From Extracting Financial Value Out Of Humanity To Putting Social Values Into Humanity

Our society is accustomed to treat people as expandable assets. Assets of which the max. possible financial value needs to be extracted, just like milk from a cow. Often indirectly driven by fulfilling the (greedy) goals of a minority. I was inspired to write this down after having read this blog from Helene Finidori: The Commons at the Core of our Next Economic Models? I liked the article a lot.

So what if humanity’s mindset would become geared towards putting in maximum human value in all people instead of extracting maximum financial value from most people? So that humanity’s goals shift from financial to social? For example, global happiness as a primary goal, financial and other values become the mere means? Looking at greed, I think we should still stay greedy, but not any longer financially greedy but socially greedy. Transform the world from a-social to social. If we all are willing to create such a brave new world, it can be done.

Only A Small Bit Of World’s Information Is Structured Enough To Be Managed “In” “Formation”

Managing Information. Into “perfectly” modular registers or silo’s. Often preferably from as less vendors as possible. That is what we try do already for a long time. But still we are not yet able to manage all of our information “in formation”. The way we approach information problems is often the same, regardless of the type of information at hand. We like to structure our information into rows and columns. So that it can be easily “managed”. Managed “in” “formation” that is. But what we often seem to forget is that only a tiny part of world’s information cán really be managed “in” “formation”. The greater part isn’t structured enough to be structured. Or at the very best, many parts can be considered more semi-structured than structured.

I believe we need a boost in Information theory to better solve this problem. I therefore also like very mich what Esko Kilpi says in his blog: “Information theory is not only unhelpful but harmful, when trying to understand communication between human beings. Communication is not about sharing information but a process of formation.” So if we keep on designing worlds information systems according to current Information theory without taking into account the process of formation, we might do more harm than good.

Could there be other ways? Look at the optical illusions picture shown here. It shows human faces, that together make up a larger face. To me this looks like a beautiful, natural way of “managing information” that humans can readily understand. Might it be that current information theory is getting at the end of it’s possibilities and might need input from something new theory, for example “formation theory”?

From Learned Helplessness To Global Consciousness

This video shows how Learned Helplessness works. So it seems very easy to (deliberately) guide people into thinking inside the box instead of thinking outside the box. What can we do about it? Well, if you want to be the change you want to see in the world just like me, you could start by getting more curious. Investigate. Browse. Look through newsletters. Find interesting sites. Connect with interesting communities. Tweet. Get mentioned. Build networks. Build your own change universe. Share with others. Get feedback. Renew. Strategize. Invent. Challenge. Learn how to let go. Let go of the old often. Don’t re-use because you think you must. Transform the world. Make it a better place to live. Help the 3rd industrial revolution on it’s disruptive way. Don’t fight radical change but use it to obtain new, better values. And finally, make clever use of the ever growing Global Consciousness. Happy transforming!

Without Deviation From The Norm, Progress Is Not Possible

The title of this blog is in fact a quote from Frank Zappa. I like it because I think we need to deviate from certain norms if we want to really create a better world and say farewell to all our crises. We have to get rid of our fears. Just like @transarchitect tweeted: “Not only is fear the root of many of our problems, it is also leads us to resist the changes that would help solve our existing problems“.

But it’s not only fears that hinder us. For example look at the article mentioned in this recent tweet from @petervan “The third industrial revolution | The Economist http://econ.st/GNWP45 > Wow! “instinct to protect what already exists” Curious if I could find any root causes for this instinct to protect, a few essential lines in the article got me thinking about root causes:

• “And with the internet allowing ever more designers to collaborate on new products, the barriers to entry are falling.” What happens? When we see that barriers to entry are falling our first instinct will say to us to protect our Business. Because we might fear to loose our Business. But what can we do to deviate from our ‘instinct’ norm? For example, no longer protect the well-known but go with the same flow. Also become one of the parties that disrupt existing barriers to entry. Instead of fighting the competitors, work with the competitors. Transform from red-ocean strategy thinking to blue-ocean strategy thinking. Join, collaborate, co-create, connect. Relax and let go of overly controls.
• “The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation”. So we are transforming from mass production to mass customisation. Fits well with consumerization. What can we do? Put the innovation power to the consumer. Release the fear of not being maximally efficient. Replace with strategy to be maximally effective. Let the consumer co-create. Deliver an innovative infrastructure that makes this possible. Relax and let go of overly controls.
• “Like all revolutions, this one will be disruptive”  At first sight, our instinct would guide us to fight the disruption. But probably a better strategy will be to not fight is but ride it (ride the wave, go with the flow, let go of control). Relax and let go of overly controls.
• “The lines between manufacturing and services are blurring” We are transforming from a product-based economy to a services-based economy. So there will be a lot of new opportunities. A lot of new jobs. A lot of new challenges. A lot of compelling cases. And a lot of possibilities to transform to a beautiful new world, towards a new “Golden” age.
  

So if we are willing to let go of our fears of not being totally in control, our instinct to protect the existing, well-known will be reprogrammed. Good luck with your reprogramming!

There’s Nothing Wrong With Reinventing The Wheel

We all have come on this earth to have experiences. So what most of us probably will do most of the time is learning by experiencing. We need to have experiences because if someone explains something to us (for example parent, teacher or boss) chances are you still have to understand it yourself. Nobody can understand something for you. You have to do that all by yourself. And if we keep educating our people so they will have no misunderstanding, they also would have no experience. If there was no experience then everything would be fully predictable. And in a predictable system there is no free will. So there are certainly drawbacks in reusing what you have been thought and accepting that blindfoldedly.

So now we come to the re-use part. We are being thought at home, at school, at work to re-use. Because others have already invented things. So there is no need to re-invent it. And that’s where things sometimes can go wrong. Because this re-use syndrome is all around society, it tends to copy things we know from the past (which might be a good thing). But it might also prevent us from thinking in radical renewal or fresh new ideas, which I think humanity is in desperate need for at this time in history. Therefore I vote for a renewal strategy where we stop looking back at the past most of the time, and start looking more to the future. And have no fear for radical renewals if they help humanity a step forwards. 

Beautiful World

Our world is a beautiful planet worth living on. But how did humanity come to the point where we are now, spoiling the earth, creating crisis after crisis? There has to be a better way. I sincerely hope and believe that global consciousness will help lift her out of the negative spiral she is currently in, and transform her into a more positive spiral with abundance and prosperity for everyone. I believe the uprising global consciousness might just be the trigger for reversing the propagation direction. So that we all become more and more aware that we are not only looking at our world but are part of it.

Marvelous Marble Caves

Just stunningly beautiful! Marble Caves in the Carrera Lake.

The Cure for Non-Curiosity

The others (not you and me) all have learning fears. It might be because whatever they learn could potentially reveal something new that might puts them out of our comfort zone. For example, their comfort zone might lie in being a specialist in some area. And let’s be honest: nobody wants to be voluntarily pulled out of their comfort zone. Or loose ‘status’, going from specialist to generalist. But suppose they could together achieve a better world, with same or higher level of comfort? And be facilited to achieve it. Giving each other room. Helping each other out where possible. So that they all become curious for learning new things. Not afraid for innovations anymore. Willing to take learning riscs. Wouldn’t that be worthwhile? I have already started my own path of never-ending curiosity. And I enjoy it! 

Relax! Faith Can Only Be Achieved Through Experience

The article “The lifting of the veil” states: “We currently inhabit a Science paradigm. Science seems to operate from the smallest verifiable level upwards towards the heavens, whereas the Spiritual community comes from the largest down to the smallest. One major difference being that science is based on being able to verify and duplicate “Facts” whereas spirituality is based on Faith and is seemingly at odds with science. Faith is the drive within humans for something beyond metaphor. Science says there is nothing beyond metaphor.”  I wonder which metaphor science has for the situations as shown in the pictures, where faith seems to play a major role. And there are lots of daily situations where you just don’t have the time for scientific approaches and therefore you have to rely on faith.

So I believe science has it’s part in helping our world getting better, but I also believe spirituality can play a part in creating a better world. Both science ans spirituality can easily benefit from eachother provided they are willing to learn from each other. Or as the Pateo academy states: “Science without spirituality is dead and without soul. Spirituality without science is fantasy and ungrounded.” 

Given all this, what could we do? Suppose you are facing a situation where scientific approach doesn’t directly help you further, you might try a spiritual approach, for example by letting your intuition decide for you instead of decision making based on scientific proof. It’s not that difficult at all. It requires only a bit of faith and a bit of practicing.  Happy experiencing!

Using the Universal Law of Attraction to Handle Attention Overload

Information Technology has given humanity a lot of useful things. But is has also given us new problems. Like the problem that we are able to produce far more information than we will ever be able to consume. So information overload is a given. We somehow have to live with it. And learn how to prevent waste coming from e.g. filter failure. But where did the overload come from? Maybe one of the more important reasons we produce information is because we want to attract attention to it. Given this, we could also say that it’s not information overload we’re facing, but attention overload. And since we just don’t have the time to handle the overload of attention there exists, we need to find ways to filter it.

The Wikidepia article about Attention Economy states:  “Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity…As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.”. What this means is the time you have available to spend for handling attention is limited. And nowadays, the time between attention interruptions also increases, which means you must have even more tools to filter the overloads coming at you. And in this constrained available time you have to carefully filter from the attention abundance. I suggest an effective filter would follow the Universal Law of Attraction: anything we pay attention to, grows. So if we want to grow good things, we should pay attention to good things. And try to ignore all the rest. But ofcourse there are plenty of other filter techniques.

Should you want to know a bit more about the ‘attention’ topic, I suggest reading the interesting post ‘Competition among memes in a world with limited attention‘ by L. Weng, A. Flammini, A. Vespignani, F. Menczer which was published 29 march 2012 in Scientific Reports by Nature Publishing Group. It tells about a/o how memes could go viral, even when there is attention scarcity (“Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay attention to a portion of the information they receive.”).