Ingenuity Arts: Strategies for Adaptive Leadership

Thinking Cities - 21 minute video

2012-02-20T10:09:00.002-05:00

Although this is a commercial video produced by Ericsson, Thinking Cities outlines at least some of the key aspects of urban development and city planning that we are facing today. One of the biases is developed cities (not much is said about informal development even though it is the most rapid area of city growth globally). Geoffrey West, Carlo Ratti, Mathieu Lefevre along with a handful of others feature as the narrators of the changing global urban patterns.

I was most interested in the social city angles as well as the trash tracking project as both relate to my own research interests in mapping social capital in urban settings. Though West is very much criticized in some circles, I applaud his efforts to try and understand if they are variables and constants in city growth, development and change. The angle is interesting even if it will end up being refined or changed over time. Ratti's work is also well worth paying attention to, particularly where it can be integrated with other research and planning processes.

What kind of thing is a think tank?

2012-01-27T10:22:00.000-05:00

They are, of course, organizations of one kind or another whether formal, informal, small, large and so on. This post from "On Think Tanks" is highlights a very obvious but critical element, namely the people who originate, lead and live in the think tank. The organization is the people, particularly at the scale which most think tanks function - small, compact, mission-driven and expertise loaded. Being small, they need to be timely, selective, and capable of acting quickly and intelligently on opportunities. That nimbleness is underpinned by having invested in capacity, intellectual and otherwise, to carry out those timely forays. Being flexible and nimble isn't about being haphazard or careless - quite the opposite.

It would be worth exploring what role conscious organizational design plays in think tank establishment and growth. If think tanks were compared against a typology of organizations, where would they end up? It would seem that the small, entrepreneurial sector of the spectrum would be well represented with a power law distribution as size increases - the bigger a think tank is, the more rare it would be.

Has anyone come across a study of this type? What would such a study tell us about the role, purpose, and future of think tanks? Are they changing more or less than other institutions in their comparative space? Do the visible aspects of a think tank reveal what is going on under that visible layer? What would we see if the top layers were peeled back?

2012-01-05T14:22:00.002-05:00

Co.Design put together a compilation of 22 of the best infographics of 2011 that is worth taking a look at for a number of reasons. First, what each of them represents is interesting. Second, as a whole, they represent the many ways that we can visualize and communicate information. Third, they are not merely graphic representations but reflect a wide range of cultural and historic dynamics that remain important as we move into 2012. Finally, making good use of the data streams around us is an important space where technology and human experience intersect.

What does dying look like for businesses?

2011-12-06T14:12:00.001-05:00

This brief video from The End of Business is a sketch of what happens when organizations don't change quickly enough to survive. Businesses have always failed in some proportion but the stat from Forbes about 70% of Fortune 1000 companies failing by 2031 is pretty sobering. None of them think it can happen or are living like it will happen. But it will.

Amazon is a Super Nova Business

2011-12-01T11:39:00.001-05:00

This infographic, sent to me compliments of Brian Dijkema, is just plain shocking. The monster size of their disruption has/is/will change the retail climate and a lot of other things as well.
Source: Frugaldad.com

2011-10-27T14:57:00.002-04:00

Understanding how people might move through a given space is very important for designers, architects, planners, advertisers, retailers, and really any setting that involves people. Daniel Hambleton has a really interesting piece of software that allows 'people' to navigate through spaces by ray casting - a method that involves the 'people' seeing the room and then moving based on what they see.

Whether you're designing office space or putting together a new streetscape, this could be a very valuable modelling tool. As we know, modelling doesn't tell you what will actually happen but it does sharpen our capacity to think through how various combinations of elements will influence human interactions and the flow of crowds.

Dragonfly: AI Perception and Motion from ArchitectureInCombination on Vimeo.

Take a look at see what you think. It's interesting to watch just one of the figures and see what 'it' does. The group flows are also very intriguing. I'd like to try changing configurations, crowd size, etc. to see what happens.

Does anyone know how this compares with crowd-flow modelling software applications like this - eg. SMART Move (see below)?

SMART Move simulation software:

2011-10-20T14:55:00.001-04:00

I recently attended Shreyas Sundaram's talk at the University of Waterloo. Shreyas is an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering. Some aspects of the talk are more technical than a general audience will likely tolerate but it is worth sticking with Shreyas through those parts for the conclusions and insights that his work represents.

A couple of points to note - the ability to discover malicious nodes mathematically in a network. This is useful in finding bad sensors but is equally useful in understanding where key gatekeepers are in a human network. The brokers who are critical to information flows have always been important but in vary large data sets they may be difficult to detect.

Another interesting point very much related to the malicious nodes work is the ability to determine which nodes bridge between network structures. What nodes, if you removed them, would split the network into two or more distinct parts? There are many possible applications of this as well.

The power of developing powerful mathematical tools for understanding networks is that the processes developed can be applied to very large data sets. Mathematics also makes it possible to see novel structures and qualities that would not be possible with human processing alone. From epidemics to information technology structures and power grids, gaining greater insight into the science of networks is critical. In addition, disseminating that information and teaching people across disciplines how the technical aspects of networks function will determine the level of sophistication we can sustain in our various domains of analysis.

The Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation was the host of the talk and they seek to deepen our understanding and application of complexity science as a means of approaching the most challenging issues and questions of our time.

Diffusing Information and Reaching Agreement in Networks: Convergence and Resilience from Waterloo Institute for Complexit on Vimeo.

(that's me ducking in at the front right at the beginning)

2011-10-01T14:21:00.000-04:00

I've never been able to restrain my drawing/sketching/doodling tendencies. During my formal schooling, it came up from time-to-time as an issue of attentiveness. The assumption was that if I was doodling, I wasn't listening. For me it was in fact the opposite. I somehow think better when I sketch and draw. That has translated to writing words, ideas and concepts and then connecting them, filling things in, linking possibilities.

This TED talk suggests I don't need to feel bad about it.

2011-09-09T12:17:00.000-04:00

I've been following InnoCentive from early on, ever since I first came across it in the burgeoning field of collaboration thinking and practice. For those of you who may not have heard about InnoCentive, this brief video is a great explanation of how it works.

I am interested in InnoCentive at two levels. The first is participation as a solver and potential seeker. The second is as a platform. I think the second is far more important and more profound. As a functional brokering of problems and problem solvers that is commercial, sizable, substantive, and growing, we must keep iterating this platform in ways that suit other settings.

Here are some possible platform spaces for this to be expanded into (or grown as there are some entries in some categories already):

Think tanks (there are 6500 globally and the number is growing)
Universities (Yaffle.ca is a good example but there must be much more it these kinds of projects)
Disenfranchised PhD grads (this pool must be tapped, coordinated and motivated to apply their knowledge to current challenges)
Libraries and databases (where search rankings and other trending data are married to people who are working in those areas or who could work in those areas)
Intellectual capital in the developing world (those who don't have institutional access but who have a great deal to offer)
Other educational spaces (imagine a richly connected network of schools at all levels where real problems were being contemplated by all kinds of students around the globe)

The Magic of Flying

2011-08-03T17:06:00.000-04:00

I grew up designing, building, flying and crashing various kinds of rockets, U-control, and radio control aircraft. There were very few things that gripped my imagination more as a boy. The first time I flew a 2-meter glider I had built, my hands were shaking I was so nervous and excited. It was fantastic (and the climb up the spruce tree to retrieve it later wasn't bad either).

Watching this amazing video of a more design that follows the motion of a bird re-awakened all the magic. It's a fantastic machine that really does change the way we might consider flying things (or ourselves) around. I'd love to see a next step where electronic or pneumatic muscles provide the motion rather than a rotating motor but it loses none of the wonder when you see it actually flying around the auditorium in a controlled way.

Data Visualization - Minimum Wage in Europe

2011-07-12T10:08:00.000-04:00

This is a dataset available on Google via Public Data Explorer and represents how minimum wages have changed in Europe since 1999. There are other very interesting datasets and with various governments around the world opening up public data, this is an important research space to watch and explore for stories.

Decision structures as simple, chaotic, complex or complicated

2011-07-04T13:27:00.000-04:00

Dave's short video is a good introduction to the cynefin framework that Cognitive Edge uses as it's core idea. One of the more important elements to keep in mind is that their approach puts data before structure rather than the much more common pouring of data into structures.

The different ways of interacting with a system or set of circumstances depending on whether it is simple, chaotic, complex or complicated is also worth noting. Missteps here in organizations and management are as common as dandelions in a lawn. Leaders and managers who get this are comparatively rare. Those who actually apply it more rare still.

The Problems of Reductionism

2011-06-23T09:25:00.000-04:00

Smith College professor, Robert Dorit, has written a very fine reflection on the persistent problem of reductionism - the illusion that by breaking something into it's parts you have fully explained it. Despite increasing awareness within the most reductionist disciplines - biology, chemistry and physics - that such is not the case, significant institutional and cultural momentum over the previous centuries means this thinking is still alive and well.

Dorit explains that reductionist thinking is a very significant problem in science and culture because it represents a hazardous blind spot. In essence, we've become highly skilled at taking things apart but have much less skill in synthesizing and integrating that knowledge.

He points out that we know a great deal about neural functions but are still unable to explain consciousness with similar detail. We know a lot about genes but don't really understand the most significant aspects of the relational web that stands between genes and a school of fish that migrates to find food. Complexity science and, I would argue, network science, may represent a turn away from reductionism and toward integration.

Analysing something by breaking it into smaller and smaller parts has yielded great insight and we shouldn't disparage that. What we need to be very cautious of is any claim that such reductive analysis represents complete knowledge. It clearly does not. Reductive analysis becomes reductionism when there is a blind commitment to disassembly as the final form of knowledge. We must avoid that and call it out when we see such assertions made at the expense of integration and synthesis.

* A tip of the hat to Ben Ramalingam from Aid at the Edge of Chaos. It was his post that pointed me to the Dorit article and is well worth visiting for any number of other posts that explore complexity, aid, and problem solving.

Hard-won research specialties are not easily surrendered or modified. That means that we have inculturated reductionism through institutionalizing it. That has it's place, too. It is not, however, a universal model or one that can work in isolation. I think that one of the reasons it is difficult to attract new people into science stems in part from the embedded reductionist paradigm.

Meaning is not usually found buried at the end of an obscure, hyper-specialized piece of knowledge. While that knowledge may in fact be important, it is meaningless apart from a relationship with all kinds of other knowledge. We need institutions and practices that recognize this hazard and that develop new ways of thinking about what we know.

Dynamic Particles form Network

2011-06-10T11:24:00.000-04:00

Seeing information in motion powerful because we get a sense of the relational dimensions of data. Each piece of data can be examined but we can't understand the patterns and possible implications until we see the wider context and the dynamics of that context. Though the following video wasn't devised to simulate network formation, I couldn't help but see the deep connection to how various agents/people in motion form networks over time that are patterned but not neatly.

In this program, variables can be changed and the program re-run. The crossing point in this came with my recent reading of Greg Spencer's paper "Creative economies of scale: an agent-based model of creativity and agglomeration" which features modelling of the dynamics of location, knowledge generation, and innovation. When the ideas in that paper are considered alongside Alvin's art/visualization/programming work, the possibilities are intriguing. Here's what Alvin says about his project:

Form finding particle field may generate a variety of forms through simple behavioural interactions. The interactions are dependant on variables such as displacement, proximity and density.

With some adjustment of variables, we can see how people, rather than particles, might form communities of practice, social gatherings, business connections, and other identifiable social patterns. Simulation does not equal an understanding of what actually exists, how it has changed or, most importantly, how it may change in the future. But if we set aside the predictive grail, modelling and simulations can help us gain understanding about how multiple variables interact over time. That can be useful indeed and the visualizations produced are powerful educational tools. They are also fantastic in translating specialized knowledge and complexity into a form that a whole range of people can understand and appreciated.

Depth Of Field (DoF) w/o Blur from Alvin C. on Vimeo.

DIY Street Planning for Neighbourhoods

2011-06-06T13:35:00.000-04:00

It can seem very simple - neighbours work together to solve the immediate design challenges of their neighbourhood where they live, pay taxes, and interact (or not) with each other. But it isn't simple. Not at all. We aren't in the habit of tackling the issues we face together. We're great at autonomy, fantastic at looking after ourselves. But some things just can't be tackled that way.

My experiences living in Canada seem very similar to this UK example. I like the idea of DIY planning and development for adjusting things toward a better solution. We need the specialists but they should never be able to do their work in isolation. An even if one solution worked at one time, an ability to evolve over time is essential to our design work at all levels.

Government 2.0 - Wiki of What's Happening in Canada

2011-06-03T13:12:00.000-04:00

For people interested in how government institutions are responding to the current communication and collaboration climate, you can visit this wiki that collects Government 2.0 initiatives from around the world and arranges them in neat columns by government department.

You can shoot directly to the Maple Leaf listings here at the Canadian Government 2.0 best practices page (I think it's more a question of whether alternative media exist at all rather than a best practices space, i.e. you get a trophy just for showing up as the field isn't well populated). You'll discover, for example, that the Canada Revenue Agency held a YouTube video contest about the Underground Economy that challenged people to make and send in a video about how bad the underground economy is. Titles include: "The Taxman is Watching" and "The Story of a Skimmer" among others.

It also has a "Canadian Government Tweeple" page that lets you see both political and non-political tweeters. I doubt that it's exhaustive - it a wiki afterall so it depends on people filling in various blanks - but it's a start and over time may become a useful place to visit if you're trying to get in touch with someone - going through the official websites of governments, particularly the civil service, is akin to a scenario where Message in a Bottle is the only movie for an international flight.

Data Visualization - "See" Stanford Ph.D. Topic Relationships

2011-06-01T13:47:00.003-04:00

There is little question that data visualization is becoming an increasingly powerful tool as more and more people are able to access the explosion of software options and use that software to view their data. This data visualization project from Stanford is particularly interesting. It allows you to click on a discipline and then see how that discipline relates to other disciplines based on Ph.D. dissertations written at Stanford 1993-2008.

You can click here to see it live. Having seen how it works, the next thing is to ask what it means. What does the visualization tell us? What new information is created by the various combinations of existing information that was loaded into the software?

You will see that certain disciplines have had more dissertations written within them than others. Some are more isolated than others. Education and sociology have an interesting (though not surprising) connection and if you look at economics, you'll see interesting approaches from disciplines in different parts of the circle. The gray shadowing gives a sense of what the overall representation is before you start clicking. If you move the slider to the far left and then use your arrow keys, you can see what happens year-to-year within whatever discipline you've selected. Another interesting one is that ethics scarcely moves the medicine/biology groupings at all.

If you took all universities and all disciplines over time, you would have a clear sense of where the intellectual investments have been made over time. Overlay funding, grants, publishing, commercialization and other data sources and a very intriguing dynamic of higher education would be created.

37Signals and Office Design

2011-05-31T13:32:00.002-04:00

Here's a brief video about how 37Signals has balanced privacy, interaction and physical space to achieve the mix of what they think is needed to be successful.

I really loved the felt walls designed like ledgestone. I've followed up with some queries about where to get industrial felt like that and have been successful in finding both Canadian and US suppliers. It's a great material (and the video tour is interesting as well).

Design: So Very Critical, So Very Vulnerable

2011-05-26T10:17:00.000-04:00

This very short Deiter Rams video segment from a Co.Design interview reflects the non-negotiability of design being part of the most important structures of an organization - if you don't have design insulated(protected) at a very high level, you can forget it. That's what Deiter says. You may have a crack team but if you put them in the wrong part of your organizational ecosystem...curtains. Dead before they begin.

That is sobering indeed. And it applies to all talent in an organization. In retail the mantra is "Location, location, location" and in talent development and creativity generating deep value, the mantra is the same, "Location, location, location".

This is clear and simple but almost never followed.

Arduino - Open Source Hardware

2011-05-25T12:03:00.000-04:00

Tinkering with any kind of code is interesting because it gets you past the front doors of the user experience and a step closer to the science and engineering that lies beneath the skin of our various devices. Access means you can change things, tweak this, drop that, add something new, and see what happens.

I've been resurrecting my Arduino experiments from January (when Dylan and I took a Saturday course on it) as I learn more about C++ and how to make a computer talk to a micro-controller and then how to make a micro-controller engage with the environment around us. I'm new to this particular platform but inventing, DIY tweaking and looking under the hood are life-long pursuits so the ideas are percolating as the technical elements become more clear. What I really like about the Arduino platform is the idea that it is an open source piece of hardware - a critical link between open source software and the world of atoms. There is deep potential in large-scale open source hardware/software combinations even beyond what we're seeing already.

Installing the drivers and getting an old recycled desktop machine on my bench to communicate with the Arduino Uno was a bit tricky. I don't have it connected online so flash drives have been the transfer medium. Then there were some problems with getting the COM port to work properly. All is now solved and I can make the LED blink, run micro switches, and get the computer and Arduino to send text messages back and forth - all vital signs of an emerging digital ecology that I hope will spark some interesting projects.

This Quadcopter is high on the hit list of things to build next - I like to move from crawl to run and just skip the walk stage. I grew up designing, building and flying radio controlled airplanes so this is a very intriguing project to latch on to. Now, could it be built using an old CD player, a blender, and a broken MacBook...

Leaving Edges Open for City Innovation - Boston

2011-05-06T15:09:00.000-04:00

There are many indicators out there given the tectonic masses of data rocketing around our collective computing devices and systems. Cities and governments are awash in it. Finding ways to connect people with skills and interest to the challenges we face is something that needs to be pursued much more intensively. There are great experiments and functioning platforms for this already but our cities need to grow in this platform space more than nearly anywhere else.

Boston has a really interesting website that includes indicators of urban health in a variety of sectors accompanied by easy ways to dig into areas of interest to learn more. It's a kind of jumbo sketch board where you can see what needs to be done and then perhaps dig in and shift the balance in favour of a solution.

The City of Hamilton would benefit from a system like this - link OpenHamilton with a wide range of other sectors and agencies to develop a map of the needs, opportunities and innovation centres that interested citizens can follow and contribute to. Half the challenge of engaging people in change is giving them right-sized and right-timed productive work to do and then, in turn, provide public feedback to see how the inputs are actually leading to changes that matter.

It is well documented that we use less electricity when we can see directly what that decreased use is and what difference it makes. When we can't see it, our commitment wanes and we find ourselves following old habits. Make the data sing, dance and serve the common good. It won't do any of those things if it is fragmented, locked up, unintelligible, or static. We need to see. We need to know.

There is the hopeful movement in this direction through Hamilton Vital Signs. A much more interesting angle would be to link this to dynamic inputs where possible, a whole range of contributing factors that are relevant, volunteer or professional opportunities, and a host of other things. There's not much static about life. Really interesting things will happen when our writing and reporting are more robustly rich and dynamic.

Your cell phone company is tracking you

2011-03-30T16:10:00.000-04:00

This post in Zeit certainly gave me pause to consider just how much other people, i.e. for-profit companies, know about me and where I go. The German politician, Malte Spitz, apparently sued his cell phone company and won six months worth of data that they had collected about him. He then presented that data as a timeline that you can watch. Speed, zoom level, online posts, etc., are all included. You can see it live here.

While we claim a certain amount of freedom through the use of wireless devices like cell phones, there is clearly an exchange going on that most of us don't think about very much. What is my data worth to the cell phone company that I buy services from? Has that been calculated into my bill? It does seem a bit inequitable that I pay them for the services I use and they harvest massive amounts of very personal data about me. Somebody is getting a two-for-one deal (hint: it's not us lowly cell phone users).

Is Crowdsourcing a Form of Exploitation?

2011-03-28T13:58:00.000-04:00

This very short SXSW 2011 video clip considers that crowdsourcing may both exploit the contributors by giving so little in exchange for a significant collective input and it may also encourage people to be inattentive to their work because the odds of it being accepted are so low.

It is important to look at these various angles in considering both the pros and the cons of crowdsourcing. Some of the writing and commentating today is much more prone to see it as a nearly unbridled source of good.

The Poetry of Riding a Bike (very well) and Filming It

2011-03-23T11:13:00.000-04:00

FRAMED-Andi Wittmann Rider profile from Felix Urbauer on Vimeo.

A structure for adaptive organizations?

2011-03-18T12:27:00.000-04:00

A colleague passed along this video that features a piece of software that reflects an adaptive organizational architecture.

Has anyone used it?

My comment was that it might not fare well inside an existing structure (seems like there would have to be very high buy-in for success to be realistic) but it is intriguing for start-up organizations or teams. I'm also very interested in how it could support volunteer teams or ad hoc groups that have some specific piece of work in mind. I'll have to dig around the website more and see where they've taken it.

Visualize Language Acquisition - See Social Interaction

2011-03-16T16:10:00.000-04:00

This Deb Roy TEDtalk is a stunning example of directions that data visualization might go - even complex data like thousands of hours of video and audio. Linking that to the study of people (language acquisition in this case) demonstrates how it might be used in person-to-person interactions but also within wide populations as well (the Obama speech that is analyzed).

What doesn't this kind of analysis tell us? What gets left out? What are the hazards?

Charles Leadbeater: We Think

2011-03-02T17:24:00.000-05:00

Here's a cool little video that takes a swing at explaining at least part of the turbulence around us.

I can't stop thinking either about Michel Serres's little piece on how education is not a commodity. He suggests that when you trade a piece of silver for a loaf of bread, you still have a piece of bread and a piece of silver - just in different hands. But when you explain to someone else how to figure out area of a triangle, both of you now know how to figure out the area of a triangle: knowledge grows as it's shared, rather than diminishing. Leadbeater doesn't say that in this video but he points to it. I think that's really interesting.

Better Cities from Better Planning

2011-02-28T06:37:00.000-05:00

Hazel Borys wrote a great article on getting small as a way for cities to bump up their thriving. I've taken the quotes she has of some thoughtful city builders below. The whole article is worth reading. Thanks to Urban Health Prof (Jim Dunn) for tweeting the article.

Finding the economic edges of smart city building:

“It’s hard rations, and it’s tough times with most all city budgets. Any infrastructure has to guarantee a return on investment. Convention center expansions, ballparks, grade separated streets, and wide streets never yield the expected returns. Cities that continue down those paths will exacerbate their fiscal conditions. Neighborhood streets, complete streets, walkable neighborhoods have major returns.”

“Local governments – because they don’t have as much flexibility as state and federal governments – have to be more disciplined. A street with healthy retail and housing is worth more to the tax base – whether property tax, sales tax, or income tax. Giant roads and shopping centers are losing strategies. Infrastructure must add value, and the time for experimentation is over.”

--Former Milwaukee Mayor and CNU President John Norquist

Harnessing a DIY attitude to foster city building:

“Shrinking city budgets have obvious implications for infrastructure. We’ve had warnings from professional engineer associations that the water systems of American cities are dangerously old and in need of replacement. Which applies to our entire infrastructure, except for recent light rail lines. We’ve elaborated a road and street system that is so enormous – and we’ve done it incrementally over 90 years – that we will have a very tough time keeping it up, as we become a less affluent nation. Without necessary funds for repair, we’re going to keep on deferring maintenance, even though the results are obvious roadway, water, power and infrastructure problems.”

“Larger picture is that our cities have become over-scaled to the resource realities of the future: oil, coal, electricity, natural gas, but also the fiscal realities. The bottom line is that all cities will find themselves contracting. City planning may become less institutionalized, with more self-organizing, emergent task forces. It is becoming self-evident that we have to plan in a certain way, to build more densely, compactly, and flexibly. I have this fantasy that all of the great underemployed planners out there at the moment will become their own developers, doing great incremental infill, sprawl repair, and redevelopment.”

-- James Howard Kunstler

When our antiquated laws hamper us in building something better - time for change:

Most of our current laws make the economic losers – from the city’s perspective – easy to build, while mixed-use walkable neighborhoods are generally illegal. Particularly at a time when incremental, small-scale infill is more supportable than vast greenfields, tools like form-based codes and zoning reform allow flexibility in a changing marketplace, along with the walkable environments that people value and that generate the most optimal tax base.

-- Hazel Borys

Social Impact: A $100 Million Experiment

2011-02-18T10:39:00.000-05:00

The growing interest in social finance is putting pressure on advocates to identify a credible metric for social impact. If, for instance, you buy a social impact bond, you will get a return on your investment that is financial and will have a positive impact on society in some specific way. The financial return side is pretty standard and we have a long legacy around how that is managed and assessed. The social impact side is more tricky in part because it is sometimes difficult to standardize a measure of social good or social capital.

This FastCompany article features the Obama team digging into the social impact bond experiment that was started in the UK. As this active work unfolds, it will receive a lot of scrutiny by people who are working in the 'social mission' sector, a space that often blurs the not-for-profit/for-profit lines in the interest of a social good outcome. The intensive entrepreneurial spirit of the United States as it appears to be turning a corner economically, is a great place for a substantial experiment like this to run. We will be well served to watch and learn as the process unfolds.

Intelligent, public good financial structures that work would represent a significant social ingenuity gain.

David Korowicz video on Complexity

2011-01-21T11:17:00.013-05:00

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Physicist David Korowicz documents the disturbing growth in the complexity of trade and financial networks and in the various types of infrastructure. He sees the collapse process as a system of re-enforcing feedbacks that cut investment in energy and R&D and cause supply chains and IT networks to break down.

Recorded on day two of The New Emergency Conference: Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World held on 10-12 June 2009, All Hallows College, Drumcondra, Dublin 9, Ireland.

Around the 18 minute mark, he reflects on something interesting. If all of the IT infrastructure of the last twenty years suddenly quit, we wouldn't go back to life twenty years ago, it would regress much more deeply in a matter of a few days to life much prior to 1990. Why?

As complex systems grow, interconnections goes up significantly. Also, what we've built in the last twenty years is tuned to the conditions as they have changed over those twenty years. In this there is the notion of collapse, ie. things don't break in a fashion that is the inverse of assembly. Instead, collapse is a new form of novelty. He doesn't say that exactly but it seems a natural tentative conclusion.

Adaptation Doesn't Equal Fun

2011-01-19T23:39:00.001-05:00

Change is often driven by some form of necessity. And that means it isn't often what we choose. Are you part of a boring, under performing, status quo organization? Do you have aspirations to make it something different? Do you want to help create a more dynamic, team-driven and passionate culture?

People will give you grief.

Some will dig at you slowly, dragging their feet, others will come at you with Howitzers, ready to splatter you. All the people who have settled for a calm, slow death will be upset that you are doing something that agitates their complacency.

You will gain some friends but you'll gain enemies as well. Add to that a sizable middle group that will treat you with baffled indifference, applauding when the winds blow your way, picking up rocks when it doesn't.

Certain individuals will, despite your successes, remind you only of your failings. You'll put together a great project, worry over it, toil in seeing it come to life, protect it, fight for it, pull it off, and then some of those who don't want you to succeed will invest their energies in making sure that whatever you missed is clearly communicated.

You will sometimes be alone in your pursuit (but don't get all lone-ranger egotistical about it because sometimes when you are alone it's because you really are off the bubble).

Make sure you aren't running solo if you can help it (we all need freaky friends, as Tom Peters reminds us) but, still, you'll find from time to time that you are pulling the bulk of the load as people second guess, get scared, get angry, or get jealous. That isn't fun, not at all.

But working for change means that you are saying that what was there isn't enough, or, to be more hopeful, that there could be a more fulfilling and effective way of living, being a family, or working. And that will anger people who have a mostly-sure stake in the current system and uncertain prospects in the system you are proposing. Avoiding change is a high priority for some while for others constant disruption is an addiction. Most of us experience the moving target between those extremes.

Keep moving. Stay committed. Be humble. Laugh.

Braddock, Pennsylvania - Urban Decay and Frontier Growth

2011-01-17T07:30:00.000-05:00

Ever since reading about Braddock, Pennsylvania in a Rolling Stone article, I've been very taken by way in which Mayor Fetterman has tried to bring life to a city that used to have 20,000 or so residents and now has around 10% of that with the core industry long gone.

PBS did a video in 2010 that features Fetterman and Braddock.

Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.

Where are you seeing efforts to re-establish the decaying edges of urban life? What kinds of urban frontier strategies do you think are most promising?

Stanford d.school

2011-01-15T10:38:00.002-05:00

The Stanford d.School has put it's design approach to work with K-12 educational experiments in both curriculum and classroom development. These approaches are living experiments based on the design approaches that companies like IDEO have used to meet the challenges and solve the problems of clients. The thinking seems to be that if an approach like that works for big clients in industry, why not apply it to how we teach and learn.

You can view a slideshow that gives an overview of their first two years at the website.

An experiment like this is worth watching because it tells us something about how design approaches might translate into workspaces - or not. Is this a new edge in education or a bit of splash and fizz that cannot deliver on the expectations we have for education?

Who needs writers? Just get some clever coding fired up

2011-01-13T17:07:00.001-05:00

This is officially the first time I've ever written a post anywhere that links to Sports Illustrated. That's not a high-minded snub of people who write for or read SI - just that I'm not one of them. A colleague, however, is a big fan of baseball and dropped this on my desk recently - an article by Steve Rushin on how www.statsheet.com is using clever coding to assemble stories from the rivers of data that pour from sporting events. Those stories then populate websites that fans read to learn about the latest intel on their favourite team or player.

They could go one step further, allowing fans to make changes or suggestions as in an interactive genetic algorithm. Essentially the code spits out two or three versions, you say which one you like, it does another two or three, etc. Once it's about right, the code remembers it for next time, adapting itself to the person providing input. It's a perfect hybrid. Lots of data, lots of stats, a bit of personal flavour, and SI begins to look like Terminator Typewriter.

It's hard not to imagine that this could be applied in any number of settings and because it can, it most likely will. Rushin notes that anywhere that stats are part of writing, this approach could, in principle be used. Time will tell. I can assure you a human wrote this.

Riders on a Swarm :: The Economist

2011-01-12T13:22:00.000-05:00

What can ants teach us about how groups of living things function? Quite a lot, actually. With very little cognitive capability, ants provide evidence for how simple rules in a variable space that includes feedback loops can lead to very sophisticated and coordinated activity. Now, ants are not, in some sense, simple at all. Relative to the human brain, that ant brain is very much less capable. But compared to a comparable size of coal, an ant is vastly more complex. It is intriguing to consider how we might make better use of the characteristics revealed in ant functions to meet the demands we have for continuous innovation and improvement in human endeavours.

This Economist article from the past summer is worth dipping into if you'd like to ponder the life of ants without having to risk being swarmed. For seasoned complexity readers, I'm afraid there won't be a whole lot of new things to discover. It's still interesting stuff to think about, though.

Complexity Theory in the Social Sciences

2011-01-10T14:02:00.003-05:00

This is a fine syllabus from Professor Robert Axelrod for his University of Michigan course on Complexity Theory in the Social Sciences (PS 793). It features an exploration of where social science and complexity theory interact and where they may go. The field is changing so rapidly and in so many dimensions but this outline captures some important aspects of it, particularly from a political science/public policy angle - as per Prof. Axelrod's specialty.

There are many very good links to other resources in the syllabus. Commercial applications are less well-represented (not the focus of the course) as the angle of the course is more oriented toward academic resources and projects. There are links to some simulations, the Santa Fe Institute, and adjacent fields of study such as cellular automata, chaos, and self-organizing criticality.

A final resource to point out is the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems. The CSCS appears mostly oriented toward existing UofM students but there seems to be some possibility of for non-UofM individuals to apply for the program. Has anyone participated in this program or had any association with it?

Visual Map of Tweeting Activity

2011-01-08T11:33:00.001-05:00

Frog Design has come up with a visualization of real-time Tweeting activity globally that is intriguing. They have also developed a 3D version that you can see online if you have the red and blue 3D glasses.

Take a look here.

Search 500 Billion Words for Trends

2010-12-17T15:46:00.000-05:00

A colleague sent this fascinating link over that represents Google's entry of more than 500 billion words from books published as early as 1500. You can enter a word and see the frequency of use over time. I ran this one on "complexity" and the term appears to have risen along with the increased pace of life and culture.

You can visit here to see it live and to try out your own words or word combinations. It's interesting to see what words like "horse" or "satchel" or "Facebook" look like when you run the query.

Organizations are Confusing

2010-12-13T13:18:00.000-05:00

We seem to have divided minds when it comes to thinking about designing, running, and leading organizations. Since we spend most of our time tweaking rather than re-formatting, it would be logical to conclude that we are content with the overall structures and processes, the ideas and actions that inform those organizations, and simply need to ensure maintenance is done - reviews, reports, feedback on this or that, adjusted policies, refined strategies, updated plans.

On the other hand, a lot of people are unhappy with the organizations they inhabit. It takes no effort at all to find people with heaps of criticism for the places where they work, learn, worship, volunteer or derive services. This malaise seems to contradict the tweaking behaviour that is common. If we really don't like things, why do we keep doing them? It's kind of a puzzle.

More than three million people have watched this Daniel Pink video/RSA live diagram on what motivates us but I wonder if you would concede that he is framing this tension in a way that promotes discussion about how we organize ourselves and what we might yet need to learn about doing it better.

Penrose on Jumbo Architecture

2010-12-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

This is a notable lecture on some really, really big architecture. Aside from the intriguing content, I love how Penrose uses a classic overhead projector with transparencies and drawings. They have a kind of flexibility that PPT doesn't and are less likely to be problematic technically. The double screen is also a very useful redundancy - if one unit fails (which is pretty much limited to a bulb burning out) you've still got another eye.

His visual elements are valuable and worth paying attention to as a means of communicating complex ideas. The introducer suggests that Penrose isn't that happy about an idea until it can be rendered in a drawing of some kind. That's not a bad way of thinking about things.

Now, is anyone building a highly compact, portable overhead projector?

Invisible Cities: Seeing Beyond the Buildings

2010-11-26T15:15:00.000-05:00

This is a very interesting project that adds a clear visual element to the idea that we need to map our cities using more than the traditional statistical data (that is also very important). We need to see the weave of the city, what can't be gained by looking at buildings. Ethnography approaches could really be enhanced by this tool.

I am extremely keen to learn about this kind of approach for Hamilton, ON.

Invisible Cities from Christian Marc Schmidt on Vimeo.

Fabrication Ingenuity - Chinese Modular Building

2010-11-15T17:24:00.000-05:00

Fascinating human ingenuity in the rapid construction of a fully modular 15 storey Chinese high rise. Highly organized, safe, off-site prefabrication means it takes more than six days to build - it took six days to assemble.

This doesn't make it any less impressive. It just shows modular construction pushed to the limits. I'm sure that the time will be decreased further. I wonder how it actually functions and what the compromises in construction were - anybody build modular steel buildings? What do you think?

Detroit: Renewal - Not Just Decay

2010-10-28T22:58:00.000-04:00

Detroit is the stormless Katrina of the north and often gets bad press for all that's wrong with it. We love success stories almost as much as we love success stories gone bad. Detroit is a complex enough landscape, human and otherwise, to support any number of story lines. Thanks to Jeff Neven for passing on this video that gives us a more nuanced view. I really liked the contrast of the old school and new school - selective journalism has often just talked about the abandoned building without reference to what's across the street.

Simple Rules - Complex Behaviour

2010-10-18T16:11:00.000-04:00

Simple rules - complex behaviour.
Complex rules - bad behaviour.

This comes from one of the slides in this engaging deck of images and ideas. Take a look.

Complexity & Humanity 2.0

View more videos from ResonanceBlog.

Network Weaving

2010-08-10T09:51:00.001-04:00

Complexity science can feel very esoteric, inaccessible and eye-glazing for all but us convinced CS geeks. If you want something that is consistent with complexity theory but which has very tangible and useful handles, you may find this Network Weaving site helpful.

I first came across the site while reading about the success of Appalachian economic development in Ohio. They developed a strategy based on intentionally building robust networks that generated actual economic value. Their approach clearly demonstrates that leadership, intentionality, structure, and planning are all requirements of adaptive organizations but the way these approaches are used led to multi-hub networks rather than hierarchical, command-control, structures.

It seems very likely that their insights and practices are applicable at different scales and settings as long as what is mimicked is the strategic/structural approach, not the context-dependent variables.

Over time I think it will become increasingly common to see social network maps of organizations, neighbourhoods, cities, etc. We'll get better and better at identifying fragile, vulnerable networks and will, over time, learn how to increase their adaptability. We'll also be able to see where the networks reflect a healthy structure that exhibits sufficient resilience to weather unknown change.

City Museum - St. Louis

2010-08-06T06:25:00.005-04:00

I had never heard of it when we arrived in St. Louis a few days ago on vacation. But after we had toured the massive St. Louis Arch, Michelle noted that one of the brochure's she picked up had flagged City Museum (CM) as a must-see. We did so.

It turns out you don't just 'see' CM - you experience it. And once you've experienced it, a kind of imprinting seems to work on you, like an embedded chip or something. CM is a strange place. When you arrive, they don't give you a map of the place with a list of things to do. Instead, you start wandering around trying to figure out exactly what you've let yourself and your kids in for. You wouldn't be surprised if Tim Burton walked past or Willie Wonka himself appeared suddenly.

CM is nothing like the McDonald's-style danger-sanitized kinds of playgrounds that surround us. Want to know what current legal contours are surrounding children and public spaces? Don't bother cracking a book - just look at playgrounds. They may be colourful but most of them are as boring as a B-grade reality show (or any reality show, for that matter).

Are you afraid of heights? CM will scare you with a dangling school bus and passenger door that opens, wire 'tunnels' six stories in the air, and wire cages that you climb inside balanced precariously on the edge of the 10-storey roof. Are you claustraphobic? CM will push your limits with tunnels under the floor, a labyrinth cave area with tiny passages, and twisty wire-cage climbing spaces. You can't quite get the sense of height in this photo we took but if you look close, you'll see kids looking out of the bus door (there is a wire barrier so your kid won't go flying out but it does little to ease the sense of hazard you instinctively feel).

Founder, Bob Cassilly, wanted a place where you would be pushed slightly off-balance, where things would verge on the edge of control. CM is a massive art installation you get to climb in, on and around. Here's a quote from a land use website:

At times integrating elements of the factory (like the spiral shoe slide that runs through it) into the spaces, at other times boring holes through it, or slicing rooms into smaller and smaller spaces, it is an architect-less architecture of accretion, excavation, and evolution. Each environment is an expository riff on form and materials, materials that were found and repurposed, clustered and flayed, from industrial remnants, to parts of other buildings, to fully formed period environments. Tight spaces shaped like dinosaur guts, galleries of gargoyles, aquariums, monstrous mosaics, plazas, stalagmites, chutes, slides, caves, chambers, mezzanines.

I haven't stopped thinking about it since we left. The idea of re-purposing a post-industrial landscape has intrigued me for a long time. Many cities, including Hamilton, have spaces ideally suited for novelty and creative re-development. City building isn't about starting from scratch - you have to work with what you have, mix it up, add some new, re-think some old.

And there is more good news. Cassilly is working on Cementland - a 54 acre abandoned cement factory that is being prepared for more craziness, including water, pitch-black caves, and more high-in-the-sky terror. I'll definitely be visiting.

Web 3.0 - Relevance Becomes Critical

2010-06-02T16:53:00.001-04:00

Quantity isn't of much value if it isn't meaningful, at least as far as information goes. Having too much information can overwhelm us, obscuring the important bits under an avalanche of irrelevance. The following video explores how we are trying to sort out the massive flow of information online.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Adelphi University - slide deck

2010-05-05T16:12:00.000-04:00

Ingenuity Arts - adaptive leadership at Adelphi U conference

View more presentations from guest110f5d7.

Creative Places + Spaces

2010-04-21T15:36:00.000-04:00

This short Artscape video considers how connecting across traditional barriers and divides is an important discipline for innovation.

Stuart Kauffman joins University of Vermont

2010-03-18T13:47:00.001-04:00

This news item just showed up. Stuart Kauffman, who is one of the gurus of complex adaptive systems research, will be spending the fall of 2010-2012 at the University of Vermont as the Macmillian Scholar-in-Residence. He was deeply involved in the origins of the Sante Fe Institute - ground zero for many of today's leading complexity theorists.

The full article featuring an interview with Kauffman is here.

For those of you who haven't had a chance to read Reinventing the Sacred, I would recommend this as a significant personal statement by Kauffman of how complexity research has shaped his view of the world. The book is a courageous and candid exploration, that will fail to satisfy anyone but will spark important thinking by all who read it.

I look forward to seeing what angles Kauffman's research work will take at UVM.

How Fragile is Your Organization?

2010-03-09T11:38:00.000-05:00

By inputing a wide variety of data sources from revenue to number of staff to units sold, Ontonix can give you a dashboard reading of how fragile or resilient your company or organization is.

This is not a predictive tool (sound complexity applications avoid that trap) but is instead a way of measuring how interconnected an organization is and how it might respond to change.

This can be very critical in assessing risk, weighing various opportunities, or addressing organizational health and culture issues.

Email Connections - mapping your relationships

2010-02-22T15:35:00.001-05:00

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo. has a strange elegance. Watch the whole thing to see the various scales and relationships that are visualized using the data in one persons email history.

Prezi - Creative Communications

2010-02-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

Trying to find nonlinear ways to make presentations, talk about emerging ideas, or showcase the rich connections between things can be challenging within some of the more boxy software offerings we rely on.

Among the constantly changing sea of cloud-based software is this one that I recently came across. Prezi is an interesting way to mix words, images, make connections and share ideas. The basic version is free and they have quite a few samples so you can see how other people have used it.

Singing Bridges on Prezi

Slime Mold Wonders

2010-02-17T09:48:00.000-05:00

This slime mold video is a great example of simple rules leading to complex behaviour. The slime mold doesn't think - it just iterates a few simple rules over and over again and ends up with a very efficient way of 'exploring' its environment and optimizing that exploration. Look at what happens and if you are amazed and wonderstruck, YouTube provides many other compelling glimpses of slime molds in action. While we like images of soaring eagles, dedicated exploration teams, last-second goals and cute polar bears on shrinking ice-floes, "slime mould" isn't likely to figure in any corporate story-telling. "Hi, we're the R&D guys and we use slime molds to solve our engineering problems." Still, an interesting phenomena worth contemplating.

This post from Aid on the Edge of Chaos is definitely worth reading. The connections between slime mold, civil engineering, public policy and aid is a great run through the complexity theory landscape. Here is the post - Slime Mold, Simple Rules and the Politics of Self-Organisation.

WIRED has a good article on the Tokyo transportation experiment and great images to go with it. You can see it here.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership - Book Review

2010-02-16T17:14:00.000-05:00

I've been waiting months to write this review, mostly because I must, reluctantly, pan it and I'd rather not. Adaptive leadership is the motherland for me. This book may be a radical step for some and that's great. I did not find it useful.

Here is my Amazon review:

Adaptive leadership is very important. In the few pockets of business and organizational life these days that are untouched by the turbulence around us, business as usual is, it would seem, acceptable. The trouble is that there are so few arenas where that is the case. Finding ways to lead in a way that can adjust to rapid and often unexpected change is critical.

I received a review copy of this book from Harvard Business Press. When it arrived I was very excited to dig in and get jazzed by all the great content. The problem was that the book was about as dull to read as it was to look at (I scrawled this on my cover: "Don't judge a book by its cover. In this case you should. This books cover is really boring"). I was twenty pages in when I felt that they were in trouble. It felt like a Harvard Business Press word container with WalMart content inside. My disappointment was that it lacked any real edge. For people who are deeply immersed in complexity theory and related pursuits that examine how systems change over time, there just wasn't any real insight. For people who don't like that sort of thing, it would, I fear, feel impenetrable.

Reading about next things should be engaging, compelling, shocking even. This book wasn't any of that. I felt genuinely disappointed as I worked my way through out. I just couldn't track with the style or flow. It felt like I was at a really dull meeting that was supposed to be important but somehow wasn't. No Wheatley. No Holling. No Stacey. No Sante Fe Institute. No Kauffman. No cheeky Tom Peters feel. No Dave Snowden deadpan humour. Nothing daring.

There were no expeditions into the heart of real, living organizations where the good, bad and ugly was on display and the authors dared to do battle with their adaptive leadership rocket launchers. No biological modelling, computer simulations, real-time adaptations. After awhile, you just start to feel like the book was off, somehow - like when someone is staring past you. If I was Randy from American Idol, I'd say, "Hey, dog, it's a bit pitchy" or something like that.

In chapter 13 you'll find a six page bit on systems thinking but that's it. An adaptive leadership text that doesn't clearly track through the latest research and insight on what informs adaptive leadership doesn't add up. There was insufficient evidence that they have their finger on the pulsing neck artery of past, current, and emerging forms of adaptive leadership. A great topic area like this needs to evidence an awareness of adaptive practices in the very delivery of the content but that doesn't happen at all.

I'd love to give it a thumbs up - the title is definitely compelling - but I just can't. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise but all I can think is that I'm glad I had a review copy sent and didn't have to pay for it. The authors are probably very knowledgeable, interesting, and capable consultants but it just doesn't come through in the book, sadly. These are big players with long track records and tons of cultural cache who perhaps need a better way to deliver what they know than a vanilla-looking book that induces yawns.

There are many other books that are in line ahead of this one for developing my teams and thinking. It reminds me of a corporate comb-over. So disappointing. Next time involve a few freaky friends in the book development process.

New Paper on Complexity Theory and Peace-Conflict Situations

2010-02-08T09:09:00.000-05:00

Diane Hendricks has written a working paper that adds another piece of research to the exploration of how complexity theory might translate from the natural sciences to the social sciences. Her area of interest is in peace and conflict studies. Here is a paragraph from the Introduction:

Complexity theory in the natural sciences has brought fresh insight into the nature and working of complex systems and some have hoped that applying this theory to social systems, albeit necessarily in an adapted form, could be equally revealing and useful. I confess to being among their number although the degree and extent of the usefulness and applicability of complexity in these areas is not yet clear to me. I am, however, convinced of the potential to, at the very least, facilitate a more realistic (i.e. closer to the reality of how the social world works) and open approach to analysis and action for change. This working paper is an exploration of ideas, opinions and attempts related to the application of complexity theory to the field of conflict transformation and some early reflections on these.

These are important explorations and we are only beginning to understand how complexity theory might apply. We need to carefully work through whether there is something of substance in this approach or whether it is a fad that turns out to lack real explanatory power for organizing and designing human institutions and the resulting interactions. I am, like Diane, optimistic that there is indeed significant fruitfulness in researching these applications.

Parrot AR.Drone + SensorFly = Real-Time Artificial Flocking

2010-01-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

This is among the most cool flying things I've seen in a while. I grew up designing, building and flying various types of airplanes form the kind with wires to freeflight to full-feature radio controlled craft.

The iPhone-controlled Parrot AR.Drone is wonderfully imaginative and, combined the autonomously controlled SensorFly from Carnegie Mellon, opens up new worlds for small flying applications. Complexity theory will play into how groups or flocks of SensorFly devices interact and move.

Interactive genetic algorithms allow users to provide input on software-generated outcomes and such an approach would work well with a Parrot device + multiple SensorFly devices. The flock finds its way with nudging from an operator who might want to search a certain area.

Inspiring.

Andrew McAfee from MIT and Web 2.0

2009-12-17T08:45:00.000-05:00

Technology impacts us socially and culturally long before we understand what that impact is. Given that business and organizational life of all kinds is deeply cultural, it is no surprise that changes in how we communicate, share ideas, collaborate and assess value will not leave our enterprises unscathed. Many aspects of our current thinking, many inherited 'common sense' defaults, and assorted default habits need to be reconsidered.

Munk Debates

2009-12-02T12:49:00.001-05:00

Rob Joustra and I attended the Munk Debates last night at the new Koerner Concert Hall in downtown Toronto. It was an entertaining evening. Rob has written a good review of it on the Cardus After Hours blog.

It was obvious that the trick of the debate was to find a balance between actual rational/scientific heft and populist stage tactics designed to fling various kinds of mud in quasi-dignified ways.

There was a fair amount of common stock put in modelling future states of the global climate. My problem with that is the inherent difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of determining what the future state of a massively complex system like the global climate might be.

Weather isn't linear. Moving up the scale of complexity to climate doesn't improve things much. It's tricky to get a bead on precisely what the actual conditions are today, never mind being definitive about what the climate will be like in 50 years. Our use of resources and our incontrovertible wastefulness is evident all over the globe. The disparity around the planet doesn't require complex computer modelling to discern and remains a very critical issue.

I also wonder how average citizens are supposed to sort out all the rhetoric, expert mortar attacks, and climatologist personality wrangles in arriving at an informed and useful position. Add to the mix politicians and angling journalists and the confusion appears to be driving things toward some sort of darkly comic confusion.

Debates drive polarization and the effect of last nights encounter was to push things closer to a 50/50 split on the question of this being "the most pressing concern" that we face. The debate wasn't about climate issues being critical. Rather, it was about climate change being the most critical issue that we face.

I was disappointed that no one mentioned near-earth-objects. If a big enough chunk of rock hits us, change will be abrupt and cataclysmic - perhaps something new to worry about if you are feeling fatigue over the environment or H1N1 fear-mongering.

Great Training - Cognitive Edge in Toronto

2009-11-23T09:54:00.000-05:00

Here is another video that explains how Cognitive Edge uses complexity theory to generate valuable insight from narrative fragments using their SenseMaker software.

Also, there is a Cognitive Edge seminar coming up on November 25/26 in Toronto. You can see the details here. There is also a one-day workshop on Nov 27 that provides help in running the SenseMaker software. Having attended a Cognitive Edge event in San Francisco, I can endorse the value of the process and solid grounding of their approach.

Volunteers and our Social Fabric

2009-11-20T13:30:00.001-05:00

The volunteers who give time and money, the people who attend meetings, write letters, vote, and generally keep the common good machinery of society running are highly valuable. If they went away, government could not afford to pick up the slack. So what is the health of our Canadian civic core? Here's some reading from the research group I belong to that sheds some light on the question:

Complexity Theory - how it applies

2009-11-09T16:04:00.000-05:00

The very sharp folks over at Cognitive Edge have put together a clean and simple video that explains at a very general level how complexity theory can inform organizational design, strategy and mapping. Dave Snowden, with characteristic humour, explains how a birthday party for kids could be organized in one of three ways and then ends with "and that's what complexity theory offers" for viewers.

I attended a training session with Cognitive Edge over a year ago on San Francisco and this is a welcome communication piece for complexity science.

Vertical Farming

2009-11-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

This series of concepts on the Chris Jacobs website for high-density vertical farming is really intriguing to look at. I first read about this at work while going through a new issue of WIRED. What about putting these things in the middle of existing farming centres that are not too far from cities? There may be fewer issues and a bit less NIMBY but perhaps the economics of doing that would make it even tougher to sell than in cities.

I also think this would be a great way to make use of brownfield spaces in our cities - places where the soil is contaminated and can't be used in its current form. Build vertical farms in those spaces while remediation takes place below the ground with new technologies and sufficient safety measures in place. These brownfields are often in commercially valuable areas or near economic corridors.

Like many innovations, success comes from bringing together a number of drivers in such a way that a new, high value proposition emerges. Hopefully that will happen soon and we will be able to see some high-rise towers of food spring up. Having grown up on a farm, it would be interesting to take an elevator to the 21st floor to do some weeding or to dig potatoes.

Science in the City - Chris Hedges

2009-09-18T16:49:00.000-04:00

McMaster University and The Hamilton Spectator sponsored a lecture by Chris Hedges a couple of nights ago that I attended. According the website intro and the extended bio presented before his talk, Hedges is a journalist, has taught at Princeton, won a Pulitzer Prize, and done a good many other impressive things.

The McMaster Innovation Park building was worth stopping by to see, the place was crowded, and it was a fantastic early fall evening. The introduction by a McMaster faculty member - didn't quite catch his name - was interesting but the lecture that followed was somewhat less so. Using a Michael Jackson motif to bolster his argument that we are (he was cleaerly US focussed and assumed us to be the same) a "celebrity culture" that is dead in our "moral nihilism" with the collapse of western civilization about to happen, next week if not sooner. Was Michael Jackson a "celebrity commodity"? Of course. No argument. Do countless PR people, marketers, wardrobe specialists, speech writers, and spin doctors of all sorts deeply shape our culture? Undoubtedly.

For the first half hour or so I was engaged in thinking through his assertions despite not agreeing with them wholesale. His argument that corporations use credit to pacify people the way Rome used bread and games to pacify its citizens is an intriguing idea. Big business does benefit a whole lot more from certain regulations and practices than do workers and consumers. Corporations mostly don't pay the price for their activites and oil companies and banks do rake in ridiculous amounts of money by exploiting people. Wages are not rising in keeping with the cost of living. Methane chimneys are venting greenhouses gases in large quantities. Rich people and wealthy corporations may have more to do with electing politicians than the public does - if you are poor, good luck running a competitive compaign.

What I grew tired of was a lack of specific examples sufficiently explained. He was far more dull and monotonous in the last half than I suspect is actually true of him. He should have stepped off his script sometime after the thirty-minute mark, provided more directly factual material, and offered more compelling ideas for innovating a better future. He repeatedly raised the spectre of the 'radical religious right' in the US in such a way that you wondered if he had ever given thought to the much more valuable contribution that religion has made to social life generally. Pointing to worse-case examples as sufficient grounds to dismiss the whole would be like concluding that Richard Dawkins militant brand of atheism is reflective of all atheists or agnostics. Any belief system has subscribers who are way off the edge. The lack of nuance evidenced made it difficult to focus on his other ideas. Given his other books, I guess the push toward a thought-stopping angle in these ideas gains attention, perhaps it will fuel strong debate.

The guy I was sitting next to whispered to me jokingly that after hearing all this, there wasn't much to do and we should just throw in the towel. Perhaps Hedges books taken together are more balanced. I wasn't tempted to buy one after the talk and can't offer any reflection on them. I'll try and get back for the October 13 lecture that features David Malone, President of the International Development Research Centre. It looks like his talk will be on agricultural productivity and water management.

Complexity Science and Social Entrepreneurship

2009-09-07T21:58:00.000-04:00

This looks like a worthwhile read. Social entrepreneurship is an emerging line of thinking and practice that has clear crossover with complexity science applications. The book is now out, though I have not seen a copy yet. If anyone has seen it, I would be happy for some comments or feedback. In the meantime, here are the particulars for the book:

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE & SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: ADDING SOCIAL VALUE THROUGH SYSTEMS THINKING

Written/Edited by: Jeffrey A. Goldstein, James K. Hazy and Joyce Silberstang. 2009. ISBN/ISSN 9780984216406 (646 pages + index), ISCE Publishing

"This ground-breaking volume explores social entrepreneurship from the perspective of complexity science and systems thinking. Case studies, models, simulations, and theoretical papers advance both theory and practice, providing an innovative and comprehensive look at these dynamic topics. Written by complexity theorists, international development practitioners, and experts in a variety of other disciplines, this must-have book is mandatory reading for everyone interested in this newly developing field."

Soulcraft and "Blue Collar" work

2009-08-14T13:28:00.000-04:00

This definitely fits in the "must read" category. I listened to the NPR interview with Matt Crawford and felt an immediate interest in reading more about his own experience with the academia and think tank leadership as it relates to motorcycle repair and our sense of work and value.

Growing up on a farm and having strong mechanical/creative instincts makes me feel an instinctive resonance with what he is talking about. There are few things as satisfying as a physically demanding day of work where you spend your entire energies focussed on tangible, right-in-front-of-you problems. I compare that with something else I love - digging into a good pile of project details, reading, writing, researching. I love them all.

For me the balance is important and most jobs just can't fully engage that balance so we have to find our own way to create a custom mix in our off-time or, where we have understanding colleagues and organizations, creatively find ways to bring that mix into our paying work. This is, of course, neither simple nor clear but well worth exploring in our conversations about work and life. I'll write more once I've managed to get a copy of the book.

Print or Digital?

2009-07-15T12:01:00.000-04:00

This video interview and article about the print-oriented Economist succeeding where Time and Newsweek have been failing by trying to be print and digital, is a discussion-sparking conversation.

You might also want to read this older article that tells the story of The Atlantic and offers insights about what survival might look like for print publications who are trying to dance in a digital ballroom.

Travel and Learning

2009-07-14T18:42:00.000-04:00

While travelling through England, Ireland and Scotland the past two weeks, I had a lot of time to reflect on the historical density that seems to be part of the European experience. It isn't that other places lack such historical density, but rather that our/my particular prejudices and cultural legacy reflected in my education has predisposed me to notice things that I've studied in books, heard talked about in lectures and discussed with friends and colleagues.

Having written academically on 5th-7th century Ireland, it was particularly compelling to see and even pick up artifacts at the British Museum from this era and to see in tangible forms what I had mostly encountered through words or pictures. Holding a stone axe head or a small carved figurine somehow folded time in a way that erased a strictly linear accounting of passing years. Later, while touring Edinburgh Castle, I was fortunate enough to be able to weild a claymore, something that wasn't on any official bucket list but which, when opportunity presented itself, seemed like something I'd always wanted to do. Artifacts fire the imagination. The more we know about what surrounds those artifacts, the richer the imaginative ponderings. I was also struck by the reasonable cost of galleries and museums in the UK - usually free. The only barrier to visiting and taking part in the mezmerizing collections is personal initiative. I like that.

1-9-90 and Social Media

2009-05-20T08:52:00.000-04:00

Brian passed along this piece about branding that included the statistic about relative levels of participation in various social technologies. Originating in the book Groundswell, the argument is that 1% of your users will post content, 9% will comment, and 90% will simply browse without leaving any active trace other than the now ubiquitous digital ghost trails. This generalization may be of use in trying to decide how to prioritize various website architectural questions.

Here's a video of the author.

Twitter Dashboard

2009-04-23T11:31:00.000-04:00

Here's something kind of interesting. You can enter any two terms in the fields and then see what is showing up in Tweets. After you enter your two terms you can hit the "GO" button and see where things are at in the Twitter world.

Useful? Waste of time?

Talking about Ingenuity Arts with Bas de Baar

2009-04-22T08:40:00.000-04:00

Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

2009-04-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

I look with envy on this institutionally-priced set of reference books. I've looked through the index and overviews and it looks to be a very useful set. Published by Springer, the Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science includes hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and images to support the text. I've queried the McMaster University library to see if they will be getting a set. Hopefully they will.

New book: Complexity and Sustainability

2009-04-02T23:30:00.000-04:00

This looks like an interesting read. Has anyone seen it or read it? The editors are Norberg and Cumming. There's one piece by Buzz Holling and many of the other contributors appear to be affiliated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Thanks to the FourCultures blog and the recommendation.

What is the New Science?

2009-03-31T10:01:00.000-04:00

Plain English series of videos - various topics

2009-03-19T13:43:00.001-04:00

Ingenuity Arts Paperback - update

2009-02-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

The experiment in on-demand publishing continues. Here's a quick summary. Cafe Press books had some kind of weird problem with the cover art - working on rectifying that but it does point out that when you use this route, it really is a case of you pushing the buttons and whatever comes out will do so without further human intervention. Good to know.

I've also been working with Mark Lefebvre, Book Operations Manager at Titles Bookstore McMaster University. He is in charge of their new Espresso on-demand print machine and has been great to work with. The first run looks really good and having a human being involved on the output side does make a difference. McMaster is in Canada which means shipping costs and exchange rates aren't a concern for Canadian customers. Here is a direct link to the book on their site.

Ingenuity Arts - Paperback

2009-02-13T17:37:00.000-05:00

During the small gaps of free-time in my semi-nomadic life these past few weeks, I've been working on a book that summarizes my thinking and experience with complexity theory, new leadership and adaptive teams.

The book is very accessible, short, pocket size, and available online from Cafe Press at the Ingenuity Arts Curio Shop online. I'm learning as I go, trying out various publish-on-demand and related self-publishing opportunities that Web 2.0 has led to. Give it a read. I would be happy to hear from you.

You can preview and buy a PDF here. If you are from Canada, it will be better to buy a hard copy here.

Kiva - a great video overview of how it works

2009-01-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.It is no secret among my friends and co-workers that I am fascinated by Kiva and the way in which they have structured their work. They have managed to figure out very well the 'many-to-many' power of the internet and leveraged that with our interest in helping each other out, regardless of where we live. This video overview is a great way to learn about Kiva.

Innovating Under the Radar

2009-01-13T00:50:00.000-05:00

The IBM Business Innovation Centre had this interesting session on challenging an industry leader without ending up in the line of fire - or, if your competition is huge and you're small, don't go toe-to-toe.

A video session available here and a PDF of the session is here.

A Suitably Grand Undertaking

2009-01-12T20:23:00.000-05:00

Looking for something to inspire your lifework? How about this challenge from Tom Peters:

"It is the foremost task - and responsibility - of our generation to re-imagine our enterprises and institutions, public and private." (Re-Imagine, 2003)

There are the lifetimes of a generation in that gauntlet.

Visualizing Big Data

2009-01-08T09:54:00.000-05:00

WIRED has written some interesting pieces on Big Data and how we crunch numbers in the age of the petabyte. This image of a software bot working through Wikipedia is the kind of overview that visualizing data can give. Ambient devices connected to any number of online information sources are another way of creating our own emergent properties from unimaginably large quantities of data. Is it fair to call this artificial emergence? We are farming emergent properties from things we have created, rather than simply experiencing the emergent properties in the natural order such as the wetness of water. Maybe we can develop a new intelligence that allows us to harness our own forms of emergence to get the kind of information we need in complex situations as leaders and designers.

Paradox, Peace and War at Christmas

2008-12-23T22:16:00.000-05:00

There is no lightness or frivolity in the peace that Peter Menzies (Cardus Senior Fellow) has written about in his recent reflection on Christmas. War is ugly and destructive. We proclaim peace at Christmas not as a trite and flaky thing that we can pair up with rainbows and unicorns but as a deep hope in the redemptive possibilities that humanity aches for. Christmas often is, but should not be, an escape from the complex difficulties that beset us all. It is instead a chance to consider costly grace and the deadly encounters that have brought many of us a measure of peace. We must work to celebrate without trivializing joy, peace, kindness and good will. Scrooge, when he experiences his redemption, may be giddy with joy, but his immediate decisions involve bringing equity to the relationships he is in, including economic equity. Among the various dimensions of Dickens' genius was a capacity to make us look at what really is there in the grinding poverty of a broken city and in that looking, to see a hope greater than the misery. I'm grateful for that today.

Google: monster whiteboard

2008-12-16T13:06:00.000-05:00

I've long been a fan of whiteboards and the gang at Google have long been proponents of using the flexible and somewhat randomized feel of a communal whiteboard to get ideas, plans and thoughts into a specific space via writing, lines, idea maps, paper taped to whiteboard, etc. Here is a shot of the uber-Google whiteboard map.

Kiva and a new project

2008-12-16T12:56:00.000-05:00

Vicente Vega from Paraguay has repaid his loan and I've new re-loaned to a small group of entrepreneurs in Pakistan. Kiva continues to make a significant impact on me and I am keenly interested in how this team of four women will use the loan to extend their individuals businesses. Here's a photo and write-up.

Fozia baji, the wife of Mumtaza Ali Haider, resides in Kasur, Pakistan. She owns a two-room brick house where she has been living for the past 10 years. She is the mother of two sons. Her elder son is in the 4th standard grade and her younger son is in kindergarten. Fozia baji’s husband has a mobile phone shop in which he sells and repairs mobile phones. He has been in this business for the past 5 years. Fozia baji has a business selling clothes. Because she wants to share the financial burden of her husband, and because of inflation is increasing every day, it's very difficult for a single person to support the family. She is applying for a loan to expand her clothing business. She is joined in her loan group by three more members. Zahida Parveen baji wants a loan to buy leather to resell. Suraiya baji wants a loan to buy groceries for her grocery shop. Amreena baji wants a loan to buy lentils, rice, cooking oil, and spices for her food business. This is a group loan. The loan funds will be distributed among the group members, each of whom will invest in her own business. The members mutually guarantee one another's loans. If one member does not repay, the other members are responsible. Note: "Baji," which means "older sister," is a term of respect for women in Pakistan.

Video on Complexity by Alan Smith

2008-12-09T09:43:00.000-05:00

Alan Smith sent me a link to this fantastic video that he did a few years back for the Telus World of Science. I really like the look and feel of the piece as it introduces the nature of complex systems in a visually rich but very clear way. If the video continued, one could imagine it going beyond human beings as individuals and mapping the space of other emergent properties that are part of our everyday lives, the invisibilities that make such a huge impact on us.

OCAD Launches Strategic Innovation Lab

2008-12-05T17:57:00.000-05:00

Last night I was part of a diverse gathering of people who made their way from as far away as Barcelona to attend the launch of OCAD's new Strategic Innovation Lab (sLAB). Those in attendance included art students, senior OCAD leadership, MaRS representatives, government officials, business leaders and others who were interested in how social innovation might bring about good for others. In addition to hearing about the sLAB vision from Lenore Richards (Executive Director) and Bob Logan (Chief Scientist), participants were given a chance to be part of a workshop facilitated by Dave Gray of Xplane that enabled us to explore as a group what our vision for the future of sLAB might be.

I was part of a group that reflected visually on collaboration, leading to an exploration of 'it takes a village to raise an idea' complete with drawings. The survival or death of ideas is something that Randall Collins explores in his Sociology of Philosophies. This was a less onerous exploration and did not occupy the thousand-plus pages that Collins exploration covers.

London School of Economics - Seminar

2008-11-18T18:48:00.000-05:00

I'm going to attend a seminar in Second Life put on live at the London School of Economics. The focus is on health care systems but features human applications of complexity theory. Session 4 has a panel of interesting people who will talk about barriers and opportunities for change in health care and the pharmaceutical world. Here are the panelists:

Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly, London School of Economics
Prof. Brian Salter, King’s College, London
Prof. Peter Allen, Cranfield University
Prof. Jeff Johnson, Open University

Collaborative Intellectual Space

2008-10-28T17:15:00.001-04:00

Creating the right conditions for intellectual exchange and innovation is a critical role for leadership in many domains, including theoretical physics. Enter the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. They have structured themselves in such a way that bright post-docs can range freely across disciplines and access leading contributors in cosmology, particle physics, astronomy, quantum mechanics and other interesting fields of research.

I'd like to tour the facilities and see how the space has been designed for interaction, study, and idea sharing. Personally, I find it encouraging to read about projects like this, where the search for great questions and courageous exploration of possible answers comes before disciplinary boundaries and turf protection.

Complexity Theory and Psychology

2008-10-28T16:04:00.000-04:00

If you have an interest in areas where complexity theory is being explored to help solve problems and respond to change, you may want to check out psychologist, Dr. Dave Pincus, who writes about Batman, economic markets, and relationships with complex adaptive systems lenses on. An underlying idea that informs his posts involves answering the question, "How do we deal with life when it seems like the interacting elements are more like a plate of living spaghetti than a neatly ordered daytimer?" Being adaptive, resilient, participative, open, and hopeful makes a difference. In his October 1 post, Dr. Dave waxes eloquent on the role of confidence in economic markets and links it to the role that confidence has in our psychological health as individuals.
What do you think about the elements that are necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing environment, financial or otherwise?

Complexity and Education

2008-10-13T23:36:00.000-04:00

Although I haven't read this new release, for people who have just begun to explore the human organization applications for complexity theory, education studies seems to be a very fruitful field where these ideas are actively researched and debated.

Business and management research is another area where work is actively underway in bridging between theory and practice. What areas are you seeing complexity theory take root?

More than one talent? Don't be discouraged

2008-10-11T19:19:00.000-04:00

We live in an era where inherited wisdom suggests that we can only be really good at singular things. The more diverse our talents, the more we are presumed to be fulfilling the questionable proverb: "Jack of all trades, master of none."

Personally, I believe this to be false. While diversity can lead to dispersed and diffused impact, there are a great many undertakings that we engage in daily that require collections of skills and talents. I was very encouraged by this quote in the new Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series book that I received from a thoughtful group of colleagues during a recent departure meal. Here's to the musical accountant, the poetic engineer, the artistic project manager.

“...it is only in recent times that the paramters of aesthetic reception have fundamentally changed and turned into their opposite. In the past, an artist who was many-sided and active in various cultural domains was considered as having an (almost innate) advantage, a bonus from his capcity to change and assimilate, whereas in the late 20th century the all-rounder and “touche-a-tout” was unable - completely unjustly - to shake off the reputation of a certain dilettantism. It is automatically assumed that an individual artist who is active in several “unlikely” fields cannot necessarily operate everywhere with the same earnestness, the same aspiration, the same quality. The dominant reactions are suspicion and scepticism. As consumers of culture, we are accustomed to artists who work exclusively in the visual, to musicians who exclusively sing, interpret or compose, to “writers only”, “sculptors only”, “actors only” - in brief, to exceptional people who strive for concentration and do not dissipate or waste their energy in different areas. The image of the artist with “several irons in the fire” automatically springs to mind.”

Jens Rosteck in Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series (215)

Innovation Architecture: R&D for social change?

2008-10-08T18:01:00.000-04:00

This reference just turned up in one of the innovation groups I'm part of. It is a UK-based group but well worth taking a look at. Here is an excerpt from the synopsis:

Highly innovative sectors of the economy benefit from an infrastructure of science and innovation parks, business incubators, R&D labs and the like. What would the equivalent infrastructure look like to support innovation that tackled chronic disease, youth crime, climate change or teenage pregnancy?

This booklet explores the role of innovation brokers in public services. It looks at what they are, what they do, and why they might be needed to support innovation in public services. In particular, it looks at how they broker knowledge and relationships between innovators with ideas, managers and commissioners looking for solutions, investors and policy makers.

You can download the booklet here for free.

Does thinking really matter? (YES)

2008-09-24T14:02:00.000-04:00

Patti's post in The{App}Gap about the research activities of Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman highlights the need for leaders to better balance the 'do something now' attitude in business with a 'think deeply' wisdom that can only come from informed reflection. And if your concern is the bottom line? Well, thinking deeply will contribute more to that over time than careless and automatic reaction. She notes the role that complexity theory thought and delibration has played in helping us become more aware of harmfully simplistic solution sets that we as leaders can depend on. US financial structure anyone?

People skills, complexity and projects

2008-09-23T23:31:00.000-04:00

I've really benefitted from reading this blog about the relationship between being a software developer, complexity theory, and people. If you are looking for ways to increase your ability to dance through the challenges of project management, and thus dance through the complexity of people as we work in groups, then this blog will be a great benefit to you.

People skills are not soft - they make a significant impact on financial and human capital bottom lines. Do you see people as components to utilize? Things to manage? Engines of innovation? Your future?

Buzz Holling - a Great Canadian

2008-07-23T22:00:00.001-04:00

In the last few days, I've come across a number of good finds related to the work of C.S. (Buzz) Holling. First of all, you can watch a hour-long video of him giving a talk at the Stockholm Resilience Centre - a good investment in terms of learning how he has applied complex systems theory to ecology and human organizational process (panarchy model).

A second lead was a notice about Holling being awarded the 2008 Volvo Environment Prize for his contributions to ecology. The value of good

ideas in discussions about environmental policy, human impact, change and adaptation seems obvious enough but being recognized for that contribution fuels his original ideas. Congratulations.

There is also the Stockholm Resilence Centre video content site where they have posted talks from a number of other valuable contributors to ecology, resilience and other complexity-driven approaches to environmental and social challenges. Those of you familiar with the TED talks will see that there are some TED-worthy candidates in this mix.

Finally, here is a recently released report about Canada's relative ranking in a variety of areas from economics to social fabric. According to this Canada Conference research, we haven't fared well in a couple of categories. What do you think?

Mapping words + doodle = wordle (I think)

2008-07-19T11:52:00.000-04:00

I came across Wordle recently, an online program that allows you to dump in text and then have it organized into a visual pattern based on frequency of words. You can check it out here at www.wordle.org and I've provided a sample from my del.icio.us tags for fun.

Complexity and Organizational Culture

2008-07-06T22:18:00.000-04:00

Recently, I travelled to San Francisco to participate in a Cognitive Edge workshop that explains how they connect complex systems theory with narrative fragments in organizations to provide much more realistic mapping of cultural values than other methods.

Their approach is a great example of how leading research and technology, wisely applied, can tell us things about ourselves that might otherwise be difficult to see. This is particularly true in the highly complex environments of organizations. Humans are deeply wired to be story tellers and our stories tell a lot about us - individually and collectively.
Using Sensemaker - a trademark database tool that deals with story fragments - Dave Snowden explored how we can be better at understanding what reality looks like in our organizations. Being aware of actual conditions is critical for effective leadership, though neither easy or, where known, easily accepted.

While in San Francisco, I also paid a brief visit to one of my favourite companies, IDEO. The Pier 28 location was just over a mile from my hotel and I stopped in and chatted briefly with one of the people working late and then discovered another IDEO member was in the seminar with me.

Finally, I managed to get to the SFMOMA as they were open late on Thursday night. Great galleries are like a nested system with the architecture and space of the building, the rooms, interior design choices, people, exhibits and individual pieces all contributing significant cultural value. I generally experience galleries rather than studying them in a detached way - paying attention to what catches me directly rather than trying to make myself appreciate something I should like.

Communication Tools 2.0 - 360 Interactive Video

2008-06-16T17:55:00.000-04:00

The Girl Effect

2008-06-10T18:21:00.000-04:00

thinkx - The Hub

2008-05-29T00:41:00.000-04:00

I found this creative hub sponsored by thinkx - a Canadian creativity and innovation organization. I signed up as a member of The Hub...we'll see how it is. I will be curious to see if the group is different from other design groups that I'm part of.

It will be hard to compete with the Transforming Transformations group but I'm willing to give it a try.