My writings - and those of others.
Practical changes
Turning to practical things I should be doing to save the planet allows a short break from thinking about other things. There is a new coach in this area in the Washington Post who is now offering weekly tips.
He points out the dilemma we continually face. One person’s actions doesn’t have a significant effect. Nevertheless, united efforts do. Anything we can do to encourage friends and colleagues to join in can help. So here is my help in spreading the news - some counter-intuitive. We live in the age of wonderful appliances that do their jobs well.
Stop pre-rinsing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. The appliance uses less water than washing by hand and detergents are effective. Scraping is good; rinsing is unnecessary.
Turn out the lights as your parents always used to remind you to do - but recognize that this action is a minor one now with the invention of LED units. Make sure you have replaced any old ones because these new ones emit more light with only 10% of the previous electricity use. What this means is keeping up with the applications of good science from reputable sources and paying attention to it.
Pay more attention to the food on the back of the fridge shelf that may be going bad than worrying about changing the temperature. Food waste is a bigger issue.
Wash your clothes in cold water. Detergents have improved. You can also try those detergent sheets that friends of mine keep recommending. I meant to order some online but did notice them in a nearby shop so I now have no excuse to buy another of those large plastic bottles that take a lot of shelf space to transport.
Combining
As I have already said, I’ve been pondering a planning exercise with a logo, slogan, and title that comes from a story in the Bible. It’s certainly not an unusual way to go for strategic planning in church land. It’s designed to suggest a new direction coming out of a pandemic. I wonder though, if it is missing something when asking about where we are and where we are going. This was the time that our institution, along with our schools, our workplaces and our law courts became digital. You can’t start from there and get to here.
People complain now that their buildings are burdens. They were doing so before the pandemic hit because of the cost of utilities, mortgages and aging infrastructure – but at least the churches were open then. Many places of worship have been locked and mostly dark for months on end. One that I know did put a small altar inside at the entrance – and some people walked up to the closed doors to see it and said their prayers. The only other time I have observed similar behaviour was when I visited the Czech Republic during its last year under communist rule. Church vestibules were open but further entry was blocked by glass barriers. I frequently saw parents taking small children inside and whispering to explain what the spaces were about. Sometimes there were elderly ladies on their knees saying their beads inside; they must have entered defiantly through side doors but were assumed to be harmless to the regime.
For about 24 months, we couldn’t sing. Part of my working life has been administering an organization that supports choirs and I have been a lifelong chorister myself. For many, singing in any choir is a lifeline to connecting with other people; we sit physically close to one another; we listen to the nearest voice and try our best to make a blended sound. The pandemic cut the lifeline. To compensate, some singers recorded a few lines on their phones singing at home alone – heard how that single voice croaked and sounded terrible without the others – and sent a small tape to someone technically sophisticated enough to compile several files into one after dozens of hours – to be sent back out into the world as a one minute recording.
We couldn’t worship together. Clergy read lessons, preached in an empty space, conducted services with one person present and sent recordings one after another into the world. Alternatively a gathered grid of familiar faces appeared on screen. When they spoke at the same time it was a small cacophony of voices. Zoom changed from an active verb to a passive noun. You became joined to Tube – the latter used to refer to a TV screen – but no more. Or nothing happened at all.
Now we say we are coming back to normal. But what is normal about still singing or preaching through a mask? What is normal about preferring to wear pajamas while watching church online, drinking coffee and checking email at the same time? We are grateful for technology as we advertise our online services. But are we pausing to ask – who are we now? What is our work now? Where are we going? How are we using technology for our purpose? How is technology using us?
New Creations
Technological Creations.
I have been doing two things lately that are connecting – one is serving as a volunteer secretary for a consulting team undertaking a study of a church diocese and its parishes. The other is reading about the nature of technology. These might appear to be unconnected, but that’s not the case.
The participants in group sessions and subsequent surveys of the study reveal several views that are not in the least surprising. They have found the recent years stressful and unsettling. Some are hopeful for something new but uncertain as to what it might be. Disconnects have been noted between leadership priorities and a more practical hands-on solutions to matters on the ground. But one thing no one seems to have noticed or commented on – how we have all been re-shaped by the recent technologies available to us – not just during this pandemic but over the past decade.
Typically I want to look up the new buzzwords, because they are everywhere but often imprecise in meaning. Here are a couple of them. A pivot (noun) is “a central point, pin or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates”. In a business context, pivot (verb) suggests “completely changing how one does things to meet increased demands from customers”. “Pivot” got mentioned from time to time in the surveys, but no one appears to recognize the significance. We have accessed several new technologies in recent years. How have they changed us?
“Hybrid” is also part of our new vocabulary. Here is a recent definition; Hybrid (noun) is “a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions”. I hadn’t thought of one as a person, though I might have done so in describing a plant or an animal with immediate understanding – we have a Labradoodle in our extended family – but a person? Yet two diverse cultures or traditions as an idea resonates since I have been part of both these the church culture my entire life and computer based technologies since the early 1980s . We’re now part of both traditions in this study – institutional religion and technology. So far we are only looking at one of them.
My current reading is a book by Brian Arthur called The Nature of Technology. It is not new but highly recommended, and it stands the test of its relevance since its first publication in 2009. In the introduction, Arthur observes that technology creates itself in an evolutionary process and the book is full of easily understood examples which we seldom think about. The evolutionary process would be helpful to apply to organizations and enterprises as well.
As an example, church buildings closed for at least a full year during the recent pandemic which first seemed to bring their lives to a full stop. When we become discouraged, we might be thankful that the duration was not as long as the Bubonic plague (coming to our attention via Monty Python) starting in the fourteenth century and lasting for 400 years. There might have been far more reasons for continuing fear then, since fleas carried the infection and there were no vaccines. The technologies of the time were limited; no one flew in from a foreign country but the disease was frightfully transmissible.
Arthur sees technology development as a system of autopoesis – a living system capable of self-creation. One might say the same of the institutional church, or indeed any organization. These all have things in common. They arise in response to a human need, which may not always be initially perceived – but when the new thing comes into existence we find a need for it, sometimes turning it into a want. They depend on some form of energy – simple and physical first perhaps – you need some to pound a nail with a hammer - and turning stones into pointy objects for hunting was one of the first cave man technologies. Later we learned to harness other energies. The creations improve with use – users provide feedback on what works well and what doesn’t. They involve combinations of parts that may exist independently at first and then go on to produce a new whole. Original uses also get borrowed for other needs, which may change the technology further. Technologies get applied.
How such things come to being, as well as their implications for use, are vitally important. These are worth exploring in the coming days.
Thinking - new and old
Happy New Year – a little late, but I have been busy.
One of my son’s family gave me an interesting Christmas present last year – called Storyworth. A small publishing operation sent a weekly question and invited me to respond online; it recorded all my writing in a sequential format. The questions were clearly designed for seniors and invited them to reflect on their childhoods, families and work lives. It was enjoyable. At the end of a year, my copy became a book – and in my case. extra copies went to each of the families for further reading.
Now that the assignment is complete, I want to get back to more writing here. While the emphasis originally was on organizational development in the late nineties, when I was still working regularly, it gravitated to an environmental focus. It is likely to change again. That’s the advantage of calling the site, Dynamic Thinking.
I’ve been doing more thinkng recently while serving as a volunteer in subordinate roles in a couple of places; that doesn’t stop some reflecting and rethinking of my own experience and seeing how that fits in now. I also have much more time to read, which also is stimulating with insights worth sharing. Expect to see some of that in the coming days.
Whither Social Media?
Whither Social Media
My compulsive side signs me up for everything. I can’t remember whether I signed up for MySpace, but I probably did. When I first heard of LinkedIn, I thought it was something like Link Eden – a heavenly place to meet like-minded people – an experience I actually had to some extent on Compuserve at the end of the 1980’s. A son’s father-in-law and I reminisced about that one recently. Twitter had an interesting feature at its inception – a limit of characters = putting it into the kind of structure that might appeal to a writer of haiku. I joined there as well. I read about Jack Dorsey and he seemed more interesting than the other computer moguls.
Things are changing fast. The new owner of Twitter is acting as a scoldng nanny to certain mainstream journalists for infringing on his privacy, though he seems less concerned about the transgressions of others. Though he is the sole decision maker here is also polling others to justify it - probablycollecting all the free speech crowd to agree with restricting freedom. It’s like a Wizard taking over a world and we are not in Kansas anymore.
Earlier this week I noticed a recent article by Ezra Klein on Twitter and summarize what he has to say here. He starts with the common assertion that Twitter is a digital town square. He then dismisses the metaphor on three counts:
Such a place can’t be global. A town has limitations relating to size and culture with hundreds or thousands of years of history that produced it. Different locations have different concerns and ways of relating.
Town squares have governance that doesn’t depend on the views of whims of a single person. The governance of such a town is sometimes the necessary antidote to such views or whims.
It’s not just existence that creates a good town square. Klein reminds us that such places can be used for brawls and lynchings. It’s the character of the participants that determines the practices and attitudes that determine them
And a key attitude of our era for many appears to be victimhood. In some cases this is totally legitimate; but I have to remind myself how lucky I am when the temporary breakdown of the old boiler that heats my apartment building gets fixed in hours, while those in Ukraine don’t enjoy the luxury of an easy repair. The very idea of the pursuit of happiness has led too many of us to think that things should always go our way.
Just because we can have attention with ease, I’m not sure we should. I am sometimes amused by how often some people change their profile picture on Facebook. Does it mean they feel undervalued and a new picture will do the trick? Does one clever tweet or retweet mean that we have made the world a better place? Does my lurking rather than posting in these places make me a superior or better person? Klein has many things to say in the article about the rightful place of attention – and reminds us that it is a collective responsibility - not just an individual one.
What he turns to after that is somewhat surprising – a Quaker meeting. The ritual involves silence and speaking only when one is moved to do so out of a whole other level of consciousness or reflectiveness. I got the opportunity to attend such a meeting some years ago and it was very moving. It was the very opposite of my flitting from one thing after another that even the mainstream news feeds us every moment flooding us us with trivia about the lives of others. I really don’t need to know the reason that the Royal Family is not responding to Harry and Meghan as both the New York Times and CNN want me to think about last night and today – but the fact that this story is covered by both is is a perfect illustration of the problem. How do we guard our attention to preserve the best of us collectively? At very least is means constant recognition of our shadow side and a choice to move away from it. Democracy depends upon that.