ESP 2007 Workshop Background: The Overview

START HERE: The Overview (From MH, N-S, TSL Workshop at ESP Summer Seminar 2007)

Today’s world of cell phones, Blogs and interactive TV offers a constantly increasing variety of instant connections
– and can lead to disorienting complexity. The best tool for responding to this complex environment, according to researcher Peter Kruse, is right inside our heads. The human brain is a self-organizing network, always creating new internal states of order, constructing its own reality out of what could be a disabling amount of input . . .

Scientists used to describe the brain as a kind of computer, rationally processing input in the cerebral cortex to produce intended results. Recent research shows, however, that we really make the decisions that control our actions elsewhere, in the limbic system, based on intuitive, suggestible, emotional criteria.

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy counters the idea of history as the result of the intentional acts of great men with
the concept of a “sum of human wills.” Another way to express this might be the total of intuitive, limbic-system decisions we think we choose and control, and which we try to rationalize after the fact.

Product catalogs are studied much more often after purchases than before. We rationalize our intuitive decisions. Advertisers and marketing firms exploit this reality, using provocation, emotional involvement and repetition to change consumer behavior.

In the brain it is the interaction between cells which creates intelligence. Every cell contributes, but the result is
more than the sum of its parts. Such interaction networks are the best answer to complex dynamics because they themselves have such dynamics. Considering the immense – and increasing – complexity of the input, it’s a wonder our brains can cope at all. But we don’t become psychotic precisely because we are irrational . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In this workshop, we will explore the possibility of using network intelligence to create
a culture of change in arts education collaborations, modeled after the functions of the brain.

According to Kruse, there are two kinds of learning: 1) optimizing existing patterns (& avoiding mistakes), aka the Best Practice model, and 2) learning new patterns (& accepting mistakes), or what Kruse calls “Next Practice.” PLEASE SEE IMAGE 1: From the Orthodox Scissor-Kick to the Fosbury Flop
. . . . . . . . Consider the bee and the fly. Trapped in an upended bottle, the bee will keep on
banging against the glass, trying to head for light. The fly will try every option and quickly escape.

There’s a process of letting go – of reminding myself that instability is the rule, and the best response
is not to fight for stability, for “risk management,” but to maximize – through network intelligence – our collective ability to steer change. PLEASE SEE IMAGES 2 & 3: Star Systems & Omelets

Pattern change requires a phase of instability, which is something for which we are genetically predisposed to have varying degrees of tolerance. PLEASE SEE IMAGES 4 & 5: Multi-Stable Images . . . . . . Okay, now go ahead and SEE IMAGE 6: Ball in Hill & Valley Landscape, too. . . . . . . . Kruse describes the “conscious creation of instability” – a culture of change – as prerequisite to development, growth, and learning.

In applying these concepts to business, Kruse suggests a very straightforward procedure: 1) Find agreement on basic standards,
2) Provide for an unobstructed flow of information with maximum transparency, 3) Establish binding values and rules: a company identity, 4) Create room to maneuver, for open-minded thinking, 5) Trust in the creativity of your staff, 6) Find a strategic balance of network stability and instability, and 7) Unleash the right people and the right ideas in a free exchange.

It’s a process, passing through many stabilizing and destabilizing phases, increasing in complexity and dynamics . . . PLEASE SEE IMAGE 7: The Upward Spiral Thing . . . from Individual Intelligence (highly decentralized) to the Transparent Organization (centralized), to Team Intelligence, to the Learning Organization, to Network Intelligence.

Timothy Wilson, Steven Pinker, and Malcolm Gladwell have described the powerful unconscious workings of the brain, and the
immense potential effects of even minimal input. Kruse refers to fractal geometry, in which iterations (minimal movements which, by repetition, create large-scale change) lead to complex, self-ordered, “autodynamic” patterns.

When these unconscious patterns are made visible and conscious (through disturbance of existing patterns or habits, provocations, rule-breaking, etc.), they set the stage for the creation of new, adapted – and adapting – modes.
PLEASE SEE IMAGES 8 & 9 . . . Each individual choice may be unpredictable, but taken together they add up to alternative modes which influence subsequent choices. Like in a stream: water creates a path, and the path directs the water . . . . .