What do Mao and geese have in common? Star Wards! I’ve been asking friends why they think that Star Wards has grown so fast and has unleashed such amazing energy and creativity. Richard Garside,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/ppro/experts/expert/727
Bright’s chair but better known as a leading commentator on criminal justice (also known by what my mate Sarah refers to as as having “a brain the size of the planet”) said it’s Maoist. “Like the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign but without the execution of intellectuals.” I’d always thought that Percy Thrower had invented the concept of Let A Thousand (sic) Flowers Bloom. But no, it was the man responsible for millions of bicycles, snazzy suits and state murders. Intriguingly, we have inadvertently emulated some of the features of Mao’s approach to local change, at least in the initial stages of the Flowers’ campaign. He believed in setting out general principles centrally and then letting local people determine how best to implement these. (We’ll of course avoid the sharp reversal of the openness of Mao’s campaign, which resulted in the savage persecution of intellectuals who had been encouraged to criticise the official regime.)
A gentler comparison without a nasty ending was provided by my much-loved pal Phil Dourado. www.phildourado.com. Phil has just pre-launched what is likely to become an Internet sensation for leaders – the Leadership Hub. the world’s first online collaborative leadership development community.
www.theleadershiphub.com. Equally awe-inspiring is Phil’s role as a carer for his wife, Sandy, who has Huntington’s Disease. Sandy has written an amazing book about her experience of living with this devastating illness, and if you only read one book this year, or decade, read this one. Each chapter is written by a different member of the family, and if you only read one book chapter this year/decade, make it Danny’s. At 15 he has produced one of the wittiest, most insightful, courageous, compassionate and articulate pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.
http://www.phildourado.com/hdbook/
Phil and I have just come back from one of our regular city breaks, this time in Oslo. We were wandering happily in the opposite direction to our target destination of the Nobel Peace Museum. (Did you know that the Norwegian word for Peace is Fred? No, nor did we.) Either of us could lead an ambitious new social movement, but neither of us could find their way to the corner shop. We were chatting about Star Wards and Phil pointed out that it has the characteristics of a ’self-organising system’. He illustrated this with a description of water falling down a hill and eventually forming a river. But apparently flocks of geese or cranes also apply the same principles of ‘emergent behaviour’. “An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
In other words, the sum is much greater than the parts. The wonderful Wikipedia (itself a fab example of emergent behaviour, with individual contributors creating the ultimate people’s encyclopaedia) points out that “In some cases, the system has to reach a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity before emergent behaviour appears.” A nifty description of what Star Wards aspires to.
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