The past lies in wait

The future is rational
only in hindsight. -mg taylor axiom

At long last, backcasting is becoming a common concept and a mainstream practice among the service design ecosystem as well as communities and organizations actively engaged in designing their future.

When I read this passage from the absurdly great Italo Calvino, I am reminded of a correlary axiom to "the future is rational only in hindsight": history lies in wait for us only in the future. In other words, what we do in the future will go a long way towards making sense and meaning of what has happened up to this point. Of course, Calvino embues it with poetry in how he phrases it:

"The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there... What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey.
The foreigness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossed places."  - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

A Singularity in Our Future

The technological singularity is the theoretical emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.[1] Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood.

Proponents of the singularity typically state that an "intelligence explosion", where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.

Wikipedia

I've been following the Singularity Movement through Kurzweil's blog for years. It has been facinating and curious to me.  Much of what I read and hear seemed too complex for me to understand but I knew I could pick up the developing patterns. 

So this past weekend I attended the Singularity Summit in San Francisco to come face-to-face with the thinkers and makers of the movement.  I was curious to think about my own role in the coming years as the possibility of the Singularity unfolds and embeds itself in key decisions of governmental and corporate policies, strategies, as well as the everyday behavior of "we, the people."

I was attracted by the words for the Summit --

The Singularity is an event that could transform the world to its foundations in a way only comparable to the emergence of life itself. As converging technologies lead us towards the Singularity, we must ask ourselves: what is our own responsibility to ensure these technologies are used wisely and benefit everyone? We hope that the discussions here help you find your own answer to that question.

So having attended, what is my answer? I sat and listened with about 300 others to the 20 speakers. I was definitely one of the oldest people attending.  I met professors in philosophy, AI, humanities, linguistics, biology and computer science, all there to listen, to absorb, and to further their own thinking. But it was the youth I was most excited by.  There were a handful in their teens, but most seemed to be younger than 35, many in their early 20s.  My friend, Sharon, who attended with me, and I were freely invited into small conversations with these young minds. They were open in their enthusiasm, visionary in their vision to improve the state of the world, and passionate in their explorations and doing-ness.  Many participate, as fellows or staff or students, in Singularity University programs which has the express purpose of graduating students who will go forth and bring solutions to a billion people!!! So I asked them if this was an impossible goal and their answer was a universal, "No, we're on it" as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

I felt significant changes in my beingness as I listened and conversed. I seem to lose my place, the me I felt I knew. Many of my talents and ways of thinking about myself seemed to become inconsequencial. At times I recalled the feeling of being in an isolation tank ... floating, drifting in and out of reality.  I found myself asking myself, "Who and what am I"?  For the first time, I saw myself within the Singularity movement, not standing outside.

When one of the speakers announced that there was a Singuarity volunteers web site, I immediately went to  and realized that I had no expertise for any of the volunteer jobs but one.  I could spread the word in a responsible manner.  My friend, Christine Peterson, from the Foresight Institute reminded us all that the Singularity movement is not foriegn to govenments or corporations. It is being actively explored by those with money and power.  Our work as ordinary citizens then is to step up and learn as much as we can, to inform ourselves and to take part in shaping the Singularity movement into technologies and thought processes...into art and science... that are used wisely and benefit everyone. 

Traditionally, we have let the governments and corporations do the work for us and look at the mess we are in! Now it is our turn.  So as I play with the essence of the Singularity movement, what can I grok? What matters that I can do? Our future is not without risk but I don't think it is useful to spend my energies being fearful or fighting the movement forward. That is not me. I sense that Singularity plays some part in our emerging paradigm. Singularity is part of the core seeds we are sowing now that will play out well into a future of some sort.  I plan to advocate that the best aspects of our humanity join with the movement and insure we have a collective, active partnership with technology moving forward.  In some ways, I think this is nature's most elequant and challenging design evolution.  Should she succeed, perhaps we will come to know ourselves for the first time. 

Syntopical Reading

"Don't go looking for ideas directly. Instead, go in search of the seeds of ideas: the elements from which ideas can grow."  The Universal Traveler, 1972

When we first started our work with corporations, the executive teams consistently told us "As executives, we don't have time to read, and our employees don't read."  No time for reading? No interest in reading? With a world going through tremendous changes, how was it possible to discount the essential importance of reading widely and often?

Matt was teaching a course called "Redesigning the Future" and he handed out a reading list of 500 books, necessary for understanding the complexities of the world.  The authors Matt called on were not those on the NY Times best seller list.  Rather, they were selections that reached way back in time, and also took the reader's imagination into the future. They were fundamental to understanding the new emerging sciences and world cultures to seeking out new patterns and possibilities.

To us, reading was an essential aspect of a new way of working.  We drew on Mortimer Adler's book, How to Read a Book to help us design a useful module to help participants work their way into reading.  In particular, we were interested in his Syntopical Reading section. While Adler was mostly focusing on an individual doing syntopical reading, we knew we wanted to make it a group exercise. 

Then we watched the power of this module come to life.  We adapted it for many occasions and several times our Syntopical Reading exercise transformed an organization.  The power and purpose for reading has slowly found its way back into many organizational worlds. 

Here are general instructions:

1) Provide each participant with some simple suggestions for how to read a book in an hour.  (adapted from Adler's body of knowledge)

2) Ask participants to choose a book that they want to read from the library. Suggest that they can read any book that looks interesting and to not to choose books too closely related to their field or product lines.

3) After reading, have the participants divide into groups of 7 or 8 and have them form a circle. 

4) Now, ask each participant to become the author of their book.  Each in turn states their name as author and tells us the name of the book they wrote, why they were compelled to write the book, and as author, what did they want to suggest to the organization... ideas that could make a significant difference.  Each author had five minutes to create their story. 

Be sure each participant assumes the role of author rather than talking about the book they read.  With this kind of story telling, the ideas expand, and often hidden design assumptions reveal themselves.  For instance during the second day of an event we asked cosmetic company participants to choose books for overnight reading.  Participants wandered through the library choosing good night reads.  One chose When Elephants Weep. Little did we know he was head of research for the company. As he assumed the role of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the author, he put his whole heart and mind into telling his organization why they should immediately stop animal testing. They did, within the week! Probably no amount of interest groups or consultants could have been so successful so fast.  But when their colleague, speaking as an impassioned expert, made his case, everyone listened. Something they had held onto for years, fell away within a five minute presentation.  But there is more to the story.  Other authors, spoke of values, integrity, changing ways of working, technology improvements, biology, complexity, etc.  Many of these presentations, while not directly about animals connected with the the elephant's intelligence in a variety of ways, reinforcing the idea that there were better ways to learn about their products than test them on animals. Suddenly the entire organization became more self aware, more eager to learn about themselves and to shed some long held beliefs. 

I could write many more such stories and if you've done this exercise you too probably have things to share. It is powerful. 

What I've learned through my years of developing our process and method is how easy it is to have people make fundamental, often transforming changes when they can do it for themselves.  We just need to provide interesting, challenging, and inspiring exercises chunked together through interesting iterations of design.