Publiek / Verandering?

Godin schrijft dat The Practice betekent dat je genereus bent voor je publiek. Dus zonder dat je je een bepaald einddoel stelt lever je toch iedere dag iets bij ze af waar juist zij iets aan hebben. Het genereuze schuilt erin dat je ze niets vraagt, maar je inbeeldt wat juist jij kan ’shippen’ (leveren) om juist hen iets te geven waar ze iets aan hebben en dat niemand anders ze had kunnen geven. Wat je ze wilt geven is verandering, ‘change’: door wat jij ze geeft zijn zij in staat om iets te veranderen.

Natuurlijk gaan ze er iets van vinden. Hopelijk vinden ze het natuurlijk leuk of goed of bruikbaar of zo, en vooral voor herhaling vatbaar. Maar veel waarschijnlijker is dat ze het kut vinden, er kritiek en commentaar op hebben hoe het beter had gekund en hoe (als je geluk hebt, en waarom). Godin stelt voor dat je toch begint te leveren: ideeën voor verandering volgens je eigen specificaties maar met de bedoeling om je publiek iets te geven. En als er dan commentaar op komt dan maak je steeds een keuze of dat jouw Practice beïnvloedt of juist niet. Er zit niets anders op: zonder shipping geen Practice, dus dan moet je ook op de blaren gaan zitten als iemand de moeite neemt om te reageren.

In het eerste geval stel je je dus voor hoe je je publiek nog beter kan bedienen door (nog) specifieker en genereuzer te zijn. Maar waarschijnlijker is dat je je werk voortzet zoals je al deed, want jij weet hoe je die verandering teweeg kan brengen bij hen, niet zij zelf kunnen je vertellen wat jij moet doen om hen wijzer te maken en dus hoe ze willen worden bediend. Want ze moeten veranderen en dat weten ze nog niet, want het is nieuw.


Je publiek past zich dus aan. Niet dat zij opeens iets leuker gaan vinden dan ze eerst vonden (of ineens belangrijk gaan vinden wat jij vindt). Eerder is het zo dat degenen die zich niet bij je thuisvoelen vertrekken, en hopelijk dat anderen die zich wel thuisvoelen zich aansluiten bij jouw populatie. Dus wie jouw ideeën voor verandering bevallen die blijven en zeggen het voort. Maar de ruimte die je zelf hebt om je aan te passen is niet groot en de Practice verandert niet, dus als er maar 3 geïnteresseerden zijn so be it.


De n van je populatie bevindt zich dus tussen een solipsistische 1 en een veel te groot getal in. Dat getal kan veel te groot worden als je je best doet om de ‘crowd te pleasen’. De originaliteit raakt zoek, je bent niet langer authentiek. Die laatste zijn mijn woorden, Godin heeft zijn bedenkingen bij iemand die zich helemaal niets van zijn omgeving aantrekt en in de supermarkt gaat liggen krijsen. Ik vind authentiek eerder het vermogen om ideeën waarvan iedereen denkt dat die bij elkaar horen niet automatisch relateert, maar dat je in staat bent je eigen combinaties te maken of zelfs eigen ideeën aan het geheel toe te voegen. Zo een rijk, idiosyncratisch, specifiek gedachtegoed vind ik authentiek.


Alleen jezelf bedienen of echt iedereen bedienen zijn de uitersten. In beide gevallen speelt geluk een rol en de kans dat je boodschap verwatert wegens te veel of te weinig publiek. De zolderkamer uitvinder die ineens een uitvinding doet die instant een publiek oplevert, en iemand die een enorme verandering tot stand brengt terwijl hij alleen bezig is de massa blij te maken zijn uitzonderingen. Maar vooral biedt een heel klein of een heel groot publiek de kans om je te verstoppen. Neem n=1: het is nooit goed genoeg om te verschepen en je blijft je eigen publiek. Neem n=groot en wat je schrijft verwatert en als het dan niets van komt dan was het toch te hoog gegrepen.


Een goede omvang is zo dat jouw ideeën voor verandering bij jouw zorgvuldig gekozen groep Anklang vinden en dat je crowd er enthousiast van wordt om die veranderingen ook echt te waarderen, tot stand te brengen, en door te geven. Ze delen ze met anderen in hun netwerk en daar komen weer nieuwe leden van jouw community vandaan. Dus de million dollar question: wie is mijn publiek? Wie is geïnteresseerd om mijn ideeën voor verandering te lezen en te gebruiken. Welke ideeën zijn dat trouwens, welke zijn concreet genoeg dat mensen er iets aan hebben om te veranderen?


Ben ik in staat om een lijstje te maken met mensen en erbij bedenken welke veranderingen ik hen wil meegeven en dus welke ideeën ik met hen kan delen? Of heb ik in het verlengde van mijn studie ideeën waar ik een geïnteresseerd publiek bij kan bedenken? En, in dat omgekeerde geval dus, wie wil dat horen en wat is dan de verandering die ik voor ogen heb?

Authenticity

Some define innovation as a lack of self-restraint. But one has to admit that lingering in a painting of what once was (Mark Fisher) generates stagnation and that is not the way of the world. El Bulli’s celebrated chef Ferran Adria instead defines tom innovate as to not copy. Montroll (1982) introduces MAXENT as a method for predicting human behaviour, because people tend to employ every position of the applicable Gauss distribution.

You have to agree that it is hard to do something that hasn’t been done before and that is why some avoid it. Seth Godin writes in The Practice that you can choose the pattern to live by. You may opt to follow an industrial one that guides your everyday activities by their expected outcomes. However, this offers different activities compared to those that establish and reinforce your identity from your own perspective (your self), and others’.

Your identity is the resultant of continual interactions with what you encounter in life. Following the industrial pattern, Godin continues, your identity instead gets to be made up of outside elements not of your choice. This affects the way you perceive and the way you are perceived. It generates a difference of perspectives on your identity and leads to friction in interactions. And, Godin argues, your products contribute to the world.

According to Godin in order to contribute to your self and to the world you must innovate by making something new in a creative process. Activities that follow an industrial pattern tend to point in the direction of desired (final, systemic) outcomes. The pattern inspires confidence in the outcomes because everything in its organisational realm is directed there according to a plan.

Or you follow a pattern that develops your identity in both of the senses. Here the approach is to do stuff and then find out what we like, instead of defining what we like and then acting in accordance. Inspiration has no practical meaning to the professional, but the need to act continually has: love what you do replaces do what you love. By following what you (turn out to) like while doing it, you find the pattern that contributes most to our identity and to the world.

Start today doing stuff without a preset plan in order to find out what you and others love about the process. In this way you develop an individual pattern that contributes to your identity guiding your future actions. The awareness that, although innovative, it may not lead to anything requires generosity without aiming for a final outcome, but for a beautiful process.

This requires the faith that this approach will add value to our selves and to the world. It can not provide confidence that we act so as to benefit the performance of an industrial system. This faith originates from the conviction that that radical pursuit of creativity lasts because it corresponds with your self and with the world.

You are more authentic if regardless of outside influence you determine your identity through actions that accord with what you favour. Heidegger qualifies the identity as authentic that results from disallowing external influence to shape the mind without conscious decision. Outside ideas as a consequence rarely remain unscathed leaving a trace on your mind. And in that way you contribute to innovation.

The Ancients about process and change

In this post I discuss some phrases that pivot around the topics process, change, and time, from The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1961). These topics are interesting in the light of my research that I founded in process ontology. My chosen ontology, what is knowable, is determined by the chosen metaphysics, my assumptions without proof.

Ontological choices are a basis for what you think and do (what you permit yourself), and of particular relevance here, for the theory I develop. They make distinctions from competing ones, and guide your thoughts in some direction, restricting their extension everywhere. Take the assumption that the earth is at the centre of our solar system. Distinct from the heliocentric assumption, it directs our thoughts regarding the movement of celestial bodies. Or take the assumption that people are a primitive, because at a Panglossianistic apex of evolution, and all else is derived, and of derivative importance. This leads to a different view than universal evolution that is indifferent to substrate.

Both initial assumptions tend to unduly allow people an important position, first because they are in a spatial centre, and second because they are the uniquely sophisticated product of evolutionary development, in the chronicle centre as it were. These thoughts are ubiquitous and persistent, and they can be consequential. They are known to go back to the Ancient Greek philosophers in written form and foundational for further thinking.

Another example of such an influential thought is the assumption, very much alive today, that everything is made up of objects and that change is explained from their relations. This is complementary to the thought that process is the pivot and change a primitive. Both strands of thought were developed at the height of Ancient philosophy (the inventive bit according to Russell), but object ontology kept the upper hand for roughly two thousand years (thereby causing a great deal of damage according to Russell).

Anachimander (~546 bc) writes: ‘Into that from which all things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time‘. This resonates with me, first because it mentions the metaphysical notions of making and erasing differences, and repetition. This description of the entire process of existence as a recursive loop is reminiscent of the Ouroboros. Every outcome (of a step cycle) is necessarily again the beginning of the next one. The meaning of the ‘injustice’, different from its modern understanding) of things is not developed to their full complement: askew from their natural order in time. That is necessarily and causally followed ‘as is ordained’ by the ‘reparation and satisfaction’ of that order. He points out that differences are made and erased at every cycle. New differences again present themselves at every opportunity as long as there is time, what Deleuze (1968) calls differenciation (sic).

The saying πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei: everything flows) is attributed to Heraclitus (~540 bc). It is exemplified by the thought that one cannot enter the same river twice. The notion of a river (including its colloquial use) is an abstraction of all the rivers that I can see and where I can take a bath. This notion is of course fortified by the word river to point out this abstraction so as one can mention the word cow to point out the species. Language in this sense tends to objectify phenomena and reinforce linguistically: a river has come to be considered an object instead of a causal process in continual flux defined by change.

Russell writes that: ‘ .. it (the subject matter dpb) is the burning not what burns. ‘What burns’ has disappeared from modern physics‘, when it turned out that matter is exchangeable for energy (p 65). Science seeks what is permanent and it would appear that not the river but the flow is permanent. I wish to mention that this fits with the statement in the Introduction of my PhD thesis that I set out to find a lasting pattern. An ontology that holds that the nature of a river is knowable as an object instead of a flow is bound to generate error. That said this by comparison recent progressive thinking exhibited in physics has not reached every nook and cranny of every obscure scientific discipline.

However, next it has been a source of doubt ever since the Ancients, and he continues to say that: ‘Philosophers, accordingly, have sought with great persistence, for something not subject to the empire of Time. This search begins with Parmenides‘ (p 65). Parmenides (~515 bc), contrary to Heraclitus argues that nothing changes. The unchangeability suggested by Parmenides is the foundation of the notion of indestructibility of substance: ‘A substance was supposed to the persistent subject of varying predicates‘ (p 70). This is a Platonic (aka essentialist) approach also called monism found in many disciplines, including business science. I believe that this is striking, because more than a river, I would consider a business to be in continual flux.

His metaphysics is based on logic and he assumes that words have a constant meaning, which he supposes unquestionable. However Russell writes that: ‘.., no two people who use the same word have just the same thought in their minds‘ (p 68). This statement resonates with me, because individual worldviews differ because of people’s differing life experiences. And in a wider perspective, that the notion of differences as a norm fit reality better than uniqueness. It is, however, distant from Parmenides’ view that nothing changes, as well as from the widely accepted view that it is possible to have identical perceptions of something and to express oneself identically. I believe this is a rare turn of events, especially regarding language, but it is possibly excepted by logic, mathematics and some strands of coding. They are fully symbolic and thereby free of human interpretation: their expression and perception are necessarily identical for different individuals.

According to Empedocles (~494 bc), last the sources of change are Love and Strife. The extent of their presence in substances determines their nature. I associate these conceptualisations respectively with a stable state in phase space that tends to last and attract, and an unstable state in phase space which is bound to repel and end. These counteracting forces are immanent to the observed processes and whether they come to the fore and the extent to which depends on outside influences. This image of naturally conflicting immanent forces is the hallmark of complexity and chaos, and thereby relevant for systems constituted by more than two elements.

This has been a discussion of a few selected phrases from ancient history of what Russell refers to a phase of Ancient Greek philosophy. They were not or hardly pursued during two millennia. Other ideas were selected instead to support the development of philosophy and to direct scientific endeavour. This course of events has moulded our thoughts into patterns beyond change or even discussion. I believe it is important that we are wary of such patterns and the consequences they bear. I believe that the foundational assumptions of some scientific disciplines are weak, because anthropocentric, little connection with modern human neuro-psychological theory, and object orientation. I also believe that some solutions, or at least awareness for the patterns that led to them, have been around for a long time.