Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]
How curious that at precisely the (Anthropocene) moment in which the living biosphere and almost all of its diverse inhabitants find themselves threatened or constrained and diminished apace, we produce replicas and robotic golems that quite dramatically dissimulate that they do not in fact possess that life or indefinable (unprovable, logically) living fact that we […]
I would never suggest that any of us should let the truth get in the way of a good story (or sales pitch and project management agile scrum), but observe how often we end up with the developmental and technological cart placed (well) before the horse. Developments in AI tend towards various unknown (perhaps – […]
Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]
Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]
What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the […]
If intellectual curiosity was nurtured, cultivated, allowed to grow wild and free upon the fertile soils of this grand experiment that is our shared history, where might we all be? Innovation is celebrated but is everywhere suffocated by a culture of convention and conformity.
Organisational systems tend to autonomously acquire and reflexively cultivate those (generally adaptive) sets of abstractions, assumptions and boundaries which best-serve the continued persistence and self-propagation of those homeostatic, corporate organisational patterns themselves. An enduring abstraction of parochial self-importance indicates the point at which historically-justifiable self-belief fractures into precisely the kind of narrative (psychological) pathology that […]
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”– John Maynard Keynes …and escaping the old ones is a monumental task when a bad idea, once entrenched, becomes the source of it’s own self-propagating rationale and serves as a limiting filter on the percolation of new cognitive methods and […]
It is interesting to observe that many, many wise benedictions on the topic of breaking down silos and valourising polymaths exist but it is questionable as to the extent of the actual application, acceptance or widespread acceptance of the associated concepts. Disassembling silos is vital for the emergence of scale-independent, adaptive, flexible and resilient self-organisational […]
What is a significant innovation? What are the most algorithmically concise paths in any recombinatory possibility-space between significant innovations?
