Sonja Blignaut, a longtime partner of Dave Snowden and experienced practitioner in Dave Snowden´s work, will facilitate a practical workshop intended to build a bridge between Dave’s thinking and methods and their practical application.

Source: The Complexity Workshop – Making sense of complexity, April 29 2019 | Crisp – Get agile with Crisp

SoL is continuing… a series of events

Source: SoL European Learning Plaza, Hungary 2019 – Global SoL

Source: Generative Music – Brian Eno – In Motion Magazine

A talk delivered in San Francisco, June 8, 1996
by Brian Eno

What I am talking about tonight is an idea that really began for me about 25 years ago and has pretty much obsessed me ever since. It began as a musical idea, it began as something I heard in music and gradually I realized that in fact it was an idea that was occurring in all sorts of areas. In the course of this talk what I would like to do is to trace the history of that idea in my own work and in the work of some other people and also to show how the idea suddenly branches out, opens up, and becomes a metaphor for what I consider a very important new body of thinking. I have 45 minutes to do this and I have a clock here as well.

In the mid-sixties, something happened in modern music which really made a division between what had happened prior to that and what was now starting to happen. At the time it was called the new tonalism, or the new tonality. It was a movement away from the classical tradition which had sort of defined progress with becoming more atonal, becoming more chaotic and in a sense becoming less musical in the sense that ordinary people would understand the word music.

	A Year With Swollen Appendices, by Brian Eno
	If you buy these book here a portion of the sale goes to In Motion Magazine.

In the mid-sixties, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and several others began working with tonal music again. Simple chords, simple intervals, rhythms that you could follow that weren’t in 15/8 and things like that (laughter). Music in fact you could almost dance to.

At the time, the distinguishing characteristic of that music seemed to be that it was tonal, as opposed to atonal. Over the course of time, since then I think another important characteristic has emerged. It was very clear in the first major piece of Terry Riley called In C. Most of you probably know of this piece or some of you probably know it, and many of you may have played it. It’s a very famous piece of music. It consists of 52 bars of music written in the key of C. And the instructions to the musicians are “proceed through those bars at any speed you choose”. So you can begin on bar one, play that for as many times as you want, 20 or 30 times, then move to bar 2, if you don’t like that much just play it once, go on to bar three.

The important thing is each musician move through it at his or her own speed. The effect of that of course is to create a very complicated work of quite unpredictable combinations. If this is performed with a lot of musicians you get a very dense and fascinating web of sound as a result. It’s actually a beautiful piece and having listened to it again recently I think it’s stood the test of time very well. That piece however was not the one which blew my socks off.

That dubious credit goes to another piece of music by a composer called Steve Reich. I think it was his earliest recorded piece. It’s a piece called It’s Gonna Rain, and I would like to listen to a bit of that now.

(It’s Gonna Rain played.)

For many years I was the only person I knew who thought that was a beautiful piece of music (laughter). It’s quite a long piece, it’s about 17 minutes long. It’s produced by a very, very simple process. It’s a loop of a preacher saying “It’s gonna rain”. Identical copies of the loop are being played on two machines at once. Because of the inconsistency of the speed of the machines they gradually slip out of sync with one another. They start to sound like an echo. Then they sound like a cannon, and gradually they start to sound like all sorts of things.

The piece is very, very interesting because it’s tremendously simple. It’s a piece of music that anybody could of made. But the results, sonically, are very complex. What happens when you listen to that piece is that your listening brain becomes habituated in the same way that your eye does if you stare at something for a very long time. If you stare at something for a very long time your eye very quickly cancels the common information, stops seeing it, and only notices the differences. This is what happens with that piece of music.

Quite soon you start hearing very exotic details of the recording itself. For instance you are aware after several minutes that there are thousands of trumpets in there – this is without drugs. With drugs there would probably be millions (laughter). You also become aware that there are birds, there really are birds — in the original loop of tape there are some pigeons or something and they become very prominent as the thing goes on. Most of all, if you know how the piece is made, what you become aware of is that you are getting a huge amount of material and experience from a very, very simple starting point.

Now this completely intrigued me. Partly because I’ve always been lazy, I guess. So I’ve always wanted to set things in motion that would produce far more than I had predicted. Now the Reich piece is really a … what would be called visually a moire pattern.

Can I have the over-head projector please?

Now a moire pattern is when you overlay two identical grids with one another. Here’s one, here’s the other. Now when I overlay them, see what happens, you get a very complicated interaction. You get something that actually you wouldn’t have predicted from these two original identical sheets of paper. This is actually a very good analog of the Steve Reich piece in action. Something happens because of one’s perception rather than because of anything physically happening to these two sheets of plastic which produce an effect that you simply couldn’t have expected or predicted.

I was so impressed by this as a way of composing that I made many, many pieces of music using more complex variations of that. In fact all of the stuff that is called ambient music really — sorry, all the stuff I released called ambient music (laughter), not the stuff those other 2 1/2 million people released called ambient music, — all of my ambient music I should say, really was based on that kind of principle, on the idea that it’s possible to think of a system or a set of rules which once set in motion will create music for you.

Now the wonderful thing about that is that it starts to create music that you’ve never heard before. This is an important point I think. If you move away from the idea of the composer as someone who creates a complete image and then steps back from it, there’s a different way of composing. It’s putting in motion something and letting it make the thing for you.

One of the first pieces I did like that is called “Music for Airports” (applause) , thank you very much. (Shows graphic of Music for Airports). This is in fact a picture of the alien fleet that abducted me last time I was in San Francisco (laughter), and that’s the mother ship just there. It was an awful experience because they stole all my hair (laughter). In fact this really a diagram of Music for Airports.

Music for Airports, at least one of the pieces on there, is structurally very, very simple. There are sung notes, sung by three women and my self. One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again.

So this is the piece moving along in time. Your experience of the piece of course is a moment in time, there. So as the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. The basic elements in that particular piece never change. They stay the same. But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety. In fact it’s about eight minutes long on that record, but I did have a thirty minute version which I would bore friends who would listen to it.

The thing about pieces like this of course is that they are actually of almost infinite length if the numbers involved are complex enough. They simply don’t ever re-configure in the same way again. This is music for free in a sense. The considerations that are important, then, become questions of how the system works and most important of all what you feed into the system.

I think that the classical composers who came to this way of composing have not thought it about very much. They accepted given instruments and invented systems to reconfigure them. To me that was an important part of it. I think coming from pop music, which of course is a music more than anything else about sound, and about the possibilities of sound in studios, coming to doing this from that background, I think I was well equipped for that.

Music for Airports came out in 1978 to howls of neglect (laughter) in fact it didn’t do at all well in England. But it did do quite well here by comparison. I have an eternal debt to the United States for actually cheering me up a little bit when that record came out. In fact I was so depressed about the response to the record and the other stuff I’d been doing in England that I decided to move to America for a few years, which might be the sign of a weak-willed person who lives off flattery but, you know, there you go (laughter).

One of the first places I came to was San Francisco, I lived here for a while. In fact I practically lived in the Exploratorium. (Laughter and applause) I have my Exploratorium. instant moire in my pocket (laughter). If you haven’t visited the Exploratorium. in the last month you should go — it’s really a good place. If every city had one of those the world would be a much better place.

In the Exploratorium. the thing that absolutely hooked me in the same way as the Steve Reich piece had hooked me was a simple computer demonstration. It was the first thing I’d ever seen on a computer actually, of a game invented by an English mathematician called John Conway. The game was called Life. Modest title for a game.

Life is a very simple game, unlike the one we’re in. It only actually has a few rules, which I will now tell you. You divide up an area into squares. You won’t see the squares on the demonstration I’m about to do. And a square can either be dead or alive. There’s a live square. Here’s another one. There’s another one. There’s another one there.

The rules are very simple. In the next generation, the next click of the clock, the squares are going to change statuses in some way or another. The square which has one or zero neighbors is going to die, a live square that has one or zero neighbors is going to die. A square which has two neighbors is going to survive. A square with three neighbors is going to give birth, is going to come alive, if it isn’t already alive. A square with four or more neighbors is going to die of over crowding.

These are terribly simple rules and you would think it probably couldn’t produce anything very interesting. Conway spent apparently about a year finessing these simple rules. They started out much more complicated than that. He found that those were all the rules you needed to produce something that appeared life-like.

What I have over here, if you can now go to this Mac computer, please. I have a little group of live squares up there. When I hit go I hope they are going to start behaving according to those rules. There they go. I’m sure a lot of you have seen this before. What’s interesting about this is that so much happens. The rules are very, very simple, but this little population here will reconfigure itself, form beautiful patterns, collapse, open up again, do all sorts of things. It will have little pieces that wander around, like this one over here. Little things that never stop blinking, like these ones. What is very interesting is that this is extremely sensitive to the conditions in which you started. If I had drawn it one dot different it would have had a totally different history. This is I think counter-intuitive. One’s intuition doesn’t lead you to believe that something like this would happen. Okay that’s now settled (looking at screen), that will never change from that. It’s settled to a fixed condition. I’ll just show you another one. I’ll show you this one in color because it looks nice. A little treat. (Laughter).

At the Exploratorium, I spent literally weeks playing with this thing. Which just goes to show how idle you can be if you’re unemployed. I was so fascinated, I wanted to train my intuition to grasp this. I wanted this to become intuitive to me. I wanted to be able to understand this message that I’d found in the Steve Reich piece, in the Riley piece, in my own work, and now in this. Very, very simple rules, clustering together, can produce very complex and actually rather beautiful results. I wanted to do that because I felt that this was the most important new idea of the time. Since then I have become more convinced of that, and actually I hope I can partly convince you of that tonight.

Life was the first thing I ever saw on a computer that interested me. Almost the last actually, as well. (laughter). For many, many years I didn’t see anything else. I saw all sorts of work being done on computers, that I thought was basically a reiteration of things that had been better done in other ways. Or that were pointlessly elaborate. I didn’t see many things that had this degree of class to them. A very simple beginnings and a very complex endings.

At the same time as I was working with Life I was also starting to some new pieces of music that used the moire principle, but in a much more sophisticated way. So now I have go back to the overhead (screen). What I started to do was make moires of different types of elements. Not only of single notes or similar sounds, but moires of basically rules about how sounds were made. This gave me some very much more interesting results. As you can see (manipulating lines and shapes on the overhead) Here’s two simple cycles going out of phase, here’s a wiggly one going out of phase, and then hallelujah – New Age music (laughter) for which I am consistently being blamed (laughter).

You can start to build very beautifully complex webs of things from very simple initial ingredients. What I would like to do is play you a piece called Neroli which was released five years ago or something which was another version of this way of working. I’ve only ever had one idea really, and that was this, and everything I’m going to play was a version of this idea. Can you put on Neroli please. I’ll leave this running because it’s a very good piece to talk over.

Can you now put on this Mac, please.

The next thing I ever saw on a computer that really astonished me was a screen-saver by a local lad called Gene Tantra. I don’t now if he’s here tonight I really wanted to invite him but I didn’t have his number. He made a screen-saver for the aptly named Dim company After Dark. This screen-saver which they only released in one of their files because it’s clearly much too good to come out very often was called Stained Glass. Stained Glass unlike almost all other screen-savers looks at its own history. Stained Glass generates images, then it sucks them out, multiplies them, chops them about, collages them together in different ways.

I realized that if you put other screen-savers in the center of Stained Glass, then it would do the same thing to them. What you have is a visual generative piece.

I’ve got three versions of Stained Glass. There’s one along the top there (pointing to overhead screen), this square is another. And then this oblong is a third. At the center of these two is a different screen-saver called Doodles. Now someone in a London magazine, when I said I’d spent a long time looking at screen-savers described this as “rather sad” (laughter) with that infallible cynicism that we English are so good at.

But the reason I was looking at them so closely was because again they picked up that thread of something that uses a tiny amount of information, a minute amount of your computer’s processing power, and produces something that for me is thirty times as beautiful as anything I’ve seen off a huge clunky CD ROM.

I quickly realized that for me this was the future for computers. Computers seen not as ways of crunching huge quantities of data or storing enormous ready-made forests of material, but computers are the way of growing little seeds.

This piece here, this Stained Glass is a very small seed, in fact I think it’s something like 25 K, now for those of you who know what a K is will know that 25 of them isn’t very many (laughter). This is the kind of precise scientific language you can expect this evening (laughter). Just to give you an impression, a CD ROM is, ohh, very much bigger than that (laughter). I’ve never actually worked this out. Something like 30,000 times more information on a CD ROM, I suppose, than is needed to make this work. I think this is about 30,000 times as interesting actually. Partly because it never repeats itself. This thing will go on generating like this, and it will stay pretty much the same, but it will never be identical. This suits me fine. I don’t want big surprises. *I want a certain level of surprise – I’m too old for big surprises, now. (Laughter) – after those aliens.

I thought this has got to be the future of computer music. I’ve seen so many things done on computers that were hopelessly overwrought and complicated and in the end sounded like what I call bubble and squeak music. Or on the other hand, sounded like typical sequencer music, sequencer music where everything is bolted together and it’s all completely, rigidly locked. It would have been great in the 1930s, I’m sure, that music.

I wanted something that had an organic quality to it. Had some sense of movement and change. Every time you played it something slightly different happened.

So, screen-savers. In fact Gene Tantra’s, as I was saying was the first thing that I saw like that. Subsequently I saw another one by another local lad called Greg Jarvit which is called Bliss, which is another very, very interesting system. Both of those things really impressed me. Mostly because they were economical. I am so thrilled my anything economical. It’s so easy not to be economical and anything that uses a very small amount of information smartly impresses me.

I came to California a couple of years ago with the idea that the right approach to using this new medium called CD ROM was to actually use it not as a way of, as I said storing forests which you then, tediously navigate through. It takes you four minutes to see another bottom on the Prince video (laughter), but I thought how much more exciting it would be to see something that happened like that, immediately, and furthermore happened in a way that you’d never seen it happen before. It seemed to me that this was the answer. To some how use the CD ROM as a way of planting seeds into your computer, and then using the computer to grow those seeds for you.

In fact, although this abstract, Tai Roberts from ION proved to me that it could also be done figuratively, it doesn’t have to be abstract. I don’t have an example of that, in an afternoon Tai managed to put together an animation of a figure which was a generative animation, that’s to say it didn’t rely on calling up a stored video, it relied on having a very small seed and then performing certain operations. They were actually twists and turns from Photoshop performed live on to this seed. In a sense the theory was vindicated, but only in a sense because it never got made in that way.

I went back to England not really having seen the musical thing I’d hoped to find. I had come with a whole proposal for how to make a sort of generative musical system in a computer. It was a muddled proposal because I don’t know enough about computers to frame it properly. But it was fairly detailed and fairly accurate to what has since happened.

When I got back to England, about a year afterwards a letter came through from some people called Sseyo, a company called Sseyo, located in exotic, sunless Beaconsfield, which is about 25 miles north of London. I had been imagining that I would find the answer in San Francisco, but in fact these guys were working just up the M1 (laughter).

They sent me a demo of something they had done. It was a music generating system. I listened to this CD and there were a couple of pieces on it that were clearly in my style. In fact it turned out that they were followers of my music. The interesting thing to me was that the pieces that were in my style were actually very good examples of my style. In fact they were rather better than any I had recently done (laughter). I was rather impressed by this.

I got in touch with them and the next example is really the center of this talk – which is lucky because I’m about half-way through on the clock. Now I need the PC please (to the control room) – it’s only available on PC, I’m sorry to say. (Hissing from audience.) Yes I thoroughly agree, the people from Sseyo are here tonight – hiss louder. We have one supporter of the PC system in the front row here – he’s wearing a white t-shirt … (laughter).

This is a very, very interesting system. It allows you to specify a set of instruments. I should first tell you a little about it technically. This is a computer (laughter). In there there’s a sound card — that’s to say a little synthesizer. And this computer tells that little synthesizer what to play according to the rules that I’ve set in here. Now these rules cover all sorts of things that you might want to do musically. They cover very obvious things like what scale is the piece in. And just to show what that looks like … this is slightly re-configured since I last looked at it. These are scales. Now if I want to have a little bit of minor second in my scale I can do that. A little of this, a bit of that, and a little bit of that, and some of that, and some more of that, and so on and so on. I show you that to indicate that all of the rules are probabilistic — that is to say they are rules that define a kind of envelope of possibilities. The machine is going to improvise within a set of rules, which is to say there’s a greater chance that it’s going to play a fifth, than a flat fifth for example. And so on and so on.

There are rules concerning harmony, that is to say, and a second harmony, play a flat fifth harmony. There are rules concerning how it would move from note to note. Will it move in big steps, or small steps, and in fact in this piece here I have some of the instruments are going to move by big steps, and some by quite small steps. There are a hundred and fifty of these kinds of rules. They govern major considerations like the basic quality of the piece to quite minor ones like exactly how the note wobbles. I’ll play you a bit – is this thing up? – He cried to the empty void (laughter).

This piece of music, which is quite unpredictable and sometimes has quite large gaps in it, as it has chosen to do right now, it’s embarrassing, this music is making itself now. It is not a recording, and I have never heard it play exactly this before. If you don’t believe me I’ll start it again. See. It will start.

This piece, I guess I’ve listened to for a couple of hundred hours or so. I often have it running in my studio, while I’m making records. It’s a very satisfying piece of music. It carries on rebuilding itself. It sometimes pulls a surprise, like this. There’s one very exotic harmony that can only occur under particular conditions and occasionally it pulls it out. What interesting to me is that again it’s very economical. You can use the computer in many other ways while you’re doing this. If you want to use it as a word processor, it’ll carry on making the music in the background.

I’ll play you a part of another piece just to show you that it can do other things. They are so unpredictable, it’s very difficult just to play to people because you can switch it on and say listen to this, and nothing happens.

Having started working with this system I am so thrilled by it. I think there are other generative music systems, but I happen to understand this one and I know it’s a good one. I’m so thrilled by it that it is very difficult for me to listen to records anymore. Putting on a record and knowing I’m going to hear the same thing I did last time has actually become a little bit irksome. It feels quite Victorian to do that (laughter). I think this has really moved up into a new phase of music.

You know up until about a hundred years ago people never heard the same music twice. Of course it was always different. When recording appeared, suddenly you had the wonderful luxury of being able to play music wherever you wanted to, and control it in various ways. But of course it was always the same thing. And now you have this thing which is kind of a new hybrid where you can play the music wherever you want just like a record, but it won’t be the same thing each time. This is actually very thrilling I think.

Now whether you like the music or not is another issue. This just happens to be the music I make. It doesn’t have to sound like this, just to console you (laughter). It’s very good for making techno and all that sort of thing as well. I was informed on the radio the other day that I was the father of industrial music – which is not something I’ve been accused of before (laughter).

I started thinking about the differences between generative and what I would call classical or symphonic music – I have not really decided on a name for the rest of it. And these are the differences. It’s not either or. Music can be anywhere along a line between these two.

Classical music, like classical architecture, like many other classical forms, specifies an entity in advance and then builds it. Generative music doesn’t do that, it specifies a set of rules and then lets them make the thing. In the words of Kevin Kelly’s great book, generative music is out of control, classical music is under control.

Now, out of control means you don’t know quite what it’s apt to do. It has it’s own life. Generative music is unpredictable, classical music is predicted. Generative unrepeatable, classical repeatable. Generative music is unfinished, that’s to say, when you use generative you implicitly don’t know what the end of this is. This is an idea from architects also, from a book called How Buildings Learn, the move of architecture away from the job of making finished monumental entities toward the job of making things that would then be finished by the users, constantly refinished in fact by the users. This is a more humble and much more interesting job for the architect.

Generative music is sensitive to circumstances, that is to say it will react differently depending on its initial condition, on where it’s happening and so on. Where classical music seeks to subdue them. By that I mean classical music seeks a neutral battleground, the flat field. It won’t be comfortable — with a fixed reverberation, — not too many emergencies, and people who don’t cough during the music basically.

Generative forms in general are multi-centered. There’s not a single chain of command which runs from the top of the pyramid to the rank and file below. There are many, many, many web-like modes which become more or less active. You might notice the resemblance here to the difference between broadcasting and the Internet, for example.

You never know who made it. With this generative music that I played you, am I the composer? Are you if you buy the system the composer? Is Jim Coles (?) and his brother who wrote the software the composer? — Who actually composes music like this? Can you describe it as composition exactly when you don’t know what it’s going to be?

Why does an idea like this grab my attention so much? I said at the beginning that what I thought was important about this idea was that it keeps opening out. This notion of a self-generating system, or organisms, keeps becoming a richer and richer idea for me. I see it happening in more and more places.

I think what artists do, and what people who make culture do, is somehow produce simulators where new ideas like this can be explored. If you start to accept the idea of generative music, if you take home one of my not-available-in-the-foyer packs and play it at home, and you know that this is how this thing is made, you start to change your concept about how things can be organized. What you’ve done is moved into a new kind of metaphor. How things are made, and how they evolve. How they look after themselves.

Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do. They produce work that gives you the chance to experience in a safe environment, because nothing really happens to you when you looking at artwork, they give you the chance to experience what might be quite dangerous and radical new ideas. They give you a chance to step out of real life into simulator life. A metaphor is a way of explaining something that we’ve experienced in a set of terms, a different set of terms.

There’s a very interesting book by Lakoff and Johnson, that famous thirties singing team, it’s a book about metaphor, it’s called Metaphors We Live By. They give a very clear example of the effect of metaphor. They say we use in our culture the metaphor, argument is war. All of our language about argument “she defeated him”, “he attacked her position”, so on and so on, they are all arguments that relate to fighting.

When we think about the process of arguing, we tend to then reconstrue our possibilities in terms of that metaphor. What Lakoff and Johnson say is suppose that somebody had said argument is dance, suppose that was the dominant metaphor. So instead of it being seen you have the process where one person defeats another, it becomes a process where two people together make something beautiful between them. We could have that metaphor for argument, we don’t.

But do you understand that a shift of that kind produces an entirely different kind of discourse. How the shift from one way of dealing in activity that we all engage in to another changes that activity. Suddenly our language of possibilities is renewed and different.

What I’m saying, I suppose, when I talk about these things here (on his chart of the differences between generative and classical musics), I’m saying we’re saddled with a whole set of metaphors that belong over here. Those are our metaphors about how the world works, how things organize themselves, how things are controlled, what possibilities there are. Generative art in general is a way of not throwing those out, we don’t get rid of old metaphors, we expand them to include more. These things still have value, but we want to include these things as well.

My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind. … An object of culture does all of the following, it innovates, it recycles, it clearly and explicitly rejects, and it ignores. Any artist’s work that is doing all those four things and is doing all those four things through the metaphors that dominate our thinking.

Published in In Motion Magazine – July 7, 1996

Also see: Brian Eno Biography

Excellent newsletter from the excellent CoCreative – subscribe at the bottom of their homepage: http://www.cocreativeconsulting.com/

Source: Systems Change is Taking Hold! News, Tools, & Updates from CoCreative’s Work

Systems Change is Taking Hold!

News, Tools, & Updates from CoCreative’s Work

With daily reminders of the complex social and ecological challenges we face, we are encouraged by the bold work of thousands of “systems heroes” around the world. In the year ahead, we’ll be working on new tools, resources, and (shh…) a new learning and support platform to support this growing field.

In this issue of our (admittedly irregular) newsletter, you’ll find tools, learning, and partnerships that are sources of inspiration and hope to us. Inside…

• 2019 CoCreative Course Schedule

• Collaborative Learning & Innovation Community (CLIC)

• Building the Field of Systems Change

• Tools we’re sharing

• Resources from the field

CoCreative’s 2019 Course Schedule

Whether you’re contemplating, just getting started or fully engrossed in taking on a complex challenge with others, CoCreative has a course that can support your efforts. We’ve taken the best of over two dozen approaches to collaboration, strategy, and change and designed a training program that can meet your needs.

Here’s what one of the participants; Deborah Chang, recently offered…

CoCreative’s training stands out in three crucial ways. One, they situate their training within the context of your long-term work Sometimes I leave .a training and think, “That was wonderful, but what do I do with it?” With CoCreative, I always walk out with a concrete way to apply their training. Two, CoCreative’s frameworks stand the test of time. I find myself going back to CoCreative’s materials over and over again, even a year later. In fact, my CoCreative training manual is within reach of my desk so that at any moment, I can refer to it when planning my next event. Three, the trainers have unparalleled experience across industries, geographies, and cultures.

No matter what you’re working on, CoCreative’s trainers will be able to support you in adapting their frameworks to your specific context.

Our full course calendar for the year is still in development but here are two open registration courses that you can sign up for now…

Collaborative Innovation Essentials May 22 -24 (2.5 days)

Washington, DC

Host: Ashoka

Register / Learn More

Collaborative Innovation Essentials

October 28 – 30 (2.5 days) 

Honolulu, HI

Host: Omidyar Fellows

Register / Learn More

Along with our core Collaborative Innovation Essentials course, we offer other courses on Collaborative Leadership Essentials, Leveraging Conflict for Innovation, Design & Systems Thinking for Transformational Change, and Advanced Collaborative Leadership. We’re happy to bring any of these courses to your community like we did last year for Health Share of Oregon, the Humboldt Area Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Building Capacity for Systems Change

Collaborative Learning & Innovation Community (CLIC!)

One of our wonderfully tenacious clients recently asked us, “By the way, did I tell you folks that this work is hard? ☺”

Yes, it is. It’s hard intellectually, emotionally, and sometimes even spiritually, to lead groups of people who don’t know each other, might not trust each other, and maybe don’t even like each other (and who are busy on top of that) to drive complex change across organizational, cultural, and sectoral boundaries. (Just reading that last sentence is hard!)

It’s not all pain and difficulty, of course; there are many moments of joy, connection, victory, and transcendent purpose that help feed our souls.

But embracing the fear and uncertainty along with the joy and purpose is what’s asked of us if we’re going to solve tough, intractable problems that aren’t going away and, in some cases, are getting worse.

That’s why those of us doing systems change work need support for our learning and, well, for our very human selves.

To get more support, many of you that have taken our Collaborative Innovations Essentials course told us that you wanted to stay connected to other practitioners in the field. We’ve listened and launched a new peer-to-peer online support network called CLIC where we can continue to learn and grow together in a safe, supportive learning environment.

Our first CLIC cohort is in process now and was open only to those who completed our basic course. However, we’ll open up the next cohort, launching in September, for anyone who’s interested so let us know if you’re interested in joining.

Building the Field of Systems Change

We reported last time on our participation in a groundbreaking gathering on Wasan Island, Canada, of 24 funders and other leaders interested in building the field of systems change.

The dynamic group dove into the challenge of scaling and building the field of system leadership and drafted possible strategies to build the field, including systems of learning and support for current and aspiring systems change leaders.

Want to learn more about what happened there? Here’s the report from that meeting.

One of the key analyses from that group was that, while there are many “toolbases” available for people wanting to do systems change-type work (mostly in the form of web pages with links to many frameworks, methods, and tools) and some good learning opportunities like CoCreative’s courses or the School of Systems Change, these are not reaching the millions of people interested in leading difficult change in their communities and the world. The problem, we’re thinking, is the lack of both visibility and a human component, including connections to other real people working on the same issues.

To test those hypotheses, CoCreative will be conducting a series of empathy interviews with systems change leaders from around the world. The interviewees will be drawn from clients, partners, and grantees of the Wasan Island group along with others. Interested in being interviewed?  Please let us know.

School for Systems Change

Russ has joined the faculty of the School for Systems Change, produced by Forum for the Future. The 6-month program supports emerging systems leaders in learning and practicing five core systems change competencies: Systemic Diagnosis, Strategy Design, Innovation for Impact, Collaboration and Engagement, and Leadership and Learning. There are a few spots still available for Basecamp #6, kicking off in the Americas in July!

Visit the course page for more information.

New Articles, Tools, & Resources

Adoption of Innovation Model (special expanded version)

Based on the pioneering research of Everett Rogers on how innovations spread throughout social networks, this model is helpful for identifying which stakeholders to engage in spreading social innovations too. Our version of the model identifies the unique roles of various groups in developing, translating, and scaling social innovations. (And this secret, expanded version explores how the 5 segments orient toward the future and systems change.)

Download

Collaborative Assessment Tool

Several groups have now used our collaborative assessment tool to collaboratively assess their strengths and places that require more attention in their collaboration. Interested in trying it out with your network? Let us know.

Try it Out

Secret Bonus:
Find More in our Pot ‘o Gold!

While CoCreative shares everything we make and use in our work, we don’t promote everything publicly because some of our resources, like training manuals, change often and we don’t want older versions floating around the Internet. However, as a site subscriber, you have access to our secret stash of manuals, mini-lectures, and experimental stuff in our pot ‘o gold. Enjoy!

Get the Pot o’ Gold!

What We’re Reading and Learning

Narratives and Storytelling

Here’s a brief article from Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters, on the work by Dan McAdams on “narrative identity” and “narrative choices.” While MacAdams’ work focuses on individual narratives that determine one’s psychological health, the insights are very useful in networks, collaboratives, organizations, and teams.

According to McAdams, people tend to interpret their life stories based on two basic narratives: Either “redemption stories” about how their lives are transitioning from bad to good or “contamination stories” about the opposite. While people who tell themselves redemption stories are more generative and more likely to contribute to society and future generations, they also tend to feel that their lives are more meaningful and experience less anxiety and depression. In addition to these two basic stories, McAdams has found that people who experience more meaning in their lives and work tend to tell stories based on growth, communion, and agency.

From our own observations, we’ve noticed a few things about shaping powerful and meaningful narratives in networks:

1. There are always competing narratives among participants, based on their participants’ own patterns and tendencies, but one or two narratives will dominate over time based on who’s advancing them, the actual direction and momentum in the work, and the feedback the network is getting from outsiders.

2. Stories of others’ experiences have a powerful influence on a network’s narrative. When we share stories of how other networks overcame similar challenges, for example, it can powerfully shape a network’s own narrative.

3. Directionality matters. The power of network narrative is not based on an objective analysis of how things are going at the moment, but include information selected from the participants’ past experience with the network and their future plans together. Even if things are going well now, if the future part of the narrative is pessimistic, the overall narrative is one of decline. That’s why we’ve found that it’s helpful in the second year of a network to really “amp up” the work by picking up the pace and setting more aggressive goals. In general, it’s simply most helpful to frame narratives to start with a negative and end with a positive (e.g. “Things have been difficult but I think we’re the right people to do this.”) than to end with a negative.

4. It’s helpful to normalize the difficulty in the work. We often do this by pointing out that (1) if the work was easy, someone would have already done it, and (2) the most difficult part of the work for any group is moving from the “diverging and expanding” part of the analysis or solution design to the “converging and deciding” part and that this group is no different, but we have methods to make it work.

Lego Serious Play

 

Our colleague Ian Jones at Jones Cubed in the UK turned us on to a fascinating duck exercise from the folks at Lego Serious Play. While we’ve experimented with some LSP methods in the past, this one is exceptional in its ability to return many insights from a quick and simple exercise.

The Duck Lego set is comprised of only 6 simple pieces. Give a set to each participant or to pairs or trios and tell them, “Make a duck.” Then be prepared to see as many unique ducks as there are teams. We’ve had groups produce 30 ducks, have used the exercise many times, and have never seen the same duck twice in any session!

We typically use it before doing prototyping with networks to talk about why it’s helpful to be concrete and specific with their prototypes, but it’s also useful in talking about ideation, communications, and mental models. Pere Juarez Vives shares other neuropsychology insights related to the same duck exercise.

You can order the Lego set on Amazon.

(If you want to order the pieces in bulk, it’s a bit more complicated, so send us a note at talktous@cocreativeconsulting.com and we’ll send instructions!)

Other Resources from the Field

Empathy Map Tool

This cool tool will help you to consider the perspectives of the stakeholders your project seeks to serve or affect. This will help you and your team to consider the many forces around your users and customers that affect their experiences.

Download

An Indigenous Approach to Community Wealth Building:
A Lakota Translation

by Stephanie Gutierrez.

 

Here’s a great resource for anyone doing community wealth building work in rural Native communities. Hear about the importance of storytelling, culture, the embrace of diversity & inclusion and decolonizing important concepts to get to a shared understanding.

Download

Rob Ricigliano “Three beliefs in philanthropy that worry me”

Rob offers thoughts on the importance of humility and truly understanding the context and potential unintended, negative consequences of scaling strategies to tackle complex, dynamic problems.

“Let’s Bust the Lone Hero Myth: The Role of Collective Leadership in Systems Change,” by Reem Rahman, Michela Fenech, Nadine Freeman, Kris Herbst and Dani Matielo. Here you’ll find out why The Avengers may be one of the most popular superhero films! Great model that outlines The Collective Leadership Spectrum for Systems Change.

Best wishes for a creative and collaborative 2019

The CoCreative Team

www.cocreativeconsulting.com

+1-202-525-6070

Follow us on Twitter 

Source: Biomimicry: 6heads Autumn Walk | 6heads

6HEADS

An experiment in shared learning at the join of sustainability and innovation.

Source: Systems of meaning all in flames | Meaningness

Systems of meaning all in flames

The Crystal Palace burning down, 1936

The first half of the twentieth century was awful. Not just materially; Western systems of meaning—social, cultural, and psychological—were falling apart. The glorious accomplishments of the systematic era could not hold civilization together, and seemed likely to be lost entirely in a global conflagration.

Many people even came to think those systems were the cause of all the catastrophes. We who live in the aftermath—we who have never experienced an intact system—we cannot fully appreciate how awful that loss of meaning felt.

This page analyzes the first phase of meaning’s disintegration, roughly 1914–1964. It should help explain the new positive alternatives offered by the countercultures and subcultures, which came next, and also why those failed.

All the events I recount will be familiar, but the way I relate them to my central themes of eternalism and nihilism, and to problems of meaningin the domains of society, culture, and self, may seem novel.

We still have no adequate response to these issues. Any future approach—such as fluidity—must grapple with problems that first became obvious in the early twentieth century.

Society in crisis

Lenin addressing a crowd, 1920

The period was marked by two social crises: class conflict and world wars. The systematic ideologies that were supposed to resolve these horrible problems seemed, by the end, to have made them worse, or even to have been their principal causes.

Greatly increased division of labor during the 1800s created numerous specialized occupations. This drove great advances in the standard of living and enabled increasing cultural sophistication. However, it also created psychological alienation (discussed below) and social conflicts. The existing social system, which had been stable for hundreds of years, functioned only in an agrarian economy of peasants, aristocratic landowners, and a small class of skilled craftspeople. It had no way of accommodating the newly created classes, such as urban industrial workers and entrepreneurial commoners—who sometimes became richer and more powerful than most aristocrats.

Theorists proposed new systems of social organization: nationalist, socialist, democratic, totalitarian. Advocates made supposedly-rational arguments for why each was right; yet supporters mostly just chose the system that might benefit their in-group against others. Conflicts between them tore societies apart, often even into civil war.

Different countries tried each of the new systems, and all produced vast disasters:

• nationalism led to World War I;
• capitalism caused the world-wide Great Depression;1
• fascism was to blame for World War II;
• communism killed tens of millions with engineered famines and the mass murder of supposed dissidents.

WWI marked the end of naive faith in the systematic mode. Most countries went into the war confident of quick victory, confident of its necessity and ethical rightness, confident that war was an opportunity for glory, heroism, and unity. God was on our side.

For Europe, it was the first industrial war,2 with the new social and mechanical technologies of mass production turning out deaths instead of automobiles. Four years later, after tens of millions of casualties, extraordinary horror and suffering, the traumatized survivors asked not “was it worth it” but “what was that all about, anyway?”

In retrospect, WWI seemed completely pointless. Or, if it had any meaning, it was to point out that the pre-war systems of meaning must have been disastrously wrong. The 1800s had seemed an era of rapid moral progress as well as economic and scientific progress. That was no longer credible. This disillusionment increased support for alternatives, including socialist internationalism, fascism, explicit anti-modernism, and explicit nihilism.

One pointless, catastrophic world war might be a tragic accident. To fight another, even worse one—the worst human-created disaster ever—just twenty years later, goes beyond carelessness. When the victors of WWII immediately began preparing to fight WWIII among themselves—this time with potentially billions of deaths from nuclear weapons—it was widely regarded as a bad idea. Yet Cold War belligerents on both sides felt justified by their systems of meaning: benevolent socialist internationalism versus benevolent liberal democracy.

Systematicity itself was a major cause of the catastrophe. Leaders and peoples took their rational ideologies far too seriously, and acted on flawed theoretical prescriptions.

Why did they choose not to see the systems were failing? Eternalism. The only alternative to blind faith in the system seemed to be nihilism.

Continued in source: Systems of meaning all in flames | Meaningness

Source: Cybersyn – metaphorum

Source: The Viable Systems Model Guide 3e

Copyright © 1991 by ICOM, CRU, CAG and Jon Walker. Copyright © 1998, 2018 by Jon Walker.

Source: The Critical Difference Between Complex and Complicated – MIT Sloan Management Review

The Critical Difference Between Complex and Complicated

• Theodore Kinni
• June 21, 2017

Featured excerpt from It’s Not Complicated: The Art and Science of Complexity for Business

It’s time to call out the real culprit in far too many business failures — Dr. Peter Mark Roget and his insidious thesaurus. Roget is long dead, but his gang of modern-day editors still assert that the words “complex” and “complicated” are synonyms. Unfortunately, as Rick Nason, an associate professor of finance at Dalhousie University’s Rowe School of Business, ably explains in his new book, It’s Not Complicated, if you manage complex things as if they are merely complicated, you’re likely to be setting your company up for failure.

Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes, like the algorithms that place ads on your Twitter feed. They also can be resolved with systems and processes, like the hierarchical structure that most companies use to command and control employees.

The solutions to complicated problems don’t work as well with complex problems, however. Complex problems involve too many unknowns and too many interrelated factors to reduce to rules and processes. A technological disruption like blockchain is a complex problem. A competitor with an innovative business model — an Uber or an Airbnb — is a complex problem. There’s no algorithm that will tell you how to respond.

This could be dismissed as an exercise in semantics, except for one thing: When facing a problem, says Nason, managers tend to automatically default to complicated thinking. Instead, they should be “consciously managing complexity.” In the excerpt that follows, which is edited for space, Nason explains how.

Source: Jargon Party – Michael Zargham – Medium

Jargon Party

Michael Zargham

Mar 5

Some Definitions and References for terms I used frequently

Preamble: Today like most days, I was throwing around phrases like bio-mimetic system and multi-mechanism differential game.These words have meanings beyond their buzzword value and I realize those meanings are often lost to listeners. Below is a quick attempt define them publicly, and to provide basic references.

[Gives definition and links for:]

Source: Gregory Bateson and the Counter-Culture

Gregory Bateson and the Counter-Culture

By Joseph Atwill – May 19, 2015

Because of his duplicity in proclaiming spiritual benefits of “magic mushrooms” as psychoactive drugs, while simultaneously accepting CIA funding for his exploits, the newspaperman and banker Gordon Wasson could be considered a “Lifetime Actor” — that is, a person who cultivated a public image which was completely the opposite of his true agenda.
Another possible “Lifetime Actor” was the famous humanist Gregory Bateson. Bateson was an early supporter and teacher at Esalen, an organization devoted to personal growth, meditation, massage, Gestalt, yoga, psychology, ecology, spirituality, and organic food. Yet although Bateson cultivated this image during the Cold War period, he had earlier been a major participant in the creation of ‘Weaponized Anthropology’ for the OSS to control ‘inferior peoples’.
 The ‘weaponized Anthropology’ Bateson developed during WW2 was documented by Dr. David H. Price in his article, “Gregory Bateson and the OSS: World War II and Bateson’s Assessment of Applied Anthropology,” as well as his book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of Anthropology in the Second World War.
Price found that during the second world war, the OSS (direct institutional predecessor to the CIA) employed over two-dozen anthropologists including Gregory Bateson. By 1947, as many as three-fourths of professional anthropologists were “working in some war-related governmental capacity”, either full or part-time. In fact, what we know as the science of “applied” anthropology was a government project that began in the OSS to determine how to control civilian populations.
It is an established fact that these anthropologists were developing social science that could be used against civilian populations. As shown below, what has not been understood is that this science was used by the CIA against the American people in the creation of the 1960’s counter culture.

Schismogenesis and black propaganda

Price noted that “Bateson spent much of his wartime duty designing and carrying out ‘black propaganda’ radio broadcasts from remote, secret locations in Burma and Thailand, and also worked in China, India, and Ceylon.” Bateson was ideally qualified to pursue this work, since his earlier anthropological research was on the subject of “schismogenesis”, which is to say, the study of how societies become divisive and dysfunctional.
As Christian Hubert explains:



In his first major anthropological study, Bateson studied the Iatmul tribe in New Guinea. From his fieldwork, he concluded that an Iatmul village is nearly perpetually threatened by fission of the community because it is characteristic that intense and growing rivalries occur between two groups. It puzzled Bateson that usually the community does not disintegrate. He found that one elaborate event heading off a blowup is the elaborate “Naven” ceremony which entails tranvestism and buffoonery.

The nature of the ‘black propaganda’ Bateson developed during WWII needs to be completely understood by citizens because it was the basis for the present ‘mind control’ operations the government uses against them.  As Price wrote: “In this work Bateson applied the principles of his theory of schismogenesis to help foster disorder among the enemy.” Black propaganda is false information that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side.
The fact that the source of the propaganda must be credible is the basis of what we have named the ‘lifetime actor’ above. This is clear in the case of Wasson given above as certainly the public’s willingness to repeat his purported use of psychedelic drugs would have been tempered if it were aware that his journeys to Mexico were an MK Ultra project intended to determine how the government could control the minds of its citizens.
Bateson presented a narrative in which he claimed to be concerned over whether or not anthropologists would use their knowledge as a weapon. In 1942, he wrote that the war:

…is now a life-or-death struggle over the role which the social sciences shall play in the ordering of human relationships. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is ideologically about just this – the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate peoples as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented and power hungry individuals to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Now that we have techniques, are we in cold blood, going to treat people as things?” (Bateson 1942, as quoted in Price.)

Taken in context, Bateson’s concern in this warning was that the Nazis would be the ones who would be applying social sciences towards evil ends. However, Price discovered that Bateson had no dilemma whatsoever in “treating people as things”. By using the FOIA, Price was able to discover a paper written by Bateson that was “not with the OSS archives, but the Central Intelligence Agency – the institution that did take over for the OSS at the war’s end.”
Bateson’s 1944 position paper below illuminates the “Black Propaganda” type of intelligence work he carried out for the OSS. 
As we cannot improve on Price’s analysis, we quote his text below.

Bateson’s primary concern in this OSS position paper was to advance the position that American diplomatic and intelligence policy makers should keep an

eye on longer range planning, we are here to promote such a state of affairs in [South Asia] that twenty years hence we may be able to rely on effective allies in this area (Bateson 1944:1).

He begins by arguing that “it will actually pay the Americans to influence the British towards a more flexible and more effective colonial policy” (1944:2). In this paper, Bateson envisions that the post-war period will mostly look and function like it had in the pre-war period. He identifies two significant “faults in the pre-war colonial system” (1944:2). Bateson wants to strive for a new and improved colonial system, and starts by asking if it is possible to: “diagnose remediable faults in the British and Dutch colonial systems and can we present our diagnosis to the British and the Dutch in such a way that the system will be improved?” (Bateson 1944).
These “two weaknesses of the imperial system” (1944:5) are labeled the “lack of communication upwards from the native population to the white [population]” (1944:2), and the British failure in the area of the “delegation of authority” (1944:4). Each of these two points are discussed separately below.
(1) Lack of communication upward
In discussing how British colonialists traditionally received information from “natives” he notes that, “In the late 19th century and up to 1914 it was customary in British colonial governments to conduct monumental surveys of language, population, religion, caste, [and] village industries” (1944:2). He argues that, while these efforts were often flawed in their methodology and results, at least under this system “every District Commissioner was compelled to go and interview people in the native communities” (1944:2). At a minimum, this traditional system forced colonial managers to undertake some level of participant-observational contact with native populations. Despite the awkwardness and artificial pitfalls of these meetings, Bateson argues that colonial managers did acquire

some vivid awareness of what native life is about. He might not be able to convey this awareness in his books but he learned to feel with his elbows the trend of native thought. (1944:2)

Bateson points out that after the First World War colonial managers abandoned these personal meetings with native populations, instead favoring more distant statistical approaches – and British managers suffered from this loss of first-hand interactive knowledge.
Next, Bateson discusses the past importance of information which colonialists gathered through intimate contact with their local mistresses. He notes that the strategic uses of these relationships have been relegated to the past due to a variety of factors.

With the improvement of transportation, the discovery of quinine, the development of sanitation, mosquito control and public health measures generally, it has become increasingly easy for the white man to have his white wife and even children with him in the colonies. The presence of large numbers of white women relieves the official from the pinch of loneliness which formerly drove him to the native woman and at the same time the white women not unnaturally use their influence to build up strong moral sanctions against the taking of native mistresses – even to the point of ostracizing the guilty officials. As a result the more durable and more educative type of relationship with the native women has been reduced to a minimum and only the casual, impermanent – and educational[ly] useless – types of relationship persist. (Bateson 1944:3)

In these passages, Bateson clarifies that the extent to which past British colonial authorities in India had established groundup communication networks – including those with their indigenous mistresses – helped them to understand and control some of the features of Indian village life. The loss of these relationships between colonizer and colonized is noted in the context of loss of information, with the clear implication being that post-war colonial authorities would be wise to re-introduce some variety of such “ground-up” communication networks.
2) The British delegation of authority: colonial codependency and paternalizing the white man’s burden
Next, Bateson discusses the overall British failure to delegate authority among the Indian population by drawing on startling imagery of Paternal-British-Colonialists and their Child-likeIndian Subjects. He begins by conjuring up caricatures of American and British differences in parenting dynamics to analyze the shortcomings of the British rule in India. He argues that the British could improve their colonial system by acting less like rigid British parents, and more like nurturing American parents. We are told that in Upper and Middle Class British households, parents “think of themselves as models who the children should watch and imitate,” while in America, many of the parents come from alien cultures, so they are more content to watch their children and to learn from their offspring who achieve great things in this world they (the parents) imperfectly understand. Bateson stretches this comparison even further by noting that “the American family thus constitutes, in itself, a “weaning machine” (1944:4). In diametrical opposition to this is the codependent

English family [which] does not contain this machinery for making the child independent and it is necessary in England to achieve this end by the use of an entirely separate institution-the boarding school. The English child must be drastically separated from his parents’ influence in order to let him grow and achieve initiative and independence. (1944:4)

Bateson’s analysis is arguing that the British would be more effective colonialists if they would become less like British parents and more like American parents. Though he does note the presence of indigenous anti-colonialist movements, he does not recommend moving towards dismantling the colonial system at war’s end. Instead, he offers advice on how to improve it functionally – that is, to reinforce its longevity. Bateson clarifies that the U.S. should not side with the growing liberation movement and he advises that “we ought not to think of altering the imperial institutions but rather of altering the attitudes and insights of those who administer these institutions” (1944:5). 
This is in some sense a culture and personality based analysis of the differences in British colonial and American neo-colonial approaches to the administration of global patron/client relationships. Bateson is advocating that the longevity of the British presence in India would be strengthened in the postwar period if British administrators would but change the “personality” of the administrative bureaucracy.
Bateson’s recommendations
In the paper’s conclusion, Bateson recommends that after the war the OSS should take four steps – to take advantage of these above mentioned “two weaknesses of the imperial system” (i.e., the lack of communication upward and the British delegation of authority). It is not exactly clear to what end these “two weaknesses” are to be put, but it is clear that they are not to be exploited as a means of ending the foreign-colonial rule of the Indian people.
Bateson recommends that: First, the OSS should gather as much intelligence as possible from British sources – while the wartime alliance is in place; Second, they need to undertake detailed analysis of pop culture – especially in terms of content analysis of Indian popular films – as a way of gauging popular sentiment; Third, and most importantly, America must learn from Russia’s successes in conquering ethnic minorities by praising and co-opting aspects of their culture – on this point he specifically suggests that it might be possible to co-opt some components similar to the symbolic capital that Gandhi has used so successfully; and finally, Bateson suggests that the postwar OSS be sure to continue with its wartime education programs for colonialist authorities. Of course, the OSS was disbanded at the end of war. Or more accurately, it was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency – the agency which kept the copy of Bateson’s report until I gained a copy of it under the Freedom of Information Act ….
Bateson’s comments on point three reveal much about the tone of his wartime OSS work and are reproduced in full below:

(3) The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man (Phenomena, comparable to Ghandi’s spinning wheel may be observed in Ireland and elsewhere). If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.

OSS can and should do nothing in the direction of stimulating native revivals but we might move gently towards making the British and the Dutch more aware of the importance of processes of this kind (Bateson 1944:6-7).

Dr. Price was unable, of course, to recognize the importance of Bateson’s recommendation above concerning an archaic revival in controlling populations because he was unaware that the government had created the ‘psychedelic counterculture’. However, every citizen should study the concluding quote from Bateson carefully. Bateson’s recommendation can certainly be understood as having led directly what the psychedelic drug guru Terence McKenna described as the ‘archaic revival’. In other words, the counter culture in the 1960’s was created by using ‘black propaganda’ to bring about an archaic revival of America’s youth and thereby make them easier to control, as had been determined by the secret anthropological experiments that Bateson somehow knew about.
The documents obtained through the FOIA reveal a clear and sinister trajectory. That anthropologic science that was developed to enslave Russia’s Asiatic tribes by bringing about a Native Revival was used against the American people. Bateson brought his science with him when he helped developed the MK Ultra program which then created the counter culture based upon the elements that the Russians had used to enslave the Asiatic tribes – the Shaman, psychedelic drugs, ‘trance music’ and dance were combined with the archaic appearances of the music idols to convey the message that the feudal past was where a young person should head — rather than a future with the technology and thinking power that might threaten the oligarchs.

Bateson, the CIA, and MK Ultra

Following the war (as Price explains), Bateson claimed to have become “uneasy” with his wartime role as an OSS operative and black propagandist, as he cultivated relationships within the human-potential movement. However, there are reasons to doubt Bateson’s sincerity in this regard.
First, let us note that Gregory Bateson played a significant role in the creation of the CIA. After the war Truman wished that the OSS be disbanded. Its head, William Donovan, wrote to Truman’s budget director, and presented him with a rationale that the organization be not only kept in existence but expanded. At least part of this rationale was written by Gregory Bateson. In an article at the CIA website entitled “The Birth of Central Intelligence”, Arthur Darling states that Bateson argued as follows:

…the bomb would shift the balance of warlike and peaceful methods of international pressure. It would be powerless, he said, against subversive practices, guerrilla tactics, social and economic manipulation, diplomatic forces, and propaganda either black or white. The nations would therefore resort to those indirect methods of warfare. The importance of the kind of work the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Strategic Services had been doing would thus be infinitely greater than it had ever been. The country could not rely upon the Army and Navy alone for defense. There should be a third agency to combine the functions and employ the weapons of clandestine operations, economic controls, and psychological pressures.

In spite of Donovan’s protest, Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945. However, in 1947, Bateson and Donovan’s recommendations emerged victorious, and the various US intelligence agencies (including those that had been split off from the former OSS) were re-assembled as the new Central Intelligence Agency. Given Bateson’s argument for its existence, it is no surprise that it immediately began to perfect the science of social control. One project in this vein had the name MK Ultra and funded (among other criminal activities) Wasson’s above-mentioned trip to harvest magic mushrooms.
The claim that the US government’s interest in LSD began with MK Ultra (which was started in 1953) is incorrect. The US Navy’s Medical Research Institute had been experimenting with psychedelics in their CHATTER program under the direction of Charles Savage, whose research report from 1951 was revealed by an FOIA request. The MK Ultra project, however, represented a considerable broadening of this earlier interest. On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to “unwitting subjects in social situations.” At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

Bateson apparently maintained at least a casual involvement in the CIA’s ongoing drug research and promotion activities, as explained by John Marks in “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate“:

[CIA contractor] Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus. No stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to what he describes as “the closed little doctor’s room full of instruments,” where he took the drug. Although he was allowed to listen to records of his choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he “was being connected to Big Brother’s brain.” He says that the experience resulted in “a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse that.”
Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was testing LSD at that same hospital. Hollister says he entered the hallucinogenic field reluctantly because of the “unscientific” work of the early LSD researchers. He refers specifically to most of the people who attended Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA and military-funded work, Hollister tried drugs out on student volunteers, including a certain Ken Kesey, in 1960. Kesey said he was a jock who had only been drunk once before, but on three successive Tuesdays, he tried different psychedelics. “Six weeks later I’d bought my first ounce of grass,” Kesey later wrote, adding, “Six months later I had a job at that hospital as a psychiatric aide.” Out of that experience, using drugs while he wrote, Kesey turned out One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He went on to become the counterculture’s second most famous LSD visionary, spreading the creed throughout the land, as Tom Wolfe would chronicle in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It is also very interesting that for his postwar research, Bateson chose topics which were of crucial interest to another of MK Ultra’s goals, which was to use drugs and hypnosis to create dissociative personalities. Bateson’s interest in double binds and the development of schizophrenia was perfectly analogous to this MK Ultra agenda. As noted by the Swiss journal “Current Concerns“, in its comments accompanying a reproduction of Price’s article about Bateson:

Metalog technology, future workshops and pseudo appreciation of “more indigenous” cultures
The American Gregory Bateson, highly-praised guru of the European future workshop scene, once developed models of communication theory for use in the military, in a circle of “chosen ones”, the Palo Alto group. Their civilian waste-products have today seeped into everyday-life vocabulary, as for instance the terms “metacommunication” and “double bind”. The term “metalog”, which the strategists of the “future workshops” use, originates in Bateson’s work and means something as harmless as the fact that the contents of a discussion are always to be connected with the form of the discussion. 
Among other things Bateson was active in the research and therapy of schizophrenia. He demonstrated the conditions in which human beings can become schizophrenic, i.e. mentally confused, so that they slip off into a psychosis and are no longer able to master their lives. In the mainstream literature on Bateson, his work is highly praised as being to the benefit of people, in particular to those who acquired a form of psychological disorder. It was not the work in the Californian Esalen institute that made him an esoteric, but it deepened his knowledge of group dynamics and large group control, the mainstream media report about him. So far, so good.
Research into schizophrenia – what for?
If one reads, however, the accompanying text of David H. Price on Bateson’s activities for the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) during World War II and his suggestions, how the colonial peoples are to be subjugated even after the war in a more effective way than the British and the Dutch had ever done it, some doubt arises on the integrity of the psychological researcher Bateson. Was it not interesting for the military to use the results of schizophrenia research in order to shatter the minds of prisoners of war and drive them mad, in order to be able to rebuild their personality again – or do so with whole subpopulations in “enemy nations”, or even in the[ir] own country? Bateson used his anthropological knowledge not only to the advantage of but also directed against human beings. We therefore have to assume that during the Cold War and probably still today power strategists use the findings of his schizophrenia and/or disorder research to direct them against human beings.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Finally, as we also noted recently elsewhere at this website, Bateson was also involved in the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), another important technology for propaganda.

Bateson had established a scholarly relationship with hypnotist Milton Erickson as early as 1932. …Bateson would have been fascinated with  Erickson’s research, which involved the idea that hypnotically effective trance states could be established in the course of ordinary life activities such as reading, talking to a therapist, or watching motion pictures, especially if intense and traumatic emotional states could be evoked by the experience. During such trance states, Erickson believed, the subconscious mind of the the target could be accessed by means of hypnotic suggestion….
This idea was later taken up by Bateson proteges Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who commercialized it as the system of “Neuro-Linguistic Programming”, described in their 1975 work “The Structure of Magic“. They drew on Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar to explain that the subliminal messages could be formed within a deep linguistic structure lurking beneath the surface interpretation.

While we cannot demonstrate a direct relationship between Bateson and the CIA during the postwar period (that is, after the termination of Bateson’s contract with the OSS), nevertheless the pattern of his research interests creates a reasonable doubt that Bateson never deviated from his agenda to promote ‘superior’ people in their quest to subjugate the ‘inferior’ ones.
Following the war Bateson headquarters was at the Palo Alto VA hospital were the CIA developed the MK Ultra project, which had earlier sent Gordon Wasson to Mexico and began the psychedelic drug movement. Also in Palo Alto, the CIA-funded drug research program introduced the individuals who would later lead America’s youth off a cliff to LSD – Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead member Robert Hunter and novelist Ken Keasy.
Thus, when we see the visual images of the ‘rock idols’ that helped to create counter culture we can now understand their purpose. Below is a photograph of David Crosby, a member of the Byrds whose 1966 hit ‘Eight Miles High’ virtually created the LSD-inspired ‘acid rock’ genre. He is sitting congenially next to his father, Annapolis graduate and former OSS member (and Oscar-winning cinematographer?!), Floyd Crosby. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Discuss in Forum! (Bateson cartoon credit: https://comunidad3h.wordpress.com/tag/gregory-bateson/)