Current schools of thought on the sources of objectivity

1. Literalist Fundamentalism: Hybrid of empiricism and scripturalism. Serves capitalism and/or tribalism.
2. New Ageism: Hybrid of tropes of modern science, superstition and common but uncanny experiences, which remain scientifically unexplored due to # 5.
3. Post Modernism: Ever changing truth lies between the lines in the ceaseless revolution against narratives of power.
4. Basic Science: Carries on halfway between rigour and rigor-mortis owing to emphasis on economic benefits, rigid schools of thought, and being a trope of legitimacy unto itself.
5. Reductionist Science: Puts the methodological cart before the ontological horse, confuses the intellectual filing cabinet for reality, hung up on "building blocks", misses context, life, imagines operational definitions to be exhaustive.
6. Promethean Science: A hubristic triumphalism of technology that, like dominionist religions, celebrates our conquest/dominion of nature.

Why hierarchy and innovation rarely mix: A Paean to Creative Nerds

There are thought leaders who can invite and harness the wealth of insight of creative and committed people. People who are creative and committed are often described as nerds. What distinguishes nerds from those reluctant to identify with nerdhood is that they are curious and creative as a matter of course, regardless of external incentives. In other words, their creativity is disinterested in the sense of being motivated to move the mental models forward and expand the frame of reference in their respective fields without reference to partisanship or entrenched tribal norms. They are the innovators who get us thinking, nudge us outside our comfort zone and drive the better side of what is called progress.

Although not inspired by extrinsic rewards, innovators are indeed hampered by disincentives, it should go without saying. Why would anyone disincentivize disinterested creativity and innovation rather than harness it? The only reason would be that it threatens the established order, that it is viewed as subversive to the order, and that the order is hegemonic.

Throughout history, great art was produced by unparalleled artists employed by the ruling class. Yet, the art is easily identified by era, indicating that style innovations were slow to accrue. Today, an exponentially expanding field of possibility is available to potential innovators, yet social structures  reproduce disincentives and thought innovation doesn't keep pace with the increase in available information and platforms to make it world changing. There is a canon that supports innovation-limiting social structures, a Canon of "objectivity" that belies its true nature.

The main value of The Canon resides in its false assurances of control:

• We set up a list of outcomes, assuming that no better / deeper understanding will emerge in pursuing them that might change them. We set up measures that readily stand in for the outcomes, although pursuing measures as ends can yield perverse effects. 
• We make a plan according to current knowledge, not in terms of the real world of ever-emerging possibilities.
• We then outline contingencies, assuming that we can adumbrate the list of relevant determinants of change.
• We execute a plan and consider deviations remarkable, requiring no end of justification and scrutiny, as if stasis were the norm. 
• We assign people formal titles and units, and expect their talents not to leak beyond these pre-defined impersonal roles.
• We break down challenges into discrete parts, and assign various disconnected units to tackle them and then wonder why everyone isn't on the same page. We might even measure the discrete successes of the units assuming that the sum of the parts is equal to the sum of the aggregate (not necessarily a "whole").
• We evaluate performance against set criteria in a changing landscape, although performance evaluations have been proven not to have any performance-enhancing value except in simple, transactional or mechanical activities. 

Where in the above is room for leveraging potentials? Whence engagement? The closure is almost complete. This perverts the ideal of the enlightenment and turns it on its head.

Nevertheless, the trope of objectivity allows the powerful to maintain control of the story of what should be done, how it should be done, and how well it was done, regardless of what actually happens, which tends to depend on ever shifting natural and cultural contexts. There is little to distinguish innovation from heresy, insubordination or subversion. The status quo is reproduced ad nauseum with nothing given legitimacy to challenge it.

That is not to say all people with high position are officious innovation stiflers. Many are thought leaders. What characterizes them?

They are open to possibility, have a desire to expand thought horizons for the greater good without any extrinsic incentive to do so. They have a keen eye for viable potential and encourage it. Their comfort zone is strong and wide, not because they control, but because they inspire trust and enthusiasm. They have a collegial appreciation of talent, seeing their employees as people with expanding potentials, not as pre-defined competency sets or roles.

On Risk Aversion (Updated)

In 2009, I wrote this post on risk aversion.

Here's where it sits on my mind today.

Is risk aversion a fear of auditors, bad press or is it a fear of losing hegemony - a denial of the natural transformation that is occurring now towards models of complexity and resilience? 

It seems we prefer the illusion of control, governed by models that are 
- analytical
- artificial 
- categorical 
- linear 
- hierarchical
- authoritarian
- siloed
- mechanical, and
- simplistic. 

To be able to achieve manageable simplicity, we would have to be able to identify and control the context, the boundaries, the parameters in which we operate. This is not possible, if it ever was. 

But how do we change that the easier way?

11 Laws of the Crank

1. If you have an axe to grind and you grind it, you will eventually be seen as a crank*.
2. If you demonstrate enthusiasm in any intellectual cause other than some self or immediate practical community interest, you risk being seen as a crank*.
3. If you are learned but don't sufficiently cite or defer to the canonical script for your discipline when expressing your novel ideas, you will be labelled as a crank*.
4. If a researcher has some good ideas amongst those which render them labelled a crank, you will be seen as a crank if you quote them (even the very good bits.)
5. If you admire someone who is insightful and who has cited the better ideas of someone who is otherwise considered a crank, you mustn't quote them except to disparage them and dissociate yourself or you too will be tainted as a crank.
6. It does not count as an informal fallacy to criticize the ideas of a crank by alluding to their character.
7. Pejoratives suffice as critiques when it comes to the writings of those who are rightly or wrongly considered cranks.
8. If you quote someone who works from a rival interpretation of your discipline, you will come to be distrusted.
9. If you quote from outside your discipline, you will be seen as a crank* **
10. If you earnestly try to change anything for the better, you will be labelled as a crank (but beaten down as an upstart)*.
11. If any of your questions cast doubt on the latest iteration of the myth of the divine right of kings (narratives that sustain various types of social authority), you will be swiftly marginalized, one way or another.

*unless you have at least 2 or more of the following:

A. A personal gravity that comes from an astounding sense of entitlement
B. Brilliant PR skills (i.e., the makings of a good con artist)
C. A wealthy and powerful backer

** unless you are an established pulp news pundit, in which case you can quote or misquote anyone you like to support your position

Fundamental Instincts

Our overarching instinct is to preserve that narrative that preserves our place in the (now technologically defined) economic landscape; i.e., the economy (now global, not place-based). 

Cultural memes (anchors of the narrative) dislodge from terra firma - soccer, religion, politics - anything really - and stand in for our homestead/place. Dangerous because unbounded. That's why we're in the grip of so many "fundamentalisms".

The power of the "divine right of kings" didn't come from the kings but from this overarching instinct. 

(Hobbes articulated it without understanding.) Without place there is singularity.

Doables, deliverables and results - change habitual mental models for more sustainable results

When the Bloor Viaduct in Toronto was being designed, the designer apparently had the prescience to include enough in the design to allow for future subway trains, even though at the time no such trains existed in Toronto.

In today's world of narrow targets and measurable deliverables, we obscure the broader horizon of potential, making us less resilient.The impulse to make things manageable by analyzing them into discrete components, picking two or three to "do" and finding easy "measures" for them means we lose context and enjoy the illusory sense of safety provided by a narrowed horizon. We may be able to check things off the list, but are they meaningful contributions? Planning that engenders tidy, comfortable conceptual grids is not the path to resiliency but of "a foolish consistency." Today, our planning models render us more machine-like than organic and responsive to real needs. Therefore they break more easily, littering and cluttering our mindscape. That's why we're so grey and tired at the end of the day.

So the question for all us is:  How we can insert possibility and breadth into our mindspace and workspaces?

There's no Accounting for It: Areas where the quest for the true story leads us to falsehood

We have confidence in numbers, not the evidence of our senses, as is often claimed. Everything we consider to be accurately observed is, in fact, accurately defined - i.e., defined in a way that makes the phenomenon of interest measurable, countable. Not until we establish the numeric lens of accuracy, or the illusion thereof, do we consider phenomena to exist beyond our thinking, our interestedness. Pause and ponder that.

You see, our confidence is misplaced. We mistake the indicator for reality. The relevance of data resides in the definition (a.k.a. "operational definition") of what is counted, and rarely are such definitions exclusive and exhaustive of phenomena, outside of some narrow scientific disciplines. 

Speaking from his experience in the area of Psychology, Jack Martin of Simon Fraser University explains that, whereas operational definitions provide investigators with initial cues to the identification and more thorough understanding of phenomena, psychologists frequently treat such definitions as if they were conclusive and exhaustive. Complex phenomena, such as human motivation and confidence, are narrowly understood in terms of a small set of predetermined factors. Understanding becomes reduced to some kind of criteriology, a labelling game. The purposes of investigation, learning and discovery, making new and deeper interconnections, are left out of this paint-by-numbers story.

From the psychology lab to the office, the situation becomes culturally entrenched. Those who report, from students to office workers, spend their days manipulating and their nights worrying about institutionalized performance measures, standardized tests, and a daily barrage of transactional data, all narrowly defined and often rather arbitrary, devoid of much concrete relevance. These measures are meant to provide insight into trends, and evidence of this or that performance, but in fact they mostly just

• eliminate context, 
• block connections, common sense and insight
• erode our capacity for reasoning 
• keep us too preoccupied to examine our purposes
• and ultimately put us on the self-sustaining hamster wheel of empty bureaucratic process

The focus on numbers may give us the secure sense that we're getting precise information, but it's a false sense of security.

See also The Logic of Quantophrenia and possibly Amy Lemay on assessing impact as reported by Asha Law at casrai.org.