Mary Panttaja

One of the challenging things about attending a “Shakespeare” Festival for over 20 years is that, well, you see a lot of Shakespeare productions. This is our 3rd Othello, though I only remember the last two. Both times the role of Iago, really the primary role of the play, was powered by one of two of my favorite actors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSH). Anthony Heald did the part last time as a small, wiry, irritable thing. Dan Donahoe, this year, was equally malevolent though he felt less damaged and more dangerous. Both actors have brilliant ranges from tragedy to the the lightest comedy (My earliest recolllections of Donahoe are of a shatteringly brilliant turn as the Waiter in “Rough Crossing”.)

When watching a familiar play (though familiarity for me is lessened by my traditional lack of good memory) I get caught up in performances and the leading roles last night were full of good craftsmanship. Iago, though, is the only deeply interesting role. Othello is tragically cursed; Desdemona is tragically innocent. They were played well, but are less interesting to watch evolve. But the role of Iago really gives an actor something to carve into, to sculpt, to embed with complexity.

Iago was frightening last night. Power embedded with evil going to the heart of real damage in the world—no accidental damage—everything is intentionally inflicted. Donahoe was quite thorough in showing all the ways an insightful person can construct destructive events. He was very aware of what Iago was doing and he showed us each spark of anger and pain that drove his intellectual commitment to destroying as many people as possible.

It’s always a joy to watch Donohoe work. It was interesting to see how his physicality has changed–partly an older body and face, partly a crafted look of tough bravado. Looking forward to seeing him in “Our Town” tonight—how different must that be? The company seems quite excited about their production of the Wilder play which has been produced in the outdoor Shakespearean theatre.

PS. Saw “Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter” this afternoon. A short play about a Marine coming home from Iraq and the broken self that she is reluctant to take home to her children. It was quite good—though we have some talking to do to come to our completed thoughts—the fun of watching a company and audience come to grips with a new play.

I wanted to write about how I use and keep my travel notes. Of course, not all travel is noteworthy or note-requiring, and I don’t always keep notes. But this trip, as many others, is also about research—being in a place that my characters are going, or finding subjects/stories/illustrations for other writing. Here, as previously noted, we are following my characters John and Sara to a places that I haven’t been or places that I haven’t been in a while.

I take notes in a variety of formats:

• I type when I can, as now when we are driving and I have power. I’m known to pull the computer out and type three sentences and put it away.
• I write in a notebook when I can’t have power, as in my trek in Nepal or our raft trip in the Arctic. I have a medium size one and a tiny one depending on how much weight I want to carry. These notes are fun because you can discern my travel modality by the quality of my script. Driving in a car in Nepal gives one level of readability; riding an elephant through the jungle gives another. I love the physical visceralness of the marks on the page. I always smile at the notes I took riding the elephant Santi.
• Often writing is impractical and so when it’s a vision or an object I want to note I’ll take a picture with my digital camera. I can usually recreate my thoughts from the image. I have a couple of photographs of a wonderful girl in Kagbeni and some experiences of her life and how she might/will relate to Sarah’s coming trek. (Next book.) The photograph is all I need to pull it all back.
• I have been known to call home and leave myself a message. I own a digital recorder, but can’t find it. I would really want a system that transcribed it, for when I did a lot of dictation the transcribing part was too tedious to make it worthwhile. This is an area that would be useful to research as the technology is changing.
• Some moments all I can do is try to remember. This works about half the time; the other half of the time I lose whatever it was. Sometimes I make little numbered lists of thoughts to remember, hoping that a structure will help. Again, it only works sometimes. But sometimes you just have to trust that if the idea was useful, it will come again.

What’s the point of being anal about capturing notes? There is the obvious answer—so I don’t forget things that I have considered. But it feels a even more organic than that to me. I feel like it is part of the process of nuturing the updraft. All those ideas and images that are flowing to me are a part of something being created. Attention on my part is necessary. My part in the process is to bring these ideas and inspirations into form and the form they take, in this case, are words. I find that the more I work this edge of flowing ideas by being present and attentive, the more it flows. And forming them into words or images is the beginning of my work with them.

I was reading the latest Gary Snyder book last night: “Back on the Fire”. It contains a series of recent essays on a variety of topics relating to nature, art, writing, and the preservation of our world. (Snyder has always been one of my favorite thinkers and important resources. I discovered once that a close friend and I were two young adults who actually wanted to be Gary Snyder. Strange. But then again not every young poet has a famous novel written about his life: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac is actually about Gary Snyder. So we actually wanted to be the hero of a story.)

In his essay, “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder”, Snyder talks about poetry and literature in relation to the language and patterns of the natural world: ecology, environment, nature.

We speak of the ‘ecology of the imagination’ or even of ‘language’, with justification: ‘ecology’ is a valuable shorthand term for complexity in motion.

He quotes a wonderful passage from “The Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry” by Jed Rasula which develops a metaphor for the artistic process, but which can also be used to understand the creative process in all its forms.

Detritus cycle energy is liberated by funghi and lots of insects. I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so ‘enlightened mind’ is to daily ego mind, and Art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like mature ecosystems. turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation, and thrill; and reviewing memory…blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator for unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. It comes not as a flower, but—to complete the metaphor—as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycella that run widely through the soil, intricately married to the root hairs of all the trees. ‘Fruiting’—at that point—is the completion of the work of the poet, and the point where the artist reenters the cycle: gives what she or he has re-created through reflection, returning a ‘thought of enlightenment’ to community.

The concept of recycling and liberating neglected inner potential really resonates with me, that inner potential really being an updraft of our own lives (or in the life of our societies) with which we have not really connected.

I sitting in in a Starbucks in downtown Seattle trying to get some work done this morning. I spoke with a man in line about how disorienting it was to find yourself in a familiar place when in the back of your mind you know you flew last night. Of all the Starbucks I’ve been in, this is one. (Hong Kong, London, Colfax, SF, Healdsburg, on and on—-I’m sure you’ve hit more.) He suggested that it was much like MacDonalds world-wide—-MacDs for grownups.

I’m trying to find a pace and pattern (maybe it’s really tactics and practices) that enable me to keep working (writing and researching) while I’m traveling. Since that’s what I’d love to be doing I’d better figure it out—how to work through a modicum of distraction. The last month, with illness, remodeling, and family events (all good; except the illness) I really couldn’t find my way. But if I can get the tactics down, I know I can do better.

A couple of my tricks:

• Write anywhere you are comfortable, but write. I used to find myself with a bit of writer’s block (not usual for me, as normally there is always something I can blah, blah on about). I discovered, to my embarassment, that it was not a block to the writing, it was a block to sitting at my desk. Sometimes I just want to be horizontal. And I can write in that position as it turns out. So I just take the computer with me wherever I have the urge to be (and in whatever position). I write on the sofa sitting up straight; I write on the sofa lounged out flat; I write in bed; I write outside in one of my REI lounge chairs; I ocassionally write in front of the tv—but would usually rather be writing than watching. I would write in the bathtub (the subject of the remodel), but my Mac is not really prepared for the possibilities inherent in that location, so I am reduced to reading.
• Keep writing topics queued up all the time—one will always meet your needs when you come to write. If you can, keep a number of threads open. For me they seem disparate some days—but most of them come back around to weaving into the general thread of the the work.
• Move items to the top of the queue as the last thing you do before going to bed. I always try to have a draft of the next blog on my desktop. Work does happen overnight, and a fresh morning and a primed pump makes getting the material out really efficient.
• Stay open to moving ideas—thoughts percolating. Grab them and put them down—this post is just something I was experiencing—and much of everything I experience comes back to be useful—a writer’s work is handy like that—life IS the topc. My character George likes to write in a coffee shop.

More later—there will be many distractions in Seattle this week: friends, biking, kayaking, music. We’ll see what I manage to get done.

The Clean Garage

It is key to realize that we are not trying to create a single moment in time when our goals are reality, only to have those goals dissolve into dust. We want to create lives/products/businesses where our goals are continually realized and continually getting better. (They have to evolve as our dreams and goals continue to evolve.) It will never be enough to use a short-term technique (hire 10 people) to get the garage clean—unless they stay around, of course—for the patterns of life and action that got the garage in disarray are still there.

On the other side of the coin, if you figured out the behaviors and mechanisms that would keep a garage clean (just imagine it), then you wouldn’t actually have to clean the garage. You would just have to start living those mechanisms and the evolution of the clean garage would come into being. Get that—-you wouldn’t have to clean the garage, it would become clean as a matter of course.

What we really want is a life style or set of mechanisms (actions and use patterns) that evolve a clean garage. The clean garage is the state that we want to create—and we need to create a preponderance of potential that the clean garage will always (or mostly) exist in our future.

Silly way to think about it? Maybe. But if you substitute your future career, your growing business, the ability to continually evolve your product line, it starts to become a richer idea. The truth is that what you are trying to create is a particular state of the world in the future—and that means we need to build the potential of that now, in the present. And not for it to happen just once—one moment. We want it to exist with us until we dream of something better.

So what could a set of mechanisms look like for the garage? Let’s play with some ideas, some tactics and practices.

1. I will never set anything down in the garage except in the place where it belongs.
2. As I use each thing in the garage, I will make sure it has a place to live.
3. For each project that involves items in the garage (tools, toys, storage) I will allocate a little extra time in my project to organize those items.
4. Once a month I will sweep through the garage and look for 3 things that I can get rid of.
5. At the end of each season, I will put unneeded items away properly.

Maybe not a complete list; I’m sure you can do better. You never stop and clean the garage, but your actions will slowly evolve a more and more organized work space.

And darn, suddenly we realize that we have to rewrite all the rules as “we will”, and get everyone to agree. Mechanisms for group goals are more challenging—mechanisms for individual goals in which others can mess with you can be really tough (you want the garage clean but brother Sam doesn’t really care). But that is where leadership always lives—on the outside edge of what is easy to motivate in others where you need to develop the ability to empower and inspire others to participate.

And, of course, this is a relatively easy goal to visualize. Most of our personal goals are not so direct. But what we see is that we want to be continually building the potential of our goal state, so that the likelihood is that our goal will be realized. That’s what we mean by the preponderance of potential (the potential for our goal is greater in amount or value than that which is against our goal.) If we want to create anything, that is our job.

And a kicker is to notice that whatever is today is the the state that has had the most potential created; whether you like it or not. Our world is precisely as it is because this is what we have created together. Want something else? Then your job is to change the potential of the future to be different. And no one else can play your part in that evolution.

Note: Another time we’ll discuss control and lack of control—once we realize that we’re not in control the way we thought we should be, we sometimes just give up. We have to learn that there is a kind of control we do have (it’s just more subtle) and that giving up is not really an option.

Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire” beautifully lays out how species can evolve patterns and mechanisms to help each other through the process of living together in a common enviroment : bees and flowers, sharks and cleaner fish, humans and fruit. The mechanisms get more complex. Fruits meet a need (or desire according to Pollan) of humans and humans provide a service to the fruit. The evolutionary participants uncovered another active member of its neighborhood and found a way to build a relationship that helps the gene pool to survive.

The apple is one of his interesting examples. It has an relatively unusual survival tactic in that its primary form of reproduction produces an excess of variety—its mechanism focuses on the “new ways to get along”-part of the simple evolutionary pattern. So it creates an incredible array of new options. It can always evolve rapidly to meet changes in its environment, which gives it stability in maintaining and spreading its genes as a species. But any given form of the apple is doomed, as cross-polinated seeds do not breed true to the parents. But this pattern of mechanistic evolution is great for another species who comes into contact with the apple: humans. There are lots of kinds of apples with a great many different qualities. And we found many that met some of our needs and desires: sweet, dependable food sources. And, importantly, we discovered that we could control the reproduction of those features we like through cloning and grafting genetic material.

So the apple-human mechanism is based on the apple producing a lot of variety genetically, and the human controlling the apples genetic variation (when it wants) with its awareness and intelligence. The apple’s genes are spread over the planet and people have a manageable food source. The overall mechanism is built out of the skills and needs of independent species. The mechanisms together build a preponderance of potential that the future will continue to meet their needs and desires.

Successful models of business, and many of the “new” business models arising in Web 2.0 style, are evolutionary mechanisms for their markets. That is, they embody mechanistic behaviors or actions that reinforce their desired state of change—growth of their audience or customer base. The early versions of these were called “viral” after one the most successful evolvers we know.

These viral mechanisms—patterns of action and use—reinforce the spread of the virus, which means the adoption of the product. The product’s growth in the marketplace is entrained by the mechanisms. You can watch the mechanism work to change and evolve the state of the market as the potential for the goal to be continually realized is increased by the mechanism.

To cause a change in the state of an organization, whether it be market growth, product development, or improved ROI, you must not just “fix” a problem, but ingrain process mechanisms that reinforce the desired path. We must create dynamic evolutionary mechanisms that default to taking us where we want to go.

One of my favorite examples is an everyday problem: for many people the garage is always a total disaster and they really want to have a clean garage. (It could be anything that is consistently arriving in our present moment which we see as a “problem”—we don’t like it, but we always have it: missing deadlines,  uphappy customers,  processes that don’t meet current needs.)

We think that what we want is just a clean garage. We think that if we had enough time and help we could just get it clean. But this is a wrong-headed idea. We don’t really want just a clean garage—that would just be a moment in time (a brief moment) when we like the state of the garage. What we really want and need is a lifestyle, or a set of mechanisms, that result in a clean garage—automatically.

What does that mean? More tomorrow.

Back to the subject of creating organizations….

I have been reading two different books that are basically about evolution: “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, and “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan. One traces the power of evolutionary forces from biology through the evolution of cultures. The other illuminates the power of co-evolution, species evolving in concert for the benefit of both. Another new focus of evolutionary thought these days is the evolution of individual and group consciousness, growth in our capacity for awareness and action.

Evolution is a great model for managing our relationship to the things we are trying to create as well. Our effort to create things (lives, families, corporations, products) is just a slightly more conscious movement of that creative impulse that has evolved everything we experience.

How does the evolutionary model help us think about the choices we make?

The process of evolution itself is a creative mechanism, that is, it is a pattern of discovering success and failure through a natural mechanism of creativity. The universe has created/discovered/evolved (??) a process that results in ever more of what it is trying to create (which seems to be more diversity, awareness, complexity, and creativity.)

Once you find a functioning mechanism that through its regular actions succeeds in continuing to create what you want, or moves in the direction of what you want, you only have to allow the mechanism to keep functioning. Of course, if you are creating something new then the mechanism must allow for movement towards something you don’t want, and adjust for that. Path correction must be part of the mechanism.

So what do these mechanisms look like?

(In the case of evolution, I will, of course, be oversimplifying.)

A plant evolves by doing its thing the best way it knows how and living to create offspring that mostly know what it knows. In addition, it blends what it knows with a sexual partner in a slightly random sort of way that mixes it up—creates some new and different ways of getting by. Some of those succeed in the environment and some fail—some don’t live to create offspring, or create fewer successful offspring. So the mechanism is something like this: make more of what works and keep throwing new ideas into the mix. The “new ideas” are really important because the enviroment is not a single stable thing, but is itself changing making survival more or less likely. Biological evolution doesn’t have to know what its going for in terms of form or function—the mechanism results in life continuing to find a way in a changing world. (Of course, sometimes the mechanism comes up against an environmental change it can’t cope with—it takes times to find new ways of getting by. A meteorite was more than the dinosaurs could work their way out of.)

More about co-evolving next time.

I just spent two days with a 5 year old. She will be six next week. We took her to the snow which she had never experienced. We put her on skis—which, of course, she had not seen. We took her onto the icy corduroyed surface of the track and coached her along.

She then skied 1.5 kilometers out the track, up and down a practice hill, and back without a hesitation or doubt, with joy and interest the whole way. She would charge up a hill with a robust determination and confidence that took your breath away.

By noon she was so enamored of gliding downhill that she was totally undaunted by the requirement to walk up it, every time. Over and over she did it. Further up, further down. Further up, further down. She never complained or ask to stop. Eventually she let us down gently by telling us that she did not need our help any longer, that she could go up and down alone. Only when she could not slide down the hill without falling three times did she accept our suggestion that maybe she might want to stop and rest a while.

On the drive home she sang to us in a beautiful, young lilting voice. In English and in Spanish. And then she determinedly began to count. For miles through the countryside she counted. Stopping to figure every once and while, stopping briefly to consider. 200. 400. We arrived at home where we decided she would pause—eight hundred and sixty.

Where does such grace in being alive come from?

I just finished reading “The Road”, an amazing novel by Cormac McCarthy.

The book is actually shocking on so many fronts. It is a delicate elegy to the bond of love between a father and his son set against the most horrific situation you can imagine (and I’ve dreamed some pretty bad scenarios). The effect is stunning. I am still in awe of how Mr. McCarthy accomplished such a wondrous thing. Of course, these characters live with him and he had only to put them in this eviscerated world he envisioned using his brilliant skill and inspiration.

The odd thing is that I cannot recommend the book to you. You will have to come to on your own. It is a very dark thing and has some very difficult moments. (I discovered that I should not read it while home alone at night.) So on its merits, I would say that this is a brilliant book—but its material is not for everyone. Some sensitive souls might not bear up. (I would not recommend this to my daughter, for example, though she may want to read it.)

On a personal note: I apologize for the week’s disappearance. A construction project and bad virus sapped my week. Not yet well and not yet done. We’ll see how this week goes.

Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

There have always been ways for people to create businesses and organizations that are small and controlled. But in most situations, this meant that the organization would have a small reach: a local contractor, a small printer, a regional consulting service. You could often control the quality of your partners, pick and choose who to work with, find a small consort of like-minded individuals.

But for the most part, you could only build a company with a small reach—that is, it was difficult to speak to a lot of people, or provide services across the country, or to market around the world. If you had a really big dream, a far reaching goal, you needed to build a larger organization, taking on all the subsequent distraction that size brings.

But the advances in communication and connectivity have delivered profound solutions: distributed platforms for working with partners and employees, dynamic platforms for outreach to your customers. In addition, as Chris Anderson and others point out, the means of production for some many of our products are now in the hands of individuals: I can write, print, publish, and market my own books from the comfort of my living room; film makers can write, shoot, edit, and distribute video from any where in the world and connect with an available audience; I have a single laptop on which I can develop almost any kind of software with tools that I can buy without getting up off the sofa. (One of my favorite work sites.)

Because of ubiquitous communications, powerful personal computers, and evolving software tools, delivering a product or service to market now takes:

• Less money

• Less time

• AND FEWER PEOPLE

And, from my current perspective, as one looking for ways to deliver my inspirations to the market place, I am intrigued with how important it is that it can be done with fewer people. A concentrated, inspired set of partners can deliver products and services of value to millions of people. How incredible is that? How focused can our potential be? How much can we control our efforts and minimize the possibilities of diluted potential? With fewer of us, can we be more effective at staying aligned and coherent in our goals, intentions, and actions?

Of course, most of us love to work with others and we want to have partners in crime and inspiration. But since every inspired participant can do more and be more productive, we can each leverage more of our personal potential to the fulfilling of our joint dreams, with better odds of building a organization that can truly build potential geometrically.

E.F. Schumacher, the economist, in his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, inspired a generation of us to examine our lives and and our work through another lense. As the new economic realities come into play, we can see that small is not only beautiful, but that it can be globally powerful as well.

What are you going to be doing next?