What the giants have been telling us

The invisible elephant

The most interesting and impactful ideas are without doubt those that challenge our very order of things. But those same ideas also present the largest challenge to communication! A shared paradigm is what enables us to communicate. How can we make sense of new things, while they still challenge the order of things that gives things meaning?

When they attempt to share with us their insights, our visionaries appear to us like those proverbial blind or blind-folded men touching the elephant. They are of course far from being blind; they are visionaries! But the 'elephant' is invisible. We don't yet even have the words to describe him!

And so we hear our giants talk about "the fan", "the hose" and "the rope" – while it's really the ear and the trunk and the tail of that big new thing they are pointing to.

We begin with four dots

The way we want to remedy this situation is, of course, by connecting the dots. Initially, all we can hope for is to show just enough of the elephant to discern its contours. Then interest and enthusiasm will do the rest. Imagine all the fun we'll have, all of us together, discovering and creating the details!

We'll begin here with four 'dots'. We'll introduce four giants, and put their ideas together. This might already be enough to give us a start.

The four stories we've chosen to tell will illuminate the elephant's four sides (which correspond to the four keywords that define our initiative):

• What constitutes good knowledge (design epistemology)
• What constitutes a good use of information technology (collective mind paradigm, or knowledge federation)
• What constitutes a good use of our creative abilities (systemic innovation)
• In what way can we take good advantage of knowledge itself (guided evolution of society)

These stories are vignettes

New thinking made easy

The technique we'll use – the vignettes – is in essence what the journalists use to make ideas accessible. They tell them through people stories!

We hope these stories will allow you to "step into the shoes" of giants, "see through their eyes", be moved by their visions.

By combining the vignettes into threads, we begin to put the elephant together. The threads add a dramatic effect; they make the insights of giants enhance one another.

Right knowledge

Modern physics gave us a gift

(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 his Nobel Prize in 1932, "for the creation of quantum mechanics" he did while still in his twenties.

In 1958, this giant of science looked back at the experience of his field, and wrote "Physics and Philosophy" (subtitled "the revolution in modern science"), from which the above lines have been quoted.

In the manuscript Heisenberg explained how science rose to prominence owing to successes in deciphering the secrets of nature. And how, as a side effect, its way of exploring the world became dominant also in our culture at large; in spite of the fact that frame of concepts was

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.

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 in was considered unreal. This in particular applied to those parts of our culture in which our ethical sensibilities were rooted, such as religion, which

seemed now more or less only imaginary. (...) The confidence in the scientific method and in rational thinking replaced all other safeguards of the human mind.

Heisenberg then explained how the experience of modern physics constituted a rigorous disproof of this approach to knowledge; 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 this "dissolution of the narrow frame" is the so-called double-slit experiment. You'll easily find an explanations online, so we'll here only draw a quick sketch and come to conclusion.

A source of electrons is shooting electrons toward a screen - which, like an old-fashioned TV screen, remains illuminated at the places where an electron has landed. Between the source 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.

One of the slits?

What really happens is this: When the movement of the electron is observed, it behaves as a particle – it passes through one of the slits and lands on the corresponding spot on the screen.

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

The question naturally arises – are electrons waves, or particles?

The answer is, of course, that they are neither.

What this tells us about our "frames"

Electrons thus defy both our words, and our reason.

This compelled the scientists to conclude that "wave" and "particle" are concepts, and corresponding behavioral patterns, which we have acquired through experience with common physical objects, such as water and pebbles. And that the electrons are simply something else – that they behave unlike anything we have in experience.

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

What this tell us about reality

In "Uncommon Sense" Robert Oppenheimer – Heisenberg's famous colleague and the leader of the WW2 Manhattan project – tells about the double-slit experiment to conclude that even our common sense, however solidly objective it might appear to us, is really derived from our experience with common objects. And that it may no longer work – and doesn't work – when we apply it to things we don't have in experience.

Science rose from a tradition, whose roots are in antiquity, and whose goal was to understand and explain the reality as it truly is, through right reasoning.

Science brought us to the conclusion that there is no right reasoning that can lead us to that goal.

What this tells us about science

Heisenberg was, of course, not at all the only giant who reached that conclusion. A whole generation of giants, in a variety of field, found evidence against the reality-based approach to knowledge.

We'll here let one of them, Benjamin Lee Whorf, summarize the conclusion.

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."

We are at a turning point

The Enlightenment empowered the human reason to rebel against the tradition and freely explore the world.

Several centuries of exploration brought us to another turning point – where our reason has become capable of self-reflecting; of seeing its own limitations, and blind spots.

The natural next step is to begin to expand those limitations, to correct those blind spots – by creating new ways to create knowledge.

Right use of technology

Digital technology calls for new thinking

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

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. He did not like what he saw.

So there and then he decided to direct his career in a way that will maximize its benefits to the mankind.

Facing now an interesting optimization problem, he spent three months thinking intensely how to solve it. Then he had an epiphany: The computer had just been invented. And the humanity had all those problems 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.

Silicon Valley failed to hear its giant

It took awhile for the people in Silicon Valley to realize that the core technologies that led to "the revolution in the Valley" were not developed by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, or at the XEROX research center where they found them – but by Douglas Engelbart and his SRI-based research team. On December 9, 1998 a large conference was organized at the Stanford University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Engelbart's Demo, where this technology was first shown to the public. Engelbart received the highest honors an inventor could have, including the Presidental award and the Turing prize (the computer science equivalent to Nobel Prize). Allen Kay (another Silicon Valley icon) honored him even more highly, by asking "What will the Silicon Valley do when they run out of Doug's ideas?".

And yet it was clear to Doug – and he 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 celebration of the Demo, and it stuck.

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

The elephant was in the room

What was the essence of "Engelbart's unfinished revolution"? What did he see, which he was unable to communicate?

Whenever Doug was speaking or being celebrated, that elephant, which is the main hero of our stories, 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? How can such a large thing remain unseen?

And yet nobody saw it!

If this may seem incredible – here are the first four slides that Doug prepared for the 2007 "A Call to Action" panel at Google, organized to share with the world his final message, at the end of his career.

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

The third slide introduced the "nervous system" metaphor we talked about on our front page.

If you wonder what happened with this call to action, you'll easily find the answer by googling Engelbart's 2007 presentation at Google. The Youtube recording will show that

• these four slides were not even shown at the event (the first slide that was shown was number four)
• no call to action was mentioned
• Engelbart is still introduced in the Youtube subtitle as "the inventor of the computer mouse"

The 21st century enlightenment's printing press

How important was Engelbart's intended gift to humanity?

The printing press is a fitting metaphor in our context, being the technology that made the Enlightenment possible, 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" if you are technical). And you would of course be right.

But there's a catch!

While there can be no doubt that the printing press led to a revolution in knowledge work, that revolution was only a revolution in quantity. The printing press could only do what the scribes were doing – while making it faster!

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!

Bootstrapping the unfinished part

You may now easily guess what it was that, Doug felt, he was leaving unfinished. He called it "bootstrapping" – and we've adopted that 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, an alliance rather than an institute is needed to do bootstrapping.

To Engelbart "bootstrapping" meant several things.

Being a systemic thinker, he saw that the most effective way in which one can invest his creative capabilities (and make "the largest contribution to humanity") – is by applying them to improve everyone's creative capabilities, including one's own.

But most importantly, Doug saw that the systemic change was the next step. And the only way it can happen is if the people carry it out in their own work and institutions, with their own bodies.

Doug saw that bootstrapping was necessary to break the spell of the Wiener's paradox (see Federation through Stories), and make knowledge count!

Right way to innovate

Democracy for the third millennium

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.

We weave these two histories together – the story of Engelbart and the story of Jantsch – in the second book of Knowledge Federation trilogy. So far we've seen that we need the capability to rebuild institutions and institutionalized patterns of work and interaction to be able to take advantage of fundamental insights and of new information technology. (Or in the language of Thomas Kuhn, we have seen that this is necessary to resolve the reported anomalies in those two key domains of knowledge work). By telling about Erich Jantsch we'll be able to bring in the third. How shall we call it? Our choice is in the title of this section – which is also the subtitle of the book we've just mentioned. We could just as well be talking about "sustainability" or "thrivability" or "creative action". Why we chose "democracy" will hopefully become transparent after you've read a bit further.

First things first

Jantsch got his doctorate in astrophysics in 1951, when he was only 22. But having recognized that more physics is not what our society most urgently needs, he soon got engaged in a study (for the OECD in Paris) of what was then called "technological planning" – i.e. of the strategies that different countries (the OECD members) used to orient the development and deployment of technology. (Are there such strategies? – you might rightly ask. Isn't it "the market and only the market" the answers to such questions? You'll have no difficulty noticing the underlying big question – What is guiding us toward our future? And that how we answer this question splits us into into two (subcultures, or paradigms): Those of us who believe in "the invisible hand" – and those who don't. Recall Galilei...)

And so when The Club of Rome was to be initiated (fifty years ago at the time of this writing) as an international think tank whose mission was to evolve and to be the evolutionary guidance or the 'headlights' to our global society (as we shall see in our next story), it was natural that Jantsch would be chosen to put the ball in play, by giving a keynote talk.

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, if it lacks (as Engelbart put it) suitable headlights and braking and steering controls, or (to use a cybernetician's more scientific tone) suitable "information and control", then there's a single capability that we as society need to be able to correct this problem – the capability to rebuild our systems. So that we may become capable of seeing where we are going, and steering.

Another way of saying this is that systemic innovation is steering – because without it we can neither choose our evolutionary course nor our future. And even the right information remains impotent, and ultimately useless.

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 the necessary insights and methods. The result was a systemic innovation methodology. By calling it "rational creative action", Jantsch suggested a message that is of our central interest: Certainly there are many ways in which we can be creative. But if our creative action is to be rational – then here is what we need to do.

Rational creative action begins with forecasting, which explores different future scenario, and 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.”

Do we really need systemic innovation? Can't we just rely on "the survival of the fittest" and "the invisible hand"? Jantsch observes that the nature of the problems we create when relying on the "invisible hand" is compelling us to develop systemic innovation as our next evolutionary step.

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.

Back to democracy

You might now already be having an inkling of the contours of the elephant; how all these seemingly disparate pieces – the way we use the language, the way we use information technology, and the way we go about resolving the large contemporary issues – can snuggly fit together in two entirely different ways!

Take, for example, the word "democracy". In the old paradigm, democracy is what it is – the "free press", "free elections", the representative bodies. As long as they are all there, by definition – we live in a democracy. The nightmare scenario in this order of things is a dictatorship, where the dictator has taken away from the people all those conventional instruments of democracy, and he's ruling all by himself.

But there is another, emerging way to look at the world, and at democracy in particular – to consider it as a social order where the people are in control; where they can control their society, and steer it and choose their future. The nightmare scenario in this order of things is what Engelbart showed on his second slide mentioned above – it's an order of things where nobody has control! Simply because the whole thing is structured so that nobody can see where the whole thing is headed, or change its course.

Back to bootstrapping

In this second order of things (where we don't rely our civilization's and our children's future on "the invisible hand" but use the best available knowledge to see where we are headed and steer

The emerging role of the university

If systemic innovation is the 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.”

The evolutionary vision

This however brief sketch of Erich Jantsch vision and legacy would be unjustly incomplete without at least mentioning his studies of evolution.

Jantsch had at least two strong reasons for this interest. The first one was his insight – or indeed lived experience – that the basic institutions and other societal systems tend to be too immense to be significantly affected by any human act. Working with evolution, however, gives us an entirely new degree of freedom, and of impact. "I'm a trimtab", Fuller wrote. (If this may evoke associations with Engelbart's "bootstrapping", then you are spot on!)

Another reason Jantsch had for this interest was that he saw it as a genuinely new paradigm in science, and an emerging scientific frontier.

With Ervin Laszlo we may say that having addressed ourselves to the understanding and mastering of change, and subsequently to the understanding of order of change, or process, what we now need is an understanding of order of process (or order of order of change) – in other words, an understanding of evolution.

Towards the end of his life, Jantsch became increasingly interested in the so-called "spiritual" phenomena and practices – having perceived among them potential "trimtabs".

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 lobbied that the university should take on and adapt to its vitally important new role in our society's evolution – never found a home and sustenance for his work at the university.

In 1980 Jantsch published two books about "the evolutionary paradigm", and passed away after a short illness, only 51 years old. An obituarist commented that his unstable income and inadequate nutrition might have contributed to this early end. In his will Jantsch asked that his ashes be tossed into the ocean, "the cradle of evolution".

Reflection

The future of innovation

We offer this reflection about the future of innovation to give you a chance to pause and connect the dots.

Right handling of our planetary condition

An unknown hero

The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course.

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.

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.

And to leave no doubt about this point, he framed it even more succinctly:

The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future.

On the morning of the last day of his life (March 14, 1984), while working on "The Club of Rome: Agenda for the End of the Century", Peccei dictated to his secretary from a hospital bed that

human development is 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.

Reflection

Connecting the dots

In what way can "a great cultural revival" realistically happen?

The key strategic insight here is to see why a very large change can be easy, even when smaller and obviously necessary changes might seem impossible: You cannot put an elephant's ear on a mouse – even if this might vastly improve his hearing.

On the other hand, large, sweeping changes can happen by a landslide, as each change, like a falling domino, naturally leads to another.

So the key question is – How to begin such a change?

The natural first step, we propose, is to connect the dots – and see where we are going or out to be going, see how all the pieces snuggly fit together.

Already combining Peccei's core insight with the one of Heisenberg will bring us a large step forward

Peccei observed that our future depends on our ability to revive culture, and identified improving the human quality is the key strategic goal. Heisenberg explained how the "narrow and rigid" way of looking at the world that the 19th century science left us with was damaging to culture – and in particular to its parts which traditionally governed human ethical development, notably the religion.

Can we build on what Heisenberg wrote, and recreate religion in an entirely new way – which would support us in "great cultural revival"?

The Garden of Liberation prototype (see Federation through Applications) and the Liberation book (the first in Knowledge Federation Trilogy, see Federation through Conversations) will show that indeed we can! Religion is now often assumed to be no more than a rigid and irrational adherence to a belief system. A salient characteristic of the described religion-reconstruction prototype is to liberate us (that is, both religion and science) from holding on to any dogmatically held beliefs!

Combining the core insights of Jantsch and Engelbart is even easier, as they are really just two sides of a single coin.

Jantsch identified systemic innovation as that key lacking capability in our capability toolkit, which we must have to be able to steer our ride into the future. Engelbart identified it as the capability which we need to be able to use the new technology to our advantage. We now have the technology that not only enables, but indeed demands systemic innovation. What are we waiting for?

When you browse through our collection of prototypes that are provided in Federation through Applications, and see concretely and in detail the larger-than-life improvements of our condition that can be achieved by improving or reconstructing our core institutions or systems, when you see that an avalanche-like or Industrial Revolution-like wave of change that is ready to occur – then you'll have but one question in mind: "Why aren't we doing this?!"

A prototype answer to this most interesting question is given in Federation through Conversations – by weaving together insights of giants in the humanities. We shall see how what we've been calling "our reality picture" is likely to be seen as our doxa – a power-related instrument of socialization that keeps us in a certain systemic status quo (recall Galilei).

We are especially enthusiastic about the prospects of combining together the fundamental, the humanistic and the innovation-and-technology related insights.

Notice how our reifications – identifying public informing with what the journalists are doing, and also science, and education, and democracy and... – with their present systemic implementations – is preventing us from seeing them as systems within the larger system of society, and adapting them to the roles they need to perform, and the qualities they need to have – with the help of the new technology. It is not an accident that Benjamin Lee Whorf was one of Doug Engelbart's personal heroes (Doug considered himself "a Whorfian")! There's never an end to discovering beautiful, and subtle, connections. In our prototype portfolio you'll find numerous examples; but let's here zoom in on just a couple of them.

The Club of Zagreb prototype is our redesign of The Club of Rome, based on The Game-Changing Game prototype. The key point here is to use the insights and the power of the seniors (they are called Z-players) – to empower the young people (the A-players) – to change the systems in which they live and work.

All our answer are, once again, given as prototypes accompanied by an invitation to a conversation through which they will evolve further. By developing those conversations, we'll be seeing and materializing the elephant!

Occupy your university

[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society’s capacity for continuous self-renewal

Why blame the Wall Street bankers for our condition? Or Donald Trump? Shouldn't we rather see them as symptoms of a social-systemic condition, in which the flow of knowledge is what may bring healing, and solutions. And this flow of knowledge – isn't that really our job?

Our story

How Engelbart's dream came true

Doug Engelbart passed away on July 2nd, 2013. Less than two weeks later, his desire to see his ideas taken up by an academic community came true! And that community – the International Society for the Systems Sciences – just couldn't have 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". And to extend its outreach further into a knowledge-work system, which will connect systemic change initiatives around the world, and help them learn from one another, and from the systems science research. 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, why we have not taken up the so closely related and larger goal, of bootstrapping the systemic innovation. If it is to be done properly – and especially if we interpret "properly" in an academic sense – then systemic innovation must grow out of systems science research – which alone can tell us how to understand systems, how to improve them and intervene in them. If we, the knowledge federators, should do our job right, then we must federate this body of knowledge, we must not try to reinvent it!

Jantsch's legacy lives on

Alexander Laszlo was the ISSS President who initiated the mentioned 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? So the choice left to Alexander was obvious – and he became a promoter and leader of conscious or systemic evolution.

Alexander’s PhD advisor was Hasan Özbekhan, who wrote the first 150-page systemic innovation theory, as part of the Bellagio team initiated by Jantsch. He later worked closely in the circle of Bela H. Banathy, who for a period of a couple of decades held the torch of systemic innovation–related developments in the systems community.

We came here to build a bridge

As serendipity would have it, at the point where the International Society for the Systems Sciences was having its 2012 meeting in San Jose, at the end of which Alexander was appointed as the society's president, Knowledge Federation was having its presentation of The Game-Changing Game (a generic, practical way to change institutions and other large systems) practically next door, at the Bay Area Future Salon in Palo Alto. (The Game-Changing Game was made in close collaboration with Program for the Future – the Silicon Valley-based initiative to complete Engelbart's unfinished revolution. Doug and Karin Engelbart joined us to hear a draft of our presentation in Mei Lin Fung's house, and for social events. Bill and Roberta English – Doug's right and left hand during the Demo days – were with us all the time.)

Louis Klein – a senior member of the systems community – attended our presentation, and approached us saying "I want to introduce you to some people". He introduced us to Alexander Laszlo and his team.

"Systemic thinking is fine", we wrote in an email, "but what about systemic doing?" "Systemic doing is exactly what we are about", they reassured us. So we joined them in Haiphong.

"We are here to build a bridge", was the opening line of our presentation at the Haiphong ISSS conference, " between two communities of interest, and two domains – systems science, and knowledge media research." The title of the article we brought to the conference was "Bootstrapping Social-Systemic Evolution". We talked about Jantsch and Engelbart who needed each other to fulfill their missions – and never met, in spite of living just across the Golden Gate Bridge from each other. We also shared our views on epistemology and the larger emerging paradigm – and proposed that if the systems research or movement should fulfill its vitally important societal purpose, then it needs to embrace bootstrapping or self-organization as (part of) its mode of operation.

If you've seen the short video we shared on Youtube as "Engelbart's last wish", then you'll see how what we did answers to it quite precisely: We realized that systemic self-organization was beginning at a spot in the global knowledge-work system from which it could most naturally scale further; and we joined it, to help it develop further.

Knowledge Federation was conceived by an act of bootstrapping

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 (which as an international federation of universities perfectly fitted our later development), 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 see themselves not 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. The idea is natural and 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 specific domain of interest. In this latter case, this community will usually practice bootstrapping, by (to use Alexander's personal motto) "being the systems they want to see in the world". 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. Again the Engelbarts were part of our preparatory activities, and the Englishes were part of our panel as well. Our workshop was chaired by John Wilbanks – who was then the Vice President for Science in Creative Commons.

At our workshop in Barcelona, later that year, media creatives joined the forces with innovators in journalism, to create a prototype for the journalism of the future.

A series of events followed – in which the prototypes shown in Federation through Applications were created.

Knowledge Federation is a federation

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.

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.

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

The Lighthouse

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

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.