In
This Issue
Feature
Power
Invisible
by
Frances Moore Lappé
As
long as we conceive of power as the capacity to exert one’s
will over another, it is something to be wary of. Power can
manipulate, coerce, and destroy. And as long as we are convinced
we have none, power will always look
negative. But power means simply our capacity to act. Many
Americans are returning power to its original
meaning—“to be able.” From this lens, we
each have power—and often, much more power than we think.
Culture,
not fixed aspects of human nature, largely determines the
prevalence of cooperation or brutality, honesty
or deceit. And since we create culture through our daily choices,
then we do, each of us, wield enormous power.
In fact, we have no choice about whether to be world changers.
If we accept ecology’s insights that we exist in
densely woven networks, then we must also accept that every
choice we make sends out ripples, even if we’re not
consciously choosing. So the choice we have is not whether,
but only how, we change the world.
Systems
Stories
Reverse Blueprinting in a Creative Mode
by Anastassios Perdicoulis
Human-built systems in engineering and architecture
start with a well-documented design: a plan or a blueprint.
This design guides the construction, allows troubleshooting
upon breakdown, and permits repairs or modifications
to the system. Natural systems, however, come with no such
documentation. To be able to work with them,
environmental engineers and landscape architects can “reverse
engineer” the system and create “reverse blueprints”—
models that can be openly communicated, questioned, and discussed.
Planners often use reverse
blueprints to assess development strategies. This article looks
the use of these models in the creative part of
planning—that is, discovering the right actions that
will satisfy a project’s objectives.
From
the Resource Shelf
Turn to the Crowd for Diverse Ideas
by Edward Miller
Are experts really smarter than the rest of us? Most
would have us think so, but according to James Surowiecki in
The Wisdom of Crowds, the answer depends on the circumstances.
He contends that, in certain situations, “randomly
assembled groups of nonexperts consistently demonstrate more
astuteness than individual experts.” He cites
examples from honeybees to horserace odds, from Google’s
algorithms to Wikipedia’s consensus-edited data. The
relevance to management is that most organizational cultures
still overvalue experts. To be really smart, leaders
need to tap into the wisdom of the crowd they have assembled
in the organization, as well as outside stakeholders.
From
the Headlines
Compounding Interest in the U.S. Economy
by Janice Molloy
The daily headlines testify to the dire state of the
U.S. economy. Many of the contributing factors fall into the
category of reinforcing dynamics, in which a problem builds
on itself over time. One such vicious cycle involves
the fall of home prices and the tightening of credit. The good
news about a reinforcing process is that it can
work in the opposite direction—under the right circumstances,
a vicious cycle can become virtuous. The other
fact about reinforcing processes is that they eventually hit
a limit and play themselves out. Unfortunately, these
abstract dynamics can create real hardship for many people.
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