I was thumbing through my photo collection last night when I came across this photo, taken (I believe) in October 2012. So many computer transfers have screwed up the dates on my photos, but I think that’s about right. There was a large parade in Buenos Aires, and the dancers and marchers had literally come from across Latin America. Folks from Bolivia, Peru, Chile — you name it. It was a mass of beautiful synchronized inclusive group activity, and everyone was having a good time, myself included. Heterogeneous age distribution, lots of connection, good food — the works. The US has so much to learn. We do public space interaction so poorly. Instead of carefree connection, we’ve got semi-automatic weapons. Sad!

I’ve been to 38+ countries (depending on how you count) and have fond memories of all of them. I’ll keep posting photos.

On to Twitter — short version, Twitter is one of the most fascinating research platforms out there. It will also make you totally crazy. You can reach all sorts of folks, but most people run their Twitter feed either as a member of the audience for entertainment, some kind of relay for views they like, or their own personal radio station. There’s a longer post on how Twitter is an amazing tool to understand people’s personal development.

So far, the only thread I’ve been involved with that a.) had numbers, and b.) involved consensus being reached (of the myriad issues facing the world,) was that every young man (no mention of women) should own a pig, raise it, kill it, and eat it as part of their personal development, or give up on bacon for the rest of their lives. Vegans and non-vegans seem to agree with this. I’m not quite sure that this is the bildung that my intellectual friends, Lene Andersen and Tomas Bjorkman had in mind. Plus, my read is that it would be very challenging to do in a 2nd floor walk-up in Manhattan. Or Stockholm. Note to readers — I was raised on a hobby farm, and have plenty of experience in this kind of lesson. I’m not so sold on it.

A small bright spot — I did find John Hagel’s work as an educational/change consultant for Deloitte on Twitter. John’s talk at the Singularity University confirmed my research techniques for divining techniques for high-performance organizations was/is fundamentally sound. The short answer? Teams of 5-15 members, with insights gained from Big Wave Surfers (in the ocean.) Not very far off from my own experience as an modestly-extreme kayaker myself, integrated into the Industrial Design Clinic. There is nothing like team-based extreme sports to teach the lessons of an evolved empathy. You have to read your friends and their situations quickly, and accurately, based on data, or someone could drown. That data-driven relational development translates well to signals and sensing in other environments. And as I’ve talked about before here, maybe all that hyper vigilance turned out to be beneficial after all.

John’s talk is here (he starts at 1:00) but this will likely vanish soon — in probably 3 days. There are a handful of practitioners on the leading edge who are convergent. I’m hoping to gather some of his more nuanced insights, as well as turn John to the Deep Code OS approach that I’ve developed, as his surface observations jibe very well with my own. What is nice is we do come at this from different spaces — John is corporate, mine is academic. He hasn’t answered my questions about his challenges yet, but I’m sure he’s had his share. At any rate, the video is worth the watch, if nothing else, for those that get this stuff to know the community is growing. Get it before it goes away.

By the way, I am working on a longer post about looking at organizational structures to solve problems sorted with a Cynefin filter. It’s a natural fit, with some unexpected insights. Stay tuned — it’s just a lot of work.