The first TED talk I ever watched was the now classic effort from Hans Rosling. His demonstration of visualising data in interesting and insightful formations was at once common sense and revolutionary. Rosling’s vision was related to accessing and relating the diverse and vast data sets in the public domain, and representing them in mind grabbing graphics. That was 2006.

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.

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I hope you haven’t settled into the year yet. A few nights ago, with a few of us at home we pulled up the movie library and scanned it for a classic to watch. This time we landed on The Dead Poet’s Society.

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.

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I have this thing about Fridays. As much as I can I like to tie off loose ends and be mentally prepared for the week after. In this aspect of life I’m a tad anal. So I hate it when stuff goes wrong on Fridays. It shatters my illusion of control. I reckon it’s a 50/50 bet.

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.

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Ahhh 1977 in Australia.

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.

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Noam Chomsky helped me get though HSC English. My 17 year old brain was wired to do better at maths and science, so linguist (and philosopher) Chomsky’s generative grammar, or what we knew as transformational grammar, a logical system that enables the evaluation and construction of ‘sensible’ sentences, allowed me spend a term of English applying Chomsky’s principles to develop answers in a humanities subject that were either right or wrong. Woohoo.

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.

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