Category: General

Wow! It appears that Sonos may be launching some additional speaker products later this year. One notable product appears to be a portable speaker that has both a Wifi speaker mode (connecting normally to a Sonos system) and a Bluetooth mode (for direct connection to any mobile device). The only product that I’ve seen close to this is a Libratone ZIPP 2 Speaker. That Sonos themselves are creating something similar is pretty amazing.

Update: The Sonos Move speaker has been released. Sounds great but for $499 in Canada, which is basically the same price as a Sonos Beam speaker, that’s way too expensive. I’d rather spend the money on another Sonos Beam, as they sound amazing.

In an ever increasingly and rapidly changing world, more and more of us are feeling like we have lost a sense of control of our lives. Peter Gray’s 2014 TED Talk reveals how children today are feeling the same way, primarily because of The Decline of Play. By reintegrating play back into our daily lives though, not only can children benefit from this, but I believe we all can. We just need to redefine play in a much bigger context, just as we are redefining working and learning within a larger context as well.

Peter begins by recognizing the fundamental nature of play and how integral it is to our lives.

From a religious perspective, we might say that play is God’s gift that makes life on Earth worthwhile.

Now, here’s the sad news, here’s really what I am here to talk about. Over the last 50 to 60 years, we have been gradually taking that gift away. Over this period of time, there has been a continuous erosion in children’s freedom and opportunity to play, to really play, to play freely.

And he reveals how an essential aspect of play for learning is its self-directed nature, which mirrors how autonomy is seen as an essential aspect of The Future of Work.

Play, by definition, is self-controlled and self-directed, it’s the self-directed aspect of play that gives it its educative power.

More importantly though, Peter reveals how critical this is in creating a sense of control of one’s life, rather than feeling tossed around uncontrollably by circumstances which can often lead to anxiety and depression.

We’ve also seen a decline of the young people’s sense that they have control over their own lives. There is a questionnaire called the internal-external locus of control scale. There is a version of this for children, as well as for adults. It’s been given since about 1960. Ever since it’s been given, we have seen a decline, a continuous decline, in children’s and young adults’ sense that they have control over their own lives. They have more and more of a sense that their lives are controlled by fate, by circumstance, by other people’s decisions.

Now this is significant in terms of the relationship between anxiety and depression because one thing clinical psychologists know very well is that not having an internal sense of control sets you up for anxiety and depression.

Most importantly of all though, in learning to take control of our lives, we’re learning to be creative and innovative, not only solving our own problems but also learning to be empathetic in seeing other points of view.

Play is where children learn that they are in control of their life, it’s really the only place they are in control of their own life. When we take that away, we don’t give them the chance to learn how to control their own life.

Play is where they learn to solve their own problems and learn therefore that the world is not so scary after all. Play is where they experience joy and they learn the world is not so depressing after all.

Play is where they learn to get along with peers and see from others’ points of view, and practice empathy, and get over narcissism. Play is by definition creative and innovative.

In his closing comments, similar to how research on The Future of Work is revealing how we need to go beyond just “work, work work”, so too does Peter reveal how schooling needs to go beyond just “learning, learning, learning”, micromanaging every second of our free time towards it.

And perhaps, most of all, we need to be brave enough to stand up against the continuous clamor for more schooling. Our children don’t need more school. They need less school. Maybe they need better school, but they don’t need more school.

So it’s not so much about playing with LEGO bricks more often but rather playing, experimenting, and socialstructing our lives in a new way from the basic “building blocks” of it. In effect, we don’t have to play the existing “game”, becoming the things we’ve conventionally been told and expected to become. We can let go of these old, outdated beliefs and “play a new game”, one where we are more in direct control of our lives and our choices which resonates more clearly with our true selves, at which point our work becomes play, as Richard Barrett notes below.

You will know when you are operating from this level of consciousness because there will be nothing else to do. You will not want to “retire” because that would stop your life from having any meaning. There will be no division between work and the rest of your life. What you considered before as your work now becomes play.

Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching

Featured image by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

I’ve collected a lot of articles over the years, annotated them immensely, added my own notes, and have written posts on what I’ve learnt from my research in the process.

Recently I’ve realized that I’ve collected these things as “proof”. So I can show people them and say, “See! My intuitions are real. I’m not crazy. I’m not just making stuff up. There’s something here. Don’t you see it!?”

More and more I’m beginning to see this larger pattern that is impeding both myself and others. A pattern that I’ve been seeing arising for more than five years.

It is a need to be trusted before one trusts oneself.

It is a need to be believed before one believes oneself.

Leadership isn’t about waiting for followers to trust and believe in you before you “courageously” lead them. It’s about courageously leading yourself, trusting yourself, and believing in yourself. Or put another way, it’s about “following (your) Self”, the real you deep within.

More and more I’ve read from other evolved travellers that there is no difference between this “inside & outside” of ourselves. When we align with who we truly are, this separation disappears.

More and more I’m realizing now that there is no separation between this “known & unknown” of ourselves as well. Rather there is an intentional blindness which creates this illusion of an unknown. Yet in truth we see ourselves. We always see our true selves.

I have seen my true self throughout the years. I feel I know it now. Yet my difficulty is not in finding the words, as I always believed, but in finding the courage to express my truth.

This is why I’ve had to walk around my truth peripherally, not focusing on it directly.

Like a wild animal within my wilderness, I approach it calmly, peripherally, so as to not to startle it. I don’t force my way towards it directly but wander around it, letting it get comfortable with me. Letting it come to me instead. Letting its curiousity naturally pull it.

In effect, instead of closing the space to reach my True Self, I broaden the space of my Self to invite it. Like the wide, opening expanse of a whole new world for it to play within and explore freely. The space beckons it, calls to it, creating a cause to explore.

I am what I’ve always been, am, and will be, regardless of what I thought I knew and what I thought I didn’t know. I see my entire life enfolded. It is not a question of making it happen but instead a simple act of just letting it happen.

Do I have the courage to let go and step out of my own way, opening & holding space for my True Self to naturally emerge, letting my entire enfolded life unfold?

I don’t need to “do” anything. 

I just need to “be”.

Back at the turn of the millennium in 2000, my life was having a turning point itself. I was working at a job that was definitely the peak experience of my conventional life so far, I was a Senior Web Developer for a local web firm whose clients included notable video game publishers like Sierra Studios, Activision, and Konami. I was effectively at the top of my world, a world which would come crashing down a year later, as the company I worked for imploded along with many others during the Dot.com Bomb period.

Fast forward to today and this experience, this ending, was a catalyst in waking me up to what was wrong with the way work worked. Yet almost two decades have past in which I’ve read books from The Cluetrain Manifesto to Reinventing Organizations and it feels like not much has changed locally where I live. In Vancouver, while there are probably more “socially aware and conscious” companies, they pretty much work internally like any other conventional company out there in the mainstream work world. In effect, the greatest social change and innovation needed today, the way companies work and operate internally, hasn’t changed at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize that transforming a company, just as much as transforming individuals, is a radically difficult thing to do. But here’s the thing that perplexes me. Why aren’t newer companies, newer startups, striving to let go of the past and step into the future, working in a new way from the very start of their inception, as it’s much easier to do with a new company. I mean Vancouver has hosted both the TED Talks and the BIL Conferences with tremendous success in the past. Lately though, this exuberant energy around changing the way work works feels like it has fizzled out. Again changing the world, even just changing your world, is a radically complex thing to do. 

Immersion

I’ve been pondering this for a while, wondering why this momentum seems to have disappeared and a single keyword keeps revealing itself to me. Immersion. Or lack there of. Simple put, we are not immersing ourselves within the New World we talk about and wish to live within because we are still immersing ourselves within the Old World. Therefore, no matter how much you wish to be within this New World, you will never get there if you don’t let go of and step out of the conventional Old World. What I’m talking about here specifically are the social artifacts that form the cornerstones of our Old World which symbolically represent the governing beliefs that hold it up.

Governing beliefs, which form the basis for other beliefs, are the most difficult to change, because they are tied to personal identity and feelings of self-worth. You can’t change your governing beliefs without changing yourself.

Dave Gray

Why we need to change these cornerstones is because they define our identity. So if we want to transform ourselves and our identity to work in new ways, we need to change these cornerstones. Think of them like the corners of a portal to our New World. Once we create them all and they can align and interact with one another, we can create a stable and sustainable portal to our New World, allowing us to not only step within it but fully stay within it.

The cornerstones of our Old World, our old identity, are evident once spoken. They are resumes, jobs, and bosses. Until these are replaced by new cornerstones, we won’t be able to fully step into this New World and into our new identities, allowing us to communicate and operate in a new way. They key thing to realize though is that in going beyond resumes, beyond jobs, and beyond bosses, our new cornerstones need to not only go beyond them in scope but also include and integrate them within this broader scope.

Growing & Becoming More

The whole emphasis here is that we are not discarding our old identity completely but are instead broadening and redefining it as a whole. In doing so, it gives us the creative capacity to handle greater complexity which is essential for this New World emerging. That said though, the experience still feels earth shattering. The you that you think is you has to die metaphorically, so the you that is truly you can be born (which mirrors Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey). But again by having these new cornerstones, we can create a solid stable footing and identity within this New World, so we can finally let go of the Old World.

Going beyond bosses to me is probably the easiest to articulate right now because it has been covered in so many books like Reinventing Organizations. Within an organizational capacity, leadership gets distributed collectively. So it doesn’t go away but instead transforms into something more. But that said, the greatest challenge here is how individuals deal with this. You have to intrinsically take leadership of your own life and create your own path, rather than extrinsically just fitting into society and waiting to be told what to do.

Going beyond jobs isn’t something covered as much. Many people think the Future of Work is new things within an old context (i.e. new types of jobs). It’s not. It’s old things within a new context. In effect, we need to work in radically different new ways, letting go of social artifacts that now limit us rather than empower us. Luckily books like Reinventing Organizations do touch upon this, loosely explaining how Teal organizations go beyond job titles and job descriptions.

To truly understand our contexts, we need to pull ourselves out of the classroom and immerse ourselves in the context, take action based on growing understanding of the context, and then learn even more as we reflect on the impact that we’ve achieved.

John Hagel

Going beyond resumes really isn’t covered by anyone, as far as my research has found. Yet to me this is a cornerstone that if changed could create a domino effect, helping to change the other ones more easily. That’s because right now, resumes and jobs form a bridge from which conventional work is achieved today, with a boss being the gatekeeper standing in the middle of that bridge. So if we can go beyond resumes, looking at the individual in a much greater, complex, and creative way, we have the opportunity to build a new bridge to this New World, one with much greater potential and possibilities for everyone. 

I mentioned in my last post a personal “altered state” experience from many years back. Why I decided to fully share this experience now is because I noticed similarities to how this experience was so extremely difficult to replicate for myself (that I was never able to do so again) and how it mirrors the extreme difficulty in achieving aspects of the triple-loop learning process as described by Markus F. Peschl in his paper entitled Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation for Profound Change, Individual Cultivation, and Radical Innovation.

As I mentioned in trying to replicate my experience, my greatest fear was in not being able to return to my sense of self and identity because I had to let go of my sense of self and identity and fall into this space of both emptiness and everything (extreme darkness and light). The following excerpt from the paper is what caught my attention, as it seems to mirror this same very thing on an existential level.

The Fear of Letting Go

Letting go. In order to reach this state of emergence it is – at first – necessary to let go what one has discovered in this process of redirection and exploration of one’s own premises, assumptions, etc. “ […] you have to change from voluntarily turning your attention from the exterior to the interior, to simply accepting and listening. In other words, […] you go from “looking for something” to “letting something come to you,” to “letting something be revealed.” What is difficult here is that you have to get through an empty time, a time of silence, and not grab onto whatever data is immediately available, for that’s already been rendered conscious, and what you’re after is what is still unconscious at the start.” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, p. 31) Of course, this process can cause existential fear in some cases, because one loses the (epistemological) ground on which one is standing and which normally provides a rather stable cognitive framework. This is a well-known state in the constructivist framework (if it is adopted in a reflected manner). Being in a state of receptivity always means being in a relatively passive role which brings about a higher chance of being (epistemologically and existentially) hurt. However, surrendering into this rather receptive and open state does not imply that one is completely passive; rather, the contrary is the case: in a way one finds oneself in an active state of extremely high attention towards what is coming up without trying to project one’s own expectations, plans, knowledge, etc. It is a slightly paradoxical situation: on the one hand one is waiting seemingly passively for what is going to happen and on the other hand this is a highly active state concerning one’s attention and receptiveness. These processes of trying to get empty and at the same time to be attentive towards what is going on “out there” are well known from art and religious traditions as well as from Husserl’s phenomenological approach (e.g., the concept of epoche).

This is the closest description I’ve seen to describing the moment just before I’m ready to try to cross over into this altered-state. Experientially I’m cocooned in this rhythmic experience of deep breathing and visually seeing “waves” of something (or nothingness) drifting across my eyes, even though they are closed. As I said, it is in this in between space where I am neither where I am nor where I want to be. I’m just letting go, letting things happen, and letting things emerge. Again I’m totally passive, letting things emerge but at the same time very awake, attentive, and receptive to what is trying to happen. I believe this may mirror what is also known as “holding space” for others but on a different lower level of being.

But of course, again at the point where this “portal” of feeling emerges, as though I am being pulled through into an altered state that is greater than my Self, that’s where the “existential fear” strikes. The fear that if I let this happen, I will lose my self and identity and not be able to return to my Self. In effect, “I” will be lost forever within this in between space.

The Process of Creativity

One can describe that process as a U-shaped curve that is realized in a series of states: the left branch going down the “U” focuses on issues of observation, perception, sensing, discovery of patterns of thought and cognition, and on how to leave these patterns behind oneself in order to be cognitively and emotionally “prepared” for profound change. At the bottom one finds him-/herself in the state of presencing: it can be characterized as a condition of high receptivity and openness and as a state where radically new knowledge/ change can emerge. The upward branch deals with issues concerning the realization, prototyping, and embodying these changes in the (external or internal) environment.

Going beyond the excitement of seeing words that describe this altered-state experience I had decades ago are seeing words, like the ones above, that also closely mirror what I’ve been trying to articulate as the process of creativity for past five years or more. In effect, the three “branches” of this U-Theory (or as Peter Senge refers to it as “presencing”) are what I refer to as the Connecting, Empowering, and Inspiring stages of the creative process.

The Fractal Universality of the Creative Process

Finally, it has to be mentioned that this way of looking at profound change processes can not only be applied on an individual level (“individual cultivation”), but also in the collective domain of organizations, social systems, etc.

What’s even more remarkable is seeing the above words which I’ve reiterated time and again that the process of creativity is mirrored universally at both the individual and collective level. In effect, it is a fractal process. That’s why it’s not so much a linear process as it is a cyclic and spiral one. When one begins to see the “multitude” of themselves individually (and later how this actually leads to the Future of Work with multi-potential people working in a completely new context), one begins to understand this.

Learning to Master Creativity in New Ways & Contexts

If these methods were combined with approaches from other fields (such as phenomenology), a highly sophisticated and powerful paradigm for radical/profound change could emerge. This paradigm would not only have a deep impact on the process of how profound change can be brought about, but could also trigger a new understanding of science that is compatible with the constructivist approach and that has a broader perspective on knowledge, its dynamics, and its permanent renewal and innovation.

This closing paragraph really surprised me though because when I read the words “a new understanding of science”, I immediately thought of Dave Gray using the scientific method for his Lab of the Possible. And when I thought of that, I immediately realized I was seeing a bigger fractal pattern here, one that I was able to step back from and see it rippling outward at a broader and broader scale.

You see I have been realizing more and more that while the process of creativity has this universality to it, at the same time there are these differences with it as one evolves and grows through the stages of human development (ie Cook-Greuter, Frédéric Laloux, etc). In effect, yes everyone is obviously creative but obviously not all in the same way. What I’m referring to here is how a person learns to master creativity. In effect, like everything else (even understanding your passion and purpose in life), it’s not an off or on state but rather a process of learning, articulating, and mastering it over time and, more importantly, applying this creative capacity in new ways and in new contexts.

And if you look at and understand the evolution of moving from single-loop learning to double-loop learning to triple-loop learning, this same fractal pattern of changing creative context can be seen. In working towards mastering single-loop learning, one realizes and learns that the things within our reality are creatively constructed. In working towards mastering double-loop learning, one realizes and learns that the reality around them is creatively constructed. In working towards triple-loop learning, one realizes and learns that their very sense of Self is creatively constructed. So again collectively, one is learning to master creativity in an ever increasingly greater context.