Category: General

There’s an awesome article on systems thinking written by Pegasus Communications Inc. entitled What is Systems Thinking? that articulates the primary problem that so many companies face today in finding innovative solutions for their product or services. It helps us to understand the clear distinction and role of customer relations and product / service design and how these two seemingly separate teams can effectively work together as a cohesive whole alongside their customers.

Systems Thinking as a Perspective:
Events, Patterns, or System?

Systems thinking is a perspective because it helps us see the events and patterns in our lives in a new light—and respond to them in higher leverage ways. For example, suppose a fire breaks out in your town. This is an event. If you respond to it simply by putting the fire out, you’re reacting. (That is, you have done nothing to prevent new fires.) If you respond by putting out the fire and studying where fires tend to break out in your town, you’d be paying attention to patterns. For example, you might notice that certain neighborhoods seem to suffer more fires than others. If you locate more fire stations in those areas, you’re adapting. (You still haven’t done anything to prevent new fires.) Now suppose you look for the systems—such as smoke-detector distribution and building materials used—that influence the patterns of neighborhood-fire outbreaks. If you build new fire-alarm systems and establish fire and safety codes, you’re creating change. Finally, you’re doing something to prevent new fires!

This is why looking at the world through a systems thinking “lens” is so powerful: It lets you actually make the world a better place.

Today, many companies see the event and some even see the patterns. Very few see the system solution and even fewer execute that solution properly.

Customer Support as Firemen

In our digital world, there are many online products and services that we’re using today. In the process of using them, problems appear, just like a fire breaking out in a town. And who comes to our rescue like firemen but the customer support people of that product or service. This is the point though where many companies stop because of a lack of perspective and awareness. In effect, they see the event and may even see the greater pattern causing the event but they fail to see the greater systematic problem and how to fix it.

To clarify this further, especially in relation to customer support, imagine a town repeatedly having more and more fires within it and the townspeople asking the mayor “What are you doing about this problem?” His response? “What problem? Our firemen are addressing the fires very efficiently. We’ve even been awarded the best fire department in the region!” Again this is the typical mindset of most companies today in that they see Customer Support as the final solution to the problem. But it isn’t.

Customer support is about customer relations. It’s not about just solving singular “events”, because you can’t always solve them all, its about employing people who have the perspective and awareness to see both the events and the patterns arising from them, so they can relay this information back to the entire company, particularly the development team, where it can empower them to make the right choices for change.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe it was even Joel on Software, or was it 37 Signals, that emphasized this by indicating not to keep a feature list but instead to watch for patterns and when those patterns arise sufficiently to then deal with them in a systematic way. That’s great when you have a team of people who have the perspective and awareness to see the systematic patterns arising from those events. But most support teams don’t as they have been trained behaviorally from a corporate cultural standpoint to just to focus on the event only and to deal with it as quickly as possible.

Development Teams Help Prevent Fires

Thus the end result here is that we need companies to see customer support as not the final solution, because again they can’t solve all of the problems, but instead primarily as a liaison group to communicate information which in turn empowers the company to make the necessary changes internally via their development teams. That’s where the real problems are solved. By the development teams upgrading and innovating their products and services which in turn makes them more usable and functional, thus reducing the problems encountered.

The key emphasis here though is that for all of this to work, you need individuals in all areas of the company who have an understanding of systems thinking to help them see their work as not just a slice or component of the whole but rather an integral and interdependent part of it. Only then will get you customer relations teams and development teams working symbiotically together in unison with their customers as collaborative members of the design and development process as mentioned by John Thackara in his book entitled In The Bubble.

From Designing For to Designing With

The relationship of the Dutch to dikes demonstrates that looking after technology is as much a matter of social organization as it is of engineering. People are too often described and thought of by designers as users or consumers when we really need to think of them as actors.

Some companies, like Valve Software, are understanding this and are light years ahead of others, as not only are they designing their products in close collaboration with their customers but they are even giving their customers the tools to empower and extend their products in ways that the company can’t even conceive. Thus the customer evolves from just a consumer to a collaborative creator and essential participant in the design process of their products and services.

The following is a newer maxim of mine. “We must work at living what we have learnt through play.” What I’ve realized recently is that it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and start living this maxim as it implies.

You see in my last post, I got really excited when I realized that there are many people out there all effectively working on the same thing as I am, that being figuring out the dynamics of this new emerging type of organization with its unique “natural culture” as I like to call it. Well with that high immediately came a low that slapped me abruptly in the face. If there are and have been a variety of notable people working on this (some for decades), why isn’t it more prominent within the business world today?

I mean there have been some companies who have integrated some of these new principles but for the most part, they are pretty unique. For example, people like Ricardo Semler have done amazing things in terms of changing the way we work, yet even when he openly shares this knowledge, even giving speeches to large corporations on the subject, it’s evident that it’s not making a noticeable impact within the typical business mindset. In effect, today when someone creates a new business, more than likely they’ll automatically create a hierarchical organizational structure and implement managers to “control” people without questioning or researching to see if there is a better way.

What I’ve come to realize now is that it’s pointless talking about this anymore. Why? Because words can only take you so far. What really changes hearts and minds are the visible actions of others, so that people can see these principles and culture put into practice itself which then can be utilized as an example to others. So I need to help create these new types of organizations so that people can see and understand how they work from the inside. Even more so, I need to try to create a variety of them in different areas of life, so that each individual can find one example that relates to their particular perspective of life, thus allowing them to understand it better.

While creating some of these living examples will be easy, because they will start as online communities, others that are more business-like will take more time because it means starting my own business or finding a business that is pliable and courageous enough in accepting this culture. Again while I have some business ideas that I could implement, they are going to take a lot of time to grow and I need work in the interim to sustain myself while I build up these examples.

Another major problem that I see is that the two initial examples that I’d like to start with, that I’ve already tested in the past, are going to be difficult to start because I don’t have the social object to build them around that I once had. For example, I’d like to use this natural culture in building a community around a video game and another one around a web development platform. Right now though, the MMO gaming scene is all but dead because there is nothing out there as yet that I’m excited about which is critical if you want to build a community around it. Same applies to a web platform. I used to love Squarespace but this is no longer the case, so I’m looking for another platform that I can get excited about again.

All said and done though, it’s time to go back into stealthy action mode and follow an “actions speak louder than words” mantra that I used to relay to newbies when teaching them online about Threewave Capture The Flag.

“Let your rocket do the talkin!”

Just viewed a couple of videos by Don Tapscott that are remarkable close to what I, myself, have perceived through my own systems thinking and observance of cultural patterns.

Institutions are failing. They can’t handle the weight of the complexity that is overloading them. We are effectively living in the past, utilizes approaches from many years ago that no longer work today. We’re at a turning point, a transition and transformation from the old world view to a new world view that is being born as we speak. We need to stop trying to iterate on the past and instead leap courageously into the future.

We’re not leaping blinding though. There are many people around the world with the foresight and vision to see this change and embrace it openly. They’ve been working for years to prepare this bridge, each in their own way, and to help people to navigate across it into this new world view.

I find it somewhat ironic that Don initially indicates that we’re creating this global machine or computer via the Web. Actually the reason that things have gotten so bad as they have is because things have become too machine-like. In effect, we’ve lost our humanity, our human nature, somewhere along the way, in exchange for efficiency and desired perfection that is failing us dramatically because of our inability to adapt and change our “programming”.

We’re not machines and we’re not perfect. And that, strangely enough, is a good thing because it our imperfections that make us human. It is our frailties, our vulnerabilities, that make us human to each other, thus making us want to reach out to one another and connect. But it’s apparent that Don himself even realizes this at the end when he indicates the emergence of a networked intelligence, a collective mind, that allows us to learn, grow, and adapt collaboratively in ways we’ve never dreamt possible before.

So what’s happening here though? What are the core components of this cultural DNA that is effectively changing mankind, helping it to evolve to its next stage of evolution? Open, sharing, and caring are the core trinity elements that I’ve seen, as Don seems to attest to as well. But it goes further than that. It’s how these elements are utilized together as a sort of cultural vaccine that rewires an organization, effectively transforming the people within it into a neural network for the emergence of a collective mind, thus allowing them to collaborate in an almost symbiotic nature. (And yes I’ve seen this level of collaboration within a team before using this same cultural DNA and it’s simply amazing to experience.)

But really what’s the composition of this cultural DNA? Well that’s what I’ve been working on for years and, yes, I believe I’ve finally cracked it. The hard part, as usual, is articulating what I intuitively know. What I can say though is that I’m calling it “Natural Culture” because from my perspective it’s a culture that restores the human nature within organizations and kickstarts it to life, transforming it from a machine into a living collective entity that can finally sustain the life within it.

I‘ve had some interesting conversations this last week with a variety of different people. In doing so, it’s made me realize something that I intuitively already knew. My vision isn’t to help empower people individually but instead to empower them within a collective environment. In effect, I shouldn’t be focusing on explaining how a person can figure out their individual passion and purpose so much as I should be focusing on explaining how an organization can naturally release the creative potential of the people within it, primarily through its culture.

What I’ve realized is that by avoiding the focus on the individual specifically, you create a more natural nurturing environment to release the potential from that individual. That’s because if you put too much focus on that individual then they almost want to automatically close themselves off from that targeted focus (i.e. turtling) which in turn makes it difficult for their potential to be released. But in working with others, they naturally want to feel useful and valued, so they naturally in turn try to better themselves which in turn releases their potential.

The interesting thing is that the focus of the group, why they are being brought together, is almost irrelevant. In effect, it is just the social object or community of practice that they gather around. What’s important is what is cultivated within the group and how it interacts. This in turn allows for the release of the potential within the individual.

That said though, the more meaningful the reason they have come together, I think the more possibility that their potential will be released. In effect, the more epic the challenge, the more likely their potential will rise and react to that challenge.

About a month back I was playing around with Workfu when I stumbled across a couple of patterns that made me laugh out loud when I saw how evident they were. You see when using Workfu, it asks you to enter in keywords that relate to your professional life. After entering in those keywords though, I felt like it would be better if they were organized in some way, rather than just being a jumbled display of keywords. When I started to organize them intuitively, I suddenly realized that the two repeating patterns that I was organizing them by were my passion and purpose in life!

Taking this into consideration, I realized that if someone actually didn’t know their passion and purpose in life, they could potentially figure them out using this exact same approach. That said, while this worked for me because of my insights and research within this field, it might obviously not work for someone else for a variety of reasons. That said though, I thought it was significant enough to share with others anyway.

Just a few words to set the baseline of understanding though. Your passion is your energy, your natural talent. Your purpose is the direction with which you release or express your passion. Your vision is that which you hope to become, your passion and purpose working in harmony to achieve your life’s calling within a specific scope and context. It’s important to realize though that you may not have enough knowledge or experience at this time to fully realize your ultimate vision in life but at the very least it will hopefully reveal the next step within it. In addition, feel free to use titles outside of your work as well, as they may reveal more of who you truly are since many of the jobs we do today are to just pay the bills rather than being something that we’re passionate about.

First off, list your job titles with your current job at the top and oldest at the bottom. Remove any descriptors, so as to achieve a title of just two words (i.e. senior web developer = web developer). In addition, if the meaning of the title doesn’t seem evident with a quick scan, try to summarize it down to its core meaning that feels right to you (i.e. clerical clerk = organization support)

Life Researcher*
Web Designer
Community Support (Customer Support)
Web Developer
Team Leader
Community Architect
Business Advisor
Systems Support
Body Therapist (Massage Therapist)*
Culture Creator*
Community Founder*
Guild Leader*
Systems Support
Organization Support (Clerical Clerk)

* Signifies a personal title outside of my professional life

Now look at the first word in your job titles and group them together, removing any duplicates if you want but at least make the duplicated keyword bigger or bolder so as to relay the importance of it. These are your passion keywords.

Life, Web, Community, Team, Business, Systems, Body, Culture, Guild, Organization

Now look at the second word in your job titles and group them together, again removing any duplicates but making the duplicated keyword bigger or bolder. These are your purpose keywords.

Researcher, Designer, Support, Developer, Leader, Architect, Advisor, Creator, Founder

Now this is where it starts to get really tricky because you need to see below the surface and understand the pattern as a thread that weaves through your life and these keywords. This is the point where you have to let go of logic and start to use your feelings more. For example, if you’ve been having positive or negative feelings throughout your life, particularly within work environments, try to draw on those. For example, I’ve notice throughput my life that I dislike corporate environments because they often have an unnatural culture that makes a person feel useless, disconnected, depressed, and machine-like at the end of the work day. Whereas I want to work within an environment that makes me feel valued, whole, happy, and alive like a human being.

Taking this in mind, I looked at my passion keywords and notice a pattern right off the bat. All of these keywords relate to systems, be they technical (i.e. computers, Web), organizational (i.e. business, community), or organic (i.e. body). Again this was much easier for me to see this pattern, as I had already figured this out earlier in my life. So based upon this though, my passion appears to be systems.

Looking at my purpose, most of the keywords related to building or creating something. So my purpose seems to be a creator which does relate to me as a cultural creative. Yet while I found this to be somewhat true, it didn’t feel perfectly right to me for some reason. To figure out why, let’s see if we can put this all together using my passion and purpose keywords, as well as my feelings, to come up with my visionary job title. One key thing to remember though is that your vision defines the specific scope and context of your passion and purpose at work. Put another way, it helps you figure out if you want to work on a large scale or a small scale. For example, some people prefer helping others one person at a time, while others prefer helping many people all at once.

For me, while I enjoy deep interactions with one person, I have this strong innate desire to help many people all at once. Thus in terms of the scope and context of my passion, it feels like its on an organizational scale or even on a societal scale. Thus in looking at the variety of system keywords that I used to figure out my systems passion, culture to me seemed like the best word that relates to the scope and context of my passion in detail. In effect, I believe my best systems approach is using culture to help change the world around me at a grand scale.

In terms of my purpose keywords, as I said before, none of my job titles seem to articulate what I’ve naturally been doing or wanting to do in my work with regards to my purpose. Being a creator is very close, as playful creativity is at the heart of my life, but it still doesn’t seem to be the perfect word. In looking back on my feelings, it almost feels like I want to help “heal” organizations and the people within them, so they they can release their full potential. While saying I’m a healer does feel right and even relates to my Keirsey personality profile (i.e. Healer), it just sounds too much like a New Age title. “Hi, I’m your organizations new Cultural Healer. Let’s have a big group hug!” Uh, I don’t think so. One word that did jump out though in my thoughts, and seemed more business-like, was an Integrator. Integration within systems is a common buzzword today so it felt much closer but still not perfect. For now, I’ll live with it though until something better emerges.

So all said and done, my visionary job title for what I want to be doing is a Cultural Integrator. If this seems to be a little far fetched at this time then you might want to read a book called Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken (or even another book entitled The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge). It describes a job title that is somewhat similar to what I’d be doing as a Cultural Integrator and what I’ve already been doing intuitively throughout my work life. But why not just use Chief Culture Officer for my job title then since it’s something that’s already emerging within the work force? Primarily because I dislike the corporate connotations it implies in its use which in turn could distance me from the type of non-corporate companies that I’d like to help.

In a future post though, I’ll try to explain how you can break down these patterns into even more specific details, thus allowing you to see the skills that got you where you are today and the skills that you will need to get you where you want to be in the future. Even more so, I’ll reiterate again the importance of scope and context to help you understand how your skills are like languages or lingo that help you to communicate your passion and purpose to others around you thus allowing you to interact and relate to them better, particularly within your work life.

Update June 21/2012: In thinking about this a bit more, I’m growing fond of the title Cultural Designer more and more. The word designer corresponds more closely within my purpose keyword of creator and it also probably seems much more human and familiar to most people as well. While the healing and integration connotations aren’t as noticeable, they are hopefully still implied deep within as great design both simplifies and empowers those whom interact with it. Best of all, Cultural Designer sounds much more grounded and accessible, particularly in comparison to a Chief Culture Officer which sounds very elitist and inaccessible.

Know thyself. For most people on the planet, this is easier said than done. The primary reason being is that we are so distracted today, not just by advertising that disempowers us, but by the basic need for survival which forces us to worker longer hours, thus giving us less time to focus and reflect on who we really are and what we are here to do. If you do find the time to reflect on this though, I think it’s important to fully understand passion, purpose, vision, and their relationship with one another first, as it will make it much easier in trying to figure out your identity as a whole.

Passion

Passion is your creative emotional energy that you must authentically and continually express within the world, so as to naturally feel alive. Think of it as your natural talent that energizes you through its use, that sustains you through life, and keeps you stabilized, as well as afloat. Put another way, it is your vehicle for expressing and moving through life. It is why I symbolize it as an intricately carved ship within my own life. Once you know your passion, you’ll start to feel more calm and stable inside, even when things seem chaotic around you. That’s because your passion is at your heart, deep inside you.

I don’t know where I am, but I’m not lost.

Emile Khadaji, The Man Who Never Missed

Purpose

Purpose gives your life a sense of direction. Yes, knowing your passion can help stabilize you but you’ll still feel frustrated because even though you can weather many storms, you’ll still feel like a captain without a direction or bearing to sail by. For example, when I knew my passion, I started saying to myself “Ok, I know what I’m good at but how do I put this talent to use?” This is why I symbolize purpose as a star within my own life because it is something I can navigate by, a logical calculated bearing that makes sense to my mind.

Vision

Vision is the realization and identification of your life in context and harmony with the greater world around you. It is your passion and purpose put together, your heart and mind integrated as one. It is your life lived to its fullest. It is why I symbolize it as the destination that lies beneath the star that I sail towards with my ship. More importantly though, vision is seeing that destination in minute detail, scope, and complexity, like visualizing a magnificent city glowing along the coast of an as yet undiscovered new world.

In closing, I think Peter Senge’s quote below from his book The Fifth Discipline helps to clarify purpose and vision even better using a couple of historical examples.

But vision is different from purpose. Purpose is similar to a direction, a general heading. Vision is a specific destination, a picture of a desired future. Purpose is abstract. Vision is concrete. Purpose is “advancing man’s capability to explore the heavens.” Vision is “a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.” Purpose is “being the best I can be”, “excellence”. Vision is breaking the four minute mile.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the rise of the generalist. What’s important to realize though is that this isn’t a question about generalists being better than specialists but instead a question of what role is needed more at this time. In effect, both roles are essential but at certain times one is needed more than the other.

Right now, we are going through a huge transitional period, a paradigm shift from our old world view to a new world view. Everything we know, that allowed us to survive as long as we have, is starting to crumble and collapse around us due to the weight of complexity. To survive, we need to find a new world to live within and we need to find it soon.

What we need now at this time are explorers. These individuals are natural generalists, as they have the ability to quickly learn, adapt and survive on their own with their diverse skillsets. Even more than skills though, they require a certain emotional and spiritual attitude to survive and thrive under adverse and unknown conditions. Most important of all though, they require a natural intuitive ability, similar to systems thinking, to map out and translate an understanding of this new world when they find it and fully realize it in its entirety.

Thus the explorer travels out and after repeated landings from different locations they soon starts getting a visual map of what they have discovered as a whole. This is no different than what many generalists are striving to do now. They are looking at things from different perspectives to try to get a better understanding of the new world view that they are already encountering now, so as to be able to better communicate it to others.

Once the generalist explorer does fully comprehend what they have discovered and can articulate it back to others within the old world, they then become navigators to help others get safely across to this new world. In effect, the generalists role is to help bridge the gap between our old world view and our new world view, so that others can safely traverse it to their new home.

Once this transitional journey has been taken by others, then the next phase of the work begins which is where the specialist comes into play. Specialists are like the colonists and settlers that populate and build within the new world, once it is safe to do so. Unlike explorers, who need diverse skills to survive, specialists can focus on one particular skill because the diversity of the whole colonizing community is what allows them to survive.

So there you have it. Generalists aren’t better than specialists and specialists aren’t better than generalists. Each is integral to the cyclic evolution and emergence of our species as a whole. Generalists are better suited for transitional periods and specialists are better suited for safe stable periods.

Creativity is like a river. And like a river, at certain times of the year its flow will be strong and at other times of the year its flow will be weak. To maximize the effectiveness of this river you need to realize its daily, if not hourly, cycles and take advantage of it when its flow is strong and also when it’s weak.

My awareness of this naturalness of creativity arose when I was reading an article a couple months back on Ze Frank in which he discussed his own creative process.

What’s your creative process look like, with that in mind?

I have a general workflow, which is, if I have an idea I try to execute it as quickly and faithfully as possible. That means that if I have a number of ideas all at once, I’m gonna bundle them together. I don’t like sitting on an idea and squeezing it till every little last drop comes out. I’d rather get it out there and move on to the next thing. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but in a sense you’re given this gift, this sort of creative force in you, and I think everyone has it, and it’s completely unique to you. And you as a person have a little bit of a responsibility as its shepherd, if you choose to incorporate that into your life. The other thing I learned is it’s really good to be undeniable. So if you want to get into the creative world, you have to just keep flogging away even when nobody’s paying attention. Because then when somebody finally does pay attention, it’s certainly a lot more interesting when you have a ton of stuff to show.

Two natural aspects of creativity he talks about in the paragraph above are the importance of flow and the awareness of blockages. In effect, when your creativity is flowing, you need to take advantage of it and reap its rewards as quickly as possible while its flowing because it won’t last that long before it subsides to regenerate itself. In addition, if you ignore this flow of creativity within you, especially when it feels like it is flowing, it will feel like a river hitting a dam, building up under pressure until it eventually overflows or bursts the dam itself. I’ve noticed both aspects of this within my own life.

In terms of blockages and buildup, I’ve noticed in the past that if I don’t try to release my creative energy or tension in a constructive way, eventually it builds up until I feel like I’m going to explode (which in turns makes me grumpy and aggravated). To relate to this, imagine moments of your life where you’ve felt like you’ve wanted to communicate something but didn’t feel like you had to words to express what you’ve felt. This in a sense is creative tension within you building up and wanting to be released. It is for this very reason that I have both a personal journal as well as a public journal. My personal journal allows me to communicate things to myself that only I can fully understand thus allowing me to release my creative tension and energy on a daily basis.

In terms of flow, I’ve recently noticed the amazing power of maximizing this creativity in the moment and to its fullest potential. Like Ze Frank said, when creative inspiration strikes, I try to utilize it and savour every last ounce of it before it fades, so as to create something sustainable with it before it disappears. The hard part though is that inspiration often strikes at unexpected times. Thus tapping into this energy requires you be ready for it when it strikes. Things like keeping a notebook with you are critical because trying to remember what you were thinking and more importantly feeling is extremely difficult to do, especially if you get distracted by other aspects of your life.

What I’m finding interesting though is that after releasing this creative energy and capturing it down in some form, it almost becomes like latent creative energy that I can tap into again to re-energize myself and open up that creative valve again. I find it’s never as powerful as an “original flow” though but it still allows me to continue a creative flow that I’ve started early. That’s why it’s always best to maximize that original flow of creativity in the moment it occurs though. If you can delay other aspects of your daily life at that moment and constructively utilize that creativity, you’ll find yourself far more productive. It’s one reason why I find getting up earlier in the mornings to be more effective for me because it allows me to creatively release and record so much of this energy before my day even begins that I feel far more positive and productive for the rest of my day.

Do what works best for you though. For example, besides my personal journal, I also tap my creative energy into visual form using iPad apps like Paper and Inkpad. But in the spur of the moment, even finding a scrap of paper to tap your thoughts into can be a boon to you, thus allowing you to release that creative flow later when you’re ready to do so.

Belief is a powerful thing. It is one of the core aspects of my life that has changed it completely. The more that I believe in myself, the more that I find I can tackle larger and larger challenges that previously would have seemed insurmountable to me.

Like most of my life, my power of belief emerged playfully from my video game experiences online. While playing Counter-Strike, I curiously questioned what was possible within the game world by defining self-limits and seeing what I could achieve within those limits. My personal mantra for this is “Limit yourself to expand your possibilities.”

For example, I decided to consistently utilize the MP5 submachine gun so as to attain a mastery over it. For many within the game, the MP5 is a crap gun that has no penetration power. I, however, looked at its strengths (low cost, high stopping power) and maximized them to my advantage. At my peak, my mastery of the MP5 stunned many opponents as I had the capability of dropping them at long range with extreme accuracy, something that was normally reserved for an AK47.

The MP5 effectiveness was maximized at close range though so I continually practiced closing rapidly with an opponent. Again at my peak, I mastered the ability to use erratic maneuvers to out predict the targeting of many opponents. My favorite way of showing my effectiveness in this area was by closing with a sniper opponent who was continually firing me as I closed the distance with him and dropping him less than ten feet away.

The culmination of these abilities and the strength of my belief was in creating a maneuver which I named after my online character’s name, “Gentle Nova”. My goal wasn’t actually to drop an opponent but to “flow” and move through them so that I could hit their other teammates from behind after encircling the map. For this to work, it required a combination of techniques similar to jujutsu, whereby you’re using the opponents own firepower and crossfire to their disadvantage by “dancing” into the midst of them and through them.

Later in my life, I decided to take these same principles of belief and put them into practice within my work life. While doing freelance web design work utilizing the Squarespace web publishing system, I was severely frustrated by the lack of functionality of the system and continually blamed the company for its lack of vision. However, once I stopped blaming them and empowered myself into believing I could come up with a solution, it was as if walls starting dropping all around me and solutions starting revealing themselves almost overnight.

The greatest single use of belief in my life though was when I finally stopped looking at myself as being part of the problem (i.e. a victim of fate) and started looking at myself as part of the solution (i.e. a catalyst of change). You see, my entire life I had felt like I was out of place, an alien within a strange world. It wasn’t until I realized that in my youth I had felt normal and natural growing up within the countryside of Alberta that it dawned on me that I wasn’t the alien but the natural entity living within an unnatural societal system that sorely needed cultivating and balancing to bring it back to its roots of human nature.

All said and done, my advice to others in this area would be stop seeing yourself as a victim of fate, adrift on a chaotic sea with no sense of navigation or control. I realize this is extremely difficult to do within our world today especially with marketing and advertisements telling you that you aren’t a complete person unless you buy their product. You are naturally whole though. Everything you need for your journey is within you. Thus disregard the Sirens of Disempowerment and Distraction that continually call to you and believe in your self, your inner identity. Once you do, a momentum of belief and empowerment will build and emerge within your life like a great wave that you can ride upon.

Just had a major epiphany. For the longest time, I was perplexed by a quote below from Margaret J. Wheatley’s book entitled Finding Our Way. Particularly my question was “Why do we have this innate desire for relationships and to be within groups or communities?”

Life takes form as individuals that immediately reach out to create systems of relationships. These individuals and systems arise from two seemingly conflicting forces: the absolute need for individual freedom, and the unequivocal need for relationships.

I obviously intuitively knew the answer but I wanted something that I could easily articulate to others. The answer to this question, strangely enough, lay within another book by Margaret Wheatley entitled Leadership and the New Science.

What occurs in these systems is contrary to our normal way of thinking. Openness to the environment over time spawns a stronger system, one that is less susceptible to externally induced change. What comes to dominate over time is not outside influences, but the self-organizing dynamics of the system itself. Because it partners with its environment, the system develops increasing autonomy from the environment and also develops new capacities that make it increasingly resourceful.

I say this is contrary thinking because we usually act from the reverse belief. We believe that in order to maintain ourselves and protect our individual freedom, we must defend ourselves from external forces. We tend to think that isolation, secrecy, and strong boundaries are the best way to preserve individuality.

Paradoxically, it is the system’s need to maintain itself that may lead it to be come something new and different. A living system changes in order to preserve itself.

Simply put, we are constantly seeking out and forming relationships around us so as to share and obtain information which allows us to flexibly change and preserve our identity in the process. This again is the trinity of natural self-organizing systems at work: relationships, information, and identity.

A living system changes to preserve itself.

Margaret Wheatley

What I find remarkable about this is how it compares to my earlier research on business culture and how it often differs from the culture of the Web. For example, anyone who has read The Cluetrain Manifesto can see this defensive stance that Margaret talks about mirrored perfectly with the internal culture of most corporate businesses today. And yet for anyone who has used the Web extensively, they can see the positive, almost natural, culture of the Web itself, whereby many of us self-organize around topics of interest to share information, so as to better ourselves. So through the simple invention of the hypertext page and its associating hypertext link, the Web itself gives us the ability to naturally self-organize in ways very similar to nature itself.

The thing that scares me the most about this though is that most businesses, particularly corporate minded ones, would probably rather die than give up their command and control culture in exchange for a more natural self-organizing one. Alas, if they don’t change with the times though then they will effectively be committing suicide by cutting off the blood or air that can literally support them and allow them to change, again eloquently put by Margaret Wheatley.

In classical thermodynamics, equilibrium is the end state in the evolution of closed systems, the point at which the system has exhausted all of its capacity for change, done its work, and dissipated its productive capacity into useless entropy.

Simply put, the system reaches a state of zero activity and thus ceases to exist. Man, does that bring back memories of the Dot-com bubble days.