Mary Panttaja

…where updraft implies a high preponderance of likelihood that something is really happening—that you are on the right track.

This morning, Saturday September 1, we are ensconced in our new apartment 95% moved in and totally functional. We chose the apartment Monday, signed and took possession Tuesday, hired movers Wednesday, and Friday did the whole shebang by 2PM when the movers left. Okay, I had some more unpacking and organizing yet, and it took a bit to do the whole first grocery run thing, but we ate dinner in our organized and furnished apartment. It surely helps that we only brought what we needed (except for three extra boxes of kitchen stuff), and that we had a house full of goods already packed and ready to ship. But here we are.

In addition, our partner Tom takes possession of his apartment today, partly furnished because the owners, at the last minute, didn’t want what was there. And we found and signed a letter of intent on an office that totally meets our specifications in size, style, location, etc. And that was quite a story: Wednesday, we asked to be shown the “Jack Falstaff” building at the corner of 2nd and Brannan, but when we got there the broker called and said that he made a mistake and he was about to show us (to his surprise) a place down the street. But it turned out to be perfect, perfect and the letter of intent was signed yesterday. It is three blocks from our apartment and two blocks from Tom’s apartment. (Our fourth partner, Matt, lives in Oakland and will be commuting.)

Last odd fact, we have a straight visual shot through a maze of buildings to the upper floors of our office building from our balcony–didn’t know that when we took it, because we hadn’t found the office yet—and that will help us with some network challenges.

That’s a bit of what you get in an updraft—a high preponderance of things going your way.

Pamela Slim posted an article that gets directly to one of the problems with a over emphasis on measurement: Obsession with the competition is a luxury of the over-funded

It is great reminder for me that there are very practical ways to explain and apply the principals of AWM (the Arising World Model). If not, then it’s not very useful. It’s application needs to extend from mundane, practical problems to the spiritual and philosophic questions that we ask ourselves. Everything should work

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.

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.