only 14 hours to save the earth.

"I love you Flash, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth."
Dale Arden's words to Flash Gordon in the Queen soundtrack of the film of the same name were triggered in my head when i was asked to put words to this cause.

Flietermolen needs new millstones, and this is being funded through a crowdfunding initiative on growfunding.be/flietermolen

Its a very worthy cause which absolutely deserves your support. Please give something, small starts at 10€s, and do it quickly - we only have 11 days left to save the project, otherwise everybody gets their money back, (and we have no funds for stones).

Flietermolen cvba is a start up based on an old windmill from 1788, its a multi-stakeholder co-operative and a registered organic mill. We work in a 30km radius with locally grown organic grain. We mill white flour in our authentically restored 1950 Midget roller mill, and everybody in the local organic world loves our white flour, and there's the pinch. The stones left behind in the mill weren't suitable for grinding wholemeal flour, only coarse animal feed, so they have to be replaced. Here they are being removed.


We need new stones to make traditional, healthy, wholemeal flour. Please help us.

There are various goodies available on the crowd funding for smaller amounts, if you're feeling particularly inspired then join us and become a member of Flietermolen.
This type of full value chain approach needs all sorts of skills, from volunteers, part time and full time people.
Thanks for your time and support
click here now please! We only have 11 days to save the stones.....

The point of embodiment.

Reflections from the Leeds complexity workshop.

 The point of embodiment: where a person crosses from linear to non linear space, from Identity produced by the surrounding systems to Inner identity, from outer conflict to inner peace, from button pushing space to non-button space, from static relationships to dynamic relationships.
In the space where determinism is not appropriate, where complexity is the equilibrium state, where ones inner state is consciously reflected in the outer world, this video might be something to consider.

  http://upliftconnect.com/inner-peace-revolution-film

New life in an old mill

Introducing the Flietermolen, built in 1788, now one of the oldest buildings in the village of Tollembeek, 25 mins SW of Brussels, Belgium.

Flietermolen cvba, is a multi-stakeholder co-operative, where Farmers, Millers, Bakers, Retailers, Customers, Neighbours and Friends jointly own, organise and share the profits of locally grown cereals, ground into fresh flour, to make delicious bread and bakery. Fresh because we keep the wheat germ, and thereby have a 'fresh' product shelf life of 10 weeks. see flietermolen.be

Put the 30th April in your diary and come and meet us all, at our official opening and sale of fresh flour.

We need your help and support, both moral and financial. If you share our convictions and want to see encourage co-operatives, the local economy, short food chains or just healthy Bio food, then please become a member - one share costs 100€, with a maximum of 100 shares per person.
For this you get 45% back from the Belgian tax man, 2% interest, and a share of the annual profit. You also get one vote and an insiders viewpoint on the workings of a multi-stakeholder co-operative, regular invitations to info moments in our transparent financial affairs, to healthy food sessions, to multiple perspective mornings, the annual general party (meeting), and involvement in work groups around new projects, products and social initiatives. flietermolen.be

The operational side of the mill is self organizing without a hierarchic boss; along the lines of the best of teal, sociocracy, and holacracy.

You will also get free access to complexity workshops, and complex human system days.
Our starting capital was 30,000€s, this has enabled us to restart the Midget Maxima Roller Mill (from 1950), to produce bio flour. Next we need to buy new grind stones to make whole meal flour, this project is about 25,000€.

Please help to achieve this quickly so that we can reach breakeven.
For more details, pictures, videos etc see our website flietermolen.be

Reaching out through the mycellium of life.

thank you for reaching out across the Mycelium of life, its always great to meet fellow travelers whatever colour their clothes…

I agree about Cog edge, for me its rather old fashioned these days, i trained on Dave's first course in 2003, and i’m surprised that people still ask for it. It probably forms a simple gateway into the nature of different systems, and i do it all with story, my cyenfin is called the farmers tale, which i then turn into a diagnostic constellation with people standing in the parts of the farm, i think they enjoy the physicality of feeling the chaos of the hippies, or the analysis of the ministry of agriculture.

my work really comes in three shapes today, the physical renovation of an old (1788) grain wind mill, now with electric motors, building a local short chain Bio flour and bread business based on the mill. Back to my roots as a farmers son, and real work!

Then the re-introduction of multistakeholder co-operatives to Belgium, via the Flietermolen co-operative.This is re-pioneering the way to optimising value in a value chain, (as opposed to maximising one sub system and what boils down to non agreed extraction at the point of maximisation) by having all stakeholders( farmers, millers, bakers, shops, customers, neighbours) as co-owners and navigating the complex field of apparently conflicting or paradoxical needs. I’ve been warned not to try - too difficult - so that's my cue, and i've been around complex humans systems for so long now that i forget most people don't even have the book on their shelf to help them with non-linear thinking or multiple attractors and all the other fun stuff we mavericks get up to.

finally getting non linear thinking into schools in the next thirty years. I’m writing a book called harvesting complexity with a old student of Prigogine, still at the ULB in brussels, Vasileios Basios brings the theoretical physics and i the stories of an ex crisis manager with practical heuristics around working in complex domains. Stef's work shop fits into this bit, Teal is on the rise, great destination but lacking a guide to the collective and personal journey required to reach it. I try to help with my toolbox of practical heuristics, these days pretty well populated. The AoH people have  had Cyneifn in their back pack since i put it there 12 years ago when they started, it seems only now do they get how complex stuff might really be different. Any seedling has to be given a chance to grow into a mighty redwood.


I suppose there is a fourth unspoken path too, this conversation for me is the natural spread of a mycelium of people who reach out through the sub soil and find each other, so that when conditions on the surface are ripe/right the mushroom ring can magically appear, and do its work.

It would be fun to meet and drink tea one day.

the boundary between trust and love in complex human systems

Iceland is a country the size of Leicester in the UK. The similarity doesn't end there, both places have football teams that achieved remarkable - nay 'impossible' results. Leicester won the Premier league and Iceland not only won through to the finals of the European championship but also qualified from the group stage and then knocked England out of the last 16 to meet France in the quarterfinals.

O=∑R^t (a system is the sum of its relationships to the power of the trust in the relationships)
is an equation that shows how a team with strong relationships can beat a group of Individuals - a well know phenomenon in sport. The equation enables us to see inside a system and watch how the relationships grow and build, or not, and how the trust of the equation becomes love. Love is the strongest most efficient form of trust. With love, often little spoken communication is required, you know and feel the other so well, that a look or even a thought is enough to take the agreed action.

This magic called love is complex, unpredictable, uncontrollable and powerful. The Iceland team has been together since they were youngsters, the environment of few professional footballers didn't allow for anything else. Slowly they have learned to make the best of the skills they have, individually often less than their opponents, and the strength of their teamwork has grown with them. They also have two coaches, giving more perspectives than one, and in their environment they have been able to learn and grow.

The workshop on 5th July at Foam, Brussels will explore how to create the conditions for this growth of relationships and trust and how trust becomes its more powerful efficient form called love.

The Leicester team only came together at the start of last season, yet they too were able to reach a level of 'impossible' results, perhaps with a little more luck, but the stability of their core and the environment  and boundaries created by the manager and his staff team enabled players to reach their full potential.

This is a new form of leadership, not based on ego but on unleashing the collective brain and spirit of a group to take individuals to places they never dreamed of. Understanding the nature of complex human systems is the foundation of this approach.

Brexit- Its a perfect example of not understanding how to think and make decisions in complex systems; the relationship(s) the UK has with EU is for more involved than even a hundred heads could hold, and it's suffered a linear intervention reduced to two options of In or Out.

 Linear interventions into complex systems explode in your face, QED.

Come to the workshop on 5th July at Foam in Brussels and we'll see together how to avoid these unintended consequences, by using our felt sense to navigate and map the systems and relationships involved and design appropriate interventions that don't throw the future to the wind of fortune.

Passionate about complexity science, I accompany people and organizations along the paths of their most difficult challenges.

Complex human systems arrive with a whole new way of thinking and making decisions. Simple right and wrong often ceases to have meaning, instead the art of navigating, harvesting and surfing become relevant, as we deal with contexts that contain too much information and too many uncontrollable variables for one head to think about and keep under control.

Unlocking the collective intelligence of an organization is one of the important interventions in situations like this.

The inclusive nature of complexity means that we map and remap the various topographies involved, so that the full extent of the relationships involved interventions and decisions can be thought through before pressing the button. 

This sounds like its getting there.....

My news is that i just bought a Windmill, with my half of the old house in Grez Doiceau, and my half of the flat in Schaerbeek, where Jane is going to live - having got a job in a school in Brussels.

It's just 400m from Hilde's house, and it comes with a 5 bedroomed house on a plot with a garden. In need of some renovation, both Mill & house, i'm going to restart the mill, millstones and flour mill is all still there although unused for nearly 10 years. (the sails were removed after war damage in 1950, replaced by a big diesel engine, also now gone i will run with electric motors. I’ll be starting up as an organic mill, there are not many in Belgium so it should have a good market. 

The business will run as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, optimising and sharing the value created across the whole value chain - my thing you know, to demonstrate that complex systems that include customers, suppliers, investors, co-workers and friends can be run successfully, if you understand the nature of complexity and how to navigate and harvest complex conditions.

And that's the third part, together with a friend who’s at from the Prigogine school of complexity at the ULB, a Physicist about our age called Vasilios Basios - greek of course - we're writing a book on harvesting complexity. A non-linear book, based around complexity lunches and workshops we’ve been holding over the past year, we hope in writing to capture a bit of the experience of navigating complex contexts, which means honing your ‘felt sense’ - a combination of Intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, intuition and musical senses. The combination of my operational use of complexity and the theory of complexity science has been fascinating, and inspiring and thats what we’re trying to get first into a book form, although etc,there are obvious multimedia forms too, from games to videos via workshops that we hope to develop over time.

Using the Mill which has great space for meetings and hosting people.

Come and see it when you’re next in Brussels, stay too, lots of space.

BEST NIGHTINGALE SONG - 3 Hours REALTIME Nightingale Singing, NO LOOP - ...

Conciousness; the last frontier - or maybe the first?

http://www.economist.com/node/21664060

the economist has been thinking about this, see link....

the emerging paradigm

..Julian

Enlightenment,

Embodiment,

Consciousness,

Systemic maturity,

Spiritual Development,

Stage of life’s path,

Self knowledge,

Connectedness,

level of insight,

Spirit,

Soul,

Depth of love,

Connection,

Insight,

Seer,

Oracle,

Psychic,

and so on…

the words flow around this rock of our perspective,

each with their own history and meaning,

each with its own trigger in us of ideas and emotions,

encouraging judgement, which muddies the water,

of seeing clearly each thing in its perspective and purpose,

all coming together at the point of focus where there is no judgement,

where they have value, create value and inspire value,

and are connected in multiple ways to themselves to each other and to the value they are part of .

Can we perceive the cycles that we all follow, the cycle of love, the cycle of value, the cycle of life

or do we only get confused by the tourbillion of things we can’t make sense of, which has us hit the wall, again, until we find the door.

Judgement is surely a safe port in fog, where the way out is the open sea, and that’s scary even without the fog..

Navigating at sea in unknown waters, needs all our senses, feelings and intuition

and is that land over there? is it a mirage, an island, or a city long forgotten?

muse on my friends, or your muse may be gone.

A new chapter.

Sitting in Denmark, with a new vertical axis wind turbine of 70kw halfway built, helps perspective on several levels.

O=∑Rt Perspectives on sustainable resilient business

By seeing a business or organisation as the sum of its relationships to the power of the trust in the relationships, we unlock the door on a new perspective that helps visualisation, interaction and thinking around the new paradigm.

A sustainable resilient organisation needs to reach a new dimension of being and thinking - complexity and change are a constant, so the capacity to enable the collective brain or intelligence to function and to create a space where emergence is perceived, is one of the elements of the new paradigm.

The resonant wavelengths can be found in the four dimension model that emerges from this perspective. These are the keys to emergent energy which fuels growth, and if we consider the whole as an organism then we begin to see how organic are thinking and interventions need to be.

The first reflection is that an organism has distinct cycles of growth, maturity and death, all of which happen in Business. Isn't the challenge to celebrate and navigate these organic cycles?

Navigation is one of the systemic intervention types, a new skill for most, for use in complex contexts. Identifying and following the energy topographies.

 more later

Story

Hi,
i'm a turn around guy, been doing it for years; i work through story for four reasons.
A) They are sticky, a good story teller takes you with them and makes you part of the story; they are remembered long after numbers or theory have faded, and we've been telling stories for longer than we can remember, as a way of learning/teaching.
B) The story of a companies identity is the key, people attach themselves to this and it becomes a shared story. If its broke, as in my work, nothing will happen until its fixed. Remember a system is the sum of its relationships to the power of the trust in those relationships, story is the explicit form of relationships, and the relationship with identity is fundamental to any complex humans systems DNA or culture if you prefer.
c)If you recognise various systemic contexts (see cynefin.org) you will see that in complex space, story can be used both as a diagnostic - narrative analysis - and as an intervention tool in various forms; indeed it is one of the tools suited to the emergent methods required under complex conditions.
d) By definition then story is a non linear form which is impossible to quantify, however if you use one of the large story capture systems, Sense maker for example, it allows you to quantify the degree of relevance and occurrence of the archetypes of a system, and in real time story analysis this can give good non linear feed back to track both diagnosis and interventions.
Finally story tracking enables you to find out what is going on without asking questions, see the observer paradox in quantum mechanics, because if a system is in a predominantly complex state, small things like questions, can have bigger unintended consequences and be unintentional interventions in themselves, with all the consequences.

So you see you need to come at story through a new perspective, and ask people to tell you stories about how they use story, because your linear analytical approach (i.e. looking for the answer) may end up with you listening to your own voice, and not whats really going on.
Your size and sector analysis is irrelevant as story is part of human identity everywhere, and the use of it will be driven by those companies that have found it useful in complex conditions, which is difficult to establish through your single answer questions.

If this doesn't help, then your brain has already filtered it out - so no harm is done.
Yours with a story to tell
Julian Still

Systemics ... the Final Frontier

Systemics... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the systemic practitioner J.R.Still. His continuing mission to explore & help strange new systems. To seek out new tools and understanding, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Captain's log, stardate 0902.2012.1900. A talk to the people of the FOAM Galaxy, they seem to speak complexity and systems thinking, more research is required in their grasp of emergence, relationship mapping and constellations. The Cynefin story continues.....

Mail to mannaz on their requirements for Global Leadership requirements

Dear Mannaz,

i have been in the fringes of your organisation for nearly five years, waiting for evolution to turn the next corner.

I am mostly rejected by Mannaz people as being too unconventional, difficult and challenging.

If now is the time to embrace some leading edge thinking and new tools emerging in the world of global leadership then i would be happy to talk.

I applaud and support your list or requirements in Global leadership facilitation. In itself it is a challenge for the entrained thinkers and linearly trained managers that populate the majority of businesses around the world.

The leading edge of the next generation of these requirements throws down an even bigger challenge.

Ways of thinking will soon be seen as a requirement; Many words have been said on systems thinking, but that's only the beginning. Systemic thinking brings together systems,complexity and learning.

Next up will be an understanding of cognitive processes, at its heart cognitive filters, and the systemic nature of the relationship between Intellect, emotion, the physical body and the spiritual dimension.

Finally the next generation of tools requires a new set of skills; collective - distributed thinking and decision making, self organising systems, collective emergence and organic and systemic maturity amongst the more important.

I understand the notion of patience, resonance and attractors so hopefully i will still be available to talk, when you are ready.

Systeemdenken

This is a blog on the systemic perspective of the Belgium political crisis, and a re-awakening of this blog.
I'll translate it if anyone is interested?

J

Dave snowden on complexity in IT development(Cynefin)

The technology question: Demand, Supply or Co-evolution
Only 1 message in topic - view as tree

This post summarises for me Daves approach and thinking on this topic, the whole idea of enabling conditions can be taken much further.
J
_____

From: act...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:act...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
Dave Snowden
Sent: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 9:01 PM
To: act...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [act-km] The technology question: Demand, Supply or Co-evolution

Maybe it would be helpful to think about enabling conditions rather than
drivers and about a different view of the traditional concepts of supply and
demand. My own work on strategy (and on the development of related software
tools) is increasingly making a distinction in scenario planning between
causal events and enabling events. The normal de facto position is to
create a string of events on the assumption that early events caused the
following event, in practice it is often the case that a certain event made
many other events possible, but the one that happened is then assumed to be
"caused". It's a western concept, this desire to see a reason for things,
most eastern philosophies have the concept of a non-causal system in which
some things just "are" which ironically

If we look at the development of KM in the mid and late nineties then I
think it is true to say that one of the enabling events was the growth of
collaborative technologies. Lotus Notes took the early lead in this and was
(and is) to my mind one of the outstanding collaborative tools.
Unfortunately whoever became responsible for its strategy focused on
competing with Microsoft as an e-mail package, rather than making the case
for "many to many" rather than "one to one" communication. As a result
Notes development and sales/marketing strategy suffered accordingly and of
recent years its decline is becoming self evident. E-mail is now the
antithesis of a productivity tool. The internet itself as active business
tool is to all intents and purposes less than ten years old and anyone with
any knowledge of history will know that you cannot assume that things will
carry on "as is": scalability is not infinitely extendible, things change
and can often change very quickly.

That leads me to the main point. Technology creates the possibilities for
things that we have not thought of before. The earliest ever commercial
computer was used to store the telephone directory of an American city (IBM
1954 and IBM announced a world market for 6 computers), we then moved over
the next 40 years into a DEMAND led use of technology in which existing
manual systems were computerized. The methods of system design and project
management grew out of this period of known need and we have been suffering
from that history in recent times in that such approaches slow down
development when the need is not fully known. In the eighties we started to
move into the SUPPLY period, in which technology capability led market need.
In this period it is fair to say that technology was a "driver" of KM
programmes. The dot com bust was one of the more significant indicators
(but not the only one) of the end of this period.

We are now in a CO-EVOLUTIONARY period in which business needs and
technology capability are interacting in ways that we do not fully
understand, but new applications are emerging from that evolutionary
interaction. One of the consequences of this which is little understood is
that we need to stop designing "applications" in which users say what they
want and technologists build to order, or for that matter buying standard
packages (ERP) and changing human systems to conform. We need to really
pick up something that was surfacing back in the 80's namely object
orientation. Here you design objects that receive and distribute services
and can be controlled by workflow (yes I know this is a crude statement but
it is the essence); the application then emerges from the interaction of
people and business needs with those objects.

It's a very different design strategy, and its one of the reasons why many
of us are interested in complexity science as it gives a theoretical base to
understand what is going on. One of the problems is that IT design
processes are still locked in the demand and/or supply periods. Since
leaving IBM a part of my work has been to create a new software company,
building tools based on my and colleagues ideas. It is object orientated,
but I have to stay constantly alert to developers who want me to provide
"use cases" so that they can build applications, not objects. The idea that
you start to provide general purpose software objects evolve in use is alien
to a generation trained on the inadequacies of the early days of computing.
Its also given rise to this terrible dichotomy in KM between "technology"
and "culture" when in practice the two are intertwined. In a recent book
chapter in the context of narrative Gary and I called these two extremes the
Techno-fabulists and the Art-Luddites. Those familiar with my more strident
views on the conference stage will recognize the techno-fetishists and new
age fluffy bunnies in a more academic disguise.

www.cynefin.net

sense making + narrative + networks
The Cynefin Centre
David Snowden
Founder
snow...@btinternet.com
51 Lockeridge
Marlborough
SN8 4EL
United Kingdom
mobile: +44 7795 437293
www.cynefin.net

OpenBC

Carolyn Dare convinced me that relationships formed on line (without ever meeting ech other) can be as strong and full of trust as face to face relationships.

On thursday night at the second openbc belgium event (great food from soul food for thought) the air under the Cinquantenaire arch had a buzz to it, the theme was art in business and various artists performed, displayed or mimed their art; brilliant; it must be part of what is missing from the out of balance financial wealth creating world.

Even more amazing was Milena Djekova, a famous (one of the top 5 best known) Bulgarian...
Her violin playing electrified the audience, and her energy cascaded through the room - wonderful to feel.

I'm torn between meeting new 'contacts' and catching up on existing ones, curiosity and familiarity competing. In the end i just went with the flow and spent some time with Milena and some new and older friends.

At one point i heard my self say that Milena could try 'feeling good about her body (she has pneumonia) and then her body might feel good about her', it seemed to open a 'in' channel - momentarily.

Thanks to everybody for the energy input; great.

the deepest voice

show the way to create wealth (widest definition; learning, knowledge, relationships, money & money equivalents) in an ethically sustainable, organic and collective way; enabling both collective and individual potential to be achieved, demonstrating how to learn from and adapt to our natural environment, using all mankind's and natures resources in an efficient and renewable way'

Widget blogging

Its supposed to be as easy as loading the widget and posting your blog.

I think i've worked out to do the sum sign correctly.

So you hit the post button and