16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
Decision Making, Heuristics, Human Systems, Humans, Implicit Knowledge, Life, problem solving, Science vs Art, Social Context, strategy
Life is not a sanitized laboratory experiment. It’s rather a messy ebb and flow that makes scientific precision a futile pursuit. The scientific method has its rightful place in the universe, but human affairs are more artful than scientific.
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in philosophy, society
Tags
Buckminster Fuller, creativity, Enlightenment, Fractals, Life, Meaning, Patterns, Purpose, Society, Subtlety, Universe, wisdom
In my previous blog contrasting creativity and planning I described the creative act as the probabilistic intersection of thought “patterns in the making” and the circumstantial experiences which completes their meaning. A life spent surfacing new patterns is an elevating journey that frees one from the grayer reality of zero sum games unfortunately still prolific in our supposedly civilized society. It is also a fulfilling endeavor that brings man closer to his rightful place in the cosmos as an implicated observer, as a “function of the universe itself” in Buckminster Fuller’s words.
29 Monday Apr 2013
Posted in management, taxonomy
Tags
Ackoff, complexity, Foundational Thinkers, Human Organization, Jaques, Life, management, Ontology, Prigogine, Vester
In a recent post I proposed a distinction between foundational thinkers and “how” teachers. While defining the generic concept, I did not give any concrete example of what I consider to be foundational thinkers. In this post, I introduce a select few. The selection criteria for these thinkers is the development of a complete and internally consistent paradigm related to life, human organization and management.
Russell Ackoff – for providing a complete ontology of the management practice and its pphilosophy,
Elliott Jaques – for providing a complete ontology for human organization,
Frederic Vester – for providing a complete bio-cybernetic model of complexity,
Ilya Prigogine – for the pursuit of the unification of natural and social sciences using complexity.
It is worth mentioning another trait these four shared: they were all iconoclastic personalities within their respective fields.
The art and science of the possible 