What’s in a moment?

We enter this world without a sense of what it means to exist in time. For an infant, there is no separation between one moment and the next, no stopping and no starting, no beginning and no end, just the undifferentiated flow of experience. But somehow, as our minds adapt and morph in resonance with the world, we become capable of perceiving time, and of locating ourselves within it.

We change, yet somehow we are the same person. This paradox is central to obscure, pedantic philosophical debates—for example, between ‘perdurantism,’ which takes the position that individuals are made up of many different temporal parts (sort of like a 4D earthworm that transcends time with different segments of its body located in different spatiotemporal regions), and ‘endurantism’ which views individuals as being wholly present at every moment of their existence. It is also at the heart of much deeper questions from which there is no escape as a human being: free will, being-in-the-world, creativity, ethics, to name a few.

As that infant develops, her initial ways of making contact with time will be coarse and rudimentary. The first of many distinctions she makes will simply be “now” versus “not now.” At this stage, she may become confused when her parents tell her something ceased to happen “last week” or will not happen “until tomorrow.” She may even ask them whether it is tomorrow yet.

As the months and years go by, she will come to believe that time is linked to specific actions or events. There is “wake up time” and “bedtime” and “dinner time” and “playtime” and “naptime” and “summertime” and possibly “Christmastime” or a different holiday-time. No longer does she live in a world without stopping and starting; she is now in a world where specific periods of time are ordained—by the Sun and Moon, by Mom and Dad, or by an Almighty Creator, or by all of them? Regardless, “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Her job will eventually become to prepare for those seasons, to take full advantage of them when they arrive, and not to squander them.

But shouldn’t she have the freedom to say how the moments of her life that pass so quickly ought to be used? As this increasingly becomes a concern, she will come to see time as something to take ownership and control of. Quite suddenly, she may become alarmed by the discovery that she is in short supply of this resource, and that once she spends it, she can never get it back. Tick, tick, tick… In an attempt to master time and ensure every moment is used to its greatest effect, she is quite likely to become adept at scheduling and planning. Viewing time as a straight line, she will begin to divide it into exact increments of various lengths. Where does she want to be in five years? Whatabout her friends—where are they likely to be when the same five years have passed? Are they the right friends for her to spend her time with? Time is money, after all. And the actions she takes today will most certainly have consequences in the future…so she must choose wisely.

At some point, such a drive to maximize the value of time and use it efficiently may come to feel like a cage. Simply put, she may feel an overwhelming desire to wake up, smell the roses, and meet people (and the whole world) fully in each moment. If this happens, she might become more open to experiencing these moments as special, specific, indivisible, and not-quite-measureable—in ways she had never imagined. And although she may not be able to spell out the mathematical proofs that Einstein discovered in 1905, she will come to intuit (in a certain sense anyway) that time is suspect, that it is relative, and not the same for everyone. Our experience of time, and of our being within it, depends on our frame of reference. Hence, our time (our history) is unique to us, and depends on the specific context of our lives. Quite importantly, if she reaches such a stage in her life, she will almost certainly bristle against her previously held notion that time is something to be sold or maximized. No, it is something to savor, to delight in, and to relish.

If she continues to develop past this point (which few people do), she will experience the biggest shift in how time occurs for her yet. She may become fascinated and lit up as she contemplates her actions and her life in relationship to the unfolding of time—not necessarily the linear unfolding she once imagined, but rather a wave-like rippling and spiraling of history—an unfolding that she both influences and is influenced by. The very idea of evolution—of being and becoming—might just blow the lid off her mind and heart. Through her actions, she will embrace and embody paradoxes like the one we discussed earlier, and this will profoundly enrich every aspect of her life (and quite possibly the lives of people around her). At this stage, she will see the truth of all the previous ways she has experienced herself moving through time, and she will integrate them in a unique and potent way. Yes, it’s true: now is the only time we have. Yes, it’s true, this season has been given to us for a purpose. Yes, we can achieve mastery over time and liberate ourselves in the process. And yes, an even deeper liberation is possible when we inhabit our unique histories as indivisible wholes.

Importantly, as she occupies this unique vantage point, she will come to recognize that because history is an arc, actions that alter the future also influence the past. She will likely become increasingly interested in the possibility of bending that historical arc, and in the significance of her existence in the face of children who have not yet been born.

Indeed, time may be nothing more than a see-through mirror, an illusion, an infinite kaleidoscopic arising of cloud-like structures that blend into and out of each other. We are embedded in a flowing fountain of past\present\future, and it is embedded in us, for now. And in this moment, the entire history of all that has ever existed, and all that will exist in the future, is present.

A Comment on Alberta’s Unique Opportunity to Shape Its Energy Future, Part 1

–In the first part of this essay (below), I attempt to build the case that Alberta has entered a difficult but fertile period of uncertainty. In Part 2 (which I’ll publish someday) I will discuss the unique opportunity that this uncertainty presents.–


In complexity theory, “criticalization” is a point in the trajectory of an economy, industry, organization or other complex system at which its future becomes uncertain. Two or more outcomes seem completely plausible, and it is impossible to predict what the system will do or what state it will evolve into. As the authors of “Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership” write:

Criticalization is perhaps the most difficult time in the life of any organization as a whole or in part, since it is all about the effect of internally or externally generated shocks that disrupt the inner workings of the company. This disruption can show itself in a growing recognition that current operating models are not efficient and small fixes are not enough to deal with the scope and pace of change. Criticalization often signals a time of conflict and differences of opinion, a period of cognitive dissonance and information overload. Critical periods, however, offer unique opportunities for transforming an organization.

In other words, either slowly or suddenly, but in increasing numbers, players in the system begin to doubt what had previously been the most fundamental assumptions about how to operate and create value within that system. They come to believe that results they could once count on producing by taking certain actions are no longer guaranteed. The authors list a number of signs that a critical period has begun. Compare some of them with Alberta’s energy industry and the current political and economic state of the province:

  • An increasing sense that what we had been doing is no longer working or appropriate.
  • Well crafted plans for entrepreneurial expansion are not working out; targets are pushed off from one quarter to the next; expectations are continuously reframed, and the pace of internal change increases rapidly.
  • Performance declines due to shifting markets and changing environments–the organization’s traditional reliance on specialized activities or offerings is no longer effective.
  • Concern that all of the small changes will never add up to what is needed, that something big is necessary.
  • Competing interpretations and passionate disagreements about the meaning of external events for the organization, including which events are relevant to the organization and what should be done to address them.

Most oilpatchers would be unprepared to imagine that Alberta could become the Blockbuster Video of the energy sector any time remotely soon. And there are important reasons why this is the case. As Vaclav Smil puts it:

For years, even decades, we have been on the verge of mass deployment of (take your pick) fast breeder reactors, of coal-fired electricity generating plants that capture and sequester all of their CO2, of fuel cell-powered cars running on hydrogen, if not a complete hydrogen economy. We’ve been promised electric cars that will not only cost nothing to run but will also power houses while sitting in garages; or microorganisms genetically engineered to ooze gasoline.

The reality of energy transitions is very different. Too many modern observers have become misled by the example of electronics, in which advances have followed Moore’s law — the now 50-year-old prediction that the number of components on a microchip will double every 18 months. This has allowed exceptionally rapid progress. But the fundamental physical realities that determine progress of energy systems do not behave that way: they are improving steadily, but far more slowly. Moore’s law implies an exponential growth rate of 46 percent a year. The analogues in energy are not even close: Since 1900, the efficiency of electricity generation in large power plants has been rising by less than 2 percent a year, advances in lighting have boosted its efficiency by less than 3 percent a year, and the energy cost of steel, our civilization’s most essential metal, has been falling by less than 2 percent a year.

Albertans, in general, count on this. They deal in facts, fundamentals and ranges of plausibility. They are conscious that killing off a chain of video stores is an adventure of a different category than killing off the underlying mechanism of the global economy. And they hold little patience for wildcard system-transforming scenarios which don’t take seriously the astronomical magnitude of our current energy system, the monumental infrastructure project its displacement entails, or as Smil points out, the physical limits of the technology which it is hoped will form the basis of that displacement.

Yet that point about technology is controversial. While energy historically has evolved slowly in comparison to the tech sector, it is undeniable that the rate of change in the space is accelerating rapidly. Tech advocates point to this and insist that it is not clear for how long the constaints we currently take as givens will continue to exist. What is clear is that both the energy and high technology sectors (each unavoidably woven into the future) are colliding like never before. We might have to wait until the dust settles before we can truly understand the impact of this momentous junction.

Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2015 (EIA)
Global Electric Vehicle Stock. Source: International Energy Agency, “Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2015”

At the same time, the Canadian oil industry seems to be in an unabating battle to alleviate its ethical-existential predicament. Oil barons dogmatize about the appropriateness of phrases like “social license to operate” and, if not that, then what a measure of public goodwill (or lack thereof) towards the petroleum industry ought to be called. Never mind the actual dollars being deployed to convince neutral bystanders that “the oilsands” is the original, more accurate name, to be preferred over “the tarsands”.

Meanwhile the hope is that the lower mainland’s underground resistance won’t arrive at Alberta’s door with flaming pitchforks the moment a new pipe spans the eastern border of British Columbia. Or rather, that even though there will be pitchforks and protests and pictures of pillaging posted on pinterest, all of this will not ultimately be enough to thwart industry’s ability to pump its product to potential purchasers across the pacific.

Eight years ago when I began my journey into oil, the idea that Keystone would not have already been built by 2015, or that Gateway would still be tied up in legal and regulatory challenges was probably not on the radar screen of most industry executives. Yet weak signals and minor fluctuations pointing in that direction were already noticeable. And today it is the reality Alberta confronts.

Of course oil is (historically) a long game, and many of the players who understand the time scale are not that fussed about delays. But with calls to #keepitintheground mounting, the divestment movement increasingly taken seriously as a thing and supply competition from shale oil, natural gas and other newly accessible fuel sources creeping up during this ostensibly indefinite waiting period, one is left to wonder if a window of opportunity is not about to close on certain assets.

It is not unreasonable to think that Alberta has indeed entered a criticalization in which the future is fuzzy. That there are any number of spaces (attractors) in which the province and its economy may find itself.

After all, the people of Alberta have just elected their first NDP government. What conclusion could possibly be reached, other than that all bets are off? 😉

What’s are design’s highest possible contributions? (Especially to sustainability initiatives).

Correlating Design Maturity Alongside Action Logics
Are there higher stages in the design maturity continuum?

The first time I encountered the Design Maturity Continuum (“DMC”) was at the HOW Design Conference in Austin, TX in 2008. Walking into that conference, I knew very little about how to think like a designer. It’s amazing what a few days spent soaking in an environment saturated with new ideas can do to alter your perspective, and even influence what you are capable of. It did that for me. One of the presentations that stuck was “Design Thinking: How Procter and Gamble is using it to meet consumer needs and solve wicked problems.” In that presentation, the DMC (created by Jess McMullin – who I just discovered happens to live in nearby Edmonton!) was referenced. (See photos below). Perhaps because I had been thinking in developmentalist terms since univeristy, the idea that design thinking capabilities progress through different stages of maturity immediately resonated with me and I’ve been sharing Jess’s continuum ever since, both to establish a common framework for working with others and to challenge them to expand their conceptions of what design is and how it adds value. In the DMC, each progressive stage of maturity brings more complexity, range, and capacity with it. The potential impact of design is therefor much greater at the more mature end of the continuum. In each progressive stage, the capacities of the previous stage are retained, but how the designer uses those capacities is reorganized in relationship to the new, emergent capacities.

Design Thinking Presentation at HOW Design Conference 2008
4938_115263735836_8311066_n First Slide: “Design Thinking: How P&G is using it to meet consumer needs and solve wicked problems.” The title suggests a late Achiever (Problem Solving) or early Individualist (Framing) design thinking perspective. Second Slide: Design Maturity Continuum.

At the same time, I have always wondered if any stages of maturity beyond “framing” could be identified, and how those stages might look in action. Barrett C. Brown’s research describing how leaders with late stage action logics design and implement sustainability initiatives not only suggests that there are several advanced stages of design capability that extend beyond “framing”, but also provides preliminary characterizations of those stages. Working with Developmental Action Logics, Brown conducted a first-of-its-kind investigation in which a cohort of leaders who were assessed as possessing a very advanced “Action Logic” (or meaning-making capacity) were studied in order to better understand how they design. Brown wanted to figure out what they know, see and do that others do not, and the impact on how they design sustainability initiatives. In what ways are they able to think, plan, act, express, imagine and feel that others are not? It occurred to me that it’s easy to see some obvious connections between the DMC and Developmental Action Logics. And when you incorporate Barrett C. Brown’s findings, you can see (at least diretionally) how the Design Maturity Continuum extends. The next thing I did was go to Google to see if anyone else had thought of this, and it turns out that Austin Govella had already attempted to correlate Action Logics with Design Thinking Maturity in 2006. That being said, I believe his model, which you can see here is miscorrelated. It also does not account for higher stages of Design Maturity, so I felt that it would be useful to propose a new synthesis. I did borrow from Govella’s model by incorporating the concept of “Innovation Trailmarker” and speculating on trailmarkers that might be associated with more mature stages (though I cannot claim to understand those stages well enough to know if I’ve gotten it right). You can review my proposed synthesis here (also inserted at the top of this post). I hope you enjoy it and welcome any comments you have!

All Asanas Create Shadow

In January, yoga classes become overcrowded as every kind of mutant and beast rises from the darkest sofa to shine forth into a new era of hope and ambition. The one next to me is hairy, overweight and proudly displays a pair of Calvins underneath basketball shorts worn gangster style. His breath is simultaneously laboured and shallow. He grunts with every pose.

I try not to judge him.

I try, simply, to maintain my equanimity.

This becomes the most ironic and absurd of struggles when – clearly – he sees no reason to take the beginners modification of “Utthita Hasta Padangustasana.” No, that would make him look clumsy and inept. Instead, he reaches confidently for his big toe with his right hand (somehow managing to grab it), and then swings his foot out – violently – mere inches from my face, parking it there with another grunt.

Disgusted, I cringe and watch the deluge of sweat pelt down from his hairy foot onto my yoga towel. Now I’m just trying not to throw up. I want to punch him in the face. Om.

By the time we are lying on our backs and working our abs I am having a mild panic attack from the cognitive dissonance of being filled with rage and disgust while striving to achieve enlightenment. Here I am, seeking mastery of higher states of consciousness. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but I have this image of myself being extraordinarily present, radiating energy and drawing people into a deeper life simply through the look in my eyes.

It occurs to me that I have a lot of work to do.

Surely one who is a master of these things would have no issue being wedged in next to the hairy grunter. Surely it would roll off of his back like water off a duck. Or sweat.

“What has gotten me so activated here?” I ask myself. “What am I resisting or trying not to see? What is the real fear – yet undisclosed – beneath this disgust and desire to bolt?”

“OH FUCK ME!!!”, he yelps during eagle sit-ups, snapping me out of my stream of consciousness. Did he seriously just say that? In. Yoga.

I realize I am not even doing sit-ups anymore. My body is weak. I am tired.

Wow. I am so full of anger and rage and disgust that I can not find the energy to do sit-ups. (I can barely even move, in fact). Fascinating.

“Where are you, oh Shadow, where are you? What is holding me back? What can’t I see? What is the clue in my anger at the hairy grunter?” I try to follow it.

“What is it about myself that I can’t be with, and have projected on to him? Do I want people to hate me and be disgusted at me? Do I think they already are? Am I angry at myself?” These questions flicker in my mind.

Flanagan, Libertarianism and Sidewalks

I took an “introduction to Political Science” class with Tom Flanagan in my first year at university. To his credit, he introduced a couple of frameworks for thinking about the world I hadn’t yet discovered, but then again I hadn’t discovered a lot back then. For example, at that point in my academic journey, I wasn’t as hip to complexity science and the idea of emergent properties as I now am. I remember Flanagan explaining that the most efficient way of getting around or getting something done usually isn’t to legislate it. Usually systems of people interacting with one another, markets, for example, tend to figure out the most efficient ways of doing things. He pointed to the uniquely curved sidewalks around campus (which had been constructed based on the actual foot traffic of students, rather than arbitrary ideas about how best to connect one building to another).
This idea about sidewalks was a manifestation of his underlying libertarian stance towards just about everything: that people ought to be left to their own devices in every situation. That the only instance in which legislation would be required would be to ensure that one human being doesn’t directly harm another.
Well, so far as complexity goes, Flanagan missed the point. The relationship between lower-order interactions and the higher order patterns to which those interactions give rise certainly has policy implications, even moral implications yet I doubt that they can be summarized in Flanagan’s impersonal teleology of self-organizing foot paths.
In any event, he is in the news for his recent remarks at the University of Lethbridge (starting at about 1:20):
Now first off, I just really need to say this. Flanagan’s lectures were some of the most boring I’ve ever had the misfortune of enduring. Each one of his classes was a slow and agonizing death. That, however, should not count against him.
Second, I don’t think he’s being intentionally or consciously hateful. I just think that his particular form of libertarianism is a product of operating on a Cartesian perspective, having no way to relate to human beings other than as objects  – objects with feelings at best. You could call it a lazy way of thinking.
It’s just lazy, impersonal, Cartesian libertarianism, tainted not by outright hostility, but in the most insidious of ways by a  lack of responsibility towards other human beings. A shallowness, even, about what it means to be a human being.
My two cents.

Evolution, Revolution, Innovation, Transformation

In coming across some old university papers the other day, it struck me not only how my thinking may have become more nuanced if less circumlocutory over time (I certainly hope it isn’t rather the case that I’ve just gotten dumber), but also how much I’ve spent my entire life preparing to master the use of language as an access to transformation.

Some of these papers are just terrible – I mean deeply flawed and painful to read, however I’ve decided to put them up in hopes that someone profoundly interested in some obscure topic like the phenomenology of religious conversion, the age old debate between the endurantists and the perdurantists, the concept of narrative therapy as a path to peace in the world, Plato’s allegory of the cave in relation to Judeo-Christian creation myth, whether or not predicates refer (totally wish I had been able to find my other papers on Speech Act Theory and Wittgenstein!), or gay rights discourse in the late 20th century, will one day find me and spark up an ever-so-satisfying conversation.

Here is a little juicy delight from the paper comparing Plato with the Old Testament. It is a good reminder of how transformation is not an improvement on what came before, but actually happens when there is nothing to transform:

A Buddhist teaching suggests that practicing Buddhism is like taking a raft over a great river. One riverbank represents the realm of ‘samsara,’ the cycle of suffering that we are all spinning around in. On the other side is ‘wakefulness,’ or ‘nirvana,’ an enlightened state of awareness characterized by an infinite sense of unity and bliss. The raft symbolizes Buddhism; its purpose being to help us cross over from samsara to nirvana. According to the teaching, however, a curious thing happens to the individual who manages to reach the ‘banks of enlightenment.’ Having climbed off of the raft, she turns around to discover that she cannot now see any riverbank on the side from which she departed. In fact, she realizes that there is no river, no raft, and – to her pure astonishment – no Buddha at all! (Zimmer, 82-90)

And here’s something interesting from the paper on Augustine, C.S. Lewis and their conversion experiences, a reminder that there is a profound difference between knowing something and being it:

In fact, it could be argued that [Augustine’s] actual beliefs just before that moment [his conversion] in the garden were precisely equivalent to his beliefs just after it, and that what really changed was the texture and condition of his involvement in those beliefs. In other words, like an astronaut who has known for a long time that there is dust on the moon, but during his first mission in space is able to step out of a lunar landing pod, reach down, pick the dust up, and feel it sift through his fingers and fall back to the ground, Augustine gained experiential knowledge of what he already believed. Christianity wasn’t an external truth to him anymore. It became the very substance of his being.

A “simple intervention” approach to will power.

In this Authors@Google video, Kelly McGonigal gives us five “really simple interventions” – based on data (she teaches a course at Stanford called The Science of Willpower) to help people know how to be self possessed.

  1. Train your willpower physiology.
    Getting an extra hour of sleep predicted drug addicts’ resistance to relapse by a correlation of 0.7 – wow!
    Meditation also impacts the physiology of willpower – Just meditating for 10 minutes a day results in measurable improvements in the brain systems responsible for maintaining focus on goals and core values within as little as two months.
  2. Forgive yourself.
    People who don’t make themselves wrong are less likely to succumb to temptation. Anger at oneself is a distraction that doesn’t make it easy to stay in touch with one’s future goals and core values – and in one study people who wrote themselves “forgiveness scripts” that they would say to themselves in advance of a junk food breakdown were shown to be more impervious to the breakdown in the first place.
  3. Make friends with your future self.
    Study participants were asked to write a letter to yourself to themselves from their future self (five years from now), thanking themselves for overcoming a willpower challenge, and this was shown to help them deal effectively with that willpower challenge. People who “get” that as their future self they will be impacted by their experiences just as they are today are more likely to be self possessed than people who don’t.
  4. Predict your failure.
    Imagining yourself not succeeding in your willpower challenge can be an effective tool for enhancing will power, according to the data. Participants were asked to answer questions like “What will you say to yourself that will allow you to break your diet…?” and simply being in such an inquiry helped them stay on track.
  5. Surf the urge.
    Learn to pay attention to the physical discomfort of wanting something, trust that you can tolerate those sensations, and wait it out, breathe it out, knowing that it will eventually end just like a wave.