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The art and science of the possible

~ A celebration of non-zero sum thinking

The art and science of the possible

Tag Archives: future

Measuring our way into meaninglessness, stagnation and crisis

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in Crisis, future, human capital, innovation, problem solving, science

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bureaucracy, Crisis, Data Crunching, economics, Fanatism, future, Kurzweil, neo-Marxism, Numbers, Religion, Singularity, Society, Stagnation, Totalitarianism

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I posit excessive measurement is the culprit behind the world’s biggest problems, as well as the likely initiator of its future crises. It is the largest hidden systemic risk to our future livelihood. Our obsession with quantity is the very incarnation of the materialistic credo, a worldview focusing on physical resources and antagonist to a knowledge economy.

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Why higher education requires a new underlying philosophy

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in future, knowledge, philosophy, society, technology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

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Christensen, Disruption, future, Higher Education, Knowledge, Online Learning, Resilience, Robustness, Technology, wisdom

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Futurists, scholars and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.

My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.

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The foundations and future of economics

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in future, innovation, society

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economics, foundations, future, human evolution, Invention, knowledge work, labor, metaphysics, Physics, politics, predicament, Technology

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I’ve often wondered whether economics can be called a fundamental “science.” Much like physics can describe the rules of the game we call “reality” without a definitive answer as to how the game was set in motion in the primordial universe, so does economics seem to me to focus primarily on transactional mechanisms for value without a profound appreciation for how value materializes out of grey matter. Money is, or should be, an accurate measure of value, but ever since we moved away from bartering we have forever decoupled our transactional mechanisms (either in time or measure) from fundamental value, allowing us additional transactional flexibility in time and space, but also resulting in economic cycles, nothing more than periodic corrections to the coupling mechanisms.

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The rising toll of the (still) predominant mechanistic mindset in a complex world

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, Crisis, democracy, future, society

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causality, Cause and Effect, Charles Handy, complexity, David Hurst, democracy, Ecology, future, Mechanistic, Mindset, Resilience, Robustness, Society, Thinking

Mechanistic_Thinking_EA

Thesis: there is I believe a meta-societal, global shift from robustness to resilience (see this for an intuitive illustration of the difference). This is fueled by an underlying transition from a mechanistic (Industrial Revolution) to a complex-adaptive (Conceptual Economy) worldview.  We have managed to design robust systems (economy, air traffic, healthcare, energy), but not resilient. Robust systems are great for quasi-stable environments, but the price for not having resilience in highly dynamic, networked environments is staggering: $12 trillion for the 2008 financial crisis, and counting. Unless we learn how to design resilient systems, likely through the application of complexity principles, democracy itself may be at risk.

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A few thoughts on the future of education

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in future, knowledge, learning

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Ackoff, Clay Christensen, Education, Free Education, future, Harvard, Knowledge, Life long learning, Michael Saylor, Multidisciplinary, Online Education, Roger Martin

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Late last year, I was in a small conference room listening to Michael Saylor, the billionaire that is as close as it gets to a Steve Jobs figure, and, luckily for me, happens to reside in the Washington D.C. area. Saylor was discussing his latest book. Besides his compelling case for an American 21st century (when most Americans are predicting the opposite) I remember a point which can be paraphrased as if a 15 year old from India scores better than a Harvard graduate on an online certification test for a particular job, why would one hire the Harvard graduate? In one sentence Saylor exposed preconceptions behind not just national and educational barriers, but also age and experience level. Which naturally leads to the question of Harvard’s relevance, and in general to that of the educational establishment in the 21st century. To drive the point, Michael Saylor has recently started a free online university. Saylor’s university is not yet accredited, but what if entrepreneurs like Saylor start hiring these kinds of “graduates” over those from traditional universities? Clayton Christensen reinforces many of Saylor’s perspectives for how online education will disrupt the educational establishment.

Many of the current arguments made for the future of education involve technology. But what if we take technology out of the picture, is there still something to be said about the future of education? I propose there is.

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Post-causality: a quiet global revolution in the making

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, democracy, future, human capital, innovation, knowledge, management, philosophy, problem solving, society, taxonomy, technology

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Big Data, business, Categorization, causality, Cause and Effect, complexity, creativity, Cynefin, Daniel Pink, Dave Snowden, Drucker, Drucker Forum, Emergence, future, Imagination, Innovation, Knowledge, management, Methods, models, Motivation, Peter Checkland, Resilience, Revolution, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, Safety, Sense Making, Social Systems, Society

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If one were to cut a global cross-section through social classes, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, professions, genders, and so forth, very few commonalities would emerge. And yet, there is I propose just such a common thread: a shared causality mindset, a globally predominant belief in the supremacy of cause and effect.

Since it is people who run our institutions, this belief continues to shape our modern society and even influence to a large extent the technological outcrops of our knowledge economy. From business strategy to macroeconomic models, and from political debates to Big Data, causality is pervasive and its implications profound.

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Why the “individuality disorder” is the great tacit crisis of our times and how complexity informed management can help resolve it

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in business, Communication, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, society

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Ackoff, Ambiguity, Black Swans, business, complexity, Corporations, Disorder, Dissonance, Drucker Forum 2013, False Comfort, future, Hamel, Hollnagel, Humanity, Individuality, Industrial Revolution, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, Predictability, Professional Fulfillment, Resilience, Resonance, Scale, Snowden, Society, Taleb, Variance, Wall Street

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With all the benefits derived from the advances in standard of living, our modern society suffers from an apparent paradox which can be best paraphrased as “if everyone is special, then no one is”.

We strive for individuality even as the economic affluence required to express ourselves is increasingly tied to economies of scale and the uniformity they foster. We do our best to proclaim our uniqueness to the world on social media pages, but have to make use of highly standardized templates in the process. We share in the belief (and rightfully so) that the very success of our modern society depends on scale, yet it is precisely scale that appears to generate confusion when it comes to the most intimate aspects of our human identity.

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Frameworks, trade-spaces, matrices: engineering thinking in management results in big, stagnant bureaucracies

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, consulting, human capital, management, Organizational Development, science, strategy, taxonomy, technology

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Analytic Thinking, bureaucracy, business, complexity, effectiveness, Engineering, future, management, models, philosophy, Validity

The most important function of management, particularly executive management, is setting future direction. That implies decisions and choices about the present and future.

Because engineering thinking or more broadly speaking analytic thinking predominates in many executive and consulting circles, it is believed that decisions require a degree of rigorousness similar to that of the scientific method in natural sciences. And so, it is firmly believed that analytic tools empower managers to make sound decisions. The result is a myriad of tools reminiscent of engineering speak – frameworks, trade-spaces, matrices – packaged in neat Power Point slides.

This all very good, but, as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers remarks  “tools are demanding – they do not confer the power of judging, they ask for the choice of the right tool for the right situation; in other words they oblige us to think and wonder”. The danger that Stengers cautions against is the rigid interpretation of the power of tools. Tool power should never be situated above human judgement. And when it does, this results in the tools getting a life of their own, and embedding the human element which is helpless to escape their hold. This ultimately results in a bureaucratic construct as the purpose of humans becomes not the seeking of meaning and validity, but rather the maintenance and upgrading of the tools. This also results in a proliferation of enforcer types at the expense of creative types, reducing the number and quality of choices about the future.

A more progressive view of management tools is as “enlightening abstractions, precious new tools for thinking” rather than “ready made instruments”. Also, in Stenger’s view, the relationship between user and tool is not one-directional; rather, “tools modify the ones who use them; to learn how to use a tool is to enter a new relation with reality, both an aesthetic and practical new relation”. In my experience, this dual directionality can also unfortunately work backwards: rigid tools can have a limiting effect on thinking.

Source of Isabelle Stengers quotations is “The Challenge of complexity: Unfolding the ethics of science – In Memoriam Ilya Prigogine”

Also check out Dave Snowden’s related blog entry.

A brief modern history of future predictions: engineers vs. social scientists

23 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in complexity, future, problem solving, society

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Club of Rome, Cold War, Consumerism, Drucker, future, management, Management Cybernetics, philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Quantitative vs. Qualitative Predictions, Social Science, Society, Stafford Beer, System Dynamics, Toffler

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At the height of the Cold War predicting the future become serious business. A nuclear World War III was a real possibility and a literally cold and dark planet awash in radioactive ash a likely prospect. But communism wasn’t the only threat to the free world. Ideology aside, consumerism coupled with energy shortages and population growth provided good reason for questioning the very sustainability of our civilization. Ironically, communist propaganda pointed precisely to greed as capitalism’s Achilles heel.

So it isn’t surprising that by the 1970’s two schools of thought were already embarking on predicting the future. Since I have not come across this type of distinction between “futurists” in literature, I will proceed to describe it here. It is worth noting that by “distinction” I don’t mean opposition since both schools of thought can be regarded as members of the larger umbrella of systems thinkers.

First let’s loosely define the “engineers”, or better said, the engineering school of thought. Engineering had proven successful in World War II for a number of inventions, including rocket control systems. While Wernher Von Braun was working hard on getting us to the Moon, geniuses of the likes of Jay Forrester and Stafford Beer saw other uses for rocket control theory. Namely they had the insight to apply engineering thinking, particularly the mechanism of feedback, to social systems. This resulted, respectively, in the birth of two entirely new disciplines: system dynamics and management cybernetics. In parallel, Mihajlo Mesarovic, also an engineer emeritus with whom I’ve had the privilege of taking a graduate course at Case Western Reserve University, was also working on an elaborate mathematical model to predict the future state of the world. The Club of Rome, a new organization with an interest in humanity’s fate, saw the opportunity for these new methods to lend a degree of rigorousness to their own predictions about humanity’s long term future. This resulted in several publications in the early 1970’s. Limits to Growth and Mankind at the Turning Point received widespread attention since they discussed the “predicament of mankind”. The underlying belief of the engineering school of thought was that given a sophisticated enough computer model, the future could be more of less “mathematically” derived. Perhaps not surprisingly The Limits to Growth report was first introduced at a symposium in St. Gallen Switzerland, which remains a powerhouse for management cybernetics – Fredmund Malik and his consultancy continuing to this day the work started by Stafford Beer.  In essence Limits to Growth painted a pessimistic view for the world future where shortages were likely to stop and even revert human progress. Simply put, the Club of Rome’s prediction for the early 21st century, largely based in engineering thinking, spelled disaster.

At about the same time, a number of futurists emerged from the direction of the social sciences. Peter Drucker, Alvin Toffler, Charles Handy and others were by no means engineers and were not using models, at least not in the quantitative sense; however, this did not discourage them from looking into the future. The term that Peter Drucker eventually chose to describe himself, “social ecologist”, captures well this entire breed of futurists. What these futurists were is astute observers of the human condition and social ecology, the same “tools” employed by the ancient Greek philosophers whose insights still form the basis of western culture. Drucker and his peers did not use quantitative methods but made predictions derived from qualitative insights at the intersection of human psychology, technology and social constructs. Many of those predictions are still relevant today while predictions presented by the engineering school of thought had to be dismissed or significantly adjusted. In all fairness, in the Club of Rome’s 2012 update to the Limits to Growth, “2052 – A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years”,  they have moved considerably away from hard quantifiable predictions. They have also moved in the direction of the social, describing their latest work as “educated guesses, combining data, modelling and hard science with an understanding of human nature and its systems and intuitions”.

Per this latest evidence, the two schools of thought can be said to be converging. Perhaps the best insight to be derived from the distinction presented in this piece is that we have much work to do in reconciling natural and social sciences. Until we do, and possibly even after, predicting the future will remain messy business. Elliott Jaques and Ilya Prigogine come to mind as two exponents of the social and respectively natural sciences that have made significant strides in reducing the divide between the two paradigms. I have always said that the universe preceded humans and so, the fact that we glean it through the reductionist lens of separate sciences suits our own convenience more than cosmological reality.

What about our ability to predict the future? Is it a legitimate undertaking or modern alchemy? Is the future clearly discernible through the lens of an all encompassing computer model, or does Lorenz’s and Feingenbaum’s Chaos Theory with its Butterfly Effect render any attempt at prediction hopeless? I would dare say that the work of Drucker, Toffler, and Handy among others has addressed both assertions: exact predictions of the future based in quantitative methods is indeed a hopeless undertaking, but a broad, nonspecific peak at the future is possible through the lens of qualitative thinking anchored in the constancy of human nature. But here’s the catch: only a select few appear to have the capacity for this type of undertaking, and they certainly aren’t employing a repeatable process or “best practice” in doing so. For the time being it appears that staring into the future is more art and science.

Why innovation is vital to our survival

10 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in innovation

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complexity, future, Innovation, Nature, science, Society, Technology

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Picture technology as a “buffer” between humans and their environment. With each new scientific discovery an environmental constraint is removed, and new resources, usually in the form of energy, become available for exploitation via new technologies.

We require energy in order to counter the constant tendency of the universe to become chaotic (i.e. counter entropy), and to build ever more complex structures needed to support progress. But since any new uncovered source of energy is finite, our civilization has to keep innovating in order to uncover new types of resources. Framed as a critical survival mechanism, innovation becomes much more than a “neat” buzzword. The steady state argument of being content with what we have doesn’t fly because, at any given time, maintaining steady state requires energy we derive from finite resources, such as fossil fuels.

Just like the universe has an in-built tendency for disorder (i.e. entropy), so it seems intelligent life has a natural affinity to discovery. Said differently, progress is not something we necessarily have control over, it’s (in) our destiny.

H.G. Wells remarked that “civilization is a race between disaster and education”. In light of the above, I would say that the race is rather between disaster and innovation. Our educational systems, particularly those related to management and organization, should instill imagination rather than build “static” knowledge and skills.

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