Wow how quickly powerful and useful ideas get traction. Here we are, at Ergo a mere tick into the future from then and we have a partnership to sell a fully developed product of which Roslings audience could only have dreamed. Instead of briefing IT development teams with report specifications that take days or even weeks to develop, leaders can now easily create and change dashboards of the most vital information and trends they need with amazing speed and flexibility.

If this sounds like a sales pitch, I guess it kind of is. I’ve not typically used this blog to talk about our products and services, but here is a tool that is almost too good to be true. I can’t imagine leaders who deal with large and complex data sets not getting excited about the power of what Tableau can do for such a low entry cost.

It was kind of predictable really. People have been saying for ages now that we are “living in the information age”; “that the most valuable commodity is information”, etc etc. It was only a matter of time before tools started to emerge that make complex data not only accessible, but useful for decision-making and other tasks that need intelligence rather than raw data.

Let us know if you want to find out more.

Robin Williams brilliantly plays John Keating, an unorthodox English teacher at an exclusive boys high school in north east USA. In the context of inspiring an appreciation of poetry as art, Keating urges the boys to ‘seize the day’, and ‘suck the marrow out of life.’ The narrative reminds us that choosing the road less travelled requires extraordinary courage and comes with no guarantees of success. We love this stuff don’t we; admiring the courage in others, but typically struggling to mimic their lead.

The next morning, with the TV on a music channel, out front of 30 Seconds to Mars, charismatic Jared Leto sings the anthem, (I will live my life …) ‘Closer to the Edge’ . So what of 2012? How’s it turning out? Routine and conformity, or closer to the edge, sucking the marrow out of life? What are the dreams? Why not go after them? Embrace risk, the consequences.

My silence on this blog is partly the result of a ridiculous and fulfilling work schedule. I arrived home Friday and with the prospect of my first travel free week this year, I’ve carved out some time to press pause and re-orient. Not that there hasn’t been some good think time this year … in fact my head has been bursting. The six projects that I’ve been working on have been wonderfully engaging. I’ve loved the time I’ve had to digest some past and current issues of Monocle – my favourite travel reading. Maria and I have been scheduling a year that includes some yurting (working and living in our caravan – Port Fairy and Byron Bay) as well as planning some more of our ‘bucket list travelling’ – as some of you know we’re in a window of opportunity given our family stage at the moment.

This is also huge year for Ergo. We are buzzing with the impending launch of a new line of business designed to expand the services we offer to our clients, one we expect will also result in growth for our company.

My silence on this blog is also an exercise in freedom. As I have written on this blog before, there is a fine line between commitment and addiction when it comes to things that in and of themselves can be good. Sometimes, for me at least, blogging can become more about the audience. As someone who has lived as an extravert, I am slowly learning to be content with my own thoughts, without the compulsion to share them. The question against every action, ‘for whom am I doing this?’ is perpetually refining and liberating.

So, not sure when I’ll get back to this blog … but in the meantime, as I process some thoughts about generative living for a publishing project, can I urge us all again not to give in to the gravity toward normal ruts. Lets keep asking ourselves, ‘Why not?’. Let’s live as if this year was our last, but without expecting it to be so.

What step changes are we shooting for in 2012? What skills, what experiences, what areas of character are we going at full throttle? If you’ve settled in, its not too late to shake it up.

Multiply that and you get a sense of how I like to finish the year. Finances in order including comforting cash flow projections, customer projects appropriately punctuated, and preparations made for the start of the next working year.

Yesterday was that day for me. Up late preparing for next years work. Reflective lunch with Derek to review the Ergo year, pottering around the yurt (caravan) parked outside our front gate getting it ready for the well worn road trip, and tying off project lose ends before the break, pausing to watch old family videos as they played on the TV. Over the last few days I’ve been nervous something would go wrong.

It didn’t.

Today is celebration day. My son Zac graduates from Melbourne Uni and middle daughter Rachel gets her VCE results. Tomorrow Maria, Johanna and drive.

Fruitcake, chocolate, sunscreen. Cups of tea in the morning while everyone else sleeps. Have a great Christmas season. If you’d like to follow our summer excursions this year, you can do so here.

Greg Chappell’s team beat England in the Centenary Test, remarkably by exactly the same margin as 100 years previously. Don Chip launches a new political party called the Australian Democrats, and tragically 83 people die in our worst train accident at Granville.

I was at high school, counting Art and Technical Drawing among my favourite subjects. Although I never went on to study architecture, I have retained a love for design and placemaking. Until last week I had a clear favourite book on the topic, Alain De Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness. A couple of weeks ago I began reading for the first time Christopher Alexander’s 1977 classic, Pattern Language.

Wow!

Why do I love this book so much? Stay with me on this one …

For some years now I have been exploring and wrestling with the meaning of ‘generative’. Indeed, I have been so captured by the concept that we’ve developed the Generative Edge brand. I first came across the concept in my association with the Society for Organisational Learning, and the work of related people including Peter Senge. In that context the word is used to mean ‘life-giving and sustainable’ and is used most frequently to describe a social technology to bring about systemic change; ‘generative dialogue’. This is how I first started using the word.

But I sensed there was more.

I discovered that the word had at least two other common, if technical uses; generative grammar, and generative music. To understand what these could possibly be, we need to dig deeper into the meaning of the word. In linguistics, generative means: ‘using rules to generate surface forms from underlying abstract forms’. Just last week in this blog I mentioned Noam Chomsky who developed a system for determining the structure of well-formed grammar based on underlying concepts, ‘generative grammar’ or what became known as transformational grammar.

The brilliance of it is breathtaking. ‘Generative grammar’ made explicit principles that native speakers use unconsciously.

Brian Eno did for music what Noam Chomsky did for grammar. As a minimalist artist, Eno discovered music and worked with some great innovators including Roxy Music, David Bowie and of course U2. Wikipedia describes generative music as ‘ever different and changing that is created by a system. In other words, generative music is real audible music that is generated by a set of underlying rules or principles. Not surprisingly, generative music is typically computer generated.

During 2010 I began writing some thoughts on generative living. I am fascinated by the idea that ‘well formed living’ is an expression of underlying, well understood rules or principles. So, when I began reading Pattern Language, I instantly recognised it as another brilliant piece of work on generativity. In this case ‘generative design’.

Alexander et al do not use the term, but it fits beautifully. Although generative design and generative art are concepts some people use, I think Pattern Language is a great candidate to lay a claim to generative design. It reveals in logical and accessible terms what comes intuitively to those who are natural designers. Indeed, the authors claim that by following their design methodology, anyone can develop an outstanding design for a city, house or veranda. Extraordinary stuff. Why haven’t I read this before now? From the intro, ‘at least part of the language we have presented here, is the archetypal core of all possible pattern languages, which can make people feel alive and human.’

So, perhaps you are reading this and have had the same thought as I’ve had. The great religions of the world encapture a ‘code of conduct’ that could be described as ‘generative living’. The problem of course is that it can get tangled with so much other unhelpful stuff. To use the dictionary language, the ‘surface form’ becomes the end game rather than the ‘underlying abstract forms’.

So my body of intelligence is growing. I am still a way off from figuring out if there is such a thing as generative living, but I’ve certainly got some ideas beginning to formulate. Well, of course there is such as thing as generative living, we see it in exceptional people, people who Clive Hamilton describes in The Freedom Paradox as ‘avatars of virtue’. The question is, how do we articulate this set of principles.

So here I am in 2011, wrestling with some stuff that Christopher Alexander had some great insight into way back in 1977 when I was watching a young David Hookes cover drive Tony Gregg for three boundaries in one over, without a care in the world.

Over the weekend I listened to an aging Chomsky give a lecture on the changing contours of the global order. He was in Australia recently, and although there was apparently no advertising of his visit, social media on its own meant 5000 turned out for his lecture at Deakin Uni. Whether or not you agree with his radical left analysis, I reckon the man is a genius. His hour-long monologue includes no introduction or conclusion, no emotion, no overarching narrative … and yet is riveting via the clarity and profundity of the historical observations.

This month’s Slow TV also included a near two hour conversation between Robert Mann and Paul Keating. I commonly find arrogance off-putting, and Keating has it in spades. However, the man’s ability to rise above the minutia and articulate a course toward a future for Australia in the world is impressive in comparison with the political leadership that has been our lot in the last 15 years. The interview should have been conducted by someone who was less complimentary than Mann, but stirring stuff nonetheless.

Oh how we need thinkers of the calibre of Chomsky and Keating. Mind you we need them on the conservative side as well so the rest if us can get drawn toward greater wisdom. I am genuinely energised by ideas to the extent that I feel my pulse quicken. But I am in love with contrast. No, that’s not even true. It’s the value of alternative perspectives that I appreciate. So, in contract to Chomsky’s thesis, I re-listened, this time online, to Mikey Smith, who’s talk was a highlight for me at the Do Lectures. Mickey’s story is of a hard-knocks upbringing on the coast of Cornwell. As Do Lectures’ Andy Middleton (@gringreen) tweeted, “beautiful life affirming stuff”. Do yourself a favour and listen to his talk, especially if you love the ocean and the waves.

Mickey’s exhortation is to live on the edge of reasonableness. Smile a lot. Remember things with a ‘photo or a scar’. His vision is not the stuff of grand theories but of grand living.

I enjoy the different modes of life. I immerse myself in the opportunities of the organisations I work with, helping them to do things better and do better things; engage deeply, explore, create, think, resolve, liberate. Switch mode: I revel in the ordinariness of the domestic routine. Family, food, home, cleaning, weeding, sleeping, exercising. Switch mode again: I bask in the wisdom of others via books, talks, TV, internet and other media. Giants of thought leadership who relentlessly inspire me to live, think, believe and act with greater integrity and insight. Switch: Oh how I love the hammocks of life. Stop worrying about doing, don’t have to justify pointless domestic pottering; just be. Sit on the back veranda, stay a bit longer. Hook up the caravan and leave town for a few weeks. Don’t listen to the news. Turn off the phone.

Noam or Mickey?

We’ve only got one life, but that doesn’t mean we have to live it all in one mode. Switching modes is an underrated skill. When you walk through the front door can you stop thinking about work? Do you care if you are offline? I’ve written about addiction on this blog before … we’re addicted when we can’t choose not to. Popular media quarantines addiction to drugs, alcohol and gambling. But social media, consuming/shopping, work and yes, even exercise are addictions that are readily observable anywhere you look, at least in my world. Are all addictions bad? Wrong question. We can be addicted to good things, but if we can’t chose to stop then our ability to switch modes is very limited and we are owned by them and lose our freedom.

Noam or Mickey? Wrong question. Better to ask, how can I live life to the full. A dose of ‘Noam’ and plenty of ‘Mickey’ will do me just fine. And this is not about balance. Balance is a crap concept. Balance implies that to really do a ‘Mickey’ you’ve got to reduce the dose of ‘Noam’. Not so. A much better concept is harmony.

A good life is one that has a range of modes that go together in harmony … they fit together, complement each other, and can cover extreme contracts. Striving for balance ends up with mediocrity. Finding modes of life that go together in loud and compelling harmony is real living.

25 years ago I had a malignant melanoma cut out of my right thigh. Although in my head I knew I had dodged a bullet, my youthful heart didn’t really think too deeply about it. A couple of weeks ago I had another one cut out of my left thigh. It’s a bit like having a baby … every one says that until you’ve had one you have no idea how it changes your perspective on what matters in life. Having cancer in your body is a bit the same I reckon.

Maria is away so rather than hang out with her, which is typical weekend stuff for us, I’ve spent a few sessions in one of our hammocks. Don’t you love the gentle rocking? Thinking. Snoozing. Now I’m at the kitchen bench (Sunday afternoon). I’m loving the sound of Bob Dylan wafting through the late afternoon. The smell of my red wine in a plain glass lubricates the harmonica. I’ve loved watching movies til late with Rachel. I’ve loved taking Johanna for a swim and watching her do butterfly better than I can. I’ve loved having the cover off the barbeque and making simple but really good food. I’ve loved eating the raspberry and white chocolate muffins that Heidi made yesterday. I even loved ironing Johanna’s school uniform for tomorrow.

(Dylan is singing about the great reversals – perhaps with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as inspiration he croons; ‘the slow one now will later be fast, the first one now will later be last’)

Among all the recent obituaries for Steve Jobs we were reminded he said he was most proud of his family. Sad though that he said his motivation for having his biography written was so that his family understood why he wasn’t here for them as much as he wished. I choose a different path.

There is so much that seems like it matters. What do you look like? What stuff have you got? Who recognises you? How many twitter followers do you have? What’s your frequent flyer level?

Let’s change the world. Let’s advocate, serve, create, facilitate. Let’s be agents of change. Let’s lose sleep in creative worry about how to make society better. But let’s remember today, not on our death beds, that in the scheme of things, ironing that school uniform really matters.

My hunch that we are being cheated was confirmed when I read this months Monocle issue on food. A myriad of exemplary food retailers from all corners of the globe are featured, including some types that don’t typically feature in a discussion on the future of healthy food such as a Japanese burger chain and middle eastern supermarkets. Australia didn’t rate a mention except for the following:

“It’s not all good news. On our frequent visits to Australia we have often wondered how a nation that has one of the best restaurant cultures in the world has some of the most boring supermarkets: Coles is like a 1970s throughback.” A column then slams the impact of the Coles / Woolworths duopoly.

For an amateur foody like me, it’s an embarrassment. Sure there are alternatives, in fact Monocle uses a stat. indicating that 30% of us (in Australia) never go into supermarkets. We get meat, fish and some fruit and veg from the Vic markets once a week and we pick up supplies at our local strip regularly, especially on the weekend. We are lucky to have a local bakery, fruit and veg, Indian supermarket and an IGA. But with essentially six adults to feed it’s hard to avoid the big supermarkets.

But apart from the pricing dimension, most of don’t realise we are being robbed of best practice food retailing, that includes transparency in the supply chain as well as the way it is presented to us. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Food is one of those big issues, around which there will need to be change on a global scale. Colin Tudge spoke about some of the issues recently at the Do Lectures. You can listen to his talk here. Sometimes, it seems we are happy just sticking our heads in the sand and pretending everything is OK.

In Melbourne, our news diet of late has featured the Occupy Melbourne protests, spawned by the Walls Street occupation. Similar gatherings are now in 900 cities around the world. Beyond the predictable media that loves to capture the antics of dreadlocked hooligans, those I’ve spoken to talk about intense and serious discussions about aspects of our society that are broken. They speak of a hunch that ‘things are not quite right’ and believe that the only way in which we can begin to develop systemic solutions is to talk, with different players around the [figurative] table. Isn’t that what a city square is supposed to be for Mr Doyle?

If, in our immediate lives and spheres of influence we are tracking along just-dandy-thank-you-very-much, then talk of ‘things being not quite right’ sounds a bit alien. But if all of us were to lift our eyes and ask questions about the long term impact of our choices and engage in genuine curiosity about what life is like for all sectors in our communities, then I suspect we would be less inclined to wish these agitators would go away. Improving the way food is produced and sold to us in Australia is just one issue for which there appears little political appetite.

Paradox has been deeply informative for my own view of the world. In particular, I accept that apparently contradictory ideas, when held together, can offer insight and wisdom that are denied us when we hold dogmatically to a particular perspective, irrespective of its apparent right-ness.

One of the things I appreciate about the way David, Andy and the team designed the Do Lectures (www.dolectures.com) in Wales this year was the bringing together of things that rarely end up in the same space.

• An international gathering of acclaimed achievers, sharing their stories while being accommodated in tents (not hotels). Eliminates the pretention that typically accompanies such events when you are bunking down in sleeping bags and lining up for simple but exception food with enamel plates.
• CEOs, activists, film-makers, inventors, adventurers, entrepreneurs … Do-ers of all kinds sharing the microphone.
• An event that unashamedly showcases a smart little country (Wales), while being genuinely international.
• High tech threads (via speaker selection and social media savvy) and earthy, high touch culture.
• … and the list could go on.

To illustrate this, in one session we heard from Zach Smith (co-founder of Makerbot industries http://www.makerbot.com/ – a 3D printing device likely to be part of the manufacturing revolution) and designer and photographer Nick Hand who rode his push bike around the coast of the UK seeking out and interviewing artisans along the way (http://www.dolectures.com/lectures/why-we-need-to-celebrate-craftsman/ ). The question about which approach, high-tech localised manufacturing or the super skilled handcrafts of the artisans is ‘better’ misses the opportunity to retain the best of the past and embrace the future by holding both stories together in tension.

Our world is in constant flux. Wise people remind us that the thinking required to solve today’s challenges cannot be the same thinking that created the challenges in the first place. When I caught up with fellow Do-participants Ross (@RossHill), Sam (@sambe11) and Derek (@dwinter) last week we talked about the difference in approach when the motivation is not so much to ‘save the world’ but to get on with creating a world with the attributes we understand as good. The Do Lectures, like many other gatherings these days, is part of a groundswell that is not just imagining what a healthy 21^st world is like, but is already living it. This is not happening by reacting against the dominant systems, but by just getting on and doing, believing that the intuitive innovation and resilience of the human spirit will create pockets of life and energy that grow organically.

Haven’t been as inspired by a group of people collectively and individually for a long time.

AFL is a better code than NRL, Macs are better than PCs, and Spooks is the best spy drama on TV.

Pronouncements like these litter our conversation. We get passionate about our beliefs and can even get into arguments. This happens because we make leaps in logic …

We go from: “I really enjoy AFL” to “NRL is a rubbish game”. What we don’t necessarily acknowledge is: “AFL is all I’ve known and it has provided me with extraordinary satisfaction and a sense of community. As for NRL, I’ve only ever seen it on TV and I’ve actually got no idea what it feels like to play rugby league or support an NRL team.”

In one sense, all we’ve got is our point of view. There’s nothing wrong with not having grown up with NRL, but why do we insist on limiting our appreciation of life by wanting to look at everything through our own blinkered experience? Why do we leap from, “I’ve experienced this to be true,” to “my experience is universally true for everyone”, and it’s corollary, “your experience of truth is invalid.”

Despite the passion involved, the relative merits of football codes don’t matter in the scheme of things. Other things matter more. Justice for people in society who get marginalised or are victims of indiscriminate power or carelessness matters more. Asylum seekers and people with disabilities are just two groups that come to mind. We should be very wary about forming views about people until we have experienced their plight first hand. Until then, listen intently.

The point is simply this: if we want to grow and develop, immersion in a situation that challenges our preconceived ideas about what is good and right is the way to go. Feeding ourselves with content and people that affirm what we already think puts our roots down deeper, but doesn’t help us figure out if we’re in the right spot in the first place.

… but Collingwood supporters really are morons.

The London based RSA, founded in a Covent Garden coffee shop in 1754, is dedicated to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Last week I read an RSA essay by Matthew Taylor exploring 21^st century enlightenment. Included in the essay is an evidence based exploration of behaviour change. Here are a couple of paragraphs;

“Most of our behaviour, including social interaction, is the result of our brain responding automatically to the world around us rather than the outcome of conscious decision-making. In this sense it is more realistic to see ourselves as a node integrally connected to the world rather than a separate, wholly autonomous, entity. For example, recent work on the impact of social networks shows how they subtly but powerfully influence our lifestyles. After studying public health patterns for two decades Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler conclude:

‘Social influence does not end with the people we know. If we affect our friends and they affect their friends then our actions can potentially affect people we have never met. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.’

Practically, it turns out that changing our context is a more powerful way of shaping our behaviour than trying to change our minds. If you want to become a better person, don’t buy a book of sermons, choose more virtuous friends.”

I first started to think deeply about behaviour change about 15 years ago after reading Professor Rodney Stark’s 1996 book The Rise of Christianity. The book unpacks the sociological context and factors behind the extraordinary growth of the movement in the first three centuries AD. At the time, the disruption in my thinking was related to the power of community to affect people’s lifestyle choices. In short, rather than people choosing a particular behaviour (for example, helping poor or sick people) because of a belief, studies of a variety of groups suggest it is more substantially driven by a desire to belong to a community who also practices these behaviours.

What we are exposed to, our experience of life, is the dominant shaper of our beliefs and behaviour, rather than our articulated belief system or worldview. So what? Here are two important implications:

1. Until we have experienced the alternative, we should be cautious about how dogmatically we argue our case as superior.

This should not paralyse us in putting forward a viewpoint. Indeed, whether it is a trivial argument about the merits of Sydney or Melbourne or a more substantial discussion about an ideology, we should make our point with robust evidence. But the point is that until we have walked in another person’s shoes our argument is simply a point of view. In a less ethereal context, a commitment to immersing ourselves in the other’s perspective is a powerful path forward in everyday family or household tensions.

It is often said that until one has a child, we have no idea what its like. Until we have grieved we have an impoverished view of life. Until we are unemployed, we have no idea what it is it actually like. I recall Ched Myers, from whom I have learned much, saying that the reason he chose to live where he did in LA was to “intentionally see the world through the eyes of the marginalised”.

2. Personal and professional development is still mired in the myth that it is mainly about content. Content, without context is hollow though. The stuff that catapults us forward is our intentional or unintentional exposure to a situation that challenges our existing capabilities or prejudices. Our lives follow predictable paths because we stay within our communities; we feed our minds with content with which we already basically agree, we hang out with people like us. There is nothing wrong with this except if our long term goal includes development and wisdom. My hypothesis is that the broader our thoughtful first hand exposure to different perspectives, the wiser our grasp of that domain.

Happy exploring.