Late this summer, I read a column in the The New York Times Sunday Review by Neal Gabler that drove me mad.   Gabler believes that Americans do not think anymore and, as a result, we no longer formulate BIG ideas that have the power to transfix and transform society.  In his editorial, Mr. Gabler points to an earlier time – pre-social networking and pre-Googling – when BIG thinkers were cultural icons – Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan, Marshal McLuhan. He makes the rather strange point that “a generation ago, these men [I assume he means “people” since he includes a few women in his examples of BIG thinkers] would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens.”  He seems to mean that we no longer want to hear what scientists have to say if we can’t consume their ideas in a Tweet-stream.

But, I wonder about that when I watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report with my 20-year-old son and we are listening to the US Ambassador to the UN discuss why the UN matters to the US or a Senator discuss the debt ceiling debate. Okay, okay – it’s a six minute interview with snarky humor laced throughout, but that’s about three minutes longer than the so-called major networks’ coverage of important topics and about as long as NPR gives a story (and that’s called an “in-depth” treatment). These are BIG problems calling for BIG ideas and they are not solely problems of the marketplace, the one domain in which Gabler acknowledges that BIG ideas are clearly being born.

But, if Gabler gives, he also takes away.

“Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some….have come up with some brilliant ideas in the ‘inventional’ sense of the word. Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.”

I have to say, that I am still trying to make sense of this assertion. It seems to me that many commercial inventions do, in fact, change the way we think. They create new frameworks which change how we see things and this is precisely how understanding is transformed. The fact that these ideas are embodied in a product or a service (are experienced in the corporeal world) does not – to my mind, at least – negate their “ideational” impact. And, the notion that ideas in the marketplace and ideas in the… “non-marketplace(?)” are fundamentally different also makes me wince. Are there any corners of human activity that are free from the curse of “monetization?” The marketplace subsidizes some pockets of activity, insulating them from its daily concerns – non-profits and government – but they are not immune or outside of its reach (ask any university that relied on its endowment funds for operations in 2009 or NGO that relied on donors).

Finally Gabler goes full bore and lets loose about what he calls our “post-idea” world. This is the world in which we are more concerned with amassing information to stay informed than to make sense of the world. We live in a gap between apprehending and comprehending the world in Gabler’s terms. Reducing our expression to 140 characters or video clips and restricting it to our circle of online friends (even if they number in the millions as they do for Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher) traps us in an endless loop of opinions which are the antithesis of BIG thinking.

I admit that I find it impossible to keep up with the flow of information that comes my way. But this was the case 20 years ago – before the Internet, before Kindles, before iPhones and iPads and netbooks and Blackberries and instant messaging and Twitter. It was nice not to be so accessible, so 24/7, but it didn’t make it any easier to be thoughtful.

In some of the work that I do, BIG ideas are afoot and they are engaging many people in provocative and energetic discussions that seek to enlarge our understanding of what it means to live in an increasingly inter-connected world in which seemingly small choices ripple outward with surprisingly large impact over long periods of time. Strands of thinking that come many different fields – complexity theory, evolutionary biology, particle physics, finance, philanthropy – are being woven together to form new ways of seeing, of understanding our world.

My children’s education at the elementary, middle and high school levels is far more concerned with understanding than it is with simply acquiring information – a marked contrast to my own experience. And, my kids are every bit as connected 24/7 via text messages and video chats as any of their peers. Yet somehow, BIG ideas still entrance them as they struggle to make sense of their world in all its close immensity. I am not a betting person, but I would still bet that there are BIG ideas out there that are heading our way and that as a species our drive to make meaning will prevail.

And, that’s as a good a reason as any on this Thanksgiving Holiday to be thankful.

Source: “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler, Sunday Review, The New York Times, August 14, 2011.

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”  Richard Feynman

Last week, as I emerged from Penn Station in New York City, I strolled up Seventh Avenue and out of the corner of my eye caught sight of the large Borders book store that commands the corner of Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street.  What flashed through my mind at that moment was “I never thought I’d live to see the end of books.”  As a kid, I’d spend the entire day closeted in my room reading a book with a dictionary beside me on the bed. I loved unlocking the meaning of big, prepossessing words as I made my way through stories that were just a little too difficult for me.  Looking back on it, I see that I was making a kind of intellectual journey through worlds that were otherwise inaccessible to me as a child of Jewish middleclass suburban Baltimore.  Later on, in my undergraduate years, I used to sit in the Divinity School Library at Duke University, my Biblical Hebrew text before me, surrounded by dictionaries and concordances – all in an effort to untangle a foreign, dead language and try to reconstruct a way of experiencing the world that could only be understood through surviving fragments of text.  When I got out of college and no longer had to read what was on a syllabus, I went on wild reading binges, foraging through the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City.  For me, reading has always been another way of seeing and experiencing the world and books have been my passport.

But, now I own a Kindle and my dictionary is no longer beside me.  Instead, I click my Kindle’s home key and enter the word I don’t know to instantly have it defined by my favorite dictionary (the OED), and then click back to exactly where I stopped reading.  I made the transition to the Kindle with some trepidation – after all, I LOVE books.  I had about three days of feeling very strange about not flipping a page and the heft of the reading device not feeling right and not really liking the percent completion display which was my only way of knowing how much I’d read and how much more there was to go.  But then, that was that, and I was on my way to loving that my dictionary was right there, all the time.  When I saw the Borders bookstore in New York City, I had just finished reading an article in The New York Times about the coming-to-me-soon future in which I would be able to borrow books from my library on my Kindle.  In fact, if I owned a Nook or a Sony e-Reader, I could do that already.  In my soon-to-be future, I wouldn’t have to go to my library to borrow a book.  I already don’t have to go to a bookstore to buy one and I don’t have to pay at all for classics like my favorite Edith Wharton or to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  The future has already arrived and I am smack in the middle of it, I just hadn’t noticed.   

Yesterday, I read another article in The New York Times about supercomputers used for scientific visualization that are called macroscopes.  Macroscopes are “…a new class of computer-based scientific instruments…composite tools, with different kinds of physical presences that have such powerful and flexible software programs that they become a complete scientific workbench.”  These supercomputers make “…it possible to uncover phenomena and processes that in the past have been, ‘too great, slow or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.’”  Macroscopes can see the future creeping in on you in ways that human beings cannot. 

What’s also amazing about these supercomputers is that the technology itself is affecting the very nature of the scientific research process.  From the lone independent researcher toiling away in isolation, it is now more likely that hundreds or even thousands of researchers in disparate geographies and ranging across many different disciplines collaborate on and jointly publish research, no longer isolated, but intensively connected through these supercomputers.  And the supercomputers themselves are not one piece of equipment or software housed in one place, but can themselves be collaborations of different pieces of equipment and applications in far-flung corners of the world.  The unrelenting force of collaboration – called the “killer app” by one scientist in the article – is also making what seemed like a risky approach, developing software in an open-source mode, now seem like the only way forward.  Technology has managed to destroy a culture and build a new one, in this case, seemingly without the calamity that accompanies most destruction. 

The same is going on in the organizations where we work.  They are already different, but we are swept along in the currents and can’t really appreciate the full extent of how much the future is already here until, perhaps, we read an article about borrowing books from a library on an e-Reader without visiting the library and catch a glimpse of a Borders bookstore on the street corner 15 minutes later.

 Sources:

• “Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther:  Supercomputers Alter Science,”  John Markoff, The New York Times, April 26, 2011.
• “Kindle Users to Be Able to Borrow Library E-Books,” Julie Bosman, The New York Times, April 21, 2011.

If you’re PieLab, a café in Greensboro, Alabama that is the brain-child of design collective Project M, the formula for creating positive change in the world is simple:

PieLab = a neutral place + a slice of pie = conversation = ideas + design = Positive Change

Initially, what grabbed my attention about PieLab wasn’t the formula for positive change, but the fact that PieLab was envisioned as a kind of pop-up community center.  I had just come back from facilitating a visioning workshop where among the many ideas that were explored, the notion of pop-up facilities (inspired by the increasing prevalence of pop-up retail clothing stores and restaurants that have become possible because of the excess of empty retail space) was bandied about. 

The article suggests that applying the term pop-up “…implies that a concept may be too cutting edge to sustain.”   And, in the case of PieLab, that proved to be true.  PieLab’s story in a nutshell involved a mostly young group of visionaries who aspired to do good, descended on a disadvantaged town, and earnestly set about working their mojo.  They scored some early, modest successes, but failed to grasp the broader context in which they were trying to make change.  As a result, they slipped up and were forced to adjust to the reality that change is a long-haul commitment.  Most of the original team left and PieLab is now known informally as Pie – operating as a traditional cafe that is more integrated into the social and economic fabric of Greensboro.

I think that what the PieLab founders got wrong in their formula for positive change is that it doesn’t capture the element of the long-haul, uncertain process.  The end result of the formula is not positive change, but rather, the potential for positive change.   With that alteration, I think that the formula captures most of the necessary ingredients for change.

I set about applying it to my experience running a successful visioning workshop with a group of people who had never worked together before.  First, I thought about how a workshop devoted to organizational change and a café devoted to social change are similar and came up with these equivalencies:

• PieLab = Safe, Secure Place/Space
• Slice of Pie = Something to share/bond over/experience together
• Conversation = High trust exchange
• Design = Problem-focused questioning

My revised formula is this:

Workshop = Safe, Secure Place/Space + Something to experience together = High trust exchange + Problem-focused questioning =Potential for Positive Change

If it’s possible to create the potential for positive change (clearly in more environments than a workshop), what has to be in place to realize it? 

A special issue of the The New York Times Magazine devoted to women’s empowerment can be viewed as a series of inquiries into creating positive social change.  The approach that brought about the relatively swift (over the span of one generation) end to the practice of foot-binding in China is one notable example. 

 From my perspective, these are the major factors that led to changing the long-standing practice:

• Understanding the larger system of which the practice/behavior is a part.
• Creating institutions that support the changed behavior.
• Positioning the change as outgrowth of the group’s natural positive progress, rather than a corrective response to failure.
• Luck (or timing or patience)

Here’s a very condensed version of how the practice of foot-binding ceased in China:  Those advocating against foot-binding at the outset were Christian missionaries.  They invested the time necessary to understand the Chinese culture, learning the language and studying the texts essential to formal Chinese education.  The anti-foot-binding advocates formed relationships with influencers – leaders in the Chinese political and social structure.  China while continuing to believe that it was superior to Western civilizations had suffered military defeats at the hands of Westerners which caused some of its leaders to think about engaging with the West so that China would be better able to deal with global challenges.  

The anti-foot-binding advocates shared information from the West that convinced these leaders that Westerners thought that the practice of foot-binding was a sign of cultural and intellectual backwardness.   These leaders realized that such opinions would create a political disadvantage for the Chinese and they became vocal opponents of the foot-binding.  However, foot-binding was a requirement for marriage in China – so part of changing its practice had to include changing the practices surrounding marriage.  The anti-foot-binding advocates worked tirelessly to form a community of parents who pledged that they would not bind their daughters’ feet and they would not permit their sons to marry women with bound feet.   In this way, the anti-foot-binding advocates created a “new normal” which did not so much disrupt society as hurry it along in a positive direction.  Of course, none of this would have been possible if these factors had not occurred at the same time – which you can view as a matter of luck, brilliant timing, or long-suffering patience.

A formula shorthand that sums up how to realize the potential for positive change:

Realizing the Potential for Positive Change =  PieLab + No More Foot-binding in China = High trust exchange + problem-focused questioning + understand the system + the right change agents + luck = The New Normal

Sources:

• Project M website
• Pie + Design / Change, John T. Edge, The New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2010
• The Art of Social Change, Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2010