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I rather like these abstract, almost poetic postlets that the moose has been leaving on her blog.

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Recordings of the talks at Accelerating Change will apparently be available on ITConversations in the near future. The BloggerCon III recordings are already beginning to trickle in.

I'm still thinking over Doug Engelbart's speech at Accelerating Change. Like the speech, his Bootstrap Institute website describes the greatest challenges the world now faces:

• Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale.
• The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.
• Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.

If that didn't make sense to you, let me try to interpret. Engelbart is considering how innovation happens in response to large-scale problems. For some problems, a talented individual can figure out a solution—great. But other problems, those of a global scale, are too large for inventors to solve. Moving from the individual scale to the organizational or even national scale, there are still problems that are beyond the reach of these larger and larger institutions that might perhaps be solvable if additional entities could contribute.

The process for solving problems that cannot be solved by invention is evolution. In biology, the problem might be stated as "what form of life survives best?" But evolution happens in other environments too. In product markets, companies design products and compete with each other, some lasting and some failing. But the evolution metaphor doesn't end there. Evolution makes progress by chance—random mutations. A strand of DNA doesn't know whether a mutation is good or bad—it doesn't even have an opinion. But without even understanding the larger questions, its mutation contributes to the solution of an incredibly complex problem. Similarly, product developers don't always know how their product will be used, but leaving it out there for experiemental, even random combination with other objects and ideas permits it to participate in the evolution.

Furthermore, the mutations need not be random. The power still lies in the gradual overall progress despite potential individual failures. But with some cleverness, the individual "mutations" can do much better than random; if our attempts are vaguely in the right direction, they can accelerate useful evolution. On the other hand, if the agents of knowledge mutation—inventors—are overly constrained in their choices, they may actually do worse than random.

Solving problems in this fashion is what I think Engelbart means by the third bullet point above. He then sets out criteria for building and improving that mechanism:

• We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.
• The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge.
• The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.
• Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success.

I don't feel I understand these points as well as the first batch. But I think when Engelbart writes "collective IQ", he is actually talking about a collective capacity for the execution of the evolutionary mechanisms. This is in part about building lots of clever inventors, but that part is severely overshadowed by the need to rapidly conceive and test lots and lots of mutations. But what about this bootstrapping business?

Well, perhaps this means that each solution reached by an evolutionary system produces not just an answer but also a new state of the evolutionary system itself. This indicates a different conception of problems and solutions: whereas an inventor might eliminate a problem by some clever invention, an evolutionary process connects the solution not only to previous solutions but to future problems and solutions. Therefore the process sets the course for its own increased productivity.

Are we witnessing the opening of a new frontier for evolution?

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Lilia Efimova believes knowledge work is all about unique individuals:

knowledge worker is someone who creates value by being subjective

I think she's onto something. Blogs, unlike other "knowledge management" tools, center around a person. This is important because it gives individuals the freedom to post whatever they want. By eliminating the fear that something you care about doesn't belong in the system somewhere, the act of posting is always much closer at hand. You don't even have to ask yourself if something belongs—you get so used to writing things down on your blog that you instead have to wonder, when wouldn't I want to share this {idea, feeling, picture, tip, joke} with other people?

And so people simply care more about blogs than other KM tools. The boat of knowledge written down on the blog is lifted by the tide of person-centered writing and discussion.

You might think that if you wanted to help your people sell widgets, you could just give them a widget-sale-data-sharing system and forget about the family pictures, stupid jokes, and indulgent ramblings you see on blogs all the time. At the very least, they could still record and exchange the same knowledge about widget-selling, which is all you care about. Right?

Perhaps not. Will your widget salespeople feel as comfortable writing about their sales failures in this task-centered environment? In a blog, a reader sees many sides of the author, automatically triggering empathy. Some people think they can do well in a constrained communications channel, optimizing their life to become the top widget sales performer in the northeast region. But the more your company's success depends on people doing their best work cooperatively, truly caring about organizational goals, and maintaining a deep company culture, the less a constrained channel can offer.

Getting people to open up and build relationships between each other is risky and complicated. Mistakes are made and feelings can be hurt. But the accelerated spread of knowledge, loyalty, help, and love is well worth it.

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The classic talk by Larry Wall.

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… there is the misconception that new ideas come simply from detail[ed] knowledge of your field. In fact, most creativity comes from around the boundaries of a discipline where fields of expertise overlap, it comes from the edges of the known not the comfortable centre. These days that overlap seems to be achieved mainly by the coming together of specialists at those boundaries - a sort of collective polymathy. But however you do it, innovation requires polymathy.

Over the past century, humankind has seen dramatic increases in specialization—at home, at work, in geography, in scholarship, in the layout of cities and towns. There is, of course, a compelling cause—knowledge in so many realms has been so much expanded that effectively applying knowledge to healthcare, law, or scientific experimentation requires extensive training. In these fields, there may be a cost in lost progress or innovation because of excessive division of understanding.

But there is also a much scarier trend. Not everyone needs to make scientific discoveries, but everyone needs to have a healthy life that includes caring for friends and family, pursuing satisfying work, making love, eating, learning, and teaching. Increasingly we have psychiatrists to care for us, consumerism as the surrogate objective of work we do not otherwise value, sexual desires shaped by mass media, food made by machines, and a school/college monopoly on learning.

Any of these effects is probably an impediment to happiness on its own. But what about the second-order effects? If, from a young age, you never believe you have a chance to become a most trusted friend, or an effective teacher, how will you approach other problems? Will you just assume you can't achieve goal because you're not a goal-ist?

This is the danger expressed in Brave New World and similar dystopic visions—that humans will tend further toward believing they can do nothing. Is that prophecy fulfilling itself right now?

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Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

—James Boswell, 1791

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"Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?"

David Bohm (1917-1992), physicist & philosopher

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MIT Instructor Amy Smith doesn't equate invention and high technology. She and her students invent cheap, simple solutions to problems faced in developing countries.

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serendipity is my drug, tunnel vision my antidote. i seek out the big ideas in every field that will reveal its treasures to my inquiries. i synthesize, recombine, mutate. infect.