To break this day
free from all
the others

to stand at the
morning end
of it and

push off from
the shore
sail beyond

the reach of all
my failures
calling after me

“You can’t just
leave us here”
shaking their fists

crowding into
the water
clamoring “We

made you who
you are” to
feel their voices

growing small
underneath
the surf

the wide un-
knowable ocean
all before me.

- “So Far” by John Brehm
Poetry Magazine Vol 178, June 2001

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. -Woody Allen

Previously, I wrote about recent findings that learning can come at a rather dramatic cost - decreased life span. Today, I swing to the other end of the biological spectrum by sharing something I learned about the mighty redwood tree: “Science knows of no built-in reason why any particular redwood tree need ever die.” This according to a story in the April - June 2008 Bay Nature about the 100th Anniversary of Muir Woods. They are able to overcome broken limbs, resist invaders and susceptible to no known diseases. Further, they not only reproduce by seed they “propagate as clones, by spouting. The stems we now see may be only the latest shoots from rootstocks many times older. Just how ancient the oldest redwoods might be, as genetic individuals, is simply not known.” We’re talking dinosaur days, folks.

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
-Friedrich von Schiller

“You do not usually get something for nothing. Now a new study reveals that the evolution of an improved learning ability could come at a particularly high price: an earlier death.” So begins the article “Critical Thinking” which appeared in April 24 2008 print edition of The Economist. This article, along with a more in-depth story the May 6 New York Times, cite recent research that shows while learning is a common ability in the animal kingdom, it is not necessarily an advantageous ability.

In the results of experiments with fruit flies, for example, researchers found “that their fast-learning flies live on average 15 percent shorter lives” while “flies that have undergone selection for long life were up to 40 percent worse at learning than ordinary flies.”

Scientist speculate one reason for this may be in that learning is not free - biologically, it takes tremendous energy - and that this may, in fact, divert or take energy away from other biological functions necessary for survival…

Dr. Reuven Dukas, one of the scientist interviewed in the NY Times article, suggests “learning evolves to higher levels only when it is a better way to respond to the environment than relying on automatic responses.” Another of the scientist involved in the research, Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki, “suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much.”

Given that human brains consume 20 percent of our caloric intake at rest, and that it takes years of learning to acquire the intelligence needed to survive on our own, the benefits of this learning must be huge in order to out weigh this cost. Yet, these recent findings indicate that, taken to an extreme, learning may extract a higher price than we think. As Dr. Kawecki’s puts it, “we could speculate that some diseases are a byproduct of intelligence.” Now, that’s what I call being too smart for our own good!

Of course, none of this takes into account the question of quality vs. quantity. Sure, being a little dumber may add a few years to the tail end of our lives. But so what? “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates famously remarked to the jury set to condemn him. Better to have learned and lost, than have never learned at all. I’d be interested to measure any correspondence between learning and pleasure.

However, it seems likely that the research of Kawecki and Dukas may go along way to explaining why politics works the way it does.

April 7, 2008 is an early favorite for Day of the Year:

We celebrated Owen Augustus’ 1st birthday. My first son’s first trip around the sun is complete - and what a trip it was! Nothing can possibly prepare a would-be parent for the thrills, challenges, learnings, emotions, affections, infections, deprivations, joys and wonders that come over the course of the first 365 (or, in this case, 366) days of a human life outside the womb.

The icing on the (cup) cake: Owen shares a birthday, with his mom! Now that, my friends, is the epitome of a ‘priceless’ gift.

Elisa (thirty-something) and Owen Augustus (one) share a birthday,
but they each get their own cupcake.

AND, as if that wasn’t enough to make it a super special day, my Kansas Jayhawks brought home the National Championship! It was their first title in 20 years - at which time I was in the second semester of my junior year in Lawrence. This year’s championship was one of the most exciting games in history, as Kansas guard Mario Chalmers sank a 3-point shot to tie it up at the end of regulation, capping off a furious comeback from 9 points down with 2 minutes to go and sending the game into overtime. KU took the momentum into the extra period, quickly opened a 6-point lead and never looked back. ROCK CHALK!

KU’s Mario Chalmers nails a game-tying 3-point shot at the end of regulation
of the Nation Championship game. The Jayhawks went on to win in overtime,
claiming their first national title in 20 years.

For anyone interested in Music Faciliation, I highly recommend listening to Salle Des Departs, a 10 minute podcast from the good folks at Radiolab:

Imagine that you’re a composer. Imagine getting this commission: “Please write us a song that will allow family members to face the death of a loved one…” Well, composer David Lang had to do just that when a hospital in Garches, France, asked him to write music for their morgue, or “Salle Des Departs.” 

In an attempt to make the most of a missed presentation at Stanford last week, I decided to swing by the campus bookstore. I happened upon a treasure of a book, LI: Dynamic Form in Nature, by David Wade. As I perused the pages, taking in the rich illustrations and the annotations that accompanied them, my mind leapt from patterns of nature to patterns of process. Specifically, to the patterns of dialogue and information flow that are created by the structure of interactions during design events.

Being the first to admit my unrefined skill at rendering what’s in my mind to an illustration on a page, I was nonetheless inspired enough by Wade’s work to break out my journal and begin sketching.

The subject I had in mind was the opening sequence of a hypothetical 1-day workshop based off of an actual workshop I had participated in recently. After the event concluded, the facilitators ask for my feedback and whether I would be interested in working with them to design the next iteration.

Each of the sketches depicts the participants entering into the event space, beginning with all participants gathered as a single group, followed by a module of individual work which would then be shared in small groups. The event would then flow into 3 large groups in which each of the 3 facilitators would deliver specific content, after which 8 or 9 small groups would form, each with a mix of participants from the 3 large groups, to share and integrate the information they had collected. Finally, the entire group would gather again and each of the 8 or 9 groups would report their work in plenary format. This entire sequence would last between 2 1/2 and 3 hours.

In the first (my personal favorite) and second sketch, time runs from top to bottom. Information/dialogue flow is represented by a line. In the third (unfinished), time runs left to right and information/dialogue flow is represented by a colored circle.

During a recent conversation about event design with my friend, Kathia, one topic that came up was the notion of balancing “pushing the envelope” with the notion of keeping a familiarity and meeting expectations among the participants, at least until a field of trust and engagement is established. While we didn’t couch it in these exact terms, this was the gist.

The more I think about it, the more I think designing to the expectations and familiarity of the participants lacks power and handicaps, rather than helps, a facilitator’s ability to unleash group genius, breakthrough thinking, and shifts of mind…

As Meg Wheatley put it in Leadership & the New Science, “reality changes shape and meaning because of our activity. And it is constantly new.”

We must be in constant, continuous modes of discovery and learning. Discomforting as it may be, it’s all guinea pig, all the time. Event and experience design must embrace this fact, not only for the participants, but for the design and facilitation team, as well.

Of course, this view is not one that ignores either experience or expectation. History, models, knowledge - all are brought to bear on the event or experience we are designing. But because reality changes shape and meaning, so must we. Experience and expectation are not enough - and, in fact, can preempt our shape-shifting abilities. Surprise, wonder, and curiosity drive exploration and create new experiences, new opportunities to evolve. It is here, in this space, that possibilities once hidden reveal themselves.

“Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch a little fish, you can stay in shallow water. But if you want to catch a the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. and they’re very beautiful.

I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.

Everything, anything that is a thing, comes from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you  go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.”
- David Lynch, from his introduction to Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creatity

Wahoo! My flipflops came out of the closet yesterday at precisely 3:47 pm, indicating only six weeks until the start of Summer. Sorry Phil, I don’t mean to steal your thunder, but it looks like we’re in for a short Spring around here this year.

Tom Prugh of the Worldwatch Institute has contributed a gem of a blog over at WorldChanging, touching on 7 “reforms that would make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable.” These are a part of the first chapter of the Worldwatch Institute’s “State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy”.

Economics is one of many fields that, I believe, needs not only new thinking such as Prugh displays, but needs to be far more integral to curriculum from an early age. While I often hear how much the typical US primary education lacks in maths and sciences (to which I agree), it is not near so often that economics gets mentioned. I applaud the work that Prugh and his colleagues at Worldwatch are doing. It is incredibly important. Check it out.

The 7 reforms mentioned (and elaborated upon) in the article are:

1) Scale
2) Stress development over growth
3) Make prices tell the ecological truth
4) Account for nature’s services
5) The precautionary principle
6) Commons management
7) Value women