.