Exploring The Adjacent Possible

Exploring and Exploiting

by Greg on January 5, 2012

All organisms balance their energy expenditures between exploring and exploiting. Last night I watched a National Geographic documentary about the forest elephants of Gabon so I will use that as an example. These elephants roam hundreds of kilometers from the inland rainforest to the coast. They forage across numerous ecosystems and in some cases even reform the environment to suit their needs. The opening portion of the documentary focused on a clearing that the elephants had created by trampling the vegetation over many generations. The pools in that clearing now collect highly concentrated minerals necessary for the elephants survival and also support plants that can’t be found in the elephants’ “natural” habitat.

In a sense the jungle elephants engage in an instinctual (naturally selected) form of agriculture. But of course, this limited form of environmental engineering is not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of an animals that can consume hundreds of kilograms of vegetation a day.

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Structural Change, Learning Curves and The Dual-Mind Limitation

by Greg on December 12, 2011

A bit of housekeeping: I promise to get back to more typical economic/market oriented fare in the upcoming weeks. I am in the process of detailing several revisions to the four quadrant economy model to be followed shortly thereafter by the addition of several new layers to that model. I am also finishing up David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years and have committed to writing a review. That will prove an interesting challenge as Graeber offers an endlessly fruitful reference to draw upon wrapped up in a perspective that is highly divergent from the approach I have taken in my own writing.

Before I get to that I am going to indulge my current fascination with learning and productivity curves one more time. I’ll make some effort to keep us on topic at the end of the post by relating this theme back to the current economic malaise.

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Cultivating Fractal Knowledge Flows

by Greg on December 1, 2011

Does strict focus lead to highly productive deliberate practice or disconnection and myopia?

Does engagement lead to productive collaboration or distraction?

…

I faced a curious conundrum recently when someone pointed out that I was equally supporting two apparently contradictory positions. A few weeks ago I wrote a long essay exploring the phenomenology of continuous learning. That was largely a story about developing one’s own internal capabilities. The implied hypothesis was that by focusing deliberately on certain forms of creative discipline, an individual can develop exponentially superior capabilities in the long run.

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Learn From People Like You – Learn By Observing People Unlike You

by Greg on November 21, 2011

I have been doing a deep dive on personality types recently. The transition to a free agent career path has imposed a steep learning curve. Lot’s of people will tell you that working independently requires more self discipline. What they won’t tell you is that working independently demands an entirely different sort of self discipline.

The hacks and habits that I had learned previously have not only proved insufficient; in many cases they have proved counter-productive. The habits that lead to success as an employee generally entail suppressing your unique strengths and emphasizing the strengths demanded by your employer. In fact, the ability to (on demand) suppress your areas of divergence and emphasize your areas of convergence is an employment skill in itself. The ability to thoughtfully choose between convergence and divergence is a free agent skill. That may be less true for people who have found particularly fitting professions, but of course the dream-jobbers are not the people adopting free agent life-styles.

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A Pilgrimage Through Stagnation and Acceleration

by Greg on November 2, 2011

Why does success so often lead to anti-climax and a sense of stagnation?

Why is creative work so perpetually frustrating ?

Why do you constantly feel like you are falling behind?

In an effort to recover from my recent mini-rut I spent quite a bit of time consuming material that, in retrospect, revolved around these questions. I will try to synthesize several of the more promising items and see if I can’t push them a bit further.

Thrust and Drag

Venkat Rao, attempting to explain the phenomenon of the 10x engineer, proposes a model of creative work based on an analogy to the mechanical concepts of thrust and drag:

He defines thrust work as those tasks with the potential for super-linear performance improvements as a function of consistent extended blocks of deliberate practice:

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I Apologize For Writing This Post…

by Greg on October 21, 2011

I apologize for this picture as well. This is how I feel right now...sans the awful mullet wig.

I bet that title got your attention. Next time I should think about attaching such an intriguing to something actually worth reading.

I don’t like this post.

I am starting with that statement. I don’t like that I am writing it. Unfortunately, I committed myself to publishing something tonight – after two weeks of silence – and this is the only thing I can force out of myself at the moment.

I have been struggling with the worst writer’s block for the past two weeks. Actually, the problem isn’t the writing so much as the completing and publishing. I have succeeding in writing and rewriting and then trashing several posts over the past couple weeks. The trouble is with the framing. You, dear reader, don’t just want information. You don’t just want rambling opinions. You don’t just want perspectives. You want all of the above wrapped up in a neat little package that makes the whole thing seem compelling. The neat little package is the difficult part. Or at least that is what keeps repeating in my head, paralyzing my refinement muscles.

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The Naive Search For Anachronistic Progress

by Greg on October 7, 2011

All plans imply an attempt to impose the values of the past…on the future.
- Alvin Toffler, 1969.

As economic malaise persists we are now increasingly bombarded by analysts and pundits who correctly grasp some aspect of the situation but then persist in immediately jumping to the wrong conclusions. A few recent examples:

An article in the Guardian entitled This Economic Collapse is a ‘Crisis of Bigness’ is introduced as follows:

Leopold Kohr warned 50 years ago that the gigantist global system would grow until it imploded. We should have listened.

Yet, in the very first paragraph we encounter the following puzzling accusation:

Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it’s a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled “growth” are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair. (emphasis mine)

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Thoughts from One Year OnTheSpiral

by Greg on September 18, 2011

Year One completed…

I recently received a notice that my first 1-year domain registration is about to expire, which makes this an opportune time to review the past year and round up a number thoughts I have been mulling for a while that haven’t justified a full post.

One year ago I decided to take this endeavor seriously enough to justify registering my own domain name. The posterous blog I originally dabbled with was located at www.spiral-out.posterous.com. At the time the domain spiral-out.com was available, but when I finally decided to register around this time last year that domain was taken. As some of you know, “spiral-out” was a reference to the song Lateralus by Tool, and specifically to the following verse:

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The Unintended Consequences of Transparency

by Greg on August 30, 2011

Before I get started I want to thank everyone for all the comments on last week’s post, Reconsidering Gift Economies. I will return to that topic next week with some revised thinking. This week I want to shift topics, inspired by an interview with election expert David Brady, via Russ Roberts of EconTalk, which suggests some curious conclusions regarding the benefits of transparency.

The part that captured my attention was a discussion of what Brady calls ‘the personal vote‘. He is referring to the trend, beginning in the mid 1960s of congressional candidates running more on the basis of their personal characteristics and relying less on their party affiliation. It is important to be clear, he isn’t arguing that candidates became less partisan…only that candidates increasingly positioned themselves as individuals with unique platforms rather than as ‘the Party X candidate’. Their messaging became more “vote for me” and less “vote for my party”.

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Reconsidering Gift Economies

by Greg on August 18, 2011

One of the most frequent questions I hear is some form of the following:

Do you think gift economies will ever develop to the point where they can supply basic needs?
or
How can gift economies be made more robust so as to supply basic needs?

The short answer is, NO. I do not think gift economies will ever supply basic needs nor do I think they are appropriate to the task. However, if you keep reading the long answer is not so pessimistic…

The basic reason – gifts are fickle. Dictionary.com defines ‘gift’ as follows:

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The Decline of Capital

by Greg on August 11, 2011

It is difficult to do refined work and creative work at the same time. Over the past few weeks I have been pursuing a number of different threads and it takes some time to see the connections between them and produce fully formed insights. Until those connections emerge, it is just a soup of disparate ideas with hints of relevance to each other.

I sit down to try to write something but everything that comes out is half formed garbage, lacking any rhetorical force. I could attempt to refine that garbage, manufacture some rhetorical import, but it would all be fake. Moreover, those manufactured conclusions would only obscure the real insights that are still floating out there somewhere…waiting to be grasped.

Creative work and refined work come and go in cycles. A long creative cycle creates a mountain of material that demands to have some order imposed on it. Extended dedication towards refinement becomes boring and creates a yearning for new direction. Jumping prematurely from one to the other simply creates confusion and frustration.

…

While wallowing in my frustration I realized that this individual struggle provides an apt metaphor for the challenges currently facing the developed economies around the world. The strains on the industrial system have been mounting for some time and the cracks in the foundation are beginning to show. Unfortunately, a fully baked alternative has yet to emerge.

In other words, a creative cycle has been building for some time. The hints of solutions are floating around, but they have yet to cohere into anything ready to be refined and implemented at scale.

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Utilizing Scarcity in the Four Quadrant Value Universe

by Greg on July 22, 2011

What insight can be drawn from the four quadrant value universe? Can it help creative professionals understand how to earn a living while pursuing their passions?

A couple weeks ago I attempted to explore modes of navigating the four economies. That post was largely unsuccessful and a few exchanges with Stefan King in the comments demonstrated the confusion inherent in any analysis of transitions between quadrants. It turned out that asking, “How do I convert?” was the wrong approach.

I eventually realized I was not discussing conversion strategies but instead the social signals that indicate quadrant boundaries. For example, you know you have moved from the attention economy into transactional economy when information begins arriving in the form of a physical product. The transfer of physical product is nearly always an indication that monetary payment will be required.

Does it follow then that refining your attention economy work into a physical product will facilitate monetization?

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