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With darkness all around you, you have to develop a feeling for what is right, often based on little more than guesswork, and issue orders in the knowledge that their execution will be hindered by all manner of random accidents and unpredictable obstacles. In this fog of uncertainty, the one thing that must be certain is your own decision... the surest way of achieving your goal is through the single-minded pursuit of simple actions. A leader who believes that he can make a positive difference through continual personal interventions is usually deluding himself. He takes over things other people are supposed to be doing, dispenses with their efforts, and multiplies his own tasks. The higher the level of command, the shorter and more general the orders should be. Leave details of execution to verbal instructions. Ensure that everyone retains freedom of movement and decision within the bounds of their authority. The rule to follow is an order should contain all, but also only, what subordinates cannot determine for themselves to achieve a particular purpose.

Steven Bungay Paraphrasing Von Moltke in “Art of Action”

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If you can’t express it on a single page, it is too complex.

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The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

Plato

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The hierarchy of disagreement, by Paul Graham. Source: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/how-to-disagree-well-7-of-the-best-and-worst-ways-to-argue

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(But remember to multiply your estimate by Pi)

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All my works are games. Serious games.

M. C. Escher

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During the key years of the corporate campus invasion they were tied up in a different battle: The all-consuming gender and race debates of the so- called political correctness wars. As we will see in the next chapter, if the students allowed themselves to be turned into test markets, it was partly because they had other things on their minds. They were busy taking on their professors on the merits of the canon and the need for more stringent campus sexual-harassment policies. And if their professors failed to prevent the very principles of unfettered academic discourse from being traded in for a quick buck, this may also have been because they were too preoccupied with defending themselves against their own "McCarthyite" students. As an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of those students who took a while to wake up to the slow branding of university life. And I can say from personal experience that it's not that we didn't notice the growing corporate presence on campus - we even complained about it sometimes. It's just that we couldn't get particularly worked up about it. We knew the fast-food chains were setting up their stalls in the library and that profs in the applied sciences were getting awfully cozy with pharmaceutical companies, but finding out exactly what was going on in the boardrooms and labs would have required a lot of legwork, and, frankly, we were busy. We were fighting about whether Jews would be allowed in the racial equality caucus at the campus women's centre, and why the meeting to discuss it was scheduled at the same time as the lesbian and gay caucus-were the organizers implying that there were no Jewish lesbians? No black bisexuals? In the outside world, the politics of race, gender and sexuality remained tied to more concrete, pressing issues, like pay equity, same-sex spousal rights and police violence, and these serious movements were - and continue to be - a genuine threat to the economic and social order. But somehow, they didn't seem terribly glamorous to students on many university campuses, for whom identity politics had evolved by the late eighties into something quite different. Many of the battles we fought were over issues of "representation" — a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language. From campus feminists arguing over "representation" of women on the reading lists to gays wanting better "representation" on television, to rap stars bragging about "representing" the ghettos, to the question that ends in a riot in Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing — "Why are there no brothers on the wall?" — ours was a politics of mirrors and metaphors. It seems like wilful blindness. The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action. We were too busy analyzing the pictures being projected on the wall to notice that the wall itself had been sold.

Naomi Klein, No Logo

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“The road to wisdom? Well it’s plain & simple to express. Err and err and err again, but less and less and less.” - Piet Hein

Photo from Martin Gardner’s Colossal Book of Mathematics

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Everyone can — and does — design. We all design when we plan for something new to happen, whether that might be a new version of a recipe, a new arrangement of the living room furniture, or a new lay tour of a personal web page. […] So design thinking is something inherent within human cognition; it is a key part of what makes us human.

Nigel Cross, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work

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Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.

Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

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Kids demonstrate how creativity and time limits influence each other.

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Here are the eight tactics the OSS recommended for tripping up an Axis agency from the inside:

* “Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit short-cuts to be taken to expedite decisions.”

* “Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.”

* “When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.”

* “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”

* “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, and resolutions.”

* “Refer back to a matter decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.”

* “Advocate ‘caution.’ Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”

* “Be worried about the propriety of any decision. Raise the question of whether [it] lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”

These tactics proved “incredibly subtle, and devastatingly destructive.”

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Communication patterns around the world

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Potty Direction

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“It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing”

“…get out of grade school and you go to high school, and its revving up – the thing is coming. Then you’ve got to college, and then maybe grad school. And when you’re through with graduate school you go out and join the world. Then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance. And then you have that quota to make, and you’re going to make that. And all the time the thing is coming, its coming; that thing, the great success you’re working for. Then when you wake up one day when your about forty years old, you say ‘my god, I’ve arrived.’I’m there! And you don’t feel very different than what you’ve always feel. And there’s a slight let down because you feel there is a hoax. And there was a hoax - a dreadful hoax. They have made you miss everything; by expectation. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they’re 65 they don’t have any energy left. They are more or less impotent and they go and rot in an old people’s senior citizens community; and because we’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. Because we thought of life by analogy with a journey – with a pilgrimage. Which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end; success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing and to dance while the music was being played. But you had to do that thing, you didn’t let it happen.”

— Alan Watts