synergy / feedback loops / surprising capabilities

In the Unpredictable Emergence of Learning entry of his blog, Julian Elvé looked into the white space between my entries on How local meetings w/global experts can boost CI, horizontalization of learning and blognotes by two other people. Julian established a couple of—cognitive and trackbacked—links between them, including:

The public, linked, asynchronous nature of blogs and related technologies both exposes conversations to a wider pool of people and helps the ideas start to flow before any face-to-face meeting.

His picking up on that fave theme of mine inspired me to share more about it. The "it" is intermedia synergy, the social, knowledge, and (potential) business value emerging from the right combination of two or more modes of communication, including real-time and asynchronous. I've been extensively thinking and writing about this since 1986, most of which has never made it to my blogs.

What this trackback-facilitated exchange with Julian reminds me is that what is getting cross-fertilized in blogosphere is not only information and ideas but also inspiration. The fact that somebody is paying attention to and find useful what one writes, establishes a posiive feedback loop calling forth more on that subject. In this way, what we pay attention to tends to expand. Directly or indirectly, our attention is guided by our values, AND in its aggregates, it is guiding the global brain's imprinting new neural paths upon itself.

When a significant minority of change agents in an organization starts paying attention to what they pay attention to, their emerging new knowledge and combined capabilities will be rather surprising.