Tag Archives: Mental Maps

Our Models of the World

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The Eagle’s Gift

The eagle lived on the tree beside a deep well and in the well a community of frogs. None of them had ever been out of the well. Every night the eagle could hear the granny frog tellling bedtime stories to the young one. One morning when the thermals had begun rising in the air, the eagle swooped into the well, grasped one little frog in its claws and rose up with the thermal. The heights and the fear of death overtook the little one. Then the eagle let go of the frog from the heights above the well. While falling back, the frog had just a glimpse of the world outside. The eagle went back to the tree and waited for the sun to set, to hear the story of the day. What will be the story of the day? Tell us?

We have been collecting these stories for over 19 years now. Initially everyone connects it in their own ways.

Some identify themselves with the eagle and some with the frog and the fear of death. Not many with both, eagle and the frog, the big and the small, telescope and the microscope, Hubble and the Femtoscope, Global and local and the  connections in between, how mental models are formed and revised to become  mental maps – knowledge

How best to continually learn and how an old world of the frog collapses or the new frames come to sit on the older version of the software. A new world is born. Yet we are all in that well – of Nature

We will never see all of it, but we can see much more now than any time in the past and there is a long way to go on that road.

Knowledge architecture

Meenakshi asked, “Explain knowledge architect” and Wanderer found the word “awesome”

Knowledge Architecture is Knowledge + Design, as we see it.
Designed to?
• Creating a more desirable future.
• Learning faster as individuals and communities
• Targeted at problem specific solutions
• Deliver sustained improvements.
• Facilitate dialogue and learning
Most often, solutions do not lead to net improvements. The provider turns myopic to the issue out of a natural bias to one’s own baby, driven by selfishness than appropriate selfishness (Handy), create leaders and followers, teachers and students amounting to more of dependence than independence and interdependence
Knowledge is the sum of all that we know, we will know and can know and the process is learning. To learn is to connect, reflect and catalyze- better, faster and deeper and improve together. Parents and teachers desire that children learn faster. Managers desire that they learn faster than the competition. Citizens wish that the country positions itself as a learning community and improve faster. But do we really learn?
There is extreme urgency for rapid learning in the context of environmental concerns, social divides, growth vs. inequity, war for talent, inclusiveness and the role of corporations in creating a more desirable future. Technical connectivity enhances the possibility of real time collective and purposive learning. Complexity of these issues demands a new pedagogy, tools and processes. More of the same would not suffice. It is not that we may not know. It is also equally important to design new ways of prioritising, showing, experiencing, comprehending what we already know at a greater scale and pace. Knowledge architecture addresses these issues of crafting new ways of seeing, a prerequisite to creating a more desirable future. There are many ways to achieve this.

Visemiotics is one. Symbols facilitate easier navigation than written text as in the case of GUI of computers and software applications. A picture is worth a thousand words. At times there is no substitute for a visual symbol as in the case of road signs. Some aspects can only be communicated through visual symbols and text often hides the big picture. The younger generation is more visually dependant than on any other stimuli for learning. The visual stimuli have the highest bandwidth too. Yet one cannot ignore any one since each one has their own preferences. Stories, storytelling, scenarios, dream work, models, experiential leaning, open space, real time management development, dialogues, a lot many tools are now available to take care of the process.
The integral framework is a visual tool, a product of knowledge architecture to accelerate learning and mastery of some of these competencies

+ Manish Agarwala, the Mac Arthur Grant 2009

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Slumdog Billions and Leap Frogging the Recession

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The miniature ecosystem, see figure, has an eagle, a vulture, a small community of frogs, a tree and a very deep well.  The eagle and the vulture come to perch on the tree.  The frogs always lived within the deep well from which they had never gone out nor can they move out of it on their own, other than dream about it. Every night the granny frog tells bedtime stories to the young ones in the well, most of them passed down over generations with an occasional improvisation here and there. The eagle could hear the stories.

One morning when the thermals had begun rising in the air, the eagle swoops down into the well, grasps one little frog in its claws and rises up with the thermal. The heights and the fear of death grip the little one. The eagle stayed with the thermal circling for some time and when it finds that the little one has calmed down a little, releases it from its claws from above the well.  The vulture waits in the hope that the frog will turn carrion. But the frog lands back into the same well, unhurt, still afraid and probably elated. While circling in the sky with the eagle the frog had opened its eyes for a brief moment to get a glimpse of the world outside the well.

The eagle went back to the tree waiting for the sun to set, to hear the new stories.

The Oscars.

The curious case of Benjamin Button and the Slumdog Millionaire

The Slumdog Millionaire swept the first Oscar since the recession. It is perhaps more than coincidental that we dream up another version of the rags to riches story when billions vanish in the stock market and the market caps reach rock bottom. There is no greater fantasy to beat a recession when the ‘developed world’ reels in its flames. ‘Developed’, stands for the ‘top of the pyramid’ within the context of this post and has no geopolitical connotations.

The kids from Dharavi, the Bombay (Mumbai) slum, flew up to Oscar heights, shedding their slum maps of the world to the eagles view from the top, for a fleeting moment. or was it the vultures view? When they come back to the same old well, the well wouldn’t have changed much. Yet some things will never be the very same again. For fleeting moments the bottom and the top connects and the media goes into overdrive vying with each other to generate our daily dose of adrenaline.   The Slum dogs and the dogs in Beverly Hills (or Malabar Hill) have the same DNA – the same potential. So does the human. Other than the cosmetic, the dog’s potential is not far behind in terms of its performance. It is still a dog’s life. Some might quarrel for morsels while the lucky ones, the adopted ones, don’t have to.

The story of the human is not the same. We could be much better than the dogs, wherever they are. The bottom and the top of the pyramid are connected through fantasy and fiction. The Oscar jury sits in judgement to decide which story is the best.

We need a design to make this leap-frogging to happen on a regular continual basis. The recession is a brief window of time to grab wider attention to mull on it. Mobility accelerates learning. Dreams, celluloid or lucid, connect better to our deep structures and at times can help us to awaken into a better future.

In 2008, 2, 90, 000 candidates appeared for CAT, the common admission test to the IIMs, Indian Institutes of Management. The process is not far different from the Dharavi kid turning into the Slumdog millionaire though the chances are less than 0.6 %. Another 100,000 will join US universities to pursue their dreams of flight. Some of them will join the $ Million league and work towards reaching the top of the pyramid, now capped at $, 500,000 if you have taken the bailout. Others will trail behind and wrack their brains how to beat them in the race.  A few of them would turn entrepreneurial or find other ways to win their millions. Some will completely opt out of the race to move to the bottom of the pyramid. Bose, one who  opted out of the race from one of the IIMs, tells me that the b-school days still bring back memories of street dogs fighting for their morsels, for whom the bell tolls, and Pavlov’s dogs. The CEO of a bank walks away with a lifetime pension of over £ 6.50,000 /annum leaving the ship he was captaining to sink, a  typical role model for the participants of the race. But things have changed overnight. With the slow down, governance is back in fashion, and many of them would join the public sector companies this year. The champions of free market will take a voice rest till things warm up a little. Most of those who fail to make it, along with a larger number, less ambitions or unfortunate than them, would aspire to join the sunshine sector of IT that emerged during the India shining phase of the growth story. Many of them would keep flying between the top and bottom in delivering outsourced solutions to the top of the pyramid. These dreams have turned sour now. Much of the shine has vanished with the recession.

Around 30,000 Indians will return from the US every year to settle down in their home country for various reasons, people who successfully chased similar dreams.  The story is a much better version than Danny Boyle coming down to Dharavi. Within an individual life span, a critical mass of people have flown out of their individual wells, fulfilled their dreams  and return to the same well. The well has not changed much but many of them see new possibilities in leapfrogging at a larger scale, bringing together the best of both the worlds. 27 % of the world’s poor are in India. The bottom suffers from abject poverty and the top from intellectual poverty, the two sides of the same coin.  The challenge is to see the third side, the side/s that connect the two. The farmer who feeds the bottom and the top hope and pray for the monsoons continue to be favourable, that the government will increase the procurement prices, that the loans will be written off ( As in  the case of the bailout billions, the relatively non-performing are more likely to end receiving such relief)  or perhaps in an election year, the procurement price will be higher than the cost (which includes the share of the rats and lions too) at which the government builds up a buffer stock.

Climbing Mount Everest, (Hillary and Tensing), Wright brothers and flight, the moon shot, in short every human achievement has a common thread that connects to the whole. At one end of the continuum is the well, the local and at the other is the very large, the global. To learn is to connect between the two, a bolt of lightning from the blue connecting to the earth.

Once we take the invariant position, that we are here to learn and learn continually, then it is a journey of connecting the small with the large, the local with the global. What we see changes with the variant positions we take during the journey. Something new comes into our perspective improving the old maps.  Development is a process of connecting potential to performance and narrowing the gap between the two. The eagle/frog frames are joined together to produce the movie of our individual lives.  Do we direct it on our own or get directed is what matters most! If we learn the lessons right and shed our preoccupations with the maps of change and quantitative growth over quality, we could leverage it to come out of the recession, out of the booms and busts to a phase of continual improvement in the quality of life, community and sustainability.

Prahlad reinvented the pyramid for our time. There is a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid! It has always been a trend with the top of the pyramid coming down to the bottom in search of the treasures for different reasons. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates connect to connect to the bottom. We hear academics wondering now, a bit too late perhaps – Is business ANTI social that wealth needs to be balanced with charity? What does charity beget? The circle is now complete! Until creation of wealth and business turns pro-community, charity seems to be the dominant paradigm by which we connect to the bottom, the current version of the missionary zeal of the colonial era. Some of them were in for a surprise and those who connected in a spirit of learning to the bottom brought to light many a treasure. Mohammad Yunus showed the way in more recent times – the royal road to beating the recession which the white revolution had demonstrated in an earlier phase of the India growth story.

The moral is more important than the story. Be a frog, be an eagle and keep switching positions continually to connect between the local and the global, the big and the small, the telescope and the microscope, Hubble and the Femtoscope and the myriad connections in between. The devil is in the details, the well and God in the heavens and at times like a bolt from the blue the two connects and there is a leap in learning. With every leap of the frog there is a collapse of an old world and a new world takes birth. Yet we are in the same well, the well – of Nature, which we will never fully comprehend. It might make us a little more humble and help us realize that we cannot reinvent the basic design.  Meanwhile there is a lull. No thermals seem to be in the make to those who reel in the flames of the recession. The eagles wait on the tree and the frogs continue to be in the well.  The recession is raging on and the vultures have a feast.  But the thermals are always in the making, some place or the other.

The original story of ‘The curious case of Benjamin Button’ was published in 1921, the same year that Einstein received the Nobel Prize. We cannot age back like the protagonist of the story and meet Scott Fitzgerald to find out why he wrote the story or he would agree with the film adaptation of the story which begins with a curious clock maker which goes well with the overall theme.  Let us also hope that he wouldn’t find objection to colouring the story to suit our present context. The extreme geriatric, the process of his aging back and the curious clock that goes back in time triggers one to reflect on our present reality.  The clock is a simple machine without self-regulation. The technology that we have developed remains mostly at this level of maturity. While we are no doubt scaling up the ladder to higher levels of technology with increasing self – regulation, as a culture we are no better than a non-self regulating, self-destructing clock work system, a product of the Newtonian world-view. (1642-1727) Extreme geriatry has come to be our collective illness. Benjamin Button is turned out of Yale because he ran out of his cosmetics to hide his age. The gates of knowledge is closed to him though later on when he grows younger, he makes a second attempt to make it to Harvard but fails to graduate as he loses his learn-ability to the pace of his growing young.  The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was first published in 1859.

We have three different sets of maps but we fail to connect these maps together and evolve a common one, unable to grow out of the Newtonian maps. Darwin was in a way ahead of Newton and Einstein to deal with emergent qualities between classes of life. Even to the untrained eye, these qualities are discernible that no machines come anywhere near a cell, that from the unicellular to the multi-cellular is a giant leap and within the multi-cellular, plants, animals, human and community have higher levels of complexity and potential that the lower levels do not possess. Still our collective reality has not moved ahead from the level of the clock.  We are caught up in what is fashionable, the world of machines.

Even after 150 years of the origin of species, the essential learning remains outside our collective understanding of reality and makes us a less favoured species in the struggle for survival. The curious case of BB captures all the limitations of the Newtonian paradigm. While humanity moves ahead on the path of decay and ageing to self-destruct itself, the hero goes against the flow, but the ultimate destiny is not altered.

Cosmetic solutions will not gain us admittance to understanding but they contribute significantly to the bubbles  and busts.   Real learning would help us design real solutions. Between the positive and negative flows of time, is emergence, the bolt from the blue that negates entropy and decay. Accumulating real learning helps us to beat the fate of the tragic hero. The curious case of Benjamin Button proved predictive, prophetic, of our current reality.

Conflict is part of the story of evolution. We have reached the apex of the pyramid of conflicts. Yet another emergence is in the offing.

Designer Lives (2)

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Potential and Performance

The dog is in attendance and we continue.

“The world is chaotic, disorganized and vexing. Medicine is no exception “says one of my dialogue partners and friend, the surgeon. He advises government on health policy issues in addition to his hectic and often punishing routine.  The only issue on which we come together is our morning routine and on all the rest we take the polar opposite positions.

This is why inner ecology is important. If we don’t find order in our own self, what we see in the world outside is chaos, disorder and when you advise the world, you could be contributing to more of the  chaos and disorder. The intentions are always good but the effect is disastrous.

Since you come at the end of the assembly line in the health system where surgery is the only option, most of what you see influences your world view.

That is ridiculous.

The more you see the conflicts, violence, absence of harmony outside, you are more likely to be caught up in it. You become what you pay attention to and come to believe that this is the nature of reality. The opposite also is true, the more you look for order and organization, one becomes more ordered in one’s own SELF. You will then be contributing more to order than chaos. The choice is yours. What you see depends on where you stand, your position.

What are you driving at, change my career/ position at this stage?

I am not suggesting anything.  I say that this should not be your invariant position which would emerge from a larger perspective of the true potential, a better understanding of the design, so that when the system goes out of order, one can restore order without resorting to extreme measures. These extreme measures are contingent on taking such a position and nothing but belated inferior solutions.

When our car or the net book does not perform, we go back to the design to put it right. Our system doesn’t come with a User Manual which helps us diagnose and bring back the system to order.  Without understanding the design we cannot decide whether the system is true to the design. Most of our expectations are based on ill- informed assumptions about the design and we pay a heavy price for it.

To repeat, our most well meaning intentions create the most disastrous results.

You are getting ready for more jugglery.

Simplicity is a noble goal but it should not be at the cost of truth. What I suggest is that we go up together and get the lunar perspective. Perhaps we might come to share the dog’s perspective.

Shoot.

We will first take a look at the potential quadrant, the left front wheel of the learning engine. Though when we drive the four wheels move together the car is  now at rest and we are looking at each of the wheel assemblies in isolation. In juggling all the balls should be in the air but we are just studying the ball which is  at rest. The eye at ground zero stands for the compass perspective.  The compass is hidden here. To use the compass one has to climb up the 10 storey lighthouse.  Or we assume that within the potential ball there are 9 more balls and we start from the small to the large. If we  miss any one ball or storey, potential is zilch.  These are the 10 heads of the Asura King, Ravana in the epic journey of Rama, the Ramayana. (In spite of the ten heads Ravana fails and in spite of defeating Ravana, Rama fails to win the heart of Sita. Men better take a cue from the feminists. The other epic Mahabharata is all about our inabilithy to SEE in which the leader is blind, both in terms of light and the light that enlightens the blind)

Start climbing?  We step in to the ground level.

1. The compass is buried in the foundation of the lighthouse.

2. The ground level is the repository of all existing maps, results from all previous climbs what other climbers have left for us which might make the climb a lot easier.

A map could be on almost anything, not just a map of the terrain. It could be  a story  a myth, music, dance, art, science, technology, religion, from any discipline or aspect of knowledge. The periodic table is a good example.

These maps might as well create a bias. We will look at them on our way back.  Let us move up the stairs to the next level.

3. We come to the world of simple machines. Clocks, compasses, guns. All of those machines which have no ‘mind’ of their own. The bullet does not come back to the gun nor does the clock change its pace to suit our whims.or haste.They dont do any regulation on their own. They are on the path of entropy.

4. We have all the advanced machines with a ‘machine mind’ here.  The compressor in the fridge works only till the desired temperature is reached.

5. The world of the unicellular. A cell in our body, a diatom, an amoeba, bacteria, virus. No machines come anywhere near in terms of its degree of self regulation.

6. All the plants

7. The animal

8. The human, individual.The cell is to the body what the individual is to the organisation.

9. Groups, organisations, communities, community

10. Perfect knowledge

We are on top. We SEE from horizon to horizon, the past and the future. The view is complete. We stand on a 10 layered sandwich. No single layer stands on its own. If any step of the ladder is amiss we don’t reach the top. All the levels are indispensable for the emergence of true potential which is infinite. No limits here, in time or in space.

This is why we need all the ten heads / avatars to realise the fully human, the ideal, perfect, conceptual human.  Here everything is perfect, heaven.

We climb down. We check our new map with the old maps. All of them are correct in some ways but not complete as the one which is fresh in our memory. We start checking our new map against the physical world (hell?) represented by the rear right wheel of the learning engine.

We are in for the surprise of our life! NONE OF US HAVE  EVOLVED BEYOND THE LEVEL OF THE CLOCK ! and we claim outselves to be civilized and cultured ! We need to revisit Newton, Einstein and Darwin at the same time. Have a webcon !

All the levels match one to one in terms of their potential and performance till the level of the animal. The gap begins at the level of the human. It widens as we move up the level of groups, organisations, communities and community. The waste, unrealised potential becomes visible. We SEE and we can SHOW. This is the first step to the first step of the journey of the learning engine, the shift in direction to TRUE NORTH.  Before we take the first step in that journey of a 1000 x miles we need to make certain that we place that step in the right direction.

The design and delivery do not match. The system is not in order. There is no alignment between the two wheels. ( forget the other two for now) We could run the diagnostics to set right the alignment between the two wheels at various levels. .

When we set right the alignment, all the four wheels need to be corrected at the same time, because any small change in any one affects all.  To do that we need to understand the design of the other two wheels also.

What about the metrics?

The process involved in  metrics comes first. It is about reflecting over performance with the design in mind and that the system is designed to continually improving on its previous best performance, in terms of quantity, quality and time. All metrics are approximations and is not an exact science. The actual indicators, criteria of performance, could be quite simple which shows us the progress to true north and reduction in   WASTE. We will come back to the issue of metrics after an overview of all the sub- assemblies.

It is becoming dense. Let us take a break.

You claim to be a virtual Perma – Culturist?

My father was the original. He believed that doing nothing is Doing Everything. It took me a lifetime to understand what he stood for. By the time all the land was gone and I could  only be a virtual Perma ‘culturist’ !

Perma culture is about understanding the design of nature and allowing the design to express itself, not to stand in the way of nature. The templates of nature are perfect and beyond improvement. Our best efforts to improve them most often fail. We need to live with them.

Learning has no cost. It always fetches the best ROI. The metrics need to take  into account the future savings of costs associated with not learning.(eg: savings from avoiding a cardiac arrest)

We need to start with culture before we get into Perma – Culture.

What is common to the Amazon forest dweller and the Wall Street investment banker is the basic template? One stakes his claim to be civilized and from  the first world while . the other does not make any such claims. One is blissfully unaware of the design whereas the other claims to have all the keys to unlock the potential.  We need to strike the miiddle path between the two.

When Vasco Da Gama reached Malabar, he was shocked to find the women going topless. Now when the tourists come to the very same beaches and bare themselves,  they are ogled at. The wheel has come back full circle in just around five centurires!It is not even two centuries since we abolished slave labour. We abolished it when we found better ways to achieve the very same purpose ‘in style’. Same goes for dictatorships.

Why does the emperor shout that he is the emperor?

The emperror is not certain that he is the real one !

You have a Freudian fixation with the Ps

My professor (Ramaswamy) was much better at it. He would juggle with 100s of Ps and make them dance in the air while my professor of maketing was juggling with just 4 Ps. I am told that he has gone up to 7 now. I am just using around 40 Ps, the very minimum to show you what I want you to see. This is a minor fixation, synchronicity at work.

Why do you always take recourse to myths?.

Beware of  myths because they will survive all the mass wipe outs. It is better to understand them so that we go beyond them. The myth is the key to our unconscious, the silent sub-surface driver of the engine, a source of mis-alignment. We will get to this much later.

Where do we go on from here?

We take a look at the other two wheels, the engine and the driver of the learning engine.

It is getting complex.

Complexity is the best challenge to stretch your self. It is a headache but I peddle a ‘one minute cure’ for headache. Complexity feeds me.

Continued

Designer Lives ! Greening Our Selves

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I did a search on Google India when I started this post and abandoned it when I saw

Designer lifestyle – 26,400.000

Designer life coaching – 14.400,000

Designer Sarees – 8,69,000

Designer Sarees pic – 22,80,000

I also spent some time finding a coach to air  these ideas. I was not successful because I had modelled my theory on my understanding of two of my role models who could be life coaches. One was over 100 years when he died (he ran out ot work) and the other is 113 years and still going strong. So all that search amounted to nothing?

Not really because now I know that Indians are slightly more interested in  design than designer sarees and designer jewllery. The last time they were looking for somebody to head the national centre for design they approached one of my neighbours who dabble in jewellery design

I turned my attention to the Times of India and the interview with Malcolm Gladwell. He says we are information rich and theory poor.  If the dogs can ‘see’, what they ‘see’ will be worth a look.

My search had to be abandoned because most theories, in the long run have not  even helped the proponents other than getting some flea span of attention.

Many gods die very young! At my age, I cannot afford to be taken for many more rides.

Why don’t you stop theorising and get to the issue? Do you have a set of principles? Where do we begin?

Get ready for some mental jugglery.

  1. We need to make a SHIFT
  2. We need to approach Potential ,Performance, the WHY and How  of  the potential performance gap, simultaneously
  3. We need to take an informed position and be our SELF
  4. We need some simple metrics to be certain that we are on the PATH

Well that is juggling with too many balls at the same time?

It is now established that juggling improves your intelligence. More the balls, bettter it is. Most of us can manage just one or two at the same time.

Moreover, we have the four wheels, the engine (self) and the driver in place to begin the journey.

Wow. It is a DIY Manual !

Yes, it is.

It is another day.

Which dog are you talking about?  There are 162 dogs, the slum dog type, in our gated community and another 36 luckier (?) ones  owned by dog lovers who have taken permission from the management committee of the community headed by an animal rights activist.The dialogue happens after our morning walk. There is this one dog which seeks us out and joins our company  on a regular basis.

Of the 162 dogs why is it that this one finds it worthwhile to join us?

It knows that you are a recruitment manager who knows the difference between dog-ness and human-ness! It sniffs the difference between the rest of us and the one who knows what it is to be human!

Wow. That’s an idea. Dogs could be used in recruitment. It would be more effective than most of our metrics. Perhaps I could patent the idea and leave my job to the dogs!

Well it is coming to that very soon. There are agencies that teach us to mimic animals or the rest of nature as if they hold the key to human-ness?

Why mimic?

  • Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
  • It is such a headache to think, know, understand

But mimicry is a kind of pathetic humour that comes out of help – less – ness. When we don’t have the original we make do with copies.

When we hear the next guru talking of inner ecology, take it that the inner desertification (or interior decoration?) is complete!

What does this dog, the other dogs and the pet dogs see?

Well dogs, as a community, seem to believe in the steady state theory since at the last count too we had around 160 dogs. They know what dog-ness is all about.With every one out of three of us likely to get cancer, one in ten to get  a heart attack and with all the other odds taken together shows that dogs are healthier than humans. We live a dog’s life !

Somebody  I knew was chased by a pack of dogs on a beach. He had no option but to get into the water. The dogs stood howling on the shore and were chased away by his friends. He lived for another six months and took the exit route on his own.The dogs knew, it seems.

Well what does this ‘special dog’ in the visual see?

This dog sees the two paths. It sees that most of what we see as progress is a fall and together we are heading in the wrong direction. It also sees the path that we should take, the path of human-ness, continuous improvement, real progress.

It would probably not join us  if we start imitating the other 161 dogs!

This dog knows. Most facts are stranger than fiction.

The Pipers of Hamlin, Wall street.

We are back at it again with the special dog in company.

The master said, be the child. Where on earth are the children? They have vanished with the Pipers from Wall Street!

The children are so ‘well informed’ these days that I feel myself an ignoramus. They know what is in and what is out and I am certainly out by those standards.

How do you take an ‘informed position’ and be my SELF?  How can I be my SELF when there is such a well- intentioned, charity driven,  messianic attack on our collective SELF, the most threatened and endangered entity in our current context.

I am not complete in my SELF without a fan following (my twitter count of followers is zilch) or following somebody in sincere flattery.

Is there a gold standard certification in these things? I see that every guru of the day, self – certifies his /her claims ! Most of them are younger than me, never been married, never raised any children.Another set of pipers ?

I am afraid I would prefer not to follow anybody and drive away potential disciplies who would rob me of my silence.

Well in that case you can not be a GURU.

How long will gold be the standard?  When everything else is of no value can gold have any value? If everybody does a Gandhi or Thoreau what happens to the economy?

You have’nt cotributed much to the economy. You are taking more than what you give to it. You have not been ill for a long long time which means you are contributing to the recession. You dont use any cosmetics. How will the economy recover ?

Are we getting to the age of The Descent of Money ?

The ‘piped music’ is so enchanting that i don’t want to unplug and listen to my SELF which is under attack from all the four directions, from the bottom and the top. 24x7x 720. Perhaps what we consider music is noise which has silenced the silence, the real music from a dog’s perspective.

We wonder where all the children have disappeared. They have lost their innocence and with it the wise men too have vanished.  The Pipers have been doing a very good.

Look at all the exercise freaks. They are all plugged in, connected, wired to their i-pods, i-phones, i-touch, i-book, i-spouses. It is a connected world ! There is very little else to be connected and be taken over by the machines. Sci-fi has become the reality.

In spite of all the stretching many of my one time friends vanished in their forties.

The problem can be abstracted as:  i > I  or self> SELF

We cannot solve the puzzle without a decision compass which would help us to find the directions and fix our position.  The four directions are the four P balls that we juggle around – Potential, Performance/metrics, Perfection and Psychodynamics (Continual renewal/ Continual Learning/ Continuous Improvement, Kaizen,  whatever you choose to call this wheel of the car / the learning engine)

What is a learning engine?

A learning engines improves on its pervious performance. II feeds itself on waste. If is a fusion engine. There is no cost for learning. The ROI is always positive.

I hope you will stop with the four balls!

I was about to pull out more smaller balls from each of the four big balls

That is enough for the day. Time for a break.

(B…s to you. I could almost hear it)

The next day:

What is the gap between self and SELF?

This is the space between the two paths, what we call the blue ocean space, the solution space or the problem space depending on which position one takes. This represents the unrealised potential, the gap between best of individual realisation of potential to the  best of the collective potential of the human.

KISS !

Example: PCD lived for > 100 years while the life expectancy for males in this context was 72, the normality of the time. The potential / performance gap is 28 years if we just take this one dimension. To make it simple we adon’t take into account the quality of life of the masses against the quality of life that PCD enjoyed or any of his other achievements.

If we consider the case of SRC, 113, who is still working and hopes to work for more years, we get an idea of what potential is and where the masses are! We cannot really fix an upper limit to potential but we can chart out the broad contours of the direction of the path.

I get a rough idea of the direction that we are talking about.

As we move forward we will be able to see what is beyond the next bend on the road.

The visual also suggests that a good part of our behaviour is sub-animal!

This is our shadow side, the porn that greases the web engine, the medicines, drugs, cosmetics, the years wasted in asylums, prisons, lives lost in conflicts, suicides, terrorism, so on and so forth. Unrealised potential is  the root cause of all our problems.

When we say be myself, what we mean is be my true SELF as distinct from what we have come to believe as dictated by the noise around us.

WHY this gap exists and HOW to bridge it or narrow it  are the other two balls.

It is in relation to these four directions that one can fix the position  just as a compass or GPS would deliver what they are designed to.

There are two kinds of positions as in the case of the lighthouse and the sailing vessel, the invariant and the variant.  The ship has to change course in relation to the lighthouse.

Be more specific?

As a surgeon I take the position that I am a professional which means I have a set of competencies which I practice in a specific domain which I continue to perfect over a life-time.  I am also bound by a code of behaviour which expects me to hold my client’s well-being as my overriding principle which provides the context in which my performance becomes measurable. The standards are the most challenging. In case of non-delivery, the surgeon will not be able to go scot-free as the Pipers of Hamlin, Wall Street.

I hope you see the invariant postion and the variant postions in the journey of the professional. The invariant is, come what may, even at the cost of my life,I would remain a professional. it is a do or die postion. The variant is as I move ahead on the journey I continue to improve my competencise and scale higher and higher levels of perfection.

It is time we pull out the balls within balls. The journey from our animal self (i)  to the human (I) begins here.

You are a pain. Enough for the day

I believe in the PIA theory of motivation.

Good day, JM

My Inglish style sheet says, “break the container and get the content”.   What Sanskrit is to Prakrit, Inglish is to English.

Hope you too see what the dog sees or ‘god’ sees the big picture. The headwind is strong. It is better for a take off than sailing.

Continued

Man meets Woman

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Man meets woman, Adam and Eve

Since their parting outside the gates of paradise

They had lost their selves

At the beginning of time or even before

Together they saw the road they came

That they thought was the wrong one

Or was it the right one?

Why did he tell us not to eat from the tree of knowledge?

Now we know

He wanted us to eat from the tree, crafty old fox that he was

And continues no less to be

Now that the lesson is learnt the wrong one has become the right path

The pain gives way to a silent growing pleasure

Together they went back in time over the ages

Seeing how they were reduced to their shadows

Empty cages from which the parrots had escaped , long long ago

Now the parrot has come back to its nest

No more the cage that it thought it was

No more the parrots that they thought they were

But eagles waiting for the thermals

To take them up into the new sky over the blue oceans

The world will never be the same again.

FAQs

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Built to Last

Built to Last

Why FD?

  • We have too many disciplines and it has become impossible to navigate through the semantic swamp created by these disciplines
  • Learning begins at birth, may be even earlier and lasts till death, LLL, or we die when we stop learning. Learning is the core, the first, and other disciplines can only be secondary
  • Self is integral to learning and the discipline covers self-learning as individuals to organizational and community learning. The concept of self / identity at these levels and approaches to learn as groups, organizations and community are critical to our common future.
  • The only real competitive advantage is to learn faster than the competition
  • The very survival of the species depends on whether we learn as a single community as well as diverse specific local communities without compromising identity and interdependence of each other.
  • FD is an umbrella term to bring together the concepts, tools and methodologies relevant to this context

What is the learning outcome of FD?

Development / Sustained high performance. Development is the process by which we realize our personal and collective potential conserving and enhancing our commons to produce sustainable and justly distributed improvements in our quality of life consistent with our own aspirations.

It sounds a lot like David C Korten.

Yes, almost, except that we are not external to the process.  We also learnt it from experience while working with artisanal fishermen for over two decades.

Why did you go to two B-Schools?

I went to those two schools as a student to learn whether they mean business or not. Now we frequent B-Schools as part of our work. We believe that it is business that makes or mars development.

What was the best learning from the B- Schools?

That they don’t mean business or they only mean business depending on how you define the term. But this was the best learning, which took us to the new curriculum

You also worked closely with governments for over three decades. Did you learn something?

Yes, primarily how not to manage. That governance will always be done by businesses directly or indirectly.

What is the process of your learning?

We offer a nano MBA on one to one basis. We also offer 3-5 days’ short duration organizational workshops and seminars designed to meet their specific requirements. Other than the tool and methodology, everything else varies with each student/client to meet his /her/their learning requirements.

Tell us something about the tool

It is a meta map, a map of all maps. We work with you to understand this map and customize it to your requirements.

What about the methodology

We have a large inventory. Some of them are storytelling, dream design, activities, games, projects, dialogues, action learning and so on

Who can join?

Anybody whose business is REAL sustained high performance /improvements

Any age preferences?

Older, the better.

Do you award degrees certificates, diplomas?

None whatsoever!

Why should I join?

No reasons whatever other than if you want sustained high performance/improvements and live a life of your own design.

What are sustained High performance competencies?

1. Positioning

2. Directioning

3. Reflecting

4. Personal Mastery

5. System/s Thinking

6. Community Intelligence

7. Accelerated learning, Stretch

8. Continual Renewal

9. Mental Maps

10. Aligning with the unknown

In short the practice of three imperatives and six perfections

What does it cost to me?

Nothing, other than your time. Real learning has zero costs. This is the only real investment that invariably gives you the highest returns.  We guarantee that the benefits far outweigh the cost of time and money.

Are there any scholarships?

Yes. You need pay only a small part of the incremental returns to you and as decided by you just to meet our very minimal overheads when you can afford to pay.

How long have you been doing this?

Since 1990.

Do you have case studies of successful alumni? We have had only successes.

Give us some examples

I refuse. You might meet some of them and it is up to them to divulge

Less FAQs

What is the first step to a journey, physical, virtual or the journey of life the second step and then the third? What differentiates the human from the animal?

What is our most basic need even more basic than the physiological? Guess what? We are yet to get the right answer at the first shot over a period of two decades from  groups of some very intelligent people and their gurus !

Romancing the impossible / The ultimate pragmatist

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Do not

Wish for it ever, it might come true

To be immortal and die the perfect death

To be the perfect master and the perfect slave

Wish for perfect madness and perfect sanity

Meet the perfect partner, commit the perfect crime

Lose your voice and find it in its pristine clarity

Meet the fire in those eyes haunting you for ages

Hear the mountain brook of your childhood sleepless nights

And the chirping of the crickets deep within the concrete jungle

Do not

Wish for it ever, it might come true

To sing for you while you dream those impossible dreams

Do not

Wish for it ever, it might come true

You live the complete fullness /complete emptiness

Every moment of your seamless flight

And it comes true.

The denial of work/love

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Stones waiting for Pygmalion
Ahalya waiting for Rama

Frozen and numbed in the loveless cold

To regain the paradise lost

Come, the catalyst and the moment of truth prevails

Pygmalion sculpts the stone

In love and hope that both will come back

He gives like the Jersey Cow

What he gives comes back to him

The stones at times complain

Why the torture?

Love and hope prevails cold reason

Coaxing the stone to come to life

Of the three masons in the Cathedral/ Taj Mahal story

One is a Pygmalion and others just ‘workers’

When was the last time, you were lost in love / work and how long did it last?

In my case it was just yesterday, believe me; it went on non-stop for 23 hours.

Did you get paid?

Not in money. But what I gave will come back to me in abundant measure

And i will fall in love head over heels

When work comes beckoning again and again

Did the miracle happen?  Yes and NO. It doesn’t really matter.

Yes, one has to agree with Gibran. Work indeed is love expressed.

No ‘managers’ and no ‘workers’

Never a manager and never work

We are just, LOVERS

Because denial of work is LOVE denied

Fall in love all over, again and again

Then get up and GO
Bon Voyage.

P.S

Galatea comes to life, falls in love with Pygmalion

To realise that within him Pygmalion is dead

The sculptor is dead.

Galatea turns Pygmalion to bring him back to life

The perfect woman that she is

She fashions the perfect man from her memories

And brings him back to life from the world of dreams

To the world of the living. keeping each other alive

The Will to Stretch

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“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you are good but the thing that you do that makes you good” – Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers.

It is just practice and nothing but practice.

I just reviewed one of my practices for over six months which I call Jowar, for jogging walking and running. I stretched myself by doubling my output today to find that I could do much better, if I wanted to. The numbers were 2 Hrs 30 minutes – 18 Kms in place of my regular 9 Kms in 70 minutes.

Why do it?  Unless we challenge the  present we would never transcend any of our limits and no history is made?

There is nothing great about my walking performance  and I am not out to create a new record. I know that my performance can improve three fold or more. I maintain my interest in these numbers as a test of my will to stretch mySelf. For a lazybones champion of idleness  for over six decades, to beign something of this sort and to stick to it certainly needs some rudiments of that thing called will. More than stretching myself physically it also involves my mind and spirit. I talk to myself while I am at it, ” you are not doing it just for yourself, you are running for all the seniors and the would be seniors and you are much more than your 58 kgs of clay .”

It is spiritual since in many ways it has become the ‘most meaningful’ – the anchor activity – of my routine.

I don’t keep any metrics of far more worldly important aspects of my performance as I have little faith in most popular metrics

I was ‘walking the Brigade’ in Bangalore with one of my students, a practice that goes back forty years to my student days. I remain a student and continue to walk the same road.

He has been ardently working on converting me to a vegetarian and as usual I have been resisting. I hold the view, in arguments, that being a vegan is no big deal and the perceived benefits derive from the bias created by randomness of being born in a vegetarian family with me falling in the opposite camp.

There is a whole array of my other argumentative missiles that I keep in stowage to be deployed when required, some of them so effective that I have done my share of conversions in the opposite direction. I take one of them out

Come, let us do a KFC. Show me that you can do it. I can any day turn a vegan but can you become a non ? I am more evolved  since  I have  more options to choose from. In a game those with more options than the opponant  comes out the winner. Survival of the fittest. You are a vegetarian because you have no other options!  As a one-time (circus?) trainer, at times,  I do a little bit of arm-twisting.

Your  treat?

Yes

I ‘m game.

My student proved smarter than me. He went on for a second and third helping and I was flabbergasted. This was a first for me. And  that was not the end of it.

How could you pull it off ?

Sir I have made it a practice to walk your talk.

What is that?

Do the most difficult. I just did that. That is all. Sir, can I ask you something?

Shoot.

How long have you been smoking?

Over 40 years

How many a day?

Used to be 30-40, now 6,7.

Why don’t you quit smoking?

It is been a friend of my lonely days and sleepless nights. I don’t see any reason to quit. The most well-known of them do not appeal to me.  Why should I quit?  May be this is an expression of my death wish! (This was a major insight. We all have it. We only are responsible for death. Nature or god has nothing to do with it. Our best efforts at defeating death is what accelerates  it !)

Sir,  it is your advice.  Do the most difficult.  Why don’t you quit?       ………….NOW!

This was a moment of truth, the bolt of lightning from the blue. There was  thunder and  silence. That was on 23 Feb 2010 .5.36 PM.

I threw my death wish down and stamped on it. I haven’t smoked since then.

Would you become a vegetarian now?

No way, I will eat less and practice non-eating. Vegetarians also kill to eat. Besides the non-vegetarian food is more advanced in the pollution chain which means it undergoes a further processing in the animal system. They die for us in advance.

So what is the learning?

Cut the crap.

Manipulate if you are ready to be manipulated

End of teaching. Learn together. Practice the Will to stretch oneSelf

The Glass Bead Game

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“All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.” – Herman Hesse

This organist plays in real time. He is one with all understanding of the past and the future too. He makes perfect music. We work with limited information, knowledge and much less of wisdom. Though we have great faith in our decisions and they are invariably taken with the very best of intentions, most of them turn out to be not very wise.

The DC is a tool that enables the user to appreciate the complexity of the decision making process and to improve the outcomes in terms of quality, sustainability and community.

Decision Compass and the Blue Ocean

The DC reduces the search effort involved in managerial problem solving, points to the solution space (blue ocean), accelerates learning and brings the woods and the trees together without missing either of them.

The tool and methodology were evolved in the context of working with very challenging developmental issues and communicating these issues to the stake holders, over two decades.

The Game

The decision compass (DC) is at the apex of a series of frames which together form the First Discipline Framework.

Mastery of the DC frame is achieved through accelerated learning and competency development work shops by simulating a high performance work environment.  The participants work together (play) with specific roles corresponding to the levels and functional expectancies of the DC.

The duration varies from 16 – 40 working hours for an introductory workshop.  The duration varies with the level of participants and the mix of the facilitation team.

Participants: 50 – 60.

The First Discipline Framework is broken into its component frames numbering 60 cards in VIBGYOR. Red cards are six in number and green four. Other colors are ten each.   Red and Green represent governance and sustainability issues and are external to the organization. The organizational groups are positioned at the centre and at the centre of the four quadrants. They change positions anti-clockwise after each round of discussions and presentations.

Time:  16 – 40 hours in 2 to 5 days.

Round  1

Step 1- Pre process metrics

Step 2 The facilitators explain the DC (60 minutes)

Step 3 Each participant picks up a card. In case total number of participants is less than 60, some participants may have more than one card. These participants will perform the additional roles implied by the extra cards. Each participant on his/her own prepares and presents a brief understanding of his /her role. The facilitators supplement clarifications if necessary. As the process picks up extent of facilitation comes down. At the end the learning from round one is summed up and shared (45-60 minutes)

Step 4 Participants group into each color and assume their roles.  They work towards connecting the learning from the exercise and its strategic implications.  Presentations follow at hourly intervals. Further clarifications are provided by the Facilitators at the end of each presentation (4-5 Hours)

Step 5 Post metrics.

Further briefing with organizational data or using data from sample case studies

Round 3

Step 1 The groups work with organization specific / case study related information to demonstrate the application of the model and the implications

Step 2 Summing up

Step 3 Post metrics

More rounds will be required in the case of new recruits. The rounds are repeated till the facilitators are certain that the participants have reached the required level of proficiency as reflected by the metrics, quality of the presentations and proficiency with the language of sustained high performance.