Blog of Collective Intelligence

Andrew Campbell wrote somewhere, "The more whole and integrated each person the chances for choices are increased..." I may have found that sentence in the context of his conversation with de Lange on the Learning Organizations list, 5 years ago. The following paragraph from de Lange’s “Choice and Chance are They One?” message struck me and helped me clarifying the meaning of an interesting pattern in my own experience of navigating on the high seas of life.

The more we imagine the system's "coin" as an omnibus of "chance events", the less the coin leaves us with "free energy" to imagine its future as a "choice event". On the other hand, the sooner we deal with each "chance event" as an actual opportunity rather than stacking it together with other "chance events" of the past, the more the coin leaves us with "free energy" to imagine MANY "choice events" following from this ONE "chance event". I myself try to convert every "chance event" as soon as possible into as many as possible "choice events" so as to nurture my "free energy" and the "one-to-many-mapping" of my creativity. (emphasis added)

I found the "one-to-many-mapping"--in the sense pictured by Andrew Campbell's Lightening Branches below—of one’s creativity, both a fascinating metaphor, and a model for contributing to each other’s body of resonance with the emergent futures.

In my view, the painting also suggests presencing is a community art: the diversity of evolutionary possibilities triggered by one collective choice is a reflection of the diversity of talents and sensibilities present in making that choice.

Campbell's painting and de Lange's quote above also reminded me of what Otto Scharmer wrote in the 10th Principle of Presencing:

“Who we become will depend on the choices we make and the actions we take now. That being of the future is our highest or best future possibility.”

Attracted to realize that possibility, I notice how rapidly I flip events that present themselves by “chance” into “choice” events I use for my learning. The same attraction also pulls my attention to the question: What are the practices that communities can use for navigating their future (without blindspot) as they are co-creating it?

Continue reading "Chance and choice experiences, presencing as community art" »

Posted by George Pór at 1:25 PM | Permalink

It was one of those rare teaching dreams. I was the captain of a ship returning to the harbor. There were cheering crowds waiting there, giving us a heroes' welcome. They must have already known what we came back with.

It was not an ordinary ship sailing on water; we were explorers navigating in a different horizon of time, returning from the future. What guided our exploration was our individual and collective inner navigation. That's what steered our ship into the unknown era calling us, which we grew to appreciate as the era of "wisdom society."

Initially, there was no map to it other than the maze-like patterns of branching trees of new possibilities triggered by every turn we took, every choice we made. It was like UK artist Andy Campbell's "Lightning Branches" that I discovered in Dave Pollard's blog. See below.

To advance with confidence in the right direction emerging, we needed to turn navigation into a community art.

Continue reading "Wisdom society and navigating towards it by CI" »

Posted by George Pór at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"One of the things I love that is so special about the Redwood trees is that they are MASSIVE and yet they only send their roots about ten feet deep... they send them wide and hold onto their community for strength. Good reminder for us all," says Gentle Thunder, a sister of the "standing people," her bellowed tree beings. She plays flutes, drum and hammer dulcimer in a way that stirs the souls and seduces us into the deepest reverence for life. The beauty of her music and the systemic wisdom of her words reminded me a new way to look at my quest, a new way to hold my question:

Why can't we stand together as the redwoods, grounded in our collective intelligence and wisdom in a sustainable way, not only in the precious moments of enlightened communication or the magic in the middle (.pdf), when our heartbeats synch with the rhythm of Life itself?

Continue reading "Redwoods, Messiah, shared-attention, and sustaining CI" »

Posted by George Pór at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by George Pór at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Professor Pierre Levy wrote:

> Dear coach, I will be very interested by your advice about expanding attention bandwidth and - therefore - time. :-)

Let me start with the model that I developed a few years ago to help myself understanding what I'm talking about. The diagram below shows two perspectives on attention, that we could label as

Attention Managemnet on the left and Attention Ecology on the right.

(Click on the "Continue reading..." link below the diagram, if you want to get the rest of the story.)

Continue reading ""Shared-attention" & attention ecology" »

Posted by George Pór at 2:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Augmenting our personal bandwidth, the elasticity of our attention, is one of the ways, in which we can contribute to augment our collective intelligence.

If that hypothesis is true, then any learning partnership of 2 or more people should be able to verify and validate it. The "collaborative inquiry" in the title of this entry is a suggestion/invitation to the verification of my hypethesis.

This conversation started with the following exchange:

Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 22:38
From: Pierre Lévy
To: George Por

Hi George,

I just read your message and it is almost 10 PM... (I'm still in my office in Ottawa...)
yes, I am still working on the project of designing the growth of the CI network. But the time that is left to me by my current business is not enough.

Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2003 17:26
Subject: attention ecology / shared attention
From: George Por
To: Pierre Lévy

Time pressure is an interesting thing. What I find interesting about it is the link that connects our experience of time and attention. When we're in "flow" attention, time flies fast, yet we don't notice it, and accomplish much.

The quality of our attention influences our experience of time not only when we're deliciously focused on a single, both very demanding and energizing task or project. It is also a decisive player in limiting or augmenting our capability to concurrently sustain several co-creative, multi-channel and multi-community conversations.

Continue reading "Seed 4 a collab. inquiry into p.bandwidth" »

Posted by George Pór at 12:41 AM | Permalink