Those longing for economic and job stability are waiting for Godot. Turbulence is the new normal, and the only logical response is to build resilience.
Variety, convenience, discovery, opportunity are city advantages there to be tapped.
The public sector is good at fire engines. It is not good with smoke detectors. But smoke detectors are the reason deaths from fire are down so dramatically.
Cities with diffuse networks are more resilient than those with tight, overlapping networks.
Find the supernodes in your community, and use them to bridge the community quickly.
If you want to make progress, pick a problem that is on fire or one that is long-term. Otherwise, “ok” will be good enough.
How do we reinvigorate what gets lost as we adopt new technologies?
Creativity is at the user end rather than with providers.
Retain the capacity for doing weird and odd things.
How Creativity Is Killing the Culture
People are running away from real art, likely because they now believe that creative people are unable to make anything worth looking at or listening to.
“Creative people must be stopped,” indeed.
Weak Ties and Diversity in Social Networks
What struck me about Anne and Andrew’s pieces was the implicit idea of the value of diversity. Neither mentioned this explicitly, but for those familiar with James Surowiecki’s work The Wisdom of Crowds, diversity is crucial to wisdom, and thus problem solving. Weak ties helps explain how we continually introduce diversity within our social groups, by periodically leveraging those relationships with people outside our close-knit social networks.
To help understand what was going on, I made a sketch of strong and weak ties:
Click for full-size versionMcAfee then makes an interesting point: weak ties are valuable for enterprises who suffer from groupthink. So, while there is lots of pushback on the time wasted by employees using social networking software (many companies prohibit MySpace and/or Facebook behind the firewall), McAfee suggests that under the right conditions social networking software can increase innovation:
“The implication for SNS is obvious: Facebook and its peers should be highly valuable for businesses because they’re tools for increasing the density of weak ties within a company, as well as outside it. My Facebook friends are a large group of people from diverse backgrounds who have very little in common with each other.Furthermore, their profiles give me a decent way to evaluate their expertise. These online friends, in other words, are a large group of bridges to other networks. Facebook already provides me a few good ways to activate these bridges for my own purposes. I anticipate that enterprise SNS (whatever that turns out to be) will have many more.”
Story - The New Power Behind Organizations Today
I am convinced that if you wish to have a network organization that ONLY STORY will drive it. For with a Mythic story we can all find our place and we can all be guided day to day by our part in the living story.
A great enough story - What the USMC means to its people - to be a Jesuit - will last beyond formal employment and will inspire people to epic achievement not seen in the commercial world.
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