Posts Tagged ‘Clay Shirky’
What was your uni like?
Parties with casual yet dictatorial professors?
Most of us go to university and college and find something that looks like a lawless, unruly form of school where the lecturers and professors are the biggest outlaws. And so we go out into the world thinking of universities as schools with no business-imperative and no business-sense.
The business of universities
Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities are businesses, or enterprises; but with a business model that is so opaque, few people understand it, unless they have worked in one for quite a while. If you do business with universities, if you are in a knowledge business, if you have to hire graduates to get work done, you might like to read this brilliant description of university business models.
As greedy as bacteria
“As organisms in a system, universities evolve. They eat up smaller institutions to dominate a niche, or split of side campuses to enter new spaces. They relentlessly share their DNA, as Universities heads look over their shoulders and shamelessly copy the innovations of others. Universities fight for resources, funding, students among themselves, where a Society usually co-opts all of the resources in it’s zone of control and operates without competitive challenge.”
As disregarding as dinosaurs
As mutative as viruses
How do we cope with abundance?
Posted on: March 4, 2010
Abundance & scarcity
On Monday, an American said something to me which struck me as profound and worth storing away to think about. “People from your part of the world take something and do everything they can with it. British take something and do as little as possible with it.”
With that in the back of my mind, this morning I was reading the reports on Clay Shirky’s opening address to NFAIS. We know what to do about scarcity. But abundance confuses us.
The two ideas connected at once.
Maybe in conditions of abundance it is wise to do as little as possible with each thing that you have?
Does that chime with you?
I read a great post this morning suggesting the Clay Shirky has it wrong. We don’t really have a cognitive surplus, or we cannot make use of the cognitive surplus, because people prefer desultory entertainment to purposive action.
Positivism vs constructivism
The author writes in a scholarly genre: dealing with facts and evidence in a positivist way. I almost responded likewise.
What if the author, Steve, looked at the world through other eyes?
What if the mytho-poetic tradition, a la Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, are correct and we like to hear a narrative?
- Does that explain why we prefer to watch stories about someone? Rather than a read explanations of some thing?
What if we like to write stories in a narrative (even though it was beaten out of us at college)?
- Would we feel more cheerful, me and Steve included, if we were allowed to tell stories about
- action,
- purpose,
- calling,
- doubt,
- triumph?
- All the human attributes banned from psychological reports?
Positive psychology and the narrative
Positive organizational scholarship, for example appreciative inquiry, are quite clear that a positive approach includes social constructionism – in other words, our voice and the voice of others. The positive principle is expressed not only as something positive and not negative, but as something purposeful, compelling, engaging, enduring, exciting, soothing, validating.
Positive psychologists (as opposed to positive scholars) tend to retreat back to questionnaires to measure their strengths and virtues. Just as happiness strictly refers to a life well-lived (not a mood, person or moment in time), I suspect someone better read than I can explain why a strength or virtue belongs in a narrative, probably as a ‘calling.’
In short, the Hero’s Journey, or narrative structure is still to be adopted by positive psychologists with vigor.
The essence of positive psychology is a point-of-view
Would I be going too far on this Saturday morning to suggest that the essence of a positive approach is a point-of-view? We all want to hear who does what, and why. What was their deep moral case for spending time the way we do.
And is it so wrong to relax by following the moral case of others?
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I hope my title caught your eye and made you panic a little – ooooooh, there is something I should be doing . . .!
Well, I hope to persuade you to do it less. Or, to run a mile from any organization where you hear it a lot.
Reify : To regard or treat an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence
It really bothers me when we talk of an organization as if it has an existence beyond the people who are in it.
It is true sometimes the organization has a legal persona. We will eventually talk about the Democratic Party nominee, for example. But that is simply a decision that members of the Democratic Party will make following a procedure they devised and adopted.
Real thinking, breathing, living people who are quite entitled to change those procedures as and when they deem it fit. Indeed, they have anticipated doing so and have already laid down procedures on how to initiate change – as do all good organizations.
The rules that we lay down do not live and breathe without us. Every organization has rules that are still written down and have been ignored for years. Every organization also has rules that are extremely powerful and are not written down anywhere.
What the rules tell us, written or unwritten, are the relationships we have with each other.
This is why I think it is dangerous to reify an organization: this is why it is dangerous to present an organization as a mind beyond the minds of the people in it.
Compare the minutes of a meeting which say “it was decided” to “Mary proposed” “Peter seconded” and the votes was carried “10-5” with no abstentions. Compare these minutes with minutes which include the voting record of each person.
When we say “it was decided”, we are deliberately concealing who said what and who decided. Why are we concealing that information?
Because we don’t want to write down how we made the decision. Whatever we did that day would not, we believe, reflect well on us.
Most likely, we have made a decision we are not entitled to make. Most likely we have usurped authority that is not ours.
Can we get away with saying “it was decided”?
Yes. Often. Rensis Likert has written on this problem.
1. We may not talk about a problem.
2. We may not talk about not talking about a problem.
This is a mark of a festering trouble-spot in an organization. When the double-bind is widespread, the organization is likely to run into deep trouble.
I remember a colleague who used to send out memos headed “from the desk of . .”. Mmmm, she received a lot of replies addressed “To the desk”.
Survival guide to contemporary corporate life
1. Be wary of the passive voice. Ask ‘who dunnit?’
2. Be double wary when inanimate objects and abstract concepts are used to resume the active voice. Ask ‘who substituted a thing or an idea for a person’ , and then, ‘what have they done that they don’t want me to know’!
3. And if you can, cut your losses. As Clay Shirky said, a four year old knows that any activity not designed for her participation is not worth sitting still for.
Don’t allow people to obscure who gains from an action and who has been cheated. If you cannot restore a better atmosphere, then look for a better place to be. It is important to be in a place which is honest in its essence. Where people intend to do well by each other even if they get it wrong sometimes. Look for that essential honor and head there.
Who moved my mouse?
Posted on: May 6, 2008
Image via WikipediaI am looking for my mouse
Clay Shirky at Web2.0 Expo tells the story of a 4 year old who gets bored looking at a DVD and crawls around the back of the screen: “I am looking for my mouse”. This is the story of child brought into a technological age where we expect to participate in whatever we do. “Looking for the mouse” is the mark of a generation who expects to take initiative.
Who moved my cheese?
Just ten years’ ago, we were delighted by another story, an allegory, Who moved my cheese? This story is about a generation who does not expect to take initiative. Indeed, it resists taking the initiative. It wants to ‘put the clock back’.
We spend a lot of time crying, “we want the cheese to come back.” Or, words to that effect. We celebrate the past rather than the emerging future.
The positive message of this allegory is that once we can move beyond fear, we are free to move on, and find fresher, more interesting, more enjoyable cheese.
My advice is “follow that mouse!”
I live a double life as I have said before. In my one life, I work with Zimbabweans who are frozen in terror about the changes going on in their country. Their fears are real, and justified. So too, is their desire to go back to a time when cheese was there for the taking. Their liberation will ultimately come when they stop protesting the unfairness of it all and start to explore their future.
In my other life, I work with HR professionals who are also frozen in terror. In the case of HR, there is a little cheese left, but not much. The world has moved on to work patterns where there are new demands and new generation who says “I am looking for the mouse”?
For Zimbabweans and HR professionals, I am looking for my mouse has a sadder meaning The mice have already detected the dwindling cheese supply and have left.
My advice is “follow that mouse”!
Is 2.0 a passing fancy?
Posted on: May 4, 2008
Both Scott McCarthur and Jon Ingham have been blogging on 2.0 recently. The big question in discussions about 2.0 is always whether or not 2.0 marks a fundamental shift in the structure of society.
Here is a video of Clay Shirky speaking at the Web 2.0 expo recently with a compelling story about why 2.0 is here to stay: “I am looking for the mouse”!
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flowing motion 
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