Society 3.0 – A Radical Thought Experiment #13 #cong20

Synopsis:

what kind of society might be formed by a collective of citizens evolving the capability to perceive the social organism, and the processes that shape it?

Total Words

687

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. Coming soon

About Jeffrey Gormly

i use my creativity to make space for yours.

Contacting Jeffrey Gormly:

You can connect with Jeffrey by email..  

By Jeffrey Gormly.

Not only is it possible to imagine a radically different society, it is possible to imagine society in a radically different way.

In fact, we seriously underestimate the role of imagination in understanding society now, or in any form it has held in the past or might hold in the future.

to perceive .. the social organism as a living being, to perceive its movements – to see what has been formed – in other words, to compare the contemporary shape and form of the social organism with its archetype. This is a sculptural concept… (J. Beuys)

Imagination has the power of creating a picture of things by organising, framing and shaping the data of our senses into patterns, procedures, and expectations. Imagination is a perceptual organ itself, and by reappraising our powers of imagination, we can give ourselves new power to invent, create, discover the future

Complexity, cybernetic and quantum theories centrally posit the idea of observer-entanglement, that the very act of observing creates change in what we are observing. This also implies that we can only have a limited understanding or perception of complex systems we are a part of, because we are ourselves inside those systems – there is no place of impartial objective observation.

Even the use of data to create objectivity is limited in that to precisely model reality would require computing resources and energy consumption greater than our finite world can actually provide.

But there are other kinds of technologies.

According to the principle of emergence, complex systems can and do arise from accumulated actions and interactions – in this model, mind is an emergent phenomenon based on the interactions between neurons and within and between nets of neurons; a hive is emergent on the interactions of thousands of bees, etc.

We can think of a future society as a social organism that is emergent on the perception and creativity of citizens.

In this radical thought experiment, our mode of perception is the technology and we are shifting the operating system for dealing with our environment from the level of the individual to the level of social organism or superorganism. Developing a sensitivity to how individual actions inflect complex systems will be one instance whereby humans will grow what Joseph Beuys refers to as “new organs of perception”.

In one aspect, this technology is ideological: how we frame our perceptions to recognise the processes and discern the dynamics of emergence, in order to be able to dance with those processes. This form of the technology has been called cybernetic epistemology.

This technology is also a kind of wisdom-knowledge practice for coping with uncertainty, emergence and creative process. It’s being in a state of dance, navigating the multiple choreographies of complex systems. Kirsi Monni calls this technology techne. I call it choreonautics.

Entering fully into this thought experiment will not only generate new thinking, it will cause the thinker to develop mental and perceptual flexibility; a new level of comfort with the unknown, uncertain, ambiguous; a deeper feeling of ease with creative processes; a new sense of optimism.

To sum up: what kind of society might be formed by a collective of citizens evolving the capability to perceive the social organism, and the processes that shape it?

Over the next few weeks imagine your self as an element of that social organism. How does your behaviour affect the larger organism, eg by reinforcing, confirming, conforming, inflecting.

 

Further Reading

Joseph Beuys – What is Art?

Jeffrey Gormly, Michael Klien, Steve Valk – Book of Recommendations

Kirsi Monni – Sense and Meaning in Dance

Peter Miller – Smart Swarms

Ernst Von Glasersfeld – Radical Constructivism

October 7, 2020 2020 Society 3.0 No comments yet

distributed leadership #15 #cong19

Synopsis:

I believe leadership can arise (emerge) spontaneously. It can manifest through a statement, an action, a relationship, or a process.
Supporting people to give authority to their creativity supports leadership. Each person becomes encouraged to offer their intuitive sense of direction to a situation in an instance of knowledge or authority. This is leadership distributed across the collective (group, team, community) or context (project, process).

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. creative activity, initiative, enterprise, and leadership all exercise a common muscle
  2. that muscle is best exercised in a social setting
  3. we could call that muscle authorship
  4. authorship is about standing up for the progress of an idea into the world

About Jeffrey Gormly:

i use my creativity to make space for yours

Contacting Jeffrey Gormly

You can connect with Jeffrey by email.

By Jeffrey Gormly

“In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily a dance of interacting parts”
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

I work with an idea of leadership as an emergent property; that is, I believe leadership can arise (emerge) spontaneously. It can manifest through a statement, an action, a relationship, or a process.
Supporting people to give authority to their creativity supports leadership. Each person becomes encouraged to offer their own intuitive sense of direction to a situation in an instance of knowledge or authority. This is leadership as spontaneous, improvised, fluid, and mediated by context rather than some outside authority. This is leadership distributed across the collective (group, team, community) or context (project, process).
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In this work I focus on creating (choreographing) conditions that allow and support leadership to emerge. Creative practice encourages attentiveness, physical liveliness, concentration, a refinement of the senses of seeing and listening, and invokes or rehearses a hypothetical ‘sixth sense’ of telepathy or intuition (imagination).
The intention is to have fun, build an ensemble, promote full presence of mind, raise concentration levels, and tune everyone in to what I playfully refer to as hivemind, a kind of collective intelligence which encompasses self, each other, the space or larger context, and the task at hand. It’s about creating an ensemble out of a group, and staging situations that allow people to voice their intuition, their own sense of direction, with authority, and perhaps offer that to the group as a gesture of leadership.
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An authentic experience of creative process includes developing and trusting intuition; listening to oneself, others and the situation; bravely expressing oneself freely; not taking things personally; trying things out; not knowing for sure; rehearsing and reflecting.
Playing with the idea of hivemind offers the chance to explore and experiment with relations between part and whole, between individual and collective; to ‘tune in’ to the larger creative, thinking, or growth processes taking place; to sense what needs to be said; and place thoughts, dreams, desires, wishes, creative ideas and free associations into an open, communal container.
Individuals can also let go of troubling or difficult issues by placing these thoughts into ‘hivemind’ and allowing them be understood as a ‘symptom of the system’. This encourages free speech and direct address of the situation, without triggering interpersonal conflict or disagreement. It offers the opportunity to freely say what needs to be said, without being tied to ownership of these tidings, in a kind of ‘immunity from prosecution’.
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Underlying this work is a belief that creative activity, initiative, enterprise, and leadership all exercise a common muscle, and that muscle is best exercised in a social setting. We could call that muscle authority, but I prefer to think of it creatively, as authorship.
Authorship is not about claiming the origin of an idea, but standing up for the progress of that idea into the world. It is a kind of leadership that manifests in an instant, a gesture committing us to what we feel we know to be true or possible, in that moment expressing our belief and passion about that possibility and shaping its trajectory.
We identify this courageous gesture as leadership because it gives voice or action to something-needing-to-be-said: intuition, we could call it: trusting our own knowledge about creativity, community, economy, culture, and allowing these dynamics to take form through their own process.

September 4, 2019 2019 Community No comments yet

creativity wants to flow #34 #cong18

Synopsis:

Creativity wants to flow – taking time to observe and understand the flow of creative process – what is happening and where it wants to go next – not only generates new ideas, but ensures those ideas are useful and appropriate to what you want to think about. here are some useful tips…

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Creativity unfolds, like, say, a flower. There is a rhythm and a sequence that can be observed.
  2. To have good ideas, I make space – in my day, in my notebook, in my mind.
  3. Intuition is a compass. It’s the thread that guides you through the labyrinth of creative possibility
  4. Thinking about idea-having as a kind of dance reminds me that I have a body. Getting my body activated by dancing, moving and playing mobilises whole resources of brain power that we are usually inclined to overlook or ignore.

About Jeffrey Gormly:

Artist, Author, Thinker, Collaborator
Current research topics:
Creative organisation – how we can unlock creativity in our collective life
Creativity for health – strategies for normalising creative self-expression
Creativity for freedom – making room for creative diversity in society

Contacting Jeffrey Gormly:

You can contact Jeffrey by email and see his work on Rice on Hydra

By Jeffrey Gormly.

Creativity wants to flow, so I shall let my thoughts go, unedited. A one time one take streaming of ideas about ideas. Not just my ideas – I’ve been collecting ideas about ideas for a long time now.

Creativity wants to flow – this much I intuitively know. It’s why we call it the opposite when we say so and so is blocked. So what Mihaly has said about flow applies to having ideas – it can be practiced, it can be observed, and it gives pleasure.

Creativity unfolds, like, say, a flower – perfect image of creativity. There is a rhythm and a sequence that can be observed. There is a process at work, and there is a language of process, that can be learned, even if each instance, each idea, is unique in and of itself.

Process can be thought of, in the words of Arnold Mindell: “what is happening … and what wants to happen” – which suggests that if you pay attention – the right kind of attention, and enough of it – you can maybe see what is happening, and anticipate what wants to happen next.

This is my way. My tao. As artist, author, thinker, maker, leader, follower, I put hard hours into observing what is happening, really happening, so that I can make the lightest, most effective, most precise intervention possible. I want to be precise, I want to be economical, I want to be clear, and I want to be ecological – leave the lightest footprint.

To have good ideas, I make room. I don’t know where they come from, but those original, interesting, context-breaking ideas can’t emerge if there’s no space for them to breathe. So I make space – in my day, in my notebook, in my mind. I stare at a blank page, I drink my coffee, I listen to music, I take time.
What kind of an idea am I looking to receive? Am I open and willing to take what comes to me? Can I accept the universe’s generosity?

I lay out my territory. I am a hunter, stalking a breakthrough moment. I am a gardener cultivating a fertile ground for creative thought. I think about what I want to think about. For instance, thinking about ideas, I’m thinking about creativity, flow, process. I’m thinking about the role of the thinker. I’m thinking about gardening. And hunting. I’m thinking about the relationship and difference between my inner world and outer, and how ideas bridge that difference.

These thoughts are what chaos theory calls strange attractors – strong ideas that act like gravitational bodies, stars and planets that pull the random movements of my mind in different directions. So that over time my thoughts start to find pathways within and between all these strange strong attractors, without ever settling on just one. With luck, this movement starts to feel like a kind of dance.

Dance implies flow. Dance is a source of pleasure. Dance means creative flexibility. These are all good things.

Dance is also a good way to inhabit the not-knowing chaos and mystery that I believe is the birthplace of all ideas.

Before you have an idea, you have to have no idea!

You can have clues though. Clues point to ideas. That ability of humans to find a way through mystery, doubt (there will always be doubt!) and the thicket of experience is what I think of as intuition.

Intuition is a compass. It’s the thread that guides you through the labyrinth, a golden thread you discover one step at a time. You can only feel it, and you’ve got to trust it, even when trusting it exposes you to potential ridicule, disbelief, misunderstanding from others. That’s what makes a safe space so important.

And this is a good time to remember that the space you need to follow intuition into the labyrinth of creative process, is the space you can give others to do the same. Solidarity between creative thinkers! Let’s give each other space to explore, to experiment, to expand, to be wrong. Let’s practice the receptivity to each other’s creative expression that we all crave for ourselves.

Thinking about idea having as a kind of dance reminds me that I have a body. And, as Ken Robinson reminds us, that body is not just a delivery system for my brain! It is a thinking feeling communicating engine of creative sensing, making and expressing.

Did you know there are as many neurons in your gut as in your brain? Trust that ‘gut feeling’, right? That’s intuition.

Did you know the latest research describes the immune system as a ‘floating brain’?

So for me, getting my body activated by dancing, moving and playing mobilises whole resources of brain power that we are usually inclined to overlook or ignore.

Being in a state of dance is crucial for when the moment of truth arrives and an idea finally emerges. Running with the idea – trying to keep up with it as it flies ahead of me – takes constant adjustment. Often the idea is unexpected. It never comes when and where I anticipated. And it won’t hang around forever waiting for me to be ready to concentrate on it.

As I follow the idea’s progress through the world, trying to honour its integrity, communicate it authentically, and observe it changing and growing, I must keep on my toes, keep moving with it, stay flexible and ready. I feel like a surfer – the wave is the same wave, but the wave constantly changes.

So I try to keep my balance, I dedicate to staying with the wave – the idea – all the way.

All the way – to wherever it takes me.

October 24, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet