It took me most of my young life to figure this out. After growing up as a precocious political junkie I got jaded pretty early. I grew up in a rural conservative family but somehow, deep-down I’m an urban technophile who often hopes there’s no problem that walkable neighbourhoods and Twitter hashtags can’t solve. In [...]
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cities,
conservatism,
democracy,
design ego,
elections,
government,
ideology,
moral psychology,
motivation,
politics,
pragmatism,
progressivism,
purpose,
relevance,
values,
voting,
will to relevance
Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward. Quote from Dan Ariely’s column in the Harvard Business Review, [...]
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behavioural economics,
design,
design thinking,
experiments,
future,
management,
mindsets,
organizations,
pragmatism
Of everything I’ve written, I think The New Pragmatist has retained the most value. I told someone two years ago I was going to clean it up and publish a PDF, but I got pulled away from it by too many new ideas to have any patience for futzing around with something old… until now: [...]
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books,
epistemology,
knowledge,
lulu,
objectivity,
practice of theory,
pragmatism,
publishing,
self-publishing,
subjectivity
I’ve learned not to care as much when other people are being stupid. It’s their problem. Last year I did more blogging in the spirit of “someone’s wrong on the internet,” but lately I’ve learned to lay off and let people screw up. (I’m so kind.) When I started writing about media it was because [...]
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collaboration,
complaints,
criticism,
government,
ideas,
open government,
opinions,
optimism,
pessimism,
politics,
pragmatism
Some thoughts culminating out of the last post about how open standards emerge… a recent post by fellow Londoner Bill Wittur on some open government basics… the latest post on the Google blog defining their notion of openness… and a book I perused a couple days ago by Beth Noveck on open collaborative government. There’s no way I [...]
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beth noveck,
collaboration,
collaborative democracy,
deliberative democracy,
democracy,
google,
open government,
open source,
open standards,
policy,
pragmatism,
think21st,
wiki government
Some readers may have noticed I’ve been getting little deeper and more technical lately. I’m trying to unburden myself of all of the theoretical equipment I’ve been using for the past few years — trying to make it explicit, get it out into the open, into the light of day. I should stress it’s just [...]
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about,
beta-think,
concept development,
creative philosophy,
design thinking,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
think21st,
thinking alive
Diving in even further over my head, here’s further elaboration of the philosophy I use. To understand why we do things, we have to appreciate why things happen at all. It’s ridiculously simple: things happen because time exists. I’ve found this principle to be a useful heuristic for grounding uncertainty and making random occurrences continuous [...]
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epistemology,
metaphysics,
object bias,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
process,
process philosophy,
reification,
space,
spatiality,
temporality,
think21st,
time
The core of my practice of theory is an appreciation of what I call “object bias” — our tendency to conceive experience composed of distinct and permanent objects.
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abstract objects,
abstraction,
cognitive science,
epistemology,
evolution,
heuristics,
object bias,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
specialization,
think21st
Reflecting on last weekend’s talk on creativity I worried that probably emphasized the “open” aspect of the creative cycle at the expense of the “closed” aspect. My gist seemed to be, “Don’t worry about anything… try everything, and fantastic creations will magically appear.” Given the circumstances, I’m happy I erred that way rather than the other. We [...]
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benjamin franklin,
bruce mau,
complexity,
creativity,
dennis dutton,
digital media,
discovery,
electricity,
epistemology,
evolution,
generativity,
history,
paradigms,
poetry,
pragmatism,
progress,
revolutions,
social media,
theory,
think21st,
thomas kuhn
Late last night I had a serious lapse of faith in social media — as we all must from time to time. We should have serious doubts questions about this stuff… Which is why I chuckle whenever I read editorials merely pointing out “there are hazards” and digitization “isn’t all good” — as if any [...]
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change,
communication,
community,
criticism,
deliberation,
democracy,
epistemology,
openness,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
social media,
society,
technology,
transparency,
web,
will to believe,
william james
by OpenConceptual on 07-15-2009
in concepts
Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.” That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate [...]
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competence,
cultural evolution,
evolution,
failure,
finance crisis,
generativity,
institutions,
love of learning,
new economics,
organizations,
physics,
pragmatism,
quantum theory,
randomness,
science,
success
by OpenConceptual on 07-12-2009
in mission
Just sort of a brainstorm here, following up on some of my relatively more youthful attempts to outline what this is all about: Draft Enterprise Model The Practice of Theory The other day I jotted down a few points — trying to distill the underlying mission of this amorphous enterprise. It has a few different [...]
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accountability,
articulation,
beta,
business,
change,
civics,
decision-making,
decisions,
design thinking,
digitization,
government,
information,
objectivity,
open,
open government,
open source,
openness,
org theory,
organizations,
participation,
politics,
pragmatism,
social web,
society,
transparency,
volunteering,
web
