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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGqpQu5wFy4)

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Last Fart of the Ferret

When a ferret is cornered it emits a powerful stench like a skunk. Employees, when facing closure of the company, may come up with some of their most creative ideas.

In Creativity Under the Gun, Amabile, Hadley and Kramer describe how time pressure has a negative effect on creativity unless the pressure is felt to be meaningful and is delivered in a form where individuals can work largely on their own and in a focused way. Where it’s unproductive is when there’s just too much going on, too many competing demands and pressures, too many distractions.  Creativity under time pressure, the authors maintain, is most likely to happen when people feel ‘as if they are on a mission’. In the absence of any time pressure, they argue that people in an innovation team need to ‘feel as if they are on an expedition’. What Amabile et al. are talking about is motivation. And, specifically, they’re talking about what they call intrinsic motivation, as opposed to the extrinsic motivation produced by promises of a bonus or threats of redundancy. This distinction seems debatable. What about the motivation to look cool, to get a better job after completing a successful project, or to become famous? Where’s the boundary between intrinsic and extrinsic? Why should we try to create a boundary at all?  This is at odds with a favourite idea about creativity, described in Inside Project Red Stripe: "[The idea] was developed by Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System and an inspiration to many Systems Thinkers. In an interview with an Economist journalist (and which I have never been able to trace), he reportedly likened creativity in a survival culture to the last fart of the ferret. When a ferret is cornered it emits a powerful stench like a skunk, and employees, he said, when facing closure of the company, would come up with some of their most creative ideas. [Incidentally, if you search for ‘last fart of the ferret’, Google will rather coyly ask you if you meant ‘last fruit of the ferret’ – a delightful possibility which, sadly, produces no results if you accept the suggestion.]

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Acting with Future Intent

How can people with widely varying backgrounds, expertise and views come to a shared vision of the future? How can we work with the problems our society faces and learn our way together into the future respecting both our knowledge and our ignorance of what to do? Over the last few years the Three Horizons framework has emerged as a way of helping people with these challenges.

Three Horizons is a way of working with transformational change, drawing attention to systemic patterns rather than individual events or unexamined trends; it frames the discussion in terms of the shift from the established patterns of the first horizon to the emergence of new patterns in the third, via the transition activity of the second.

A simple linear way of thinking about change places us in the present looking towards how we want things to be in future – placing the future outside the present moment, something that might or might not happen. Yet we act with future intent all the time, linking what we are doing now to future outcomes. The central idea of Three Horizons is that it draws attention to the three horizons as existing always in the present moment, and that we have evidence about the future in how people (including ourselves) are behaving now.

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Dennis Hlynsky, a professor at RISD, illuminates the invisible whimsy of nature with his AfterEffects-enhanced timelapse videos of bird flight patterns. Others of his demonstrate timelapse flocking. 

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Metathesis

Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word. 

Metathesis is responsible for some common speech errors, such as children calling spaghetti basketti.  The Old English þyrl ‘hole’ underwent metathesis to þryl. This gave rise to a verb þrylian ‘pierce’, which became Modern English thrill, and formed the compound nosþryl ‘nose-hole’ which became Modern English nostril. So the words for ‘hole’ and ‘to make a hole’ are essentially the same. Through, thrill, drill, whirl, hole are all essentially the same.  Let’s see: Hole – the [bottomless] hollow. The container. The passageway. The receptacle. The uncontainer. The receiving. Drill – the whirling, piercing through to make the hole. Thrill – the whirling, exciting, exhilarating feeling of making the hole – or is it the whirling, exciting, exhilarating feeling of the hole being made? Read more

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Age of disaster

'Age of disaster' is the term used  by cultural philosopher and activist Lieven de Cauter to describe our disastrous age marked by its mounting crises, dramatic conflicts, growing inequality and the dissolution of final certainty.  Jean Russell calls it 'Breakdown Thinking' and proposes 'Breakthrough Thinking' in its place. Don Michael called it 'the New Wilderness' and IFF calls it a 'conceptual emergency' and proposes 'practical hope and wise initiative'.

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Liquid Times

One of many, recently coined terms for the age of uncertainty that we are currently living in.

This introduction to Bauman's term Liquid Times is by Phil Dickinson at hyperrhiz.net: "We live in liquid times. All that was solid was already melting into air a century-and-a-half ago and now, at the dawn of this new millennium, what remains of the old certainties and security seems to decompose, disintegrate and disappear with dizzying rapidity. This is what Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls the doubled promise of liquid modern consumerism: that by stringing lived experience into an endless string of new 'beginnings,' "humans-turned-consumers are now offered the chance to cram many lives ... [a] whole series of families, careers, [and] identities" into each accelerating cycle of accumulation and disposal of commodities and the experiences that go with them." Capable of  "pre-empting the future, and disempowering ... the past," the 'consuming life' can now make time itself disappear beneath the imagistic flows and torrents of globalised capital."

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Trying to life a personal life vs the great dark birds of history

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Holacracy

A 'social technology' for organisation that distributes leadership and dispenses with managers.

In the idioticon

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Political Kitsch

A form of propaganda designed to shape the direction of public policy. 

Drawing on the term kitsch as it is used in the art world to mean art that either uses rubbish (literally) or that sentimentalises everyday experiences, political kitsch is designed to reassure and comfort the observer/consumer. According to Catherine Lugg at Rutgers: "Kitsch is art that engages the emotions and deliberately ignores the intellect, and as such, is a form of cultural anesthesia. It is this ability to build and exploit cultural myths - and to easily manipulate conflicted history - that makes Kitsch a powerful political construction." Political kitsch, she says, tends to make facile use of symbolism, to reinforce national mythologies and to exploit conventional, constructed political 'realities'. It colonises the receiver's consciousness and pacifies rather than provokes. In the US, political kitsch tends to play to 'homey American certitudes'. In England, former Prime Minister John Major tried to do the  something similar when he said: "Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers."

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Signs that appeared.

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In George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the zombies turn a shopping mall into a historic site. Francine: What are they doing? Why do they come here? Stephen: Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.  Next time you go to the mall or supermarket, visit it as if it were an enormous museum artefact from a post-apocalyptic civilisation. 

Seymour

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Cultures change slowly, organically. They are always in motion, always in transition – what Grant McCracken refers to as “culture by commotion”. You cannot just replace one culture with another. There is always a dominant culture side by side with practices that challenge the norms of that way of life. Cultures evolve as examples of new practice are nurtured, in the soil of the old culture but not in support of it. The beginning of successful cultural leadership is therefore always a small act of creative transgression. It is small because transgression on a larger scale amounts to revolution and will be vigorously resisted. And because the smaller – and cheaper – it is, the easier it is for others to follow the lead. It must also be transgressive because in order to shift the culture we must challenge it: we must do something counter-cultural.

Dancing at the Edge

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Mansuetude

How kindness can soften the damaging focus on 'not getting it wrong'. Dr Alissa Clarke talks about a number of our conditioned tendencies such as:

over-fixation on what is 'right' or 'correct'

critical self-comparison

judgemental treatment of the individual processes and abilities of self and other

These can all be softened by mansuetude. More here.

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Maltese Breast Stroke

Inverted breast stroke where the arms start wide and gather in praise, admiration, attention, money and other good things that we need to keep us going when times are hard. 

Naval and musical slang much favoured by disaffected members of jazz musicians who have been elbowed aside by an acquisitive band member.

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Achilles Syndrome

Apparently advanced skills built on fragile foundations - leading to a fear of being found to be a fraud. The science.