Back in 1974 I was a research assistant at North East London Polytechnic (now East London University). I was attached to a working party developing a multidisciplinary design degree, under the direction of Richard Fletcher. Richard had written a paper, "The Manager as a Designer", which argued, among other things, that many key design decisions were taken by managers rather than designers.
So, some thirty years later, I was intrigued to read this on the Fast Company site, "It rare that I find something of interest in a business school alumni magazine. But there's a remarkably thoughtful essay on design in the latest issue of the University of Toronto's School of Management alumni mag. It's written, no less, by the dean of the Rotman School of Management, Roger Martin. He convincingly argues that business people don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers."
And then to download the PDF of the original article and read this:
One organisation that has embraced this truth (no thanks to me) is Demos. They have made all their publications freely available on-line and have clearly taken on board the notion of network thinking in a serious way.
One output from this is their book "Network Logic", edited by Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller and Paul Skidmore with contributions from Perri 6, Mark Buchanan, Fritjof Capra, Manuel Castells, Diane Coyle, Alison Gilchrist David Hargreaves, Ann Lieberman, Geoff Mulgan, Howard Rheingold, Robert Sampson, Karen Stephenson, John Taylor. You can download the whole book or individual chapters in PDF format from their catalogue or buy it from here and, I guess soon, from Amazon.co.uk.
Today's entries are all a bit of housekeeping. When Ben Copsey set up this site for me a year or so ago, one of my motives was to put up a work in progress, "Purposive Drift". I did put up the "Prologue", but wanted to keep the rest of it separate from the blog entries. My attempts to find an elegant solution, that I could implement, failed, so for a long time there has been a kind of hole at the heart of this site.
The other night I had an epiphany, "When in doubt, bodge". So this is my bodge to get what has been done on "Purposive Drift" so far up on to this site. It's not elegant, but it seems to work.
I got stuck on this bit
very stuck
stuck for a long time
months in fact
Somehow I just couldn't find a way through
to what I wanted to say
Thinking about it
it all seemed to make sense
but when it came to putting something down
the pieces didn't quite seem to fit together
I didn't know where to begin
Now strictly speaking
my stuckness
is a private problem
It's not part of this more public conversation
It's something that should be of little interest to you
particularly since I largely ascribed it to
my idleness
my procrastination
my cluster of habits
that get in the way
of what I think I want
So why am I talking about it
what has it go to do with the one-sided conversation
we have been having
I haul it into this public conversation
because it is an example
of a little monster
an example of a failure to pay attention
to what is going on
a failure to learn from experience
I began the last chapter
thinking I was involved in an assault on process
and found
as wrote
that I had moved to quite a different place
As I said all those months ago
"The reality seems to be
that the world we live
and act in
is a world of processes"
And yet despite all that
I started trying to write this chapter
as another assault on some processes
I was calling
Chreods, Grotesques and other monsters
and wondered why
I couldn't go on
Then one day
I suddenly recognised that
I had been trapped
in an old mode of thinking
that despite all the learning
the changes in perspective
that had come about
by working on the earlier chapter
when it came to working on this one
I had reverted to my previous mindset
What I had failed to realise
was
that what concerned me
were frameworks for processes
not
the processes themselves
What interest me
is
that over the months
of not writing this chapter
I had a number of insights
into what I was doing
changes of tack
And yet I kept on reverting
to the same old groove
Now some of this has been due
to the wider framework
I was operating in
I had other things to do
my focus was split
writing Purposive Drift
was not an immediate priority
And
Also lurking somewhere
was fear
I feel it now
Now the straightforward reaction
to fear
is to run away
(and I guess that is what I have been doing
since in this context
not writing
is running away)
But as I talked about in the previous chapter
emotions like fear
are a signal
that there is something we should pay attention to
The question here
is what needs attention?
On the face of it
there is nothing fearful about putting
words on a screen
In this case
there is no client
who might reject what I have written
No lover who might misunderstand
my intent
No friend who could be offended
by something I might say
In fact since
at the moment
this is an entirely private affair
just me
and the words I write
there would seem to be nothing to be afraid of
And yet I feel fear
Which leads me to the conclusion
that
it is this interaction
between
myself
and
the words I write
which is where the fear lies
And this
I think
has something to do
with
the framework
that I have established
for the process
of writing these words
This book itself
is an illustration
of
purposive drift
a context for exploration
and improvisation
It has a form and structure
which has already changed
as a result
of what I have learnt
through the process of writing
The form and structure
are anchor points
to provide a framework
for drift
without getting totally lost
but they are provisional anchor points
open
(I hope)
to change
if the signals I get
suggest
that the content demands
a different frame
But
despite
this open and safe place
I have created
to explore some ideas
I still run into getting stuck
and
feeling fear
I labour this point
because
this is a very concrete example
of how
even when we create
a framework for processes
that should allow for attention
and freedom of movement
within that space
we can still lose purpose
Now my purpose in this chapter
was to explore some of the things
that blocks us
from being
"... open enough
to devise plans and processes
that are sensitive
to the ebbs and flows
of the processes that surround us
so that we can recognise
when we need to give a little nudge
to shift us
into another pattern of processes
that for that moment
seems to make more sense"
When I first conceived the framework
for this book
this chapter looked as if
it was going to be one of the easier ones
I had been thinking about Chreods
for many years
And Grotesques
for nearly as long
What I hadn't anticipated
was my experience of writing the last chapter
What I hadn't expected
was a radical change of mind
Now this
of course
is part of the purpose
of purposive drift
It's the point
It is what I have been going on about
But this long discussion
of my sense of being blocked
of my sense of fear
points to one of the difficulties
of purposive drift
It does mean
being prepared
to take the risk
of being
and feeling
lost
confused
adrift
uncertain where to go
That was what I was feeling
when I was writing the last chapter
and
clearly I didn't want to go there again
hence
block and fear
Are there any wider lessons from this experience?
Are there any strategies that spring to mind
to overcome this little monster?
Curiously
it looks as if what we are dealing with here
is another version of what
I call a chreod
I stumbled across the concepts of chreods
many years ago
when I was doing some
theoretical research
about education
My particular interest
was to develop a basis
for designing
new art and design courses
What I found was
that
there was a lack of congruence
between
my experience of being in educational contexts
and
most of the theories and descriptions
of what that experience was about
What struck me was how difficult it was
to think outside
that frame
How there seemed to be a kind of force
dragging me back
to those perspectives
on educational action
despite
my reason
and my feelings
telling me I should be looking
somewhere else
That was when I stumbled across
C.H.Waddington's concept
of chreods
The term chreod is derived
from the Greek
and means
necessary path
Waddington
who was a biologist and philosopher
had noticed
that many processes
particularly processes involving change
like the development of an embryo
or
developments in a society
are channelised
A chreod has a history
Take water running down a slope
At one point
predicting where the water would run
would have been difficult if not impossible
but
after a while
because the water wears away the slope
its path will
over time become channelised
So we can say that any process
that has the characteristics of
a chreod
will have a history
and that history is itself
a process of narrowing down possibilities
Different kinds of chreods
have a varying range of predictability
Waddington used the analogy of
rivers and valleys
In a valley with a narrow bottom
and steeps sides
the path of the river
will be relatively restricted
In a valley with a wide bottom
relatively small events
may change the course of the river
but still within the constraints
of the shape of the valley
Identifying and understanding
the nature of the chreods
we encounter
I now see
is an important part of practising
purposive drift
However
up until now
I had a very different take on chreods
and one
I don't think that
Waddington discussed
What grabbed me
and what
up until now
I had focused on
was something very different
I guess they could be called
archaic
or
obsolete
chreods
(a bit like Ellen Langer's story of the family who cut chunks off the pot roast without knowing why)
I even coined a word
chreodoclast
to describe the process
of trying to break these chreods
that had lost their relevance
but still exercised their power
over our thinking
and action
What I failed to notice
was that I was paying attention
to a very small subset
of chreods
and by doing so
missing their real significance
(This of course maybe another reason
I got so stuck
on this chapter)
Maybe
if I had spent more time
thinking
about chreods
as a norm
rather than
as an aberration
I would have got a better handle
on how and why
some chreods
(the ones we have created)
can move into the position
of now longer being appropriate
but still influencing what we do
Reaching this point
I am reminded of Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms
Now these days the word paradigm
is tossed around
in a very loose way
But Kuhn's use of the term
seems very close to the idea of a chreod
For Kuhn a paradigm
was a framework
that channelised
the thinking and action
within a scientific discipline
One of the things he was interested in
was how and why these frameworks changed
From what I remember
His thinking was that paradigms shifted
when the anomalies
- the things that could not be explained within
that framework-
reached a critical mass
But interestingly
he suggested that paradigms
didn't shift because people
changed their minds
They largely change
because the people who work
within a paradigm die
The new paradigm is largely established
by the young and by people on the fringes
of a discipline
In this sense
the process of paradigm shifts
can be seen
as a biological process
I fear he may be right
and hope he may be wrong
For
as I say
obsolete chreods seem to have
many of the characteristics
of paradigms
And
despite my earlier remarks
about my misunderstandings
of the nature of chreods
I think my fundamental instinct was right
We are dominated
by compelling ways of
understanding
explaining
and acting
in the world
that get in the way
of seeing what is actually going on
as opposed to what we think
is going on
We are strangers in the world we have created
Let me give you an example
For a long time
I shared the prejudices
of many people of my age and class
about mobile phones
I saw them as being rather stupid and vulgar
One day
I was out shopping with my nephew
He was buying food
for a meal he was preparing for a friend
who was coming round that evening
His friend had recently broken up
with his girlfriend
He was very distressed
While we were out
my nephew and his friend
who was driving
exchanged a number of calls
and decided that rather than waiting until the evening
they'd meet when we finished shopping
in a place nearby
It struck me then
that something very new and interesting was going on
The mobile phone
gave people the means
to manage and coordinate
their lives
in a more spontaneous way
that hadn't been possible before
Suddenly all the things I had been snotty about
before
shifted their meaning
The person ringing their partner to say they were
on the train
The hapless man
staring at the supermarket shelves
to say that he couldn't find any...
and what should he get instead
a whole range of small human behaviours
that I had dismissed
as being trivial
took on a new significance
and
I realised
it was I who had been stupid
not the people
using their mobiles
It all comes back to paying attention
and what
we pay attention to
A paradigm or chreod
can help us pay attention
to what we need
to focus on
It can also distract us
to the point of blindness
from paying attention
to what is new in our context
which
if you can bear the repetition
brings me back to
the question of
how we can be
"... open enough
to devise plans and processes
that are sensitive
to the ebbs and flows
of the processes that surround us
so that we can recognise
when we need to give a little nudge
to shift us
into another pattern of processes
that for that moment
seems to make more sense"
We need a feeling of purpose
if we are to get things done
and
I think
purpose implies a sense of certainty
a sense that we know what we are doing
and
that we understand the context we are doing it in
But somehow
that feeling of certainty
needs to be tempered
by
a sense of other possibilities
It seems to be a kind of tightrope walk
balancing
the certainty we need to get things done
with
an openness to other possibilities
so that we do not miss the opportunities
to do something better
that may be sitting there
under our nose
if only we could see them
I guess the biggest obstacle
to seeing what is actually there
is a strong sense of our own
rightness and virtue
particularly when it is founded
on a simple truism
EL Doctrow
gave an interesting speech
at Bradeis University
some years ago
during the first Bush years
He talk about the theory of grotesques
an idea he had borrowed from
Sherwood Anderson
As he says
"This is not a scientific theory but a historical poetic theory of what happens to people sometimes as they strive to give value and meaning to their lives."
He goes on
"Here is the theory: that all about us in the world are many truths to live by, and they are all beautiful - the truth of passion and love, the truth of candour and thrift, the truth of patriotism, the truth of self-reliance, and so on. But as people come along and try to make something of themselves, they snatch up a truth and make it their own predominating truth to the exclusion of all others. And what happens, says Anderson, is that the moment a person does this - clutches one truth too tightly - the truth so embraced becomes a lie and the person turns into a grotesque."
He goes on to give a number of examples
Thrift when you're young and starting a career
can be a good thing
But when you're established
and earning a good income
continuing to deny yourself
and others
to hoard money as an end in itself
becomes something
You become a miser
a grotesque
or more politically
and closer to the central theme
of his speech
Self-reliance
a virtue underlying the policies
of the Reagan administration
As Doctrow says
self-reliance
can be a beautiful thing
but when a government
forgets
or scorns
other virtues
such as
community
our moral responsibility to others
the interdependence of all society's citizens
you get the obscenity
of taking away from the poor
to give to the rich
As so often
I have taken
Anderson theory of the grotesque
and turned it into something else
similar in spirit
but more to do with processes
rather than people
In my notion
a grotesque
is a process
with a single dominating goal
Now of course
there are many little processes
that may have a single goal
and that's OK
The problem comes
when you have a wider process
like
running a business
or
shaping your life
Here the single goal
can become
a distorting monster
For example
many of us would agree
that making a profit
is a legitimate goal
of a business
Indeed it corresponds to the biological truth
that an organism needs
to taken in
as much energy
as it expends
One way or another
any organisation
doing things in the world
needs to achieve
something like
making a profit
Where things go wrong
is where it becomes
the single
over-riding goal
Charles Hamden-Turner puts it well
"the notion that any one value or criterion of excellence pursued in isolation is almost bound to steer you into trouble, even catastrophe ."
And continues
"All values are relative, you may think, but the need to profit, that is the one pure truth beneath the shifting sands, that is the commercial equivalent of fundamentalist scripture. When all other values have been finely balance, virtuously circled and transformed into larger meaning, profit will remain 'the bottom line', the ultimate arbiter of the effectiveness of overall strategy. I fear this is just not so."
He then outlines a number of reasons
why
holding profit
as the one measure of corporate health
can be misleading
In some industries
like the oil business
the profit you make today
may the result of decisions
taken thirty years ago
and give you give little useful information
about the quality of the decisions you take today
A company can put its future
at risk
by slashing research and development costs
or
losing its experienced people
by downsizing
but
by doing so
profitability may look good
in the short-term
even though future profitability
or even survival
may have been put at risk
But the central point
is not
profitability
as such
It is the pursuit of a single value or goal
in isolation
You could make the same case
for a company
that was obsessed
by market share
or creativity
It?s not the goal that's the problem
it's the fact
that it is a single goal
I am reminded of study
of
lucky people
by
Richard Wiseman
of
the University of Hertfordshire
In an interview in Fast Company magazine
he gave
what could be seen
as a very succinct argument
in favour of
purposive drift
"We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them."
Perhaps that says it all
everything I have been struggling
to say
in what for me has been a difficult chapter
"in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others."
This may be because you are caught in a chreod
and the process is pushing you in a single direction
or
It may be that the pursuit of a single goal
has turned your process
into a grotesque
so that you are blind
to the other perils and opportunities
that lie around you
or
It may just be a little monster
like paying too much attention
to a single signal
like
fear
or
desire
that stops you seeing
better ways to go on
It may seem from some of the stuff
I have been talking about
that I am opposed
to systematic
approaches
to how we run our lives
As if being systematic
is the same as being
machine-like
which
of course
is not the case
It is true that I am resistant
like many of us
to approaches
to life
that feel arbitrary
and imposed by someone else
Approaches that somehow
feel as if they
do not fit
what is actually going on at the time
Temperamentally
I am drawn to improvisation
and situations where
you make things up as you go along
depending upon what is happening
at that moment in time
Maybe like you
I get a buzz
out of paying attention
and
responding to the particular context
I am in
There can be real enjoyment
when we act spontaneously
guided by what feels right
at that moment
at that place
in that context
But then in contrast
if I look at the pattern of much of my daily life
often my actions tend to be less spontaneous
The day can fall into rigid patterns
a bowl of raw porridge in the morning
a mug of tea and the first cigarette
a quick check of my email
and my horoscope
another mug of tea
then take a look at what I am supposed
to be doing that day
decide to check out something
on the net
make a pot of coffee a bit later on
and so the pattern goes on
one action
prompting the next
a set of familiar
comfortable responses
requiring little attention
outside
a well worn groove
a pretty predictable pattern
to the day
Like most of us
my days tend to be structured
in clusters of habits
repetitive semi-automatic actions
that need little thought
or attention
They are just the things
we do
without much reflection
or questioning
The taken for granted
background to our lives
For something that plays
such an important role in our life
the word habit
is a curious one
We tend to think of habits
as things we need to lose
things that are bad for us
like my habit of smoking
or procrastinating
But our habits
cover much more of what we do
they are an important part of who we are
Our habits are what works for us
or what once worked for us
and provide a framework
for how we define ourselves
and our lives
in everyday action
Another way of looking at this
less coloured by the often negative
associations
we carry about habits
is to use a more neutral word
to think about this pattern of activities
we call habits
as a process
or set of processes
Now process are really interesting
and worth us spending some time
thinking about
There is a lot to unpack here
Both the things I have been talking about
the improvised action
and
my daily routines
are examples of processes
but examples
that feel very different
One feels like being alive
and paying attention
The other feels like
a way of being
that can be dangerously comatose
a way of avoiding
things that need to be attend to
However
some caution needs to be exercised here
it is too easy
to simply dismiss
the routines of daily life
just because they seem
mundane and ordinary
The issue
as I have talked about before
is more to do
with the level of attention
we give
to this kind of activity
rather than the activity itself
and what is the appropriate level
of attention
we should give
to the different things we do
I remember reading an interview with
Derek Jarman
the film-maker
shortly after he had discovered
that he had AIDS
at that time a fairly immediate death sentence
he was saying that the knowledge
that he only had a short time to live
made him appreciate
the daily routine and processes of every day life
and how even peeling potatoes
could be experienced
as a celebration of life
Now to experience
peeling potatoes
as a celebration of life
takes a very particular
form of attention
that few of us can manage
and I am not even sure
that we should try
I guess that the irritation
that many of us feel
about things that have to be done
where we want the result
rather than the process
is often because we are too focused
on the process
rather than too little
If peeling potatoes
was really a deeply ingrained
habit
that we could do well
we could get on with it
while absorbed in something else
we enjoyed more
like planning the rest of the meal
or inventing a new future
Of course
paying deep attention
to peeling potatoes
is probably very Zen
and may have profound pleasures
and provide important insights
and could be worth trying
as an occasional experiment
but all the time?
I think not
and maybe
doing so would
fail to respect
the real value of habits
and the role they play in our lives
Getting a feel for habits
is one of the things
at the centre of
purposive drift
Just as our habits
help define who we are
and the pattern of our lives
We are surrounded by the habits
of others
and that
provides the arena
in which we can act
The Universe has its habits
the planets that orbit stars
the comets that appear
in particular places
with predictable regularity
Nature has its habits
from the seasons that come round
one following the other
at roughly the same time of year
to our habit of breathing
to pull the oxygen we need
into the complex of processes
moving at different speeds
we recognise
as ourselves
And human societies have their habits
like the boom and bust
of the stock market
or the ebbs and flows of economic activity
we call growth and recession
or the pig cycle in New Guinea
where individuals accumulate wealth
by breeding pigs
and then return their wealth
to the community
in ceremonial feasts
in a seven year cycle
The easiest processes to see
are those which we can describe
in terms of habits
repetitive
cyclic actions
that come round time and time again
not always as regular as clock work
not always precisely predictable
but regular enough
for us to have a rough idea
of when they are likely to occur
or which event will probably follow
the current one
But there are other processes
which look less like habits
These are processes
which are about
moving from one state
to another
Sometime we could call them plans
I am planning to write this book
its a kind of one off
The process will have a beginning
a middle
and an end
Of course at the moment
its end is indeterminate
I may not finish it
these word could be the last
I write
But
phew
So far
so good
And of course
what may look like
a unidirectional process
from one perspective
may look like a circular one from another
You have been born
are aging
and will die
just like
me
From my point of view
and probably from your?s
that looks like a pretty one way process
From another
its just a cycle of
birth
life
and death
repeated through the generations
It all depends
upon
where you sit
Neither view is any more correct
than the other
and how we need to think about it
may depend
upon what we are doing at the time
Getting a feel for process
whether
they are cyclic
or
a means of changing state
is a an important part
of understanding what is going on
We can see our arena for action
at any one time
being a space determined
by
possibilities
and
constraints
and those possibilities
are processes that could be
just as the constraints
are processes
that act on our freedom now
The possibilities may be much greater
than we imagine
The constraints may be different
from what we believe
but both define
the spaces
in which we can move
Following a process
or
a plan
is itself a constraint
on our possibilities
for action
which may be no bad thing
for too much choice
can be as paralysing
as too little
but we need to understand
that
the process maybe inappropriate
for the situation we are in
that we may be
ignoring
vital information
readily available to us
if only
we could see outside
the process we are following
I remember once
I had to pick up my son
from his Aikdo class
(another set of learned processes)
At the time I was thinking very hard
about something
Slightly irritated
at having to break my concentration
I got into my car
and started to drive
It must have been
ten or fifteen minutes later
that I realised
that I had been following
my
drive to work process
and that I had driven
in the opposite direction
to the one I should
The thinking had still been good
because I had been focusing on it
but my immediate task
had gone seriously awry
Ellen Langer
the cognitive psychologist
whose book
"Mindfullness"
talks about both
mindfull
and
mindless
processes
tells an illuminating story
about how processes
can go wrong
Her story goes
that a friend of hers
was watching
a friend of his preparing
pot roast
He noticed that she cut off
a portion of meat
before putting it into the roasting pot
He asked her why
She told him she didn't really know
but that was the way her mother
always did it
Her curiosity aroused
she rang her mother
to find out why
Her mother told
that
she did that way
because
her mother always did
So she contacted her grandmother
and asked her why
Her grandmother laughed
and told her
that with that size of joint
the only way she could
fit it into her only available roasting pot
was to cut a piece off
Both these examples
are of processes
which
in one context
were perfectly appropriate
but in another
became stupid
Now both these examples
are trivial in consequence
and probably
lapses of this kind
are unavoidable
But
metaphorically driving off
in the wrong direction
and mindlessly following
a process from the past
may have serious consequences
and if we look carefully
at how we live
both as individuals
and
as society
we may find more worrying examples
of inappropriate processes
remorselessly being carried out
The question is
what do we do about it?
Another question is
should we do anything
about it?
There are some processes
that seem
best left alone
I remember a story
about
Paul Desmond
the soprano player
who was part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet
I don't know whether it is true
or not
but it makes the point
Apparently
someone once pointed out
that he sometimes played notes
an octave higher
than a soprano saxophone
should be able to produce
When he tried to work out
how he did it
he found
he could never do it again
Ellen Langer
tells a similar story
of
someone in her office
who could type very fast
and also read and retain
what he was typing
as he did it
When she asked him
to teach her
how to do it
he found that
consciously
analysing what he did
meant
that for a while
he lost those skills
On a slightly different tangent
talking about
the habits of a group
that had been passed down
generation after generation
there is a story
I came across
that filled me with delight
particularly
since at the time
I was working in a college
that had
a new
bright
shiny
modern management
who knew how things should be done
and knew
that most of what we did
was wrong
The story was told by a Spanish farmer
In his part of Spain
there was a complex system
of irrigation
that had been set up by the Moors
many centuries ago
Not only did the Moors
create the physical infrastructure
of this system
they also
created the system to manage it
The storyteller
had been elected leader
of one of the groups
within this system
Being young
and modern
and knowing
how things should be done
he was appalled
at how the group was run
They had no formal agendas
and kept no written minutes
of the decisions
they reached
He rapidly introduced
a series of innovations
to make the process
more efficient and up to date
Very quickly
he found the group
riven by feuds and quarrels
and their decision-making
ground to a halt
Being a sensible man
he recognised
that maybe
the old ways of doing things
had some value
and went back
to running the meetings
in the way they
always had been done
and lo and behold
the group began to make decisions
quickly
and
effectively
again
You've probably picked up
some ambivalence here
and
of course
you're right
The process of writing
of having this conversation
with you
has changed what I think
When I first began thinking
about what I was going to say
in this chapter
my focus
was on the way
that processes and plans
can blind us
to what is happening
and can take us to places
we don't want to be
I was also very conscious
of the role
that formal processes
and plans
play
in implementing
and justifying
machine-like visions
At best
I could accept
that processes
and plans
could sometimes be useful
providing
that they were questioned
and reflected upon
but some of the examples
I have given
suggest
that some processes
should just be accepted
without going through this process
Paul Desmond might have been
better off
had he just continue
to play
without analysing
how he did it
and I was suggesting
the Moors way of managing
how water was distributed
was best left undisturbed
In other words
if the signals that you get
are that things are going OK
maybe it's best
to just go on
going on
This all begins to sound
very conservative
and in one sense
it is
Purposive drift
is as much about preserving
what you value
as it is about finding out
what is important to you
We need the familiar
and taken for granted
as well as
the fresh and the new
Sometimes
leaving a process
that we can change
undisturbed
is better than changing it
just for the sake of change
But there is something wrong
with the way this view is going too
a slight sense of unease
of discomfort
a sense that
another way of way
of looking at this
would
fit
what I know
better
And this is important
These vague feelings
give a clue
to how
we might
give plans and process
their proper weight
Looking at how
we often behave
you could say
that
we've lost our senses
Now this is not to say
that
we should always act
on what we feel
Feelings can be misleading
or inappropriate
as well as informing
But we seem to have developed
a strange attitude
to our feelings
On the one hand
feelings
are seen as being irrational
and therefore
safely ignored
On the other
there is a cult of emotion
that proclaims
that we should express our feelings
in all circumstances
and that actions guided
solely by
what we feel
are the only authentic ones
A position
we seem less often
to adopt
is to see our emotions
as information
that needs interpreting
Raw emotion
tells us what we are feeling
but it doesn't tell us why
or what we should do about it
But it is useful information
that shouldn't be ignored
I guess what I am saying here
is that
any process
we have consciously devised
whether it is a routine way
of getting something done
or
a plan to move from one state
to another
needs some kind of validating
process built into it
We are biological beings
and
we have whole sets
of
validating processes
built into how we operate
If we are too cold
our bodies soon let us know
If we need food
we start to feel hungry
The sense of unease
I was feeling earlier
is also
a signal
that there is something going on
I should pay attention to
Now this is complicated
there may be many reasons
for my unease
It could be
that what I am talking about
does not make sense
or it may be that I am apprehensive
about how you will react
to what I am saying
or it may be
that I fear that I am unable
to grasp and express the logic
of where this conversation is going
It may be that I am aware
of running out of space
in the arbitrary structure
I have devised for this book
to take this conversation
to a satisfactory
if temporary
conclusion
It may even be a combination
of different
possibly
contradictory reasons
This is why feeling is not enough
on its own
It can be a useful signal
that some action needs
to be taken
It can be another piece of evidence
to be connected
with other kinds of evidence
to form the basis for a judgement
to see
whether we need to change our actions
or even
to change what we are trying achieve
I think what I am saying
is beginning to make sense
now
and links to what
I am going to be talking about
with you
in
the next chapter
There I am going to be talking about
some processes
that
we do carry out
in a remorseless way
without regard
for the damage they are doing
and disregarding all the evidence
that they are just not working
in the way we intended
But these are special cases
of habits
that have gone wrong
but most processes
fall into another category
a lot of the time
one way or another
they kind of work
and sometimes
they are the best we can hope for
Some my confusion
in this chapter
now begins to look like
a productive kind of confusion
a naming of some the dilemmas
we face
when we start
to think about
how we use plans and processes
in our lives
The reality seems to be
that the world we live
and act in
is a world of processes
and at any moment
there is only a small fraction
of what is going on
that we need to be consciously
aware of
or even can be aware of
More than that
there are only a very small number of things
that we can do anything about
anyway
Most of the time
stuff happens
and we react
more or less appropriately
on the information
we have available
and the actions we perceive
are open for us to take
Some times we are right
Some times we are wrong
And
Some times we just don't know
one way or another
In making the attempt
to live a life
of purposive drift
all we are trying to do
is to be open enough
to devise plans and processes
that are sensitive
to the ebbs and flows
of the processes that surround us
so that we can recognise
when we need to give a little nudge
to shift us
into another pattern of processes
that for that moment
seems to make more sense
and maybe
that's the best
we can hope to do
Of course this raises the question
of how do we recognise the need
to give ourselves a nudge?
And how do we know
that another pattern of processes
makes more sense
than the ones we are in now?
These are the things I want to explore
with you as we go on
in the conversations that follow
this one
but first we need
to look at
some of the other things
that can get in our way
and can block our ability
to move more freely
in the spaces that may be available
if only
we could see they were there
There is an underlying tension
in the conversations
we are having
and will continue to have
throughout this book
In many of these conversations
I am attacking
directly
or
indirectly
what I see as the
distorting effects
of what I call
machine thinking
This chapter itself
is concerned
with undermining
the fundamental premises
of
such a mode of thought
And yet
I
and
we
have to acknowledge
that the world we live in
a world in which there is
much we enjoy
much we rely on
much we would be reluctant to abandon
is
in large part
a child
of this mode of thinking
If we are
not
going to wander off
into
a kind of romantic fantasy
we have to acknowledge
however reluctantly
and
I still find it hard to accept
that
machine thinking
is part of what it is to be human
and
perhaps even
a necessary part
of how we organise
and conduct our lives
But
the reality of machine thinking
is only
part of what it is to be human
something we need to recognise
something we need to be prepared to use
something we need to find ways
of slipping around
when it gets in the way
but
still only a part
The freedom to be
our complicated selves
The messy
often unpredictable
ways we have of being human
need a space to be
need a place to be recognised
and valued
in any world we create
Where that space is squeezed
when our differences
are denied
when we have little choice
but to try to fit
into the neat boxes
of machine-like systems and organisations
we are forced into
secret forms of resistances
petty forms of sabotage and subterfuge
in order to retain our sense
of human being
and
sometimes
that
often incoherent
attempt
to retain our sense of possibility
creates another kind of confinement
a mindless state of being against
without knowing what we are for
Another blind alley
Another place where
little movement
is possible
Understanding the nature
of machine thinking
is necessary
if we are
to maintain
the freedom we have
and
to reclaim
any freedoms we may have lost
and
to avoid the perils
of mindless rebellion
And the place to start
is to look at
real machines
and what they are
what they do
and
what their limitations are
The Encyclopedia Britannica
has some illuminating things to say
It begins by saying
that a machine is a
"device, having a unique purpose, that augments or replaces human or animal effort for the accomplishment of physical tasks."
So far so good
Machines extend our capabilities
They are extensions of ourselves
(So why so often do human beings seem to be
extensions of machines?
Think of the production lines
where people appear to be
adjuncts of the machine
working at a pace
and in a manner
dictated by the machine system
rather than
their desires
and needs of the moment)
Already we have a dichotomy
The machine as a liberating extension of ourselves
or
The machine as a method of control and domination
and another
The machine as a device having a unique purpose
or
The human as a being having multiple and changing purposes
Already
we can see
the beginnings
of the tension
between
what we could call
a human centred view of human beings
and how they organise themselves
and a machine-like vision of people
and the way they are organised and controlled
So let's continue
The article goes on to say
"This broad category encompasses such simple devices as the lever, wedge, wheel and axle, pulley, and screw."
These are what as known as simple machines
and would seem to have little to do
with machine thinking
except
that we may be seen as such simple elements
as part
of a more complex machine
I remember many years ago
working as a clerk
in an insurance broker
in the City of London
We all had very simple
roles and functions
and played our part
in a set of predefined processes
As the Encyclopedia Britannica
goes on to say
"All machines have an input, an output, and a transforming or modifying and transmitting device."
I can remember very little of what it was
I actually did
Most of it seemed to involve
getting inputs of bits of paper
which were sorted and filed
and then passed on
to someone else
It was a curiously soulless machine
we were working in
a very successful money making machine
that from where I sat
did little that was productive
apart from taking
large commissions from insurance companies
for every transaction we handled
The jobs a my level
required little skill
except for very basic literacy and numeracy
and were essentially mindless
we just had to do the right thing in the right sequence
I would guess that most of those jobs have now disappeared
and that
my job
is now a tiny process
in a computer program
I hope so
because it isn't anything a human being
should do
What made the work bearable
was that
like any machine
things went wrong
There were little glitches
and bits of grit
that interrupted
the smooth flows of the machine process
That created the excuse
to wander around
contacting
the other cogs in the machine
to sort out
what had gone wrong
These were usually
tiny errors or mistakes
that took a few moments
to correct
but leaving us time
and a justification
to
chat
joke
gossip
pass the time of day
and
broke up the monotony
of doing what we were supposed to do
None of us at my level
wanted to do what we were doing
Everyone had dreams and plans of doing something else
The only reason we were there
was the pay packet
at the end of the week
It was a curious bargain
For those notes and coins
we accepted some constraints on our lives
We had to be there
from nine till five
with an hour off for lunch
five days a week
We had to keep
our little bit of the process going
at a pace
that kept us invisible
not too fast
because that would have place a burden
on those further up the line
and
not too slow
or our basic idleness
might have been exposed
Some of the constraints were probably functional
Some had very little to do
with completing the work
If you were male
you had to wear a suit and tie
If you were a woman
you had a bit more freedom
providing you wore a skirt
The relationship between
what we wore
and
what we did
was pretty obscure
except as an act of authority
a means of defining who we were
a sign of acquiescence
to the machine
This sense of artificial
arbitrary constraint
is what makes many of us
feel like
kicking against
the confinement
of machine-like systems
even though we recognise
that the system can kick back
harder than the little dents
we can make
This is why
I gave an internal yelp of delight
when I came to this short passage
in the Encyclopedia Britannica article
"The most distinctive characteristic of a machine is that the parts are interconnected and guided in such a way that their motions relative to one another are constrained."
Now the question of constraint
is really interesting
Real machine work
because the parts are constrained
They are designed to be constrained
The constraints of the parts
enable the machine to do
what it is supposed to do
But why do we design organisations
made up of human beings
to resemble machines?
The answer must be
that we see machines as being
reliable
consistent
predictable
controlled
explicitly understandable
and
perhaps most important
a realm of certainty
and
that we want our organisations
to have these qualities
Laplace
one of the great machine thinkers
summed up the dream
writing at the time of Napoleon
" Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature
is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it- an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis- it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present before its eyes."
What a wonderful world
a world of no surprises
no doubts
no uncertainties
A world running on rails
A bureaucrat's delight
Everything running as smoothly
and predictably
as clockwork
Some people it seems
actively desire a world like that
actually believe
that it could be like that
a world where there is one best way
and that is how things are done
Frederick Winslow Taylor
the father of scientific management
the high priest of mass production
was a believer in the one best way
A man who believed
that managers should think and plan
and workers should do what they were told
His work
he claimed
was scientific
because it involved
a detailed study
of the processes
involved in doing a particular job
The beginning of
Time and Motion Studies
But there is a curiously revealing
statement
which perhaps
indicates
the real motive
for organising people
like machines
In one of his papers describing his approach
he says
"In my system the workman is told precisely what he is to do and how he is to do it, and any improvement he makes upon the instructions given to him is fatal to success."
Note the key words
"and any improvement he makes upon the instructions given to him is fatal to success."
There is a bitter joke here
There used to be a successful
Trades Union tactic
called working to rule
It involved people working
in exactly the way
the rules dictated
Invariably the organisation
rapidly ground to halt
Denied the secret of the success
of machine-like organisations
the improvisations and hidden improvements
to its processes and interactions
made by the people actually doing the work
the whole system
got clogged up
by the unanticipated
and unaccounted
daily events
that make up real life
For people who work with real machines
this should be no surprise
They know
that real machines
need attention
and maintenance
if they are to function
as they should
Left alone
neglected
all machines
lose their constraints
and malfunction
or breakdown
The Laplacian machine
of perfect predictability
is a fantasy
an illusion
an ideal that exists only in the imagination
Machine-like organisations
are even more of a fantasy
unlike
real machines
they depend upon
people moving outside the constraints
to keep the system functioning
because
the simplicity of the machine model
never matches
the complexity
of either
the internal ecology of an organisation
or
the wider ecology
the organisation interacts with
So why as a species
do we seem so drawn
to building a world
that appears to work like a machine
There seems to be a cluster
of three motives
It appears to be effective
It provides a sense of certainty and solidity
in a fragile and contingent world
It an efficient means of exercising power and control
over others
The effectiveness of the machine model
maybe simply that it is more visible
and more recorded
The messy
improvised
webs of activity
supporting the machine
are by their nature
invisible and concealed
But there is also a sense
that it does seem to deliver
and that
soldiers triumph over warriors
priests over shamans
nations over tribes
big corporations over small entrepreneurs
and I can buy my milk and cigarettes everyday
In a curious way
the world seems to work
for many of us
and in some respects
it works in what can be described
as a machine-like way
(Though we need to remember that there may be other ways
of describing how it works
that fit all evidence better
Think cybernetics
Think ecology
but more of that later)
The desire for sense of certainty
is more easy to understand
Some level of certainty
is something we all want
need
have to have
in order to function at all
The question becomes
from where this sense of security
comes from
I remember reading
a story
about a group of hunter gatherers
being studied by an anthropologist
When the hunters
made a big kill
they would have a feast
with everyone gorging themselves
until the meat was gone
The anthropologist
in what seemed a curiously unanthropological way
suggested
that maybe they would be better off
saving some meat for another day
The hunter gatherers were baffled by this idea
What was the point?
They'd catch another beast the next day
or if not then
the next
or the next
Their sense of security was based
on a sense of their own abilities
and a belief that their environment
would provide
what they needed
For most of us engaged in this conversation
the story has been very different
The bargain that existed
in much of the industrialised world
both West and East
from the late 1940s on
was that if we were prepared
to follow the rules
we would be provided
with a livelihood
and that
much of our lives could be mapped out
in advanced
Of course
many people reached their middle years
disappointed
that they had not moved
further along the tracks
higher up the pyramid
than they had hoped
but never the less
the map of the railtrack
seemed to be there
and people had a sense
that they knew what to expect
Uncertainties
began to break out
in the late seventies
with an even bigger break
when the Wall fell at the end of eighties
an the vast
seemingly monolithic
machine
of the Soviet sphere
imploded
under its own contradictions
Now we are left in a strange state
a largely unspoken unease
permeates the atmosphere
a pretence that the old map is still there
and our knowledge
that it isn't
We know that simply following the rules
is no longer a guarantee of security
We know that we can be
downsized
rightsized
rationalionised
out of livelihoods
but few of us have
the confidence in our own abilities
and a sense of the benevolence of our environment
felt by the hunter gatherers
But bubbling under the surface
there are those
who live
a life of purposive drift
making up their lives as they go along
and the opportunities arise
who have a greater affinity to those hunter gatherers
whose way of life was dominant for most our history
on this planet
than they do to the pyramid dwellers
who have claimed history
as their own
For here we come to the not so secret
dark secret
of
the machine vision
Getting people
to behave
like parts of a machine
where
"the parts are interconnected and guided in such a way that their motions relative to one another are constrained."
is a great way
of the few
exercising power of the many
Of course it's more complicated than that
It always is
It leaves out all the
compromises
negotiations
bargains
benefits
bribes
sanctions
threats
physical and psychological intimidation
alliances
promises
programming
illusions
prejudices
hopes
fears
all the work and energy that goes into sustaining
the myth of the machine
And
despite the ambitions of some
for power and control
the ultimate irony
is that many of these systems
we have created
have
in a sense
taken on a life of their own
so that the most powerful politician
or financier
or military leader
or business mogul
can find themselves
at the mercy
of the very systems
they sometimes imagine
they control
But most curiously
the ultimate product of machine thinking
the computer
seems to offer another kind of metaphor
for how we see ourselves and our organisations
(Don't for a minute think
that I am suggesting that we are like
computers
We're not
We are beings with bodies
and histories
and experiences)
What makes the computer interesting
quite apart from the impact
it is having
on almost every aspect of our lives
is that it is a possibility machine
Almost any process
that can be imagined
and then described
in terms of the rigorous logic
of digital thinking
can be simulated
on a computer
In the sixties
some the early student activists
in California
used a slogan
"Do Not Bend, Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate Me"
a reference to the punch cards
that held their details
to be fed into
the mainframe computers
that organised their academic life
They felt that they were being reduced
to products being processed
by the university machine
rather than free beings
extending their knowledge and capabilities
At that time
the computer
was seen
as the ultimate expression
of
machine rationality
an instrument of control and domination
the bureaucrat's dream
come true
But even then
some of
the dreamers
the free spirits
the rebels
were drawn to the magical properties
of the computer
and the opportunities
it open
to create spells in its rigorous logic
that promised something very different
from the tyranny of the machine
it promised freedom
An interesting kind of freedom
that depended upon
an understanding of the rigid constraints
of a digital system
an ability to work with
and around
those constraints
to turn what was essentially
a machine modeled
on a hierarchical bureaucracy
into a magical possibility machine
So now we have an extraordinary range
of devices
from mobile phones
to networked computers
which can be used
as instruments of control
surveillance
and domination
and equally
can be used
as a means of supporting
more spontaneous and responsive
ways of managing and organising
our lives
The myth of the machine
is being broken
by the actions
of many people
scattered all over the globe
Connections are being made
that
allow new ways of being
and thinking
and acting
to evolve
Despite the power
of machine thinking
and
machine-like organisations
and the variety of interests
that cling on that view
in spite of the perils
that the domination of that way of being
holds
for our very life on this planet
(for although we talk of
preserving the planet
the planet
and life
are perfectly capable
of looking after themselves
It is we who are threatened
by our follies
not the planet)
But despite all that
I see glimmers of hope
in the bustle and interactions
of people
acting like human beings
working towards
becoming human
drifting towards a way of being
that recognises
the connections between each of us
and the world we have made
and the world that makes itself
If we can learn to pay attention
to what is going on
just maybe
things will be OK
What do you think?
I don't know
I can only
guess
and hope
and speculate about what I see
and carry on
trying to connect to you
in the conversations
we are having
Purposive drift
sound like
a contradiction
and maybe
in one sense
it is
But
in that contradiction
there is
a fruitful tension
a pull
between
the focussed attention of being on purpose
and
the random surprises and unexpected places
that drifting
can take you to
Lurking behind all this is a theory of what it is to be human
or
perhaps more accurately
a theory
of what it could be
(sometime is)
to be human
A theory
if that's not too grand a word
about
what it's all about
and whether
any of it makes an sense
or whether
it's simply an arbitrary adventure
we find ourselves on
All of us at some time
ask the question
What's the point?
And I don't know about you
but very often
it's a question that seldom has a satisfactory answer
In the prologue
I talked about an answer
that took me a long time reach
that more or less satisfies me
I claimed that the answer was to experience
valued moments
If that doesn't resonate with you
you might think that this conversation ends here
because if purposive drift
is just a way of opening yourself
to valued moments
and that idea doesn't connect
then what's the point of going on
But
as I said
behind all this there is a theory of what it is to be human
and being human seems to have something to do
with freedom
of not being a cog in a vast machine
of not running your life according to a set programs
determined by some one else
of not fitting in to a set of predetermined slots
Perhaps this sense of being confined within
a machine-like view of the world
that seems rational
that seems hard to argue against
but doesn't feel as if
it makes sense
is something that does resonate
with your experience
It was certainly where I started
and is actually
in the main
what this conversation is about
Sometime ago I wrote
"I had always found the language of goals and objectives
to do lists
career planning
and all the other ideas that treated life like an engineering project
totally baffling
I couldn't do it
And not being able to do it didn't seem
irrational
or
feckless
or
irresponsible
It just felt that there was something missing from looking at
the world
life
myself
like that
So I
read
and thought
and talked
and wrote
trying to find a language that would make sense of my experience and perceptions
Then one day reading Jane Jacobs "Cities and The Wealth of Nations" I came across this passage
"The Japanese anthropologist, Tado Umesao, observes that historically the Japanese have always done better when they drifted in an empirical, practical fashion (' Even during the Meiji revolution, there were no clear goals; no one knew what was going to happen next') than when they attempted to operate by 'resolute purpose' and 'determined will'. This is true of other peoples, too, although Umesao believes what he calls 'an esthetics of drift' is distinctively Japanese and one of the major differences between Japanese and Western cultures. Had he been looking at Europe and America in the past rather than the present, he would have seen, I think, that 'an esthetics of drift' was distinctively Western too, and worked better for western cultures than 'resolute purpose' and 'determined will'.
A flash of light
A moment of insight
Yes
Yes
and Yes
but there was one connection missing
A fragment from Chris Jones "Essays in Design"
(page 162 John Wiley & Sons, 1984 if you want to look it up)
"When you go to process, you lose the goal, you lose the aim.
I'm beginning to see it now .....THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PURPOSES......the purpose of having a result, something that exists after the process has stopped, and does not exist until it has stopped..... and there is the purpose of carrying on, of keeping the process going, just as one may breather so as to continue breathing?......the purpose is to carry on."
And so I came to the notion of purposive drift
a kind of heuristic for navigating between
the aimlessness of just drifting
and
the blindness of narrow targets and detailed plans for reaching them
a way of carrying on
a way of being
that seems fully human
In that earlier piece
(it was called
"It seems to be a meme: Some rambling thoughts about Purposive Drift")
I quoted Stafford Beer, the cybernetician
"An algorithm is a technique, or mechanism, which prescribes how to reach a fully specified goal."
"An heuristic specifies a methods of behaving which will tend towards a goal which cannot be precisely specified because we know what it is but not where it is."
"These two techniques for organising control in a system of proliferating variety are really rather dissimilar. The strange thing is that we tend to live our lives by heuristics, and to try and control them by algorithms. Our general endeavour is to survive, yet we specify in detail ( 'catch the 8.45 train', 'ask for a rise') how to get to this unspecified and unspecifiable goal. We certainly need these algorithms, in order to live coherently; but we also need heuristics - and are rarely conscious of them. This is because our education is planned around detailed analysis: we do not (we learn) really understand things unless we can specify their infrastructure. ...'Know where you are going, and organise to get there' could be the motto foisted on to us - and on to our firms. And yet we cannot know the future, we have only rough ideas as to what we or our firms want, and we do not understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude. Birds evolved from reptiles, it seems. Did a representative body of lizards pass a resolution to fly? If so, by what means could the lizards have organised their genetic variety to grow wings? One only has to say such things to recognise them as ridiculous - but the birds a flying this evening outside my window. This is because heuristics works while we are still sucking the pencil which would like to prescribe an algorithm."
Let me take one sentence from this long quote
which lies at the heart of what purposive drift is about
"And yet we cannot know the future, we have only rough ideas as to what we or our firms want, and we do not understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude."
If we break this down into three components we get
"And yet we cannot know the future"
"we have only rough ideas as to what we or our firms want"
"we do not understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude."
It seems to me that our present way of life
how we teach our children about the world
and
how we ourselves were taught
is based on the idea that
we can know the future
we have clear ideas about what we want
we do understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude
A set of ideas that are fundamentally wrong
but
seem to work somehow
seem to be how things are
seem to stupid to argue against
seems to be a deep code
that underlies the way
we are supposed to live our lives
even if it doesn't feel quite right
A set of ideas that are deeply programmed into our ways of being
Basil Bernstein
a sociologist who thought deeply about language and education wrote
"...the ultimate mystery of the subject is revealed very late in the educational life. By the ultimate mystery of the subject I mean its potential for creating new realities. It is also the case, and this is important, that the ultimate mystery of the subject is not coherence, but incoherence: not order, but disorder, not the known, but the unknown. As this mystery ...is revealed very late in the educational life - and then only to a select few who have shown the signs of successful socialization - then only the few experience in their bones the notion that knowledge is permeable, that its orderings are provisional, that the dialectic of knowledge is closure and openness. For the many, socialization into knowledge is socialization into order, the existing order, into the experience that the world's educational knowledge is impermeable. Do we have here another version of alienation"
Now
Basil Bernstein was talking about a particular form of education
but I think what he has to say
has a much wider relevance
if you substitute the word "life"
for his words "the subject"
you get
the ultimate mystery of life is not coherence, but incoherence: not order, but disorder, not the known, but the unknown
And that gives us another take
on Stafford Beer's
"And yet we cannot know the future"
"we have only rough ideas as to what we or our firms want"
"we do not understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude."
but more than that
again taking a wider view than Bernstein's concerns in this quotation
we could say that what makes us human
is a capacity
to create new realities
And
what is curious
is how many of our institutions
like
families and schools
could be seen as systems to program us out of our capacity
to create new realities
If we look carefully at young children
we see
that they seem to have no problem
in creating new realities
I can remember my son
sitting in his sandpit
one moment a pirate
the next a spaceman
the next something else
The things that surrounded him
could be an ocean
deepest space
or where ever his imagination took him
And yet
as they grow older
as we grew older
you can see
a hardening of the categories
that sandpit becomes
just a sandpit
we become
just who we are
From a world of infinite possibilities and wonders
our world shrinks
into
a set of certainties
a cage of how things are
Many years ago
I came across a quote
that electrified me
I read it in a review of a book called
"Rubbish Theory: the creation and destruction of value"
by an anthropologist
Michael Thompson
who is one of those people
who has had an interesting and varied career
including working as a builder's labourer
teaching in an art school
as well as pursuing his professional path as an anthropologist
What he said
(and this was the quote in the review)
was
"The great landscape gardener, Lancelot Brown, when confronted with a client's estate, did not say "what is your problem?", he asked "what are the capabilities of this piece of land?". Optimism, generality, and scope flowed where otherwise all would have been pessimism, specificity, and narrowness. That is what is wrong with conventional wisdom: not enough Capability Browns and too many Problematic Tom, Dicks and Harrys."
As soon as I could
I bought the book
hoping to find out more
but that was it
lots of other interesting stuff
but no elaboration of what he meant by
capabilities
But the idea seems clear enough
the world does not have to be
as it now appears to be
It is not fixed
but permeable
It is a world of more possibilities
than
we can imagine
Seeing the world in terms of capabilities
is a bit like being a kid in sandpit
the difference being
that the child is living in the world of their imagination
whereas
what we imagine
we can sometimes make so
I used to live in an area of London
Barnsbury
a part of Islington
that is now an expensive and fashionable place to be
Michael Thompson worked there as a builder's labourer
(he may even have been involved in a bit of property speculation
though I forget whether he talked about that)
The Islington we see now was largely created
as a middle class suburb
then it became part of the working class East End
with only a few tiny pockets
remaining occupied by the middle classes
Just after the Second World War
tenants in houses
just like the one I lived in
were offered their house for nothing
they were seen as having no value
When I moved there
the area was slowly being colonised
by the relatively poor middle classes
artists
designers
musicians
teachers
actors
social workers
teachers
who wanted somewhere nice to live
but couldn't afford the "better" parts of London
For the first few years I lived there
the my part of Islington was under threat
the idea was to knock it all down
and build some modern flats
(an idea welcomed by many of the working class people who lived there)
but
the fashion for large scale redevelopment fell out of favour
so the desirable Victorian and Georgian houses
remained standing
and now
those same houses
once valued at nothing
are the preserve of the rich and the successful professional
In financial terms
the value of the house where I lived
has risen
some two hundred times
which
even accounting for inflation
is a pretty massive shift
The irony of course
is that what I valued about living there
has largely been destroyed
the people
and the atmosphere
that made it a time and place
I valued and enjoyed
are long gone
So what's the point I'm making here?
I guess what I am trying to say here
is that the child's view from the sandpit
is closer to our reality
than
the realistic view
of the sandpit as just a sandpit
that searching for capabilities
can sometimes make more sense
than problem-solving
In Islington
the structure of the houses and their sites remained the same
sure the fabric of the building got run down
but essentially they were the same houses
their Georgian and Victorian speculative builders had created
What changed over time
was the perception of their value
For the planners they were perceived as being slums
and only capable of being slums
and therefore
a problem
A problem that could only be solved
by tearing them down and starting again
For some of the "poor' middle classes
they were seen as being
houses with potential
Places that with a bit of work
attention
and money spent on them
could be nice places to live
For the property speculators in the sixties
it looked like an area on the up
where they could make a financial killing
You could say it was all a matter of perception
But
of course
it isn't quite the same as the child in the sandpit
The world isn't quite as fluid and permeable as that
but
it is a great deal more fluid
than the universe of
the planner who could only see slums
and
literally wanted to bulldoze through
a solution
There was another place that I lived
on the edge of such a solution
rows and rows of house bulldozed down
a new pattern of streets and walkways imposed
a community broken up
and people
with no previous connections
brought in to fill the shiny new flats
It didn't take long
for the place to become
another kind of slum
A place where many of the people who lived there
were ashamed to say where they lived
despite their new kitchens
and bathrooms
and the neat separation
of roads
from walkways
A place that became better known
for crime
vandalism
and drug taking
rather than the good place to live
that had been promised
by the architects
planners
and politicians
But there is a further irony
lurking here
At the same time as many of these
developments from the sixties
were being seen as being so
valueless
that the only thing to do
was to literally
blow them up
and start again
Some of the tall blocks
were bought by private developers
who added a few features like
swimming pools
gyms
better security
and now those valueless slums in the sky
have become
desirable places
for professional people to live
So what am I saying here?
Am I saying that
the planners
architects
and
politicians
were stupid?
Actually
it's the opposite
Many of them were very bright
rational people
The problem lies in what it is to be rational
the underpinning to what is considered to be rational
the view that
we can know the future
we have clear ideas about what we want
we do understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude
This is a bit like looking at life
like a railway system
It is all solidly mapped out
permanent
fixed
If a new line is added
you know where it fits
If a line is closed down
you know where the gap is
And
getting to your destination is straightforward
you just need to know that you are at point A
and that you want to get to point B
then you just need to know
which points on the line to switch
in the right order
and you will get to where you want go
Simple isn't it?
And sometimes it seems to work
There are people
who map out their lives like that
and
know what?
they actually get there
Of course
we know less about the people
who map out their lives like that
and don't get there
but never mind
Taking the other view that
"And yet we cannot know the future"
"we have only rough ideas as to what we or our firms want"
"we do not understand our environment well enough to manipulate events with certitude."
means living another kind of metaphor
There's a good
old one
which is to think of life being like a river
A different kind of system from a railway
One that is harder to pin down
that is in a state of constant
change and flux
but has patterns
we can recognise and learn from
On a large scale
there are big patterns
to which most river systems conform
They start off
small
fast and shallow
and
end up
wide
slow and deep
or something like that
And there are a whole set of other patterns
to visualise and understand how they behave
at various points
in their development
which can be observed and described
but the point is that
they are dynamic
changing
systems
A very detailed map
will almost certainly be wrong in detail
the moment you make it
because the water has risen
or fallen
a bank eroded
or the bed shifted
altering the currents and flows
(actually if you get down to fine enough detail
the same is true for real railways systems
which are more dynamic and subject to change
than our myths of machines allow)
but to continue
Navigating a river is very different
from
making a rail journey
especially if you're very small
the best you can hope for
is some
purposive drift
some nudges
to take you into a current
to move you closer to places
that feel good
or
away from places that feel bad
You have to pay attention
to the way the water moves
and
know yourself well enough
to recognise the places you'd like to be
and
those where you'd rather not
Knowing yourself is more difficult
than it sounds
Often we don't even know
what we know
Some months after I stumbled across the notion
of purposive drift
feeling quite puffed up
and
proud of myself
for the years of thinking
and reading
and talking
that had led me there
I had a nagging feeling
a sense that I had been there long before
Then I remembered
When I was in my teens
I had read a book
recommended by my father
He was particular keen on the "cork" theory of life
it expressed
I was very taken by this idea at the time too
but it slipped into an area of mind
below consciousness
so you could say
that I had forgotten it
but there it was
quietly working away
informing my thinking
without me realising it
only to pop up again
into consciousness
many
many
years later
The book was by Jean Renoir
the film director
and it was about his father
Auguste Renoir
the painter
I have problems with Renoir's paintings
they don't do much for me
but
Claude Renoir's descriptions of his father's life
and their conversations
seemed to show
a man who lived a very human life
a life worthy of respected
In passages like this
Renoir talked about his approach to life
"One can always earn a living. But I have an aversion to making decisions: the 'cork' you remember...You go along with the current...Those who want to go against it are either lunatics or conceited; or what is worse 'destroyers'. You swing the tiller over to the right or left from time to time, but always in the direction of the current."
There seems to be a deep realism
in this view
a recognition that much of our lives
are governed
by forces outside our control
for which
we have no responsibility
and
yet equally
a sense
that we are responsible for the way we live our lives
in circumstances
which we may not have chosen
or desired
but never-the-less
can be lived
in better or worse ways
(We need to pause here
for
both
"better"
and
"worse"
beg many questions
and
I hesitated for a while
before
putting them down
and
wondered for some time
whether
I should delete them
and put some other words there
But for the moment
they can stand
they are roughly what I mean
and sometimes that's the best we can do
So with that qualification
we can move on)
By now I hope
you
are beginning to see
the meandering direction
this conversation is going in
You may find it curious
after all we have been talking about
to find that I have plan
about where we are going
but there is no contradiction here
There's nothing wrong with having plans
providing you build in enough feedback
to change the plan
or
even drop the plan
if it stops making sense
If you think of a plan as a kind of tool
that is
sometimes useful
sometimes essential
and no more than that
then plans can help us make sense of what is going on
rather than blinkers
that blind us
to the important stuff
just outside the range of our vision
The first part of book
is about some of things that can blind us
and can be seen
as an argument in favour
of looking at life
more like a river
and less like
a railway system
The second part of the book
is about
paying attention
which could be another title for this book
for
paying attention
and what we pay attention to
is central to the notion
of
purposive drift
The third part of the book
is a about
some of the qualities of mind and action
that form the frame
of living a life
of purposive drift
I hope I have made in clear
that
this is not going to be
a conversation
where I am the one with all the answers
telling you
how to live a successful life
I have found no formulas
no recipes
that guarantee success
My life
like your life
is still an open question
I may have got much of it wrong
All I can say
is that the idea of purposive drift
feels promising
is worth a try
and as we go on
you can see
whether it makes any sense
to you
I'd like to begin a conversation with you
about how we live
and whether we could do it better
It's a bit of a one sided conversation
because I'm writing
and you're reading
and although
you can react to me
I can only guess at your response
and I'm probably wrong
and your "hang on a moment"
just hangs in the air
unanswered
(though maybe the internet and the web
can even things up a bit)
It's a peculiar conversation in another sense
because it's also a conversation with myself
Even though I have been thinking about a lot of the stuff
I want to talk with you about
for many years
(perhaps
even before you were born)
I still have more questions than answers
and even the answers
are still provisional and tentative
So I am writing as much in the mode of discovery
as I am in the mode of presentation
Despite all this
I still like the idea of conversations
because they are
fluid
of this moment
open to change
and
if they're any good
can take you to places you didn't know you were going
And
even though this may be an odd set of conversations
maybe
you and I will find ourselves
at different places from where we started
through engaging with these words on a page
A little like
a time
and
a place
I found myself some years ago
For those of you who can remember
the time was two weeks before
NATO started to bomb the country we used to call Yugoslavia
and the place was just outside a town called Ohrid
in the south of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia Macedonia
(or as the international bureaucrats say FRY Macedonia)
It was 4.30 in the morning
still dark
stars shining in a wide open clear dark sky
Until a few minutes earlier
we'd been dancing
the music blasting out of the speakers
until the police came and closed the place down
So there we were standing in the car park in the DiscoPark just outside Ohrid
a mobile military hospital parked a few hundred metres up the road
the words of a jolly Macedonian Serb journalist
still reverberating in my mind
serious for a moment
a few days earlier after an evening drinking in a Jazz bar
"The Serbs won't stop"
he said
and he was right
but we didn't know it then
as we stood waiting for our taxi to come
Around us a bustle of young Macedonians
gossiping
smoking
mobile phones going
deciding what to do next
go home and go to sleep?
find some other way of continuing to party?
And the taxis and cars
came and went
and we stood there
enjoying the scene
in no hurry for our taxi to come
to take us back to the hotel
for a few hours sleep
before the journey back to Skopje
and the plane to take us back to London
and our familiar lives
Looking around me
and thinking of the party
and the previous week
and all we had experienced
and the people we had met
and worked with
and laughed with
and talked with
and dreamed with
I turned to my friend and colleague and said
?Isn?t this bizarre. Who could have predicted that we?d be standing in the DiscoPark outside Ohrid at 4.30 in the morning, even a short time ago??
Now
in some ways
there was nothing strange about that moment at all
Unpredictable things often happen
The other day
I met the ex-girlfriend of my nephew
at Kings Cross station
A chance encounter
but nothing exceptional
Unpredictable
but nothing unusual
The kind of thing that happens as part of a routine life
That moment in Macedonia was different
It was a connective moment
A node in time that linked
the web of events in my life
to a wide web of events
A recognition that the world is filled with more possibilities
than we can imagine
An acknowledgment that life can be richer
and more varied
and more filled with hope and wonder
than our experience of the routines of everyday life
sometime allows
That moment of standing there in the dark
feeling so alive
so connected
resonates in my memory
and
I found myself being drawn back there
over and over again
The moment was unpredictable
but it made sense
it wasn't just a random happenstance
Looking back over my life
I could trace how I got there
That thread
began
some thirty or so years earlier
I was at a party
drunk
obnoxious
The host asked someone to get me out of there
and I ended up sleeping on a kitchen floor
with three hairy dogs
and the woman who rescued me
asleep in her room next door
We fell in love
lived together
(got married and divorced)
and changed the course and direction of my life
so that years later
there I was standing in the car park in the DiscoPark just outside Ohrid
A pattern of events that makes sense
in retrospect
A pattern of events that by their nature
was unpredictable
and
of course
with a few
tiny alterations
along the way
could have meant
that at 4.30 in the morning on that day
at that time
I could have been somewhere completely different
All of which
brings me
to what this conversation is about
That moment in Macedonia
was a connective moment
but equally important
it was a valued moment
A point in time when I felt vividly alive
On that trip there were many such moments
It helps that I was in a strange land
a place unfamiliar to me
somewhere I had scarcely been aware of
until a few weeks earlier
It also helped that the trip was filled with surprises
the spring like weather
the beauty of the place
the intensity of our collective experience
the changes we all went through
The strange and the unexpected
often jolts us out of the numbness of everyday routines
and enable us to meet
those moments we value
But
even in the quiet moments
of everyday routine
we can
find valued moments
Even in the most familiar circumstance
that flash of value
as we experience
the beauty of a shadow on a wall
the taste of a mouthful food
the conversation that takes us to places we didn't expect
the piece of work well done
the expression of love that penetrates our deepest being
even moments of intense grief
or loss
can be moments where we are paying full attention
to the wonder of our being
I began this conversation by asking
about how we live
and whether we could do it better
And here I come to a tentative answer
to my own question
Yes I believe we could live our lives more fully
but what does that mean
It means I think
a life more filled with valued moments
Some fourteen years ago or so
I was sitting with my son
at that time a very young child
when I had an epiphany
For much of my life
I had feared death
and had struggled with the intransience of life
Even in the moments I was enjoying myself
I was conscious that
the moment would pass
slipping through my hands
and be gone forever
My life was dominated
by
a kind of discontent
an inability
to really experience now
a life lived
in a future that still hadn't happened
and
a past which couldn't be undone
A way of living
I suspect
that is not uncommon
A way of life
which we cope with
by anesthetizing ourselves
against our knowledge
of how precarious our lives are
and the inevitability of mortality
But then sitting on a pile of cushions with my son
tuned into his rhythm
and pace
Just being in the here and a now
I suddenly had a taste of infinity
A realisation that nothing that happened
nothing that was experienced
could ever be destroyed
Now
of course
this is true for everything we experience
It is all indestructible
but
somehow
I can't help feeling
that
valued moments
are a better connection with the infinite
than
busy moments
lived for what they will achieve
for what they will get us
for where they will move us to in the ladder of ambition
I remember another moment
sitting with my friend
who knew she was to die
from the melanoma that riddled her system
sitting in my kitchen
the garden outside
bright with sunlight
and talking
openly
about how her impending death
made her value
whatever time she had left
all the more
and how
she tried to live
a life
where what was important to her
her children
her husband
her family
the every day business of being
everything she valued was given prominence
and where much of the nonsense
that fills our lives
was put to one side
There was a truth to that part of her life
because
for all of us
each day may be our last
The motorcyclist who doesn't see the car door open
The child walking to the market when the sniper's bullet strikes
All the arbitrary incidents which mark our frailty
And yet we are infinite in our transience
and this is what I want to talk with you about
a way of being that offers a greater possibility
of valued moments
An approach to life I call
purposive drift
I make no claims to live my life this way
Sometimes I do
Sometimes I don't
Like all of us I am prey to the same stupidities
the same vanities
the same fears
the same loss of nerve
the same desire for an anesthetized life
But over the years
the promise of purposive drift
has grown
It seems to make sense
and in the following pages
the sense it makes
is what I want to share with you
to see if my experience
connects with your experience
and whether
this conversation
will take us both to place
that neither of us expected
These are strange days. If you follow the news it would appear that we live in a world dominated by people who live in a Manichaean universe. The categories are very simple - good vs evil, for us or against us, believer vs infidel, black or white and definitely no greys.
But, under the surface, there is something else going on too.
Flicking through a series of links (Matt Jones to Z+ Partners) I came to an essay by Grant McCracken that lifted my spirits as he pointed to that something else going on too.
Early in the essay he says:
Later in the essay he goes on to say:
But there is another use for difference. In this case, we use difference as a definitional opportunity. We say of otherness, "Wonder what that's like?" We venture out and try otherness on. This has always been the spirit of Mardi Gras and other liminal moments. But I think there is good evidence that our entire culture is shifting in a transformational direction. More and more, we are prepared to try on difference, to test it out.
This is a radically new approach to difference, one that completely shifts the field of assumptions. In the old sharpening model, we use difference to push off against. We are not what the other is. In this new transformational model, we use difference as a definitional opportunity. We use it as a shape to try on and act out. Our most fundamental reflexes are rewired. When we see a new species of social life ... we no longer say, "Weirdo! Get 'em!" We say, "Um, that's pretty strange. What's it like to be like that?"
Looking at the world like that lifts some of my gloom. Of course, the multiplication of difference will for some induce a hardening of the categories. It is a confusing world. But what is encouraging is that so many people embrace the uncertainty as a potential space for liberation and are "prepared to try on difference, to test it out."
Some weeks ago I put together a short piece composed of three quotations and three links and called it, "What do we need to thrive?" Looking at some stuff recently, that I intend to write about later, I was reminded of the author of the last quote, Rich Gold. His quote, "We should be careful to make a world we actually want to live in.", taken from a friend, Stu Card, was a good one. But the link just goes to the last page of his on-line book, The Plentitude, and I'm not sure how many people would have taken the trouble to explore his site further.
If they didn't this would be a pity. Rich Gold, who sadly died last year, was someone who really lived up to his name. His site is rich with nuggets of pure gold. A good place to start is Plentitude, published in PDF format. This is one book I really would like to see in print as well as on-line. It's the kind of book you want to savour, to hold in your hand, linger over, to think about.
He writes and draws in a deceptively simple style, but there is much to reflect upon in what is there. He covers an extraordinary range of subjects including how to use PowerPoint effectively, the nature of creativity, ubiquitous computing, the fecundity of nature, to mention a few. A truly rich read, well worth a visit.
The other day I started writing a snotty piece about the difficulties of networked or, as it is sometimes called, ubiquitous computing. Then I hit a question I couldn't answer.
It all began well enough. There was a short entry in Matt Jones's blog, which took me to Gene Becker's thoughtful reflections on the collapse of technologies at Prada's New York Epicentre store and his thoughts about what he call ubicomp.
Reading it I was reminded of a story in Michael Lewis's "The New, New Thing". In it he describes the maiden voyage of Jim Clark's yacht, Hyperion- a heavily computer controlled boat. The bit that had amused me and I had thought a salutary lesson was the story of how an automated partition in the galley had unexpected risen and then fallen, without any of the programmers being able to work out why it had occurred.
There were also some more serious, in the sense of life threatening, incidents with the boat's engine, that were finally resolved by ripping off its sensors.
All of which seemed to support my prejudices about the difficulties of networking to real world objects and Gene Becker's conclusions:
But, I had a nagging thought at the back of mind. Lewis's story was about a maiden voyage. The reason the programmers were on board was because they were still working on the system. In these circumstances glitches were inevitable. I needed to find out what happened later on and that has proved difficult.
What does seem to be the case is that Hyperion works. It won the Millennium Cup races in New Zealand a couple of years after its maiden voyage. The question that this raises is how does it work? Did they sort out all the problems or did they scale down the level of ambition? Is it a boat that can be sailed at distance with no one on board as originally intended? Or, is it just a well designed yacht with some computer aided bits? I don't know. If I did it might help answer the question of whether ubicomp is a ten year or hundred year problem. At the moment my money is still on Gene Becker being right.
I've admired Issey Miyake for many years. I've even fancied, but never been able to afford, some of his clothes. But most of all I have marvelled at the beauty and inventiveness of much of his work. What impresses me is the way that he keeps moving forward. I was intrigued when he moved away from high fashion and started "Pleats Please", clothes you can roll up into a tube. Now I see in Wired, that he is moving A-POC, A Piece of Cloth, clothes you can cut out and customise yourself, into areas like furniture and, perhaps even into buildings.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a very short piece about Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant article, "Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety". I was interested to see that Gerd Gigerenzer, who I have written about before, has also tackled the subject of illusions of safety.
What I think we can infer from Gladwell's article and Gigerenzer's research is not so much that people are irrational, but more that we are often mistaken. The people who buy SUVs or who abandoned the comparatively safe airlines for the dangerous roads have good reasons for their decisions. It's just that they are ill-informed decisions, as are many of our decisions. And they are ill informed because we are ignorant.
I remember some years ago talking to someone from the WHO. His concern was that malaria was still a big killer. What worried him was that there was a lot of solid knowledge about how to prevent and how treat malaria, but that this knowledge was not widely disseminated and hence was not put into practice.
Back in February, I quoted from Brecht's "Life of Galileo:
"Truth is the child of time, not authority. Our ignorance is infinite, lets whittle away just one cubic millimetre. Why should we want to be so clever when at long last we have a chance of being a little less stupid."
It seems to me the task of becoming less stupid is one of the most pressing of our time. We have the tools do it. The question seems to be, do we have the will?
I could say that HyperCard changed my life. Like many of my generation HyperCard was the vehicle that got me into what I still like to call hypermedia. So I was a bit sad, but not surprised to see that Apple had finally withdrawn all support for their unloved baby.
One of the reasons why HyperCard was unloved by Apple was the difficulty in finding a neat, simple description of what it was. As Tim Oren says in his "A Eulogy for HyperCard" - "What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question."
It was, of course, all those things and more. Perhaps the best description was Bill Atkinson's, its creator, who wanted to create a programming tool "for the rest of us."
This was perhaps what Apple missed. Bill Atkinson had joined the honour roll of people like Alan Kay with SmallTalk and Seymour Papert with Logo, who believed in trying to promote a genuine computer literacy. As Alan Kay said not so long ago:
HyperCard was perhaps the nearest we have got to a computing environment, which could act as a foundation for this kind of literacy. At the simplest level it was a simple to use tool that enables people with a limited knowledge of computers to create useful things on them. (Even I, who is at a practical level technically incompetent, was able to make some things that were useful for me using it.) But it also offered a graduated route to doing increasingly sophisticated things with it and in the process taught people some fundamental programming concepts.
But that aspect of HyperCard very quickly got lost. Instead it was seized on as a tool for creating interactive multimedia products. There was a slightly earlier alternative, Peter Brown's "Guide", which in some ways was more sophisticated and was multi-platform, but HyperCard became dominant because, at first, it was free and bundled with every Macintosh.
There were some very good products produced using HyperCard, I think particularly of some of the stuff published by Voyager. But because of the relatively neglect by Apple in further developing it for this area, professionals began to switch to more sophisticated development environments, such as SuperCard and later Macromedia's Director.
This left HyperCard hovering in a kind of no man's land; there were better tools for professionals and there was little promotion and development of it as a programming tool for the rest of us.
Perhaps, as Tim Oren suggests "HyperCard could have been forked into several related products, each tailored to a specific market." But as it was, it wasn't and a great opportunity was lost.
One day another Alan Kay or Seymour Papert or Bill Atkinson will come along and produce something that will act as the foundation for a genuine computer literacy. It probably won?t look like HyperCard but will be equally simple and equally deep only better. Then we will be able to claim that Alan Kay?s computer revolution really has arrived.