Herding Particles vs Herding Cats:

Lessons for IFF from the ATLAS Experiment at CERN

Presentation by Max Boisot, London, 23 July 2010

This is a record of an IFF meeting in London on 23 July at which Max Boisot shared his latest research on the ATLAS experiment with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and invited a discussion of the lessons for IFF and for other organisations seeking to foster emergent creative processes. Note that the pre-lunch session involved a presentation by Max which broke out into discussion at various points. Contributions and questions from other participants are indented from page 7 onwards. Other remarks are Max’s – either as part of the presentation or in response to points raised by others. We are grateful to IFF member Jennifer Williams who participated in the discussion, took the photographs of people in this report and produced the cutout above as a reflection on the event as a whole. More of Jennifer’s photos of the event are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iff_photos. Some of Max’s slides are included in this presentation. For more information contact boisot@ispaceinstitute.com.

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Introduction Graham introduced the session. The core question is how to organise for an emergent creative process? He thanked Max for offering to share the ideas he is developing on this subject from his study of CERN and the ATLAS experiment. This is a creative, emergent process, but also stable and well funded, able to tell a powerful story to resource holders. What if any lessons might there be in this experience for IFF? The story relates to other strands in the IFF conversation. Martin Albrow’s work on ‘integrity’, for example: the search for a new organisational form suited to the times and able to maintain moral purpose over time. Or Bill Sharpe’s work on healthy creative ecosystems. Our work in the arts has highlighted the potential of the ‘adhocracy’, which Mintzberg identified as the most creative organisational form but also the most dangerous, supporting the strong but destroying the weak. Maybe there are lessons in Max’s work for how to give an adhocracy more stability and sustainability, including for the people involved. That would be useful learning for IFF. Pat then opened the formal part of the meeting with a period of silence, before Max introduced the core ideas in his presentation. The ATLAS Collaboration Max’s involvement with CERN started at a conference in Puerto Rico five years ago. One of the coordinators of the ATLAS experiment was there and made a connection. The ATLAS detector is part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is one of the largest, most complex and most ambitious experimental machines ever built. Its construction and the experiments it has enabled involve 2900 physicists from 135 research institutes and 33 countries. Max has become involved with the team since that initial encounter and is publishing a book with them using the I-Space as a framework for understanding its novelty. There are some commonalities with IFF.

There are four experiments at LHC. The collider increases the energy levels of the particles. Every increase in the energy range allows you to ‘discover new worlds’. So the LHC is like a giant microscope – making new things visible. The particles in the LHC go round the circular tunnel 11,000 times a second, very close to the speed of light. The ATLAS detector machine

weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower and sits in a cavern 300ft underground the size of a cathedral. It is one of four detectors in the tunnel.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

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This is an evolutionary project. There were smaller accelerators in the past. This builds on them. That is part of its success path. Plans to build a similar experiment from scratch in the US (the Superconducting Super Collider) were cancelled in 1993. At the start of the last century this kind of experiment happened in the lab in a cloud chamber, then graduated to a bubble chamber, then sophisticated electronic simulations. Now some $15bn and about two thirds of the particle physicists community are involved with the LHC. Science requires replication and verification of results. In the past that meant replication by different teams in different places. But there is only one LHC, so now replication has to happen in the same place – but using different technologies. The experiments at LHC are therefore in competition with each other in order to provide replication. But they have a common goal: ostensibly to prove the existence of the Higgs boson postulated by the Standard Model in particle physics. The detectors in the tunnel detect the path of the particles and their energy. There are a billion particle collisions a second. The ATLAS detector analyses trajectories post collision and selects 200 to concentrate on before the next second. There are several thousand computers in the tunnel to do that initial analysis. Then the data is passed out into the world – to over 130 institutions distributed around the globe.

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The organisation chart for the ATLAS Collaboration (as it is known) looks straightforward. But there is no boss. The ‘Spokesperson’ would be identified as the boss in any other organisation. But the role is about communicating with the world outside and has no authority. The boxes at the bottom each contain several hundred people in research groups. All the players report back to their institutes, take orders from there, not from the project manager or from ATLAS. The whole collaboration works by persuasion and consensus. They have lots of meetings – at CERN. These are partly virtual – lots of people looking in from elsewhere in the world. What binds the whole thing together is a

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Memorandum of Understanding, a gentleman’s agreement. Funding is secured under an intergovernmental treaty for the 10 – 15 year duration of the experiment. By contrast, the US SSC was funded by Congress, which left the process very politicised to the point where the project was abandoned. The ATLAS Collaboration is effectively a voluntary organisation, in which nobody can tell anybody what to do. In meetings no proposal is rejected. Proposals wither but are never dismissed. Interest is attracted through talk to certain alternatives, but nothing is explicitly rejected. Options remain in play in case they need to be revived in due course if the path chosen fails. There is a huge amount of cognitive redundancy. They operate in this way because they are right at the edge of what we know about physics and about tech/engineering. The experiment demands high performance in a number of domains that are in tension with each other. For example, if there is a faster collision rate then that requires improved performance on detection and data acquisition. These different requirements can be mapped on a spider graph. There is a constant process of trade offs and negotiations between parts of the experiment to optimise performance on all axes. This leads to what Max describes as ‘the ATLAS puzzle’: the Collaboration is held together by memoranda of understanding, decision making is bottom up and decision making is distributed – so how does the Collaboration manage to reach the tips of the spidergraph? This is the antithesis of everything you would expect to see in a commercial hi-tech organisation. The I-Space Max then introduced the I-Space as a conceptual framework for making sense of what is going on in ATLAS. The I-Space is about knowledge, what flows, what doesn’t flow and why. A ready introduction to the ideas can be found at http://www.ispaceinstitute.com/ . The vertical axis shows a movement between three kinds of knowledge. Experiential knowledge: what can I see, hear, feel, smell or touch? Narrative knowledge: what can I say about it? And Abstract Symbolic knowledge: what can I extract from it which is stable and durable?

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Max contrasted the Zen master and the bond trader. Zen master knowledge is communicated or diffused to a few disciples who must spend lots of time face to face with the master, in an atmosphere of personal trust and there remains lots of ambiguity in what is shared. The knowledge the bond trader works with can be written down, put into machine code, distributed quickly, and is impersonal so can be shared easily with people the trader has never met. We like, and science likes, codified and abstract knowledge: it is manipulable and predictable, can be treated as an object, is generalisable to new cases, easily stored, you can write contracts about it, you can sell it. But, and it is a big but, you may lose ‘contextual richness, feeling and understanding’. You can then consider the different information environments that arise in the I-Space. What kinds of interactions are likely to emerge depending on the critical knowledge we are drawing on in those interactions? We are drawing on all kinds of knowledge all the time.

For the market (top right) the critical requirement is that prices are available to everyone. The culture operates on the heroic assumptions that we can capture all the tacit attributes of a product in its price and that the price information can be made available instantaneously to everybody.

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[Note that Nassim Taleb records in his Black Swans book an experiment in which bond traders trading only on knowledge of the price do better than those with more information. What that suggests is not that more information is worse, but that there is higher volatility and uncertainty in the bottom left of the I-Space. Some individuals will do well in that environment, others not. So the group performance will be better in the more stable domain top right – but there will be highly effective individuals bottom left – even if their magic may be short-lived.] A ‘fief’ is a grant of land over which you have jurisdiction. It is a zone of personal power. There is a kind of knowledge that is difficult to articulate that gives personal power. This is the domain of the Nobel scientist running a lab, or the charismatic leader. Clans involve a limited diffusion to a smaller group of people. Information is generally shared face to face, under conditions of trust and ambiguity. Typically this leads to formation of in groups and out groups. Does the in group solve its problems at the expense of the out group? Scientific communities are not immune to that. The ATLAS clan has to legitimise its existence in relation to outside stakeholders, who do

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not have their knowledge. It is amazing that they have done so much on the basis of the prediction of one individual in Edinburgh in 1964 – Peter Higgs. All of these structures – markets, fiefs, clans, bureaucracies - are just different types of network. ICT Consider the impact of ICT on the I-Space. There is a diffusion effect: we can reach more people with more information per unit of time. But there is also a bandwidth effect. The greater bandwidth allows more redundancy in the channel that allows us to repersonalise communication. It is possible to restore what the anthropologists call ‘joking relationships’. This bandwidth effect is evident at ATLAS.

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Globalisation is usually seen to be about the diffusion effect – we are all moving towards markets. But there are other effects. In ATLAS and elsewhere the bandwidth effect allows the emergence of clans, often quite large and distributed (Al Qaeda is another example arising out of the same conditions). Bureaucracies are permanent quests for order. They structure the world, control the social interactions. Lower down in the I-Space is the domain of chaos. There is no control over who gets what or how it is structured. But we need to visit this space to get anything emergent. The curve shift - in diffusion and in bandwidth – enabled by ICT may allow us to handle greater degrees of chaos. Applying the I-Space to the ATLAS Puzzle The ATLAS Collaboration is something larger than a clan. Clans often emerge from shared experience. ATLAS is bigger and more loosely coupled. It meets all of Mintzberg’s criteria for an adhocracy. But it could and should fly apart. Why doesn’t it?

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There is deep shared commitment – the search for the Higgs boson. And there are deep core values in the professional model. But are core values enough? Coordination is the essence of management – somebody at the top with an overview. There are elements of that here, but it feels more emergent. Take the analogy of traffic management. Traffic lights are one coordination mechanism: they represent authority. But that can get messy when coordination gets complex. Alternatively we can install a roundabout: the object itself enables coordination. It is a ‘boundary object’. There is one simple rule – give way – and then everybody uses their own judgement in their own time to achieve coordination. There is no single authority. The LHC story started with a series of simple simulations in 1984. The simulations were like boundary objects, coordinating across groups, heterogeneous, very scattered, with different skill sets. The ATLAS detector itself can be seen as a collection of boundary objects that help these groups relate to each other. With the boundary object in place, hierarchical coordination by managers can be replaced with enough shared values to factor out opportunistic behaviour. The system polices itself – like in a clan (reputational effects police a clan – if opportunistic behaviour occurs feedback spreads through the system quickly). This way of working has created the most complex piece of machinery ever built.

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The Detector as boundary object allows us to move beyond clans. The detector (which has moved up the I-Space since the early days of electronic simulation and is now visible) has become the centre of a kind of magnetic field, the seed for a self-organising process.

- (Bill): Roundabouts are highly codified. The behaviours are highly stylised and you have to learn them and obey them. There is freedom, but you can only do one thing on a roundabout. There is a highly constructed set of degrees of freedom, which were evolved, but also highly codified.

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That relates to the social learning cycle (http://www.internationalfuturesforum.com/social_learning.php and also www.ispaceinstitute.com). In the process of absorption we take coded knowledge and embed it in larger and larger contexts. We build tacit uncodified knowledge around the code. If you have mastered the codes of the roundabout you can decentralise decisions to the drivers. There is more discretion than for the traffic light as boundary object.

- (Wendy): an ‘image of the future’, or a ‘vision’ can act as a boundary object, enabling coordination.

- (Chris): You could use this to predict what goes wrong. What if the Higgs

boson is not found? Or it destroys the standard model? Which clan will come out on top? Fragmentation? How could that be managed and keep the community of expertise together? We could publish a thought experiment.

ATLAS is looking for anomalies. If they find what they are looking for then they pack up and go home, and they don’t want that. They will be really excited if what they find violates previous theory and propels them around the learning cycle again.

- (Bill): organisational architecture ends up mapped to product architecture. Introducing new architectures is not just hard but impossible – especially as the organisation is also embedded in the external context it serves. But you can get intense innovation within that – eg Moore’s Law. Nobody knows how to do Moore’s Law but it gets done. There is a set of fundamental architectural abstractions that people work within and everyone knows what a processor is. But if we come up with a whole new conception of what a processor is, what then?

- Just suppose you cannot ever complete the standard model without a

rearticulation of the relationship between mind and matter. ATLAS is built around standard assumptions about experimental method, ad hoc experimentation, observation etc. But what if it becomes clear that it matters who does the experiment? It would come to a dead halt, because the experimental methodology/ architecture built into the whole system would have fallen apart.

- (Barbara): what about dispute resolution? Talking things through takes time

and money, which are usually in short supply: how did they get these? These points raise interesting questions about the role of the outside world. There is a need to communicate with external stakeholders. And inside the adhocracy we have both competition and collaboration. Will it break apart if something goes wrong? There are lots of different groups – competing all the time, if only for space. Constant negotiation, trade offs. Disputes are talked through until one of the alternatives withers. There is not a win/lose feel. Nobody is made wrong. Options stay in play until the people who propose them lose energy. There is no manager to resolve disputes. There is no boss with authority. There is a withering equity of some kind. And group norms of ‘just drop it’. It can be cruel – a merciless adhocracy. You lose because you’re not good enough. There is lots of redundancy in the processes. Redundancy is not waste – it is not wasting time but making good use of redundancy. How do they get money? This is

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a community that has delivered. It prides itself on predictability and rigour which can be communicated to those outside. Prediction followed by confirmation – eg the W boson and the Z boson. Their cautious approach is about maintaining this credibility. ICT is part of the binding agent (the dotted line linking the adhocracy to the boundary object). The boundary object is like a totem. ATLAS is a virtual totemic society.

- (Andrew): The I-Space is cyclical. Monotheistic and rational cultures invite linearity. Polytheistic and mythological cultures have totems and tricks. Every multi-god mythology has a trickster to shake things up, working in the joints. If the detector is a totem, or a bronze, it has huge symbolic meaning. The antithesis of market exchange is gift exchange – strong in the scientific community. It is a culture that can tolerate great diversity – not in expectation of an answer, but that life can be lived fully in that realm of exchange.

ATLAS is a new game within science. The gift relationship implies an obligation both to give and to receive. The same with scientific publishing: your name is listed as an author, and your paper is cited by others. Papers from the Collaboration have 2900 names on them, all in alphabetical order. There is no lead author. So what drives these people? There is a progression from working as a PhD student to becoming part of the research group and an ‘author’. At 3 am the lights at ATLAS are still on. There is very strong motivation. It is about membership and belonging, being a member of the clan. And there are clans within clans: there is a bush telegraph that knows who really wrote the paper, who made the critical observation etc.

- (Andrew): how does one get to the higher consciousness needed in a world like that? There is no longer a big bear at the top, lead authors on the paper. If we are moving to complex globalisation that mode does not have the requisite variety. How does identity get reformed for the new world, in which we are comfortable being one of a million?

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- (Rohan): Is the detector a totem. Do we assign an intelligence to the machine, anthropomorphising it? Does the machine imply a monotheistic culture? That takes the pressure off ‘being on the front page’ of authors. Relax into a position within the 3000.

- (Chris): read about the history of the internet – ‘the weaving of the web’.

Once it was created it was taken away from Europe to the US - because it became a challenge to the dominant culture where it emerged.

The ATLAS Hypothesis This brought Max to what he calls the ATLAS hypothesis. NASA was built around an engineering, can-do culture that is able to exploit existing knowledge: engineers on top, scientists in tow. It is a typical matrix organisation. ATLAS and CERN (the adhocracy and the bureaucracy) are parts of an ecosystem, loosely coupled and much better for exploration. The scientists are on top, the engineers in tow. The ATLAS Collaboration has to navigate multiple stakeholder cultures. Each operates with different truth and justification conditions. The ATLAS challenge is then to manage a cultural ecology. The hypothesis is that ‘the detector acts as a collection of boundary objects that bind the cultural ecology into a complex adaptive system’. The implication is that this is a socio-technical example of what Andy Clark calls ‘extended mind’. Or what Per Bak calls a ‘self organised criticality’ – novelty and self-organisation at the edge of chaos. That’s where the ATLAS Collaboration sits. The binding agents are trust, shared values, and ICT that allows this to happen virtually. IFF is also a scattered organisation. It has a set of core ideas that could metamorphose into set of boundary objects. So what are the points of comparison and what can we learn from Atlas?

- (Bill): The nature of what this whole thing is producing is important: scientific knowledge, remove the person, advance incrementally. AND… there is Zen Buddhist person-centred knowledge. That operates very differently. How do we grow and diffuse the knowledge of what it means to love, in any way that bears any resemblance to building a LHC? Because it is about growth. I need to grow my knowledge of how to live, you grow yours – art is the mechanism by which we diffuse that (eg Shakespeare). But we can’t build a LHC for the next round of Shakespeare plays. IFF integrity has to do with processes of growth and diffusion, with particular individuals going through patterns of growth and relationship that cannot in their very nature be diffused. So how can I diffuse this kind of knowledge?

This is at the heart of my interests. The old language of technology transfer implied moving knowledge as object from a to b. Lower in the I-Space knowledge can be models (representations of the world), values (constraints and enablers), and feelings (motivations). We can’t talk about transfer in this domain. But think in terms of setting up resonances. Create a locus for the generation of knowledge in others that

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may resonate with what I have. That leads to something more heterogeneous – and the possibility of novelty and emergence. So the LHC equivalent would be setting up a network of resonances, multiple perspectives – that ultimately create an emergent object.

- (Roanne): a certain kind of confidence and belief is required to get that kind of emergence. As for IFF: what is our boundary object?

- (Chris): think about climate change. Science is a domain. So too are

economics, politics etc. Normative and positive questions need to be resolved. So we need many CERNS overlapping. Problems lie in the overlaps between them. How can we create a consciousness around that – which will pull us through the century? It is not evident that there is a ‘Higgs boson’ out there in this domain.

- (Bill): a musical score or the text of a play are boundary objects. They

coordinate performance. So too the three horizon framework – coordinates an IFF performance. Think in terms of ‘performative coordination’.

Do we treat the planet as an object or as an environment? Earth as boundary object? Or is planet too much like an ecology, too complex, to be treated as an object? Organisations are deemed to be purposive. Ecology doesn’t have a purpose, per se.

- (Andrew): if we posit a oneness, what does that do to questions of scale? What is a tree for (intentionality)? Rollo May’s Cry for Myth suggests that the abiding neurosis of our age is narcissism. The human drama is not life – life is something we are a part of. What is the relationship between life and love, and where does science fit into that?

- (Bill): I have solved this conundrum about intentionality and purpose etc, at

least to my own satisfaction. We can take any pattern as a system of concern – look over its shoulder, see what allows it to continue, what constitutes value, intention etc from that point of view. These terms arise from adopting a system of concern as a point of view on the whole. These are points of relativity. And we need all of them. We can pick up the language of purpose and intention and value from the perspective of a system, and drop it when we return to the whole. Think of going round the learning cycle in the opposite direction: I get an abstract word like love, interpret that in my life, diffuse that into other lives through resonance. The language of value, intention, agency, purpose etc arises by privileging one spatial and time scale and one system of concern – and looking over its shoulder.

After Lunch: Exploring the Ideas Following lunch Pat asked for suggestions for what people would like to explore further. The following suggestions came up:

- An early IFF meeting considered Gandhi’s salt march as a means of massively mobilising people. Higgs in 1964 has mobilised all this. Another example of a small action triggering an amazing series of events. What can we learn from these examples for IFF? We could include the role of ICT in this;

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- How to rock back and forth, create a standing wave, between mastery and messiness, wizard and apprentice, exploitation and exploration; random ants, mutant bees and serendipity – going off the path to make discoveries;

- The distinct properties of scaling performative knowledge. Avoid physics

envy;

- Exaptation – the colliders built on what was already there and turned it to good use. IFF might learn how to do that too. Build on what is there;

- Setting up a set of independent experimental spaces – what is the structure

that holds them together. Relationship between adhocracy and bureaucracy (and power) – as in ATLAS and CERN;

- What is the IFF’s role in convening collision – supporting adhocracy rather

than just being one? The large ideas collider;

- How could the IFF world model and the platform for planetary learning learn from the LHC to scale up collaborative centres working to build a body of holistic knowledge?

On this basis the group split into three around the broad topics of ‘the world model’, ‘management structures that enable experiment’ and ‘learning for IFF’. These group discussions reported back as follows. The World Game The IFF world game encourages a holistic one planet perspective at any level of recursion. It is inaccessible as an intellectual tool. But people can play their way into it. It was generated in the tacit realm, but is moving in the I-Space towards more codification and sharing. What happens next? We don’t want this to take off in a conventional institutional way – so what can we learn about this diffusion process in less conventional terms? We find from the discussion that a stronger version of the game is as a meta-game: it enables people to invent their own game. That changes patterns of localisation, ownership etc. But it should not just be a DIY game – we want to keep certain elephants in the room (briefing) and the discipline of connecting the dots (the structure of the world model and its 12 nodes). So it is recognisably a version of the original.

Chris added his framework: complexity and uncertainty defining the problem space. Experts deal with low uncertainty and low complexity. They are a small community. The consultant deals with greater complexity and uncertainty, and proves capability through track record. Further out we have politics, think tanks, interdisciplinary thinking – the real wisdom of crowds.

The problems IFF deals with, and the world now faces, are step changes. There can be no track record. Anybody saved a planet before? So IFF and the world game can act as a strong bridge between interdisciplinary and expert thinking. The game might work at the level of helping people construct their own picture of the world – the Kelly

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repertory grid model. That’s your picture, this is mine: compare and contrast. Look for patterns. Then generate scenarios. The stakeholders in Falkirk, for example, could share models, then open up a Falkirk wiki based on the stable structure that emerges – and invite people to participate beyond the game. Feedback from other participants:

- Gaming stimulates and rehearses joined up thinking – where there is no track record.

- Simulation models create reference points that allow you to recognise

significant signatures in the mess of collisions. Cognitive priming.

- This is the 50 year totemic history and goal of the academic field of futures studies. Images of the future facilitate people to articulate vision in rich and holistic ways, then share to get common patterns.

- Andrew has engaged first with the experts on the state of the city of Glasgow;

then responded to the call to develop wider indicators around 12 nodes; now 50 people are scanning for information around those nodes and connections. This is working in the gap between experts and inter-disciplinary thinking. Soon there will be a wiki. There is no name for the project yet – GIP (Glasgow Indicators Project)?

- The world game appears to be about climate change or whatever, but it

embodies a different way of thinking. You can change the nodes and it still works. The game embodies IFF thinking – and we need it because the experts and the silos don’t have the structures to do this kind of thinking. This way of interacting, the IFF adhocracy, could be at different scales: the Glasgow project, individual members, IFF cards etc. There are emerging IFF tools that contain process knowledge. We could follow up the game to see what happens when action results – did we understand the system correctly? Use the game as a way of triggering an adhocracy way of working when we need to operate in that mode?

- What does it mean to belong to an organisation – frequency and intensity of

interaction. So what does the organisational boundary mean? When there is a boundary object, think of the organisation around it as a magnetic field. You don’t need a boundary any more (shared values etc). Organisation is a matter of degree.

Management Structures that Enable Experiment Barbara: this is my project. It follows 10 years of scenario work in East Africa. East Africa has a duality of cultures – African and colonial legacies. Always in arbitrage. Nature matters – it has been abundant, but there are consequences with a larger population. Nature is under stress. African knowledge about nature and institutions may be useful for this. Hence the Barbets’ Duet project (http://www.barbaraheinzen.com/site/barbara.php?catId=37 ). We set up a group of learning sites, each committing its own land and managing it differently to increase environmental goods, and to invent rights, structures etc to allow us to be paid for those goods. There are five learning sites in E Africa, more recently joined by one in Cornwall, and most recently one in the US. What holds

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these sites together? As ‘spokesperson’ I can’t attract finance because we don’t exist as an organisation. What is the nature of our coming together as autonomous sites? Wendy: this is a story about taking tacit knowledge from practice, sharing it and starting to codify it to articulate a vision of an ecologically sound system. There are some strategic questions. It needs some sort of organisational support, also to act as custodian of the rules of the game. It needs infrastructure and a front person for identity (and funding). The diffusion of interest is high (no shortage of possible sites). But the ability to connect them is difficult. How can we have a bureaucracy that can manage that? That keeps the rules of the game, articulates an identity that has the rules of the game embedded in it? And what are the rules? Pride in local knowledge and humility in the face of others’ expertise seem to be critical. Also interesting is the structure of a ‘pentangle’ – five sites in a group, perhaps recruited five at a time. They contribute to a learning ecology – a tangle of pentangles. How to maintain levels of communication that are face-to-face-like in the wider system? It needs a steward. Some of the violations of the rules of the game are local, some are ‘pan-tangle’ violations.

Graham: connections to power beyond the system are important. One connection might be to TED – which has its own rules of the game. TED’s 10 commandments for making a presentation are about staying low in the I-Space – but TED’s connectivity makes the stories spread virally, through inspiration. Consider also the ‘tragic lifecycle of a vision’ – the vision gets too codified and so we get stuck, it turns into an ‘inflexible totem’. Oral culture is less prone to this – sound vanishes. But writing is not the reason the vision gets stuck: it is the lack of a learning cycle. Compare the US Constitution and the Quakers’ ‘Faith and Practice’. The latter is updated every 10 years.

There is always a risk that the founding stewards, elders, keepers of the values, become their own H1 – but organic growth comes from H2 and H3 and there needs to be one rule of the game that encourages the elders to give H2 and H3 respect and make room for them.

- The notion of custodianship is helpful. ‘Founding partners’ is useful too – and that they are in E Africa is good. The founding partners will define themselves as wizards. Swahili for elders is ‘wazee’ – like wizards.

- The International Postal Union (Universal Postal Union) is a remarkable

institution for combining universalism and autonomy. Take a look at it.

- The learning cycle needs all four cultures. It is a question of balance. In this instance there needs to be a bureaucratic element – but a nightwatchman bureaucracy. But the bureaucracy needs a high degree of legitimacy to be

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light – if you have no legitimacy you have to operate with a heavy hand of authority.

Learning for IFF What is IFF? Does it have to scale – mobilise millions – in order to have a large impact? One way is for it to get much bigger. A different way is to focus on transmission and replication. Most of what makes IFF magic is the exchange of tacit knowledge face to face low in the I-Space in a trusting environment. That is a long way from getting three horizons or the world game patented, training MBAs and starting a consultancy that can later be taken over by a global scale player.

An alternative is zen transmission. Apprentices spend long periods of personal reflection and training and experience with the zen master. Then a monk walks over the mountain and starts their own monastery. The nexIFF generation might get involved for a while after being attracted into thecommunity and then – like David Hodgson in San Francisco – seek to reproduce the capacity elsewhere in ways that are fit for the place and fit for the time etc.

t

IFF

What is valuable about IFF is the idea that every individual is a source of their own renewal. We come to a situation where there is a conceptual emergency and we don’t give people the answer. We provide a space of reflection, suspend judgement, absorb complexity and allow things to emerge with active listening. What the people we work with know may mean something different from what they think it means. It is not that we know something that they don’t. We provide space for slow reflection, face to face, holding many things in the head without making a decision, creating something new out of the connections, finding new patterning. That takes time, pause, reflection. It is more like the scaling model of cellular reproduction. And there is a gift aspect. We give people the opportunity to pause in complexity, wait as long as possible, find new patterns in their problem space. There is no need to scale at the millions level. The people we are involved with can take this on, carry on their own salt march.

- This is about setting up resonances not transfers. Every regeneration the other side of the mountain is a new generation of knowledge, not a copy.

- This model is the antidote for the internet and its assault on the attention

span. People are desperate to get away from the instant and hear ideas in depth, process, take time, talk to people.

- IFF could be the society of slow thinkers. Slow Reflection International (SRI).

- Don’t polarise: TED is about both face to face and internet. The internet

contains many models of replication.

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- One advantage of the internet is being able to think with more people – it preserves social networking in a much more dispersed way (joking relationships). The diffusion curve can shift down with bandwidth. The internet can be used to go in the slow direction as well as going faster. It releases temporal resources for redeployment to other areas, like attention (different from speeding things up). It might speed up the speed of regeneration (new IFF centres established) but not the speed of reflection (the core IFF processes).

- The kind of knowledge that IFF embodies will replicate through zen

transmission. Close Graham thanked all the participants – and especially Max – for a fascinating and enjoyable day. He undertook to produce a report to encourage further reflection….. Max presents the I-Space Graham Leicester 26 July 2010 With thanks to all participants: Max Boisot Roanne Dods Rohan Gunatillake Barbara Heinzen Pat Heneghan Tony Hodgson Graham Leicester

Charles Lowe Andrew Lyon Noah Raford Wendy Schultz Bill Sharpe Jennifer Williams Chris Yapp

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