My friend David Schmaltz's new book The Blind Men And The Elephant ISBN:1576752534 is coming out. David Schmaltz brilliantly identifies the true Root Cause of the difficulties in project work: "in-Coherence" (the inability of a group of people to make common meaning (Shared Vision) from their common experience)... Schmaltz exposes such oft-cited difficulties as poor planning, weak leadership, and fickle customers as poor excuses for Project Failure, providing a set of simple, project coherence-building techniques that anyone can use to achieve success. He explains how "Wicked-ness" develops when a team over-relies on their leader for guidance rather than tapping their true source of power and authority-the individual. I'm definitely buying it.

Artist Collective turned TrendWatch report machine. (more)

On going Fruit Picking... (Local Food) (more)

Mike Maples Jr: How to build a breakthrough: the secret of Backcasting (Working Backwards) Marc Andreessen’s call to arms — It’s Time to Build is a powerful manifesto for a more ambitious future. If you haven’t read it already, you should. (2020-04-18) Its Time To Build Andreessen Horowitz (more)

Generic term for merging your various streams (in out and?) - Universal Outbox (more)

Normcore is a unisex fashion trend characterized by unpretentious, normal-looking clothing. Normcore fashion includes jeans, t-shirts, sweats, button-downs, underpants, socks, and sneakers. Clothing is considered to be normcore when it is both attractive and comfortable, and is viewed as 'normal' by all people. Normcore is a portmanteau of the words normal and hardcore. The word first appeared in the webcomic Templar, Arizona before 2009[1] and was later employed by K-HOLE, a trend forecasting group,[2][3][4][5] in an October 2013 report called "Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom".[6][7] As used by K-HOLE, the word normcore referred to an attitude, not a particular code of dress. It was intended to mean "finding liberation in being nothing special."[8] However, a piece in New York magazine by author Fiona Duncan[9] that began popularizing the term in February 2014[6] conflated it with what K-HOLE referred to as "Acting Basic", a concept which involved dressing neutrally to avoid standing out. It was this sense of normcore which gained popular usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normcore

John Thackara on "The Thermo-Dynamics of Cooperation". How do we design work that enhances Tacit Knowledge and embodied knowledge, rather than pretending that they do not exist, or do not matter?... How do we improve the capacity of situations to support these kinds of inter-personal interactions?... Are we sure that the design attention we give to tools for community and collaboration - the "we-ware" - is in balance? Or do we need to think more about the "why?" issues of collaboration? (Collaboration Ware, Knowledge Management) (more)

aka State Change, Macro Change (more)

The last mile or last kilometer is a phrase widely used in the telecommunications, cable TV and internet industries to refer to the final leg of the telecommunications networks that deliver telecommunication services to retail end-users (customers). More specifically, the last mile describes the portion of the telecommunications network chain that physically reaches the end-user's premises. Examples are the copper wire subscriber lines connecting landline telephones to the local telephone exchange; coaxial cable service drops carrying cable television signals from utility poles to subscribers' homes, and cell towers linking local cell phones to the cellular network. The word "mile" is used metaphorically; the length of the last mile link may be more or less than a mile. Because the last mile of a network to the user is conversely the first mile from the user's premises to the outside world when the user is sending data, the term first mile is also alternatively used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile (more)

Restaurant take-out that comes to you. (more)

On Cory Doctorow's 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism Civilization' (Automation) (more)

aka Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment 2017: Donald Trump Edition. I want to focus specifically on the victory of the “Trump Insurgency” and drill down into detail on how this state change will play out. I use John Robb’s term “Trump Insurgency” here to highlight the fact that the election of 2016 was not an example of “ordinary politics”. (more)

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment 2018: the Calm Before the Storm. What follows is an update and inspection of the “four front” framework laid out in 2017, this time with a heavier touch of the central (“collective intelligence”) proposition. (more)

aka Jordan Greenhall

Bookmarking for the power users of the web. A privacy focused extension to annotate, search and organize what you've seen online. https://getmemex.com/ (more)

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment: Right Now. The story of the unfolding meta-crisis (Long Emergency) that we have been watching for the last decade has become enormously more salient over the past few weeks. (more)

Two Visions of Humanity's Future by Marshall Brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) ASIN:B007HQH67U - free online http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm (more)

single unit of ComIcs? (more)

Fresh links lately to Donella Meadows' identification of Places To Intervene In A System.