Started off thinking how we have shifted from following people who think they have the answers, to facilitating others to find their own answers. Problem is, if we are all facilitating other people to come up with their answers, we never come up with answers. This seems to be the state of affairs with the leading edge of thinkers at the moment, as it shares the edge with community building. I was going to produce a simple quadrant of distinctions, but when I started this post, and the title indicated I should take a different trajectory.
There are people in power. That is, working. They have their hands at the wheel, or on the mop, or on the gun, or the money, or whatever. They make a decision, and money flows. Most of these organisations are hierarchical, and most people are somewhere embedded in this hierarchy. There is a remit of control, of decision-making, of effort, and the consequential result. Thus the micro-transmission-unit of power that maintains the system. And self-employed dudes, owners of companies, are included in this too; from this perspective, they have less flexibility than most because they are answerable to the entire direction of the company.
Then there are bunches of people who advise the people in power. Experts, pundits, consultants, intellectuals. They don't do anything except talk, and their talk can of course be operational through a person in power to effect significant change. In this way, a company outsources its knowledge, and perhaps even decision-making, and perhaps even the transmission-unit of power.
I remember in my early twenties hearing about the fisherman cleverness: give a man a fish and he eats for a day, give him a fishing rod, and he feeds himself and his family. Something like that. Seems to me, we are obsessed with this. And clearly, this is a world gone mad, because surely the kids just want the fish given to them because they're hungry. Or traded with someone who doesn't have the time to fish, but has grown some potatoes, for example. There are so many fishing rods being pushed around, nobody is fishing, just empowering each other with fishing rods. Seems to me, this is what the entrepreneurial edge is like. And this market of fishing-rods is sustained because of cash injections, various forms of governmental funding, and investors, and speculative evaluations of the market, etc.
It is like the problem of management, where a company, or a government, becomes fat with positions that do nothing but increase the size of the company or organisation. It sounds good, innovation, entrepreneurialship, all that, but it is essentially privileged. Outsourced management. Outsourced fat.
So, what can we do? Either you are in the system, working, doing something, or you are helping someone improve what they are doing, and living off what they are doing. A kind of lateral hierarchy. Power doesn't operate as it does in the traditional doing-hierarchy. And here's my suggestion, at least as it occurs to my mind now -- and I wonder if it relates to anything which this line of thinking reveals in your mind: can we come up with a system that is entirely consistent within these "lateral hierarchies"? An economics and structure that matches how the micro-transmission-units of knowledge (as opposed to power) operate? Recommendation systems spring to mind.
You see, I believe we have all the skills, the answers, the wisdom, already. It is like what happens when we study for an exam, and we go too deep into the answer for the first couple of questions, when really, it is much easier than we think. This is the main problem we are facing. So, let's stop looking for new answers, assuming those around us don't have them, but confronting one another with our answers (our fish) and seeing which we should be eating NOW, and which can wait a bit, which preserve well. Being part of the Next Edge curated group on Facebook is interesting, as all new experiences are, but I can't help but think it is a talk shop. A high level talk shop, and I am sure plenty of people are learning through their conversations. But as a collective, it is not moving, and I am certainly not making a living out of it. Nothing to eat. Just a lot of fishing rods. Incredible people, and I think most are making money somehow, as advisors mostly, I think.
What would happen if we simply tracked our likes? Not only those that are attributed to us, but those we attribute? What if we did some maths, and came up with an algorithm that could give us a... rank, like google's pagerank? The factors would have to worked out. The equation designed, and the results interpreted and tested. A subjective test, of course, like matching what we think the rank is, to the rank that the algorithm produces. After all, the stats are based on subjective evaluations, whether we concur or not with a post or comment. Not so much a currency of likes, though perhaps we might have a daily ration of them, perhaps a like costs one, a comment three, a new post ten, that kind of thing. The trick is, it has to be so simple, that it does not interfere with the natural flow of the engagement. It serves no purpose to game the system. No purpose whatsoever.
I've thought about this before. I called the points "wyse" in a book 10 years ago, though I had no idea of the system. I tried to think about it when I was teaching maths in my last year of work because some classes were just not getting it, naturally as it were. The trick is, for any enumerated subjective value, you are not trying to win them. You are trying to give them away. Fractions of a whole rings a bell, you can't gain more attention, you just divide it on a daily basis. Or, when two masters meet, it is an engagement of apology, and he who gives most in some way, whose ego pulls least, is somehow acknowledged. That is the trick of it: to ascribe attention without it becoming too heavy, without it becoming accretive.
Strange post this. Wanders a bit. Sorry. Can a system like this be developed by 2020? Before? Who might be interested in discerning the factors? Tying it into an equation? Working out the non-accretive, or non-accumulating value of it so it doesn't bend the natural engagement of the participants? And then testing it within a collective?
0 responses:
Post a Comment