In assembling complexity the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time.
As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes into a higher order.
Ilya Prigogine

Anyone who knows me well has heard me utter this quote. It is one of my favorites ... maybe because it has so much hope in it. I will say however, that I was beginning to tire of the number of 'trys' it was taking. Then suddenly, we the American people voted Barak Obama in as our new president and I have come to understand the word "escapes" in a totally different light!

The first MG Taylor axioms is "The future is rational only in hindsight." Over the years as I thought about the axiom I now realize that I was thinking too rationally. This is true within a given paradigm, but not so when a paradigm shifts to a higher order.

Clearly, President-Elect Obama's win was not rational. It really was an escape!!! So beautiful! Think about it. In 2004, a little known person gave a speech ... not just any speech but one that called out to each of us. Mr. Obama made us us realize how starved we were for wholesome, nourished, natural born hope. He unburied our hope. His speech brought to the forefront of our minds how hungry we were to create a new world, to begin again, to find joy in each other again. Obama's speech was a tremendous attraction to our better selves ... regardless of party affiliation.

To facilitate means "to make easy"” The art of facilitation is the art of bringing clarity and effectiveness to the work process of individuals and groups. The facilitator's mandate is to ensure that the process is designed and implemented in a way that brings out the best thinking of each participant and the best resolution of issues from each group.

This morning I was thinking about my experience with cancer and the coming to knowing of my situation. I have had a slew of physicians and alternative health practitioners trying to facilitate my way to health. A few are quite good and others quite lacking with their facilitative skills. Cancer is a very individual experience. While there are many common elements and shared experiences can bring forth much useful knowledge, in the end it is my work to do. Work that is physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally taxing.

It seems relevant that I consider my own journey into a very foreign landscape and territory from the perspective of the MG Taylor system and method. Facilitation is such an important concept in our process and it has always been inclusive of several levels of recursion. There is no single facilitator or controller of the system. Instead, we consider three levels: Front of the room facilitator, middle of the room facilitators, and back of the room facilitators.

Consciousness: that annoying time between naps. ~Author Unknown

 Last weekend I got to enjoy watching young Owen (18 months) sleep the afternoon away. After a very short messing about, he got so still and stayed that way for more than two hours. He was so still, so calm. His body was so relaxed and present in some strange way.  I thought it was beautiful. When Owen woke up, kind of slow, but happy, he seemed to take delight in seeing his stuff surrounding him.  Smiles, and ews and ahs ... his delightful comments about the things he cares about.  It is like he drew his world around him again.

Over the last few days the same thing has been happening to me.  I am beginning to get a new thought about this kind of sleep. This past year has been a curious one as I have moved in and out of pneumonia, surgery, and now chemo therapy, I remember some of my awakenings.  It is as if the minute before there was no me, no world ... just body. Each of these times are so different from most when I wake up full of thought, axiety, excitement, restlessness, tired, etc. etc.  I wake up to my brain, not my body!

I think there must be times when the body just takes over and puts everything conscious on hold. I like these times! I am no expert here so I give way to my imagination. I remember watching a Nova film about children growing. They don't grow gradually, but in spurts. It can be true that your son is 1.5 inches taller one day from the next! I bet the body puts the mind to rest when it is doing this stretching and drawing forth, modeling the seeds sprouting forth, working their way up from the rich soil of possibility.

I have been told that sleep heals and I have tried to be patient with the time it takes.  Mostly I have succeeded, especially when I have the "body at rest" type.  It is so wonderful.  Such a miracle to wake up and wrap my complete world around me again.  I know now that I am in chemo, that the treatment itself might be killing off some of my healthy cells that make me tired and anemic. So, I am watchful.  And appreciative that there is real comfort and peace in the midst of fighting this cancer. 

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
R. D. Laing

I remember years ago (1962-65) when I was teaching second graders by showing pictures of a pond with one lilly pad on day 1; two on day two; four on day three, etc.  Young eyes drew large when the metaphor revealed that one day after the pond was half full, ti was full! "No way" they exclaimed.  That's when we began our own experiment accumulating rice at an exponential rate. Each day one of the students would double the grains of rice. One corner of the room got quite full and each day it took the student longer to count out the grains.  I also challenged the class to estimate how far an adding machine roll of tape would go. Such a small roll. Students estimated that one role would cross the classroom, about 35 feet.  WOW ... all the way to the principal's office! How could that be as they unrolled and unrolled. We talked about compounding interest and other such things ... project learning for 7 year olds.  We all learned a lot that year. Young minds learned to think about patterns and I think they came to know that being surprised about their assumptions was a very good thing. 

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.
John Lennon, Beautiful Boy

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."  Albert Einstein

I forwarded part of a email about Pangea Day to a friend...

...Take a look at these films. They are each just one minute long. They feature a choir in one country singing another country's national anthem: a simple idea that packs surprising emotional power.
 France sings for USA

Kenya sings for India
Japan sings for Turkey

They were shot by film directors looking to support the landmark TED project Pangea Day....

After reading the email and listening to the singing, my friend wrote back:

"OK, you've got my attention - the idea is absolutely amazing (something about the simplest things)"

In deed! Pangea Day will be a remarkable day because people all over the world will come together, physically in communities, and virtually around the world, to celebrate together what is working.  As of last count there were more than 1000 communities organizing events to gather the local energies, hearts and spirits to watch and sing and be inspired enough to continue the dialogs well past May 10, 2008. 

The idea is simple really. Create a large vision. Share it. Create a self-organizing ecosystem of doers and like-minded people. Inspire networks to pass the word and create more self-organizing events.  Many years ago we had simple market places where good ideas fermented and took root:

"In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up." The Cluetrain Manifesto, 2000

Today we have a global marketplace called the Internet. It is a remarkable tool.

"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the...universe."  R. Buckminister Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969

I met Matt in 1976. He had created Renascence Library and was teaching a course called Redesigning the Future. It was there that I was introduced to Buckminister Fuller by reading his book, Intuition.  Matt had a long list of books, more than 500 that he believed necessary to read and understand if one was to successfully navigate the future and thrive well into the 21st Century.  His course brought the contents of these books alive and always he gave credit and recognition to the authors and their bodies of knowledge.  Some of the books explored ancient histories and others forecast futures.  The list recognized every field and every religion. Some were fiction, others non-fiction.

While my field was education, I had come to know that as a teacher, I should be reading a vast variety of books outside of my field.  Through the Learning Exchange, I was introducing teachers and children to a world of ideas and linking these ideas to their work, showing how ideas build upon each other.  Nothing came from nothing, but rather through the assimilation of a collection of thoughts and ideas perturbing our minds and catalyzing new ideas... perhaps higher order ideas.  I take much joy in this reality.

We are prepared to see, and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors that we each possess are the filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what we perceive on high and low levels. - Douglas Hofstadter

Hofstadter's 'perceptual attractors' are what we call search images. These images are the perceptual cues we look for to identify and assess the systems that make up our world. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, Chapter 4: Assembling Complexity, provides a great example by telling the story of what ecologist Steve Packard learned over numerous attempts to grow a prairie from scratch. He has some of the necessary search images going into his exploration, but they proved insufficient:

... He felt yet another ingredient must be missing which prevented a living system from snapping together. He started reading the botanical history of the area and studying the oddball species...

"What the heck is this?" he'd asked the botanist. "It's not in the books, it's not listed in the state catalogue of species. What is it?" The botanist had said, "I don't know. It could be a savanna blazing star, but there aren't any savannas here, so it couldn't be that. Don't know what is." What one is not looking for, one does not see.

... An epiphany of sorts overtook Packard when he watched the piles of his seed accumulate in his garage. The prairie seed mix was dry and fluffy-like grass seed. The emerging savanna seed collection, on the other hand, was "multicolored handfuls of lumpy, oozy, glop," ripe with pulpy seeds and dried fruits. Not by wind, but by animals and birds did these seeds disperse. The thing -- the system of coevolved, interlocking organisms -- he was seeking to restore was not a mere prairie, but a prairie with trees: a savanna... once Packard got a "search image" of the savanna in his mind, he began to see evidence of it everywhere.

What search images are you using to identify the key ingredients and instructions for assembling the project or venture you're working on?