Sullivan and emerging languages
The Bay Area dubliner David Sullivan sent me this. He claims that the internet and the new forms of commons rigths are driving the emergence of subtle languages. What do u think?
Ontological Design
April 21, 2009
April 14, 2009
Searle's 50 years at Berkeley
A celebration. A conversation. New questions.
February 20, 2009
Synthetic Realities, Social Labs & Excellence
- Orchestration of Networks
Orchestration of Excellence in Networks
Orchestration of Excellence in Pluralistic Networks
Orchestration of Excellence in Pluralistic Hybrid Networks
Fernando Flores has been insisting, for few years, that there is a variety of technologies - such as MMORPG- that creates and support the development of social, persistent virtual worlds. In other words, technologies that creates synthetic realities. The opportunity that this synthetic realities open is huge. They can be used as laboratories and simulators for innovating in social practices, as well as in developing practical mastery.
Many of these MMORPG -WoW- are political in its nature and involve a rich variety of activities -career, economics, business, community, militar, etc-. Consequently, they offers a natural space for social involvement. However, in order to be used as Labs or Simulators, significant adjustment to the game and the logic of playing the game should be introduced. The Lab do not operate and can't operate with the logic of Wizzard Entertainment and its game designers. The presuposition that playing a particular MMORPG will develop leadership, management or any other social skill is greatly misleading. Games by itself often become a painful addiction.
A twiked MMORPG -or in the near future a customized simulator- offers something that traditional education -with few exceptions as martial arts or performing arts- have not been able to offer until know: mastering practices. Following H. Dreyfus argument, he claims that mastering a practice requires social involvement. Only in social context that imply social involvement individuals can experience, observe and modify their emotional dispositions, encounter emergent aspect in their worlds, and endlessly refine their habits. MMORPG are not just social, but massive, diverse, global and hybrid providing a new horizon for developing and "orchestrating" masteries...
A new wave of technology driven transformations?
October 20, 2008
Ontologizing or acting with others in shared worlds
Ontologies, in my practical understanding, are theoretical frameworks that offer a set of distinctions -and relations between them- to articulate what are the fundamental aspects of the being of a particular being. What is important to keep in mind is that in creating the ontological framework to grasp the phenomenon, you also define the phenomenon to be grasped and -by extension- the territory for the emergence of anomalies.
Ancient understanding of being as a being such that has essence and existence has practical consequences in our daily life. It contributes to the belief that a human being has a surface, an appearance, and on the other hand, probably an essence, a fundamentally true nature that defines what that individual really is. So, appearance and essence can be coherent, aligned, or they can be highly misleading. What is interesting about this ancient ontology -still alive in our common sense- is that it may invite us to ask ourselves about our first impression and orient us to maintain open questions all along a relationship. A certain humble inquire in front of the inexhaustibly other and their unaccessible essence. However, this distinction has its flip side, and it can be used in a fundamentalist fashion to characterize others disregarding their appearance -actions, utterances, presence-. Specially in regimes or institutions that claim to have some privileged access to the inaccessible essences.
Modern Ontology, as articulated by Descartes and Kant offers a whole new perspective. Being is characterized as subject able to discern and doubt while confronted with a unambiguously commensurable res extensa . In this approach we are a kind of being that is intrinsically well equipped to observe, explain and transform the world around them. Moreover, "observation" has a particular characteristic, observations can be "objective". In other words, individuals may have access to the essence of things, to the transcendent, universal characteristic of something. The interesting aspect of this ontology is that it gave a lot of legitimacy to the individual, the person, to discern and engage in controversies. This impetus was particularly relevant for the development of science and technology and marked the religious/scientific struggles of the Renaissance.
Post Modern Ontologies, as articulated by Heidegger moves the center of gravity from the individual to the "whole" -clearing-; from the articulated present-to-hand foreground to the transparent background of the ready-to-hand -cultural and practical habits-; and from abstract generalizations to the concrete texture of the being-there-with-others-in-the-world as such. The beauty and value of this post-modern ontology is that it provides a robust context for dealing with the challenges of living together in local/global communities. In simple terms, only the experience of anxiety (nothingness) gives us an ephemeral chance to regain some access to the shared whole, to the shared background and to the other in a vibrant and creative fashion.
Ontological Design belongs to this post modern stream. Flores makes an original contribution to post modern ontologies by building on Heidegger and J.L. Austin controversial understanding of language. In doing so, he now moves the center of gravity from the past to the future; and from contemplation to action. In this very same orientation Hanna Arendt and Paul Ricoeur explore the language of commitments in moral, ethical and political discourses. The value of this Ontological Design -post modern- approach is its capacity to design, develop social practices in a simple, powerful and accessible way.
"Ontologizing" is a OD practice to transform any valuable disciplinary discourse -set of distinctions- in distinctions that are build out of specific actions and commitments. In doing so, notions as communication, listening, innovation, management, trust, leadership or networked networks loose their vagueness and are transformed in accesible practical tools.
February 10, 2008
May 08, 2007
April 20, 2007
William McDonough on Cradle to Cradle
Here is a very thought-provoking video on design from the widely-known architect, William McDonough.
April 10, 2007
Descartes and the Cartesian Style
A decade ago Maria Flores-Letelier and I wrote this reflection on the modern way of being and its philosophical roots. Take a look and let us know what do you think.
February 16, 2007
On Management
Managers are in the game of organizing work for the sake of delivering recurrent value to a set of customers and constituencies:
- Managers design organizational structures, cross-functional horizontal processes, extended open networks, action pathways, management systems & a wide variety of business practices.
- Managers design, implement, and develop business roles.
- Managers mobilize action by exchanging commitments, caring for others' concerns, anticipating breakdowns, re-interpreting contexts, and assuring customer satisfaction on-time and on-cost.
- Managers declare priorities, declare breakdowns, manage risks, and reconfigure capabilities.
- Managers develop trust and cultivate productive and creative moods.
- Managers contribute to their communities by mentoring people, developing meaningful work, and honoring ethical principles of extended communities.
All that managers do happens in conversations, in a dance of speaking and listening. Productive conversations produce productive managers, and vice versa. Management is fundamentally based in traditions of historical linguistic practices.
February 15, 2007
Ontological Design
In the early 80s, an engineer captivated by the emergence of PCs and networks, working at Stanford University and completing his PhD at Berkeley University, produced a historical philosophical insight. After many years of working with his theoretical breakthrough, he hesitated on how to name it. He tried “hermeneutic pragmatic”, and after a while “pragmatic hermeneutics.” He abandoned both, and never persevered in creating a definite name for his contribution.
His work wasn't particularly theoretical or abstract. On the contrary, he chose very practical issues as the terrain to develop his thinking: software design, management, organizational & processes design, education & skill development. In engineer Fernando Flores' view, most of the difficulties related with productivity, quality, and innovation were rooted in modern understandings of work. His critique didn't target particular management traditions, such as bureaucratic administration, scientific management, rational decision making, or the cybernetic approach. His critique was directed at the philosophical underpinning of all those theories at once.
Inspired by Martin Heidegger – or better, by Hubert Dreyfus' interpretation of Heidegger – and by John L. Austin – in professor Searle's version – Flores claimed that modern understanding of work missed one fundamental piece: a phenomenology of action. It sounded simple, but with that claim, he was turning up-side down a wide variety of management assumptions, organizational development criteria, and software design principles. Furthermore, he was spotting a historical cognitive blindness.
As an illustration, I'm going to point out a few of his claims. He claimed that the essence of work is communication, that human communication in a business context is about engaging in conversations and exchanging commitments, and that commitment always happens in the listening of the involved actors (including the situations in which I'm listening myself). Consequently, he developed a wide variety of theoretical papers that reinterpreted traditional thinking, putting at the center this new perspective language and human coordination. He and his team wrote on a wide variety of subjects including: managing networks of conversations, linguistic ontology of organizations, conversations for action, conversations for possibilities, ontological reconstruction of discourses, team leadership, focalization of strategy, and even subjects that seem closer to psychology than to business, like cognitive emotions and moods.
While exploring the possibilities of his theoretical insight, Flores assembled a diverse team that included computer scientists, biologists, physicians, philosophers, politicians and a variety of business professionals. Among the most active contributors were Francisco Varela, Michael Graves, Richard Owen, Rachelle Halpern, Chauncey Bell, and Bob Dunham. They simultaneously built a company – Logonet, Inc., set up a lab for designing networked social practices (Ontological Design Course ODC), and created a discipline that they named Ontological Design.
In many respects, Ontological Design was a reaction to a pervasive orientation in education, psychology, and management unbalances to be extremely prolific in explaining the past, and extremely weak in shaping futures.
The basic premise of Ontological Design was that the primordial foundation of human realities and human existence is the historical stability of patterns in a wide variety of interplaying and autonomous phenomenological domains. Using technology and networking for distinguishing patterns, observing patterns, assessing patterns, and creating new patterns was at the core of the game.
Flores' insight was that there are a set of linguistic patterns configured and evolved out of human social life, that allowed human beings to share historical worlds and to create new worlds. He called those patterns commitments, and he distinguished four basic forms: Request, Promises, Declarations, and Assertions. The original intuition on this matter came from previous works of Adolf Reinach and John Austin; however, Flores hermeneutic interpretation of these linguistic patterns gave them whole new dimensions. Probably, the change is equivalent in magnitude to what Karl Marx did in reinterpreting G.W. F. Hegel's dialectic.
These linguistic patterns – commitments – become the primordial principles of Ontological Design. Basic human practices like communicating, learning skills, managing a team, dealing with money, or developing careers were complex unities whose components were simple commitments. Consequently, those practices were reconstructed as structures of recurrent conversations built out of commitment.
Following the same approach, valuable historical disciplines like management, finances, education, manufacturing (TPS), politics, software design, among others, were reinterpreted as discourses and practices whose essential value rested in its capacity to synthesize patterns of commitment, and by that, able to disclose possibilities and disclose action pathways to effectively address specific business, social, political, spiritual or any other historical human concern.
The notion of commitment empowered the Ontological Designers to put most of their attention on inventing patterns to shape the future, and to overcome the often wasteful explaining-the-past habit.
The notion of commitment seems obvious, and for that reason is most of the time unnoticed or overlooked. Commitment patterns have some very striking aspects.
- Commitments are social practices that allow us to bring forth new futures, by virtue of being celebrated in the present, based in past consensual conventions. We produce action in social networks based in our capacity to invent and celebrate commitments. Basic patterns of commitment are few; they exist in every culture – in their own way; they exist with independence of idioms; and they produce enormous simplicity and focus at the moment of producing action.
- Commitments are at the heart of language, and make us sensitive to the facticity that, in speaking and in listening, we are never describing an objective-independent world. To the contrary, we are socially co-configuring – better to say disclosing – a shared world based in consensual distinctions and a shared background of practices and habits.
- The ultimate grounding of our commitments is our communal humanity that grants modern human beings the freedom to bring forth commitments – out of traditions, nothingness, and will – and the obligation to cope with the consequences.
So, going back to our story on Ontological Designers, I said that the core of their design work was designing commitment-based practices, and exercising them. In doing so, they produced new practical skills. They were able to build paradigmatic practices to modify individual and collective styles or cultural orientations – a rather existential exploration, and they were able to articulate – reconstruct, and make visible – and modify social habits, emotional patterns, and moods.
There are three valuable sources for this story: Understanding Computers and Cognition by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Disclosing New Worlds, by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life by Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores
I was an early participant in this experiment and I will share with you my view about what was produced in that prolific social lab and I will also elaborate on what I have produced out of my work with ontological design.
