Scan and Play

“If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity.Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas.Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”

David Bohm with David F. Peat, in their book, Science, Order, and Creativity, 1976

One of my author mentors, Draper Kaufman, in his book Teaching The Future, 1976 writes about how teachers, administrators, and parents had no idea how to think about the future;yet, here they were training young people to live in the future.  When asked, many assured Kaufman that "the future would be just the same, just more so."

Matt and I met Kauffman when I invited him to The Learning Exchange to talk with teachers about how to think about the future.  Later at dinner he told the story of one of his classes for high school teachers where he gave each teacher the assignment of completing a story. Each was given the first paragraph and asked to write out the rest of the story. After the teachers turned in their stories, he told them that half of them had the first paragraph as past tense and the other half in future tense.  Those that had the past tense assignment wrote far more than those with future tense.  When asked why, those with future tense admitted that they did not know how to think about the future.  They were not experts, they could not imagine, they didn't want to be wrong! Wrong? It was all made up. Those that wrote longer stories about the past used their imagination and there was no right or wrong! This is why Matt and I developed the Backcasting module.  We wanted ordinary citizens to practice living and working with the future. 

Our "first paragraphs" always spoke of success, sometime in the future. Participants were asked to look back in time and remember the parts they played in the success.  This is one of the most important and fun modules of our entire body of work.  We have watched thousands of participants dream, envision, and include themselves in stories of success ... great deeds accomplished; barriers overcome; simple solutions finding their way into stagnent cultures.  Today, backcasting is an often used module with many, many organizations who have never even heard of where the idea originated and for what purpose. 

Another early module to help people get over their fear of the future is our TimeLine scenario exercise.  In 1983 almost every event we did had as part of its SCAN, the development of a 50 year time line.  We marked off our long walls with dates across the top and general subjects down the side.  Participants were asked to come to the front of the room and state something that happened within this 50 years.  It was backcasting from 25 years in the future.  Participants jumped around with in this time frame.  First well known markers were noted: 1984, WWII victory, Man on the moon, Kennedy assignation, etc. These prompted other memories and spontaneity. Things like "No more war by 2010, new forms of energy by 2000; political unrest, etc.  Over an hour or so, the time line filled out with amazing patterns beginning to emerge and tell a story. Participants were seeing, some for the first time, that neither the past nor the future can be seen as a lits of ideas without context or cultural awareness. Although initially scary for some, as the board began to fill, all jumped up with ideas they wanted to get into the story.  By the end of a three day workshop or event, participants grew to like the future and to see the roles they could play in shaping it.  Here with our process, was a place to practice thinking and playing with the future. 

Today, it is not so rare or scary to play with the future.  And finally, slowly, as a nation, a world, we are learning to think longer term. Most important to me, is the notion that ordinary citizens are learning that the experts don't know as much as they know as a group.  When a group of people work with future, imagine it, move ideas back and forth among them, there is amazing accuracy of pattern and general happenings. 

Nothing is more important to a healthy, transforming process than providing good scan modules where there is no right or wrong and everyone participates from their own vantage point. 

Both of these modules do well with a larger number of participants. Diversity in mind sets, cultures, ages, educational backgrounds, and fields of inquiry give dimension and character. And both of these modules are great openings for a group who has no experience of each other, no common language, no group vision. 

"The future is rational only in hindsight." MG Taylor Axiom, 1983

How the Hippies Saved Physics

The future is rational only in hindsight. MG Taylor Axiom, 1983

Serendipity plays an interesting part in life. I recently went to Amazon's wish list to look for a birthday gift for my son, Jeff, and saw How the Hippies Saved Physics. It caught my attention, looked good so I ordered two copies.  Meanwhile, a group of us are beginning the writing of a book which we currently call 30 Years of WOW.  The story we want to write is the story of Matt and Gail Taylor's work, and more importantly the impetus that gave rise to the work and how it is becoming  a ubiquitous way of working. The story is full of time lags, other originators, and imagination writ big!

I had not read far in the book to have the entire 70's return to the forefront of my memory.  Our fashions, music, protocols and assumptions about a way of life.  I grew up in Kansas City, Mo, generally considered to be a conservative environment. Yet the 70's were in full bloom here too.  Maybe not the San Francisco scene, but the same questioning and restless searching. Where was society heading? Wasn't life meant to be richer more satisfying? Wasn't there ways to make life better for everyone? 

Sound bytes from the Hippies book:

"The hippies self-consciously opened up space again for freewheeling speculation, for the kind of spirited philosophical engagement with fundamental physics that the Cold War decades had dampened. More than most of their generation, the sought to recapture the big-picture search for meaning that had driven their heros - Einstein, Bohm, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger - and to smuggle that mode of doing physics back into their daily routine."

"The hippie counterculture sported a playful worship of youth, spontaneity, and 'authenticity.'"

"Try as we might, we cannot cleave off the goup or its activities from the 'real' physics of the day. Many of the members' activities placed them on one end of a spectrum, to be sure. But no hard -and-fast dividing line separated them from legitimate - even illustrious - science.'

Matt's course, Rebuilding the Future (1976), was about the rate of change and how to prepare for it and design our future rather than letting it happen by default.  This course, too, was full of diversity: very mainstream people, hippies, multiple ages, races, life styles. We had one thing in common, a hunger to help shape the future. 

The next 25 years, according to Matt would bring about more change than had occurred since the middle ages. Ordinary citizens would have more power than any king or queen who had ever lived.  We were each part of the future and should bring it about by design, not default.  Matt's course had us explore the cycles of the creative process, not just in our personal lives, but as a larger cycle within culture and meaning.  Culture follows science from metaphysical thought and vision, through intent, insight, building. There is basically a generation of time lag between the understanding of science working its way into mainstream thinking. This creates paradigm shifts when the old way of thinking - Cartesian, clockwork, heirarchical -  begins to die and a new paradigm is birthing.  Mostly, people took sides and had nothing to say to each other. 

My work when I joined Matt's class was in education.  The Learning Exchange, a Teacher's Center attracted some of the best and brightest teachers within a 100 mile radius of Kansas City, MO. We worked with Dean's of Education, professors, teachers at all levels, parents, and community leaders. Yet it was rare for me to find someone interested in the future. I longed for people to exchange ideas with, to perturb my own thinking about the future.  The Renascence Project offered that for me. 

This was our mode when we founded MG Taylor Corporation. How could we help educators, community leaders, rebels, and ordinary folks to give the future a try? What is it we needed to provide to unleash this dormant knowledge about the future? Matt and I were both passionate about our beliefs in Group Genius.  We had our own experiences and wanted to incorporate it into whatever we were doing. 

As the book, How the Hippies Saved Physics, indicates we were not the only ones interested in a different future.  The 70's represented a wake up call and a number of us were listening and acting on our internal beliefs. We were going against mainstream although I doubt if many of us recognized this at the time. I, for one, was simply doing what I had a passion for. It just seemed like the thing to do. 

Over the next several journals, I plan to take different aspects of our method and write about how they got incorporated into the process.  I'll be starting with:

SCAN
expertise
design of the walls and environment
working big
building trust
play
diversity

All of these concepts were developed within a context, place and time called the 70's.

An Ecology of Mind

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."
                                                           - Gregory Bateson

We are lucky here on the Mendonoma Redwood Coast, an area that covers the northern most coast of Sonoma County and the southern coast of Mendocino.  Rural, yes, but sophisticated too.  We have an incredible Art Center and community of artists. We have a small, community managed, theater capable of bringing New York Operas right into the theater.  We have no street lights, little traffic and the closest thing to a franchise are our local True Value hardware stores.  We have two radio stations, one a public one and the other capable of assisting us through potential disasters.  Our stores are unique and heavily involved in community through the arts in one way or another.  Our independent bookstore, the Four-eyed Frog serves people all over the country through its wonderful web site. Local foods are both a vocation and advocation here. 

And now, we have Nora Bateson bringing her film about her Dad, Gregory Bateson, to our theater. We who live in the midst of natural abundance and a do-it-for-ourselves economy have the pleasure of hosting Nora as she presents her film, An Ecology of Mind on July 3rd at 7pm in our Point Arena theater.  I bet those of us able to see the film on July 3rd will think a little more like nature.  I look forward to coming to knowing the Mind of Nature more fully.