>The Information Age (2)

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>Noise becomes data when it transcends the purely sensual and has cognititve pattern.
Data becomes information when it can be related to other information in a way that adds meaning.
Information becomes knowledge when it is integrated with other information in a form useful for deciding, acting or composing new knowledge.
Knowledge becomes understanding when related to tother knowledge in a manner useful in conceiving, anticipating, evaluating and judging.
Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principle, memory of the past, and projection into the future.
Dee Hock comments that more primitive societies had a far higher ratio of wisodom and understanding to knowledge and date. They hadn’t got much in the way of data but loads of wisdom. On the other hand our society is high on data and information “but understands very little of what it knows”, leaving us with “separatist, linear, mechanistic institutions, confined with our ever more isolated specialities, constricted by ever narrowing perspectives.”
So, it looks like we are stuck between a rock and a hard place – institutions not fit for purpose in our information age and no time or inclination to understand all the information of our age. Cue – theologian and sage.

>The Information Age

David Herbert1 Comment

>Listening to friend Carol’s presentation yesterday made me realise how church is tied down by the industrial age. Perception of church is stil very much building based and the church building boom seems to have been part and parcel of the industrial development of the 19th century. Often funded by industrialists churches were places to be seen and seemed to cement people’s place in society.
We have hastily moved from being an industrial society to being an information society, and is it the nature of information which has had such an effect on society and how we organise ourselves into social networks. Yet while factories have closed (and communities coped far better that they thought) our church buildings remain and remain furnished with the trappings (and pews) of the mindset of the industrial age.
According to Gregory Bateson “information is a difference that makes a difference”. Dee Hock makes these points:

Unlike finite physical resources, information multiplies by transfer and is not depleted by use.
Information is a miser of energy. It can endlessly replicate, move ubiquitously at the speed of light, and massively condense in minute space …
Information breeds. When one bit of information is combined with another, the result is new information. It will become the slave and property of noone. Efforts to make information conform to archaic notions of scarcity, ownership and finite physical quantity – concepts that grew out of the agricultural and industrialised age – merely lock humankind into old, mental boxes of constraint and exploitation.
Information is ethically neutral.
Products, services, and organisations in which the value of the mental content begins to dwarf the value of the physical content require wise people of deep understanding.

Dee Hock writes this:

Thinking about a society based on information and one based on physicality requires radically different perspective and consciousness. However, we prefer too often to ignore the fundmental differences nd carry over into the Chaordic Age of managing information, ideas and values, concepts and assumptions that proved useful in the mechanised Industrial Age of machine crafting, the age of managing things; concepts such as ownership, scarcity, spearability, quantifiable measurement, statistical economics, mathematical monetarism, hierarchical structuralism, and command-and-control management.
The birth of the Chaordic Age alls into question virtually every concept of societal organisation, management, and conduct on which we have come to rely. Clinging too rigorously to old concepts, dismissing new concepts too lightly, protecting old forms that resulted from those concepts too fiercely, imposing those forms on a changing society too resolutely, are a certain path to failure.

>Mr and Mrs

David Herbert1 Comment

>I think I take after my son Leo. From the day he started school he waged a campaign for the freedom to wear his polo shirt outside his trousers. He triumphed by wearing his trousers round his hips – too low for everyone else’s comfort but his own.
Our school governors put in a not so earth-shattering request that minutes of meetings referred to our Christian names and surnames, rather than our titles. As Chair I see it as a nice process issue to break down stuffiness. Guess what. The clerk’s manager says “you can’t do that because the minutes form a historic record”. Can’t do that – to me that’s a red rag to a bull and a reminder of Dee Hock’s theology of chaordic organisations: “Heaven is purpose, principle and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations.”
“Can we challenge that?” I said loosening my metaphorical trousers. “Save it for more important battles” was the advice of the clerk. Reaching for my metaphorical gunbelt I have to say that I suspect that these days most people prefer not to be known just by their clan name, but also the name that marks them out as special and as individual, that we want to have power over our name calling (don’t call me that please …) and that we want to see our-self as part of that historic record. So, I’ll reach for the phone to return fire. Now shall I begin “Hello Ruth” or “Hello Mrs Agnew”? It’s good to take after your children – once in a while isn’t it?
Below – too far below – the hazard of low slung trousers.
http://www.youtube.com/get_player

VISA

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Today, before any audience in the world, I can hold a VISA card overhead and ask, “How many of you recognise this?” Every hand in the room will go up. When I ask, “How many of you can tell me who owns it, where it’s headquartered, how it operates, or where to buy shares?” a dead silence comes over the room. The audience realses something extraordinary has occurred and they haven’t a clue how it happened. Nor, in my opinion should they. The results of the best organisations are apparent, but the structure, leadership, and process are transparent.
Dee Hock – Birth of the Chaordic Age p189

Hospitable Space

David Herbert1 Comment

> Turkish people were able to gather together to watch their team in the Euro finals because one of them had started a facebook to see how many Turkish people there were around in the north-east. Facebook, ebay, youtube are typical self-organising communities in our networking society. They don’t need community workers or developers. They don’t need leaders or rulers either. Facebook has over 75 million members with 250,000 joining every day.
On the other hand, membership of many other communities are in sharp decline. Membership of churches, voluntary groups, political parties all report falling memberships. Some cynically say that people are avoiding commitment – or are they avoiding commitment they are not willing to give. Or, are people leaving things where there are rules and regulations – where they are feeling they are being organised by somebody else?
What does this say to people who want to see the development of community?
The size of membership of Facebook indicates that I am not alone in wanting to develop community and belong to community. But I operate in an institution (because the Church of England operates as an institution)and as part of “leadership” implement initiatives which create frustration when the “followers” don’t respond. Myself and others who have been hide-bound by institutional community need to learn is that communities which flourish are those which are self-organising, and which are movements rather than institutions.
Isn’t this what the early church looked like to St Luke? He describes members meeting in one another’s houses, sharing everything. He underlines how fast the community was growing.
What Facebook offers is a space for people to move into. Maybe that is what the art of living is – providing spaces of hospitality in which people can belong and grow – which reminds me – I must go and lock the church. Oh dear!
This is what the Rhett Smith has to say on the subject:

Basically, people are organizing themselves in powerful ways that thwart the traditional means of organization through leaders in authoritative, hierarchical positions. No longer do people need to go through an institution to achieve their end goal. Many churches already know this, and still, so many other don’t. Those who recognize the shift will be in positions to harness the unbelievable creative power of a church community. Those who don’t will find themselves struggling to carry out the vision for their church community.

>Watching trees

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>
What about these words of Dee Hock?

True power is never used. If you use power you never really have it.

The words stand relatively unconnected in a box on page 140 of Birth of the Chaordic Age as a mini maxim.
Half an hour later I am confronted with Jotham’s Parable of the Trees from Judges 9 who uses his tree watching to reflect on the political power struggle which saw Abimelech wanting to snatch power. The trees refused to be made king. The olive tree, the fig tree and the vine didn’t want to give up the goodness of what they were producing. It was the bramble who accepted the invitation with the words “If in good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.”
I speak from bitter experience that brambles take over gardens. The invitation to seek shelter is an invitation to be throttled – and the threat of fire just clears the ground for the bramble to spread. (One test of the character of a man is to see how he treats those who disagree with him. If his only desire is to destroy those who disagree, then he is much like the bramble – plenty of good points, but no real substance for good.[from David Guzik])
So “Bramble King” is how Jotham thought of his brother. He was violent as was the rule of many of Israel’s kings. The experience of monarchy was not good. People looked back with nostalgia to a time when “there was no king in Israel, when all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” and I look forward to Dee Hock’s mini-maxim:

True power is never used. If you use power you never really have it.
and then I think of Robert Mugabe and the dictators who cause so much suffering because of their clinging to power. Is that what defines a dictator – “someone who clings to power”?