Help us search who dares raise questions in high places about Unseen Wealth, and networks as systems of systems of systems?
| Who's Who | Diary Notes |
| MB was lawyer co-chair of Unseen Wealth- areport written in 2000 and published by the Brookings economics institute in Washington DC. I interviewed her spring 2001 at Georgetown Law School. Her forecasts of risks that will compound wherever leaders govern without auditing suitable information flows on human relationships were chilling, but nothing quite prepared me for the series of social (eg 9/11) and business disasters (Eg Enron, Anderson, 100 other meltdowns) that soon ensued, and will get ever worse globally*locally while big leaders have no maps to govern or inspire future trust-flows with. | |
| Steve Brant | I interviewed Steve in Spring 2002 in NY. He was visibly still in shock from September and commits to a lifetime mission: to co-produce one video on systems that speaks in characters Hollywood will warm to. Steve believes a philantropist would then merge science fiction and business system education genres. The trouble with American big business as Deming himself found is that CEOs are taught (or conditioned by lawyers) not to trust human systems and only to invest in machine systems. So even the Baldrige quality revolution in the 80s missed the human systems point that the Japanese and others learnt from Deming in the 1960s. And as for Americans ever being world leaders in service or learning economies, well how can you invest in the clues that emerged from The Economist's and my father's "We're All Intrapreneurial Now" if you systematically refuse to account for investing in human relations systems? No wonder cluetrain and so many dotcoms became little more than a a speculator's fad language rather than one IPO's designed internetworking business arounded and Nasdaq mapped trust-flow around as part of due diligence. Perhaps only the google IPO was launched with a map of valuing no long-term stakeholder conflicts, though of cousre I would love to make a catalogue of links to other IPOs that wish to certify they did. |
| Colin Morley | Actually Colin initiated our mutual interview around December 2003. Colin was quite possibly the most constructively kindest white Englishman I have met in my life- this in spite of having conceived on of the 5 best tv advertisements ever propagated (discuss). He wanted to hear about my 20 years of practice (chronicled as a trilogy of practitioner books on World Class Branding Networks) on interviewing the truth around the community served by brands. I had 3 main branches to my experience before I met Colin: A millions of hours of interviews with societies and customers of brand because I had spent the 1980s working with the first computer database language and market models used by multinational companies. I had worked in 30 countries including deep periods in Japan which is where I tacitly understood of the best 80s Japanese companies invested in their people’s trusts and consensus of how we want to be best for the world. I’d also been told by the Japanese ambassador who awarded my father the emperor’s order of the rising sun that his 1962 survey in The Economist – Consider Japan – had come at the right time to change the country’s view of being competitive in the world to something more inspiring than just proving that we can beat the Americans in markets if not in war B Q&A approach which charters what questions will managers permit all employers to ask about the brand; particularly what questions that search out whether there are conflicts or synergies in serving different stakeholder C valuing a company’s brand maps and indeed all its intangible relations according to how conflict free they are with purposefully visioning the future we uniquely systemise Colin was a bit disappointed because he hoped I’d be a whiz in facilitation and spiritual approaches to self-organising: I could agree that I loved open space and was just off to interview Harrison Owen its originator I could agree that I love 2 minute exercises that Meg Wheatley can suggest you rehearse with peers I could agree with the conversational flow logics of a Quakers circle But while I agreed I needed to go off and discover what Gandhian practices are about, I didn’t particularly resonate with the first expert in collective consciousness that Colin introduced me to, nor some of the branches of so-called systems theory this guru co-marketed. Nor I have found any evidence that these methods were deeply connected with the unique Gandhian way of changing the world, which Einstein has rated as the world’s most valuable because it is as yet the only way of transforming to a higher order system than the one whose rules you are currently chained to by law. Gandhi was a man who slept with the law three times. On the first 2 times it beat him. (stories). On the third time he beat it and the Empire of the auld enemy of Scots and India - including it would appear my grandfather on my mother’s side. As the law became systemised more and more disgracefully in terms of compounding future diverse communal sense for human being, it is absolutely true that Gandhi’s ethical test was to find the smallest voice that the law was enslaving (or killing off) and having found a truly compelling constituent example, he experimented with how the truth of this constituency’s rights could be integrated back into the law. It’s also the case that from his 50’s to his assassination in his 80’s he started founding educational institutions and communities, and in these he set himself the severest examples of being (the change) an example where it came either to owning material things or making any decision before having led to the smallest voice. If the top people in a land are making decisions that enslave or make an underclass ever poorer and sicker, and if the laws have been written by these top people or their advisers or corporate lobbyists, what do you do? That was Gandhi’s system transforming exercise and expertise. It made him among the people he represented a world’s most trusted person as well as arguably the 20th Century’s greatest social entrepreneur (let’s also open up history’s tales of who was the 19th century’s greatest social entrepreneur, as well as the story of Drayton’s Ashoka – SE’s current world champion network). According to the Gandhian peaceful revolution model : you greatest chances are to stage events that are so compelling (eg the salt march) that even through the media was forbidden to cover them it couldn’t not, or at least the news propagated through people networks. And the news symbolised an ethical question which the top were boasting they were the high priests of guarding but were clearly not practising. That pursued relentlessly over many years is how Gandhi released freed India from British rule and coop-ted my grandfather once the main British judges in the region where Gandhi to reforming the constitutional of independence back with parliamentary leaders in Britain. |
| Harrison Owen | Jan? 2004: wow so unconferencing and open space as the simplest method of transforming hierarchical systems was invented by a reformed Anglican priest ( I can't remember how I got ther but I was on this civil rights filed, a lanky white man in a crowd of African Americans quivering with fear as the police were about to charge on us until a 7 year old black girl came up to me and said: mister will you hold my hand? -from that day on I had to help people do something more radical in communities in crisis); after hosting several worldwide annual gatherings of transformation experts in the early 1980s, I though the head people at American management Association might like to know of how this communications process changes systems; they listened over lunch and then the head man said : Harrison if you are right about innovation then 95% of what we teach MBA's is wrong... open space has been all but a no go area in US business academia ever since...still 50000 stagings across 1000 facilitator alumni in nearly 100 countries around many of the world's deepest reconciliation agendas or practical innovations can't be bad going, and who else among systemic intervetionbs has as practically useful archives as these.. why not map out why all the greatest innovations involve taking people from all sides simultaneously through a conflict barrier, recognising that chaos is when a storm of conflict has piled up because the first conflicts were ignored, and leadership confusion being at least one rule that leaders apply religiously because it was perfectly right until the environment chnaged making it perfectly wrong to govern with... |
| Water Angels Franklin Frederick Rick Nelson Prem Kumar | I had been partially blind until someone opened my eyes around 2002 with the answer: water to the question? what's the most pervasive flow most of the rich world doesn't understand life-critical dynamics of? Since then I treasure meetings with people who know about water. Three in particular who I first meet in 2004. The simpol network I volunteer at was sponsoring FF while he was over in London from Brazil. What he told me about the battles to stop multinationals buying up the people's water amazed me; as did the 100 biomass project map (where wastes from one project are typically inputs into another if we wish to sustain nature's graces) around the river basins of the world's largest dam at Foz. One of these teaches 80000 children from 100 cultures how they are all interdependent on water's flows staying clean. Then there is Prem at the 100 Visa villages in India whose 25 years work sustaining rural communities began with own our own clean water and don't let cities dump on us; then microfinance women, then find a marketable crop (cashew nuts); but most amazing of all may be the innovation of the century what Rick Nelson's solaroof architects can do with photosynthesis and algae: all the abundant clean energy we need and turning humidity into drinking water ... and much much more but only if we collaborate across hemispheres |
