You’ve reminded me that the key concern here is around *methodology* (‘value’) rather than taxonomy/ontology (‘truth’). The distinguishing characteristic, as you say, is short feedback-loops to improve the value, rather than long feedback-loops to verify the finest minutiae of the ‘truth’. As per Deming’s PDCA and the like, there’s a useful guideline that shorter feedback-loops deliver more value whereas longer feedback-loops deliver more ‘truth’ (i.e. taxonomic/ontological certainty). (There’s a diminishing-returns limit to this, though. In agreement with Dave here, it’s notable that many proponents of pseudosciences push for infinite-length feedback-loops so that the chosen ‘truth’ can never be challenged, but it also means that it delivers no value. At the other end of the scale, as we trend towards infinitesimal feedback-loops, we end up in the kind of subjective chaos that only ‘makes sense’ to an artist.) Part of the purpose for the recursive methodology I’ve been trying to explain here is to help get the balance right according to the needs of the context.

Interesting, too, how a constructive comment like this creates conditions under which new ideas arise (I hadn’t previously recognised that point about the link between length of feedback-loop and the value/’truth’ spectrum) – hence, in effect, everyone wins. By contrast, destructive comments block that kind of collective creativity, forcing retreat into defensive positions – hence everyone loses, because no-one has any chance to move. So thanks again – much appreciated.

Starting out with simple trial and error (the basic biological learning strategy if you will), science tries to improve on it by using complex procedures that (presumably) increase reliablity and intersubjectivity. The feedback loops are very long. NLP is almost the opposite, attempting to keep the feedback loops extremely short and improve them in other ways instead. But, and here is the most interesting thing I think, NLP claims that you can take advanced theory from linguistics and epistemology, and use them in these short feedback loops. This is somewhat analogous to the way technology uses physics and mathematics to do experiments on a small scale and make stuff that eventually either works or doesn’t. Figuring out whether it works or not is not difficult, unlike most scientific questions these days. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t help that the theory is correct.

Above all, NLP is epistemologically interesting. It’s theoretically deep but paradoxically that depth is not appreciated by most of its practictioners.

I did try to present you with a tool to handle situations where tests of science versus pseudoscience don’t work, and you gave me acid-in-the-face instead. Unfortunate, that, but your choice, of course.

As for evidence of fixed mind, one of the proven characteristics is the misuse of emotion and name-calling in defence of the purported ‘truth’. In effect, science becomes dysfunctional religion as soon as emotion enters the picture. (Responding, you’ll note, isn’t necessarily the same as thinking, and I must admit that I haven’t yet seen much evidence of the latter. Plainness of thought, yes – “plain as a fart”, to quote Ursula le Guin – but clarity of thought, no.) So re-read your posts and mine here and on Twitter with that in mind. Notice who indulges first and most in name-calling and other distractive rhetorical tricks? Strangely enough, it isn’t me. Notice who uses put-downs (“silliness”, “psychobabble”, “mediaeval delusion” etc – go count ‘em, there’s a lot of ‘em) in place of evidence or debate? Notice who uses repeated assertion that something ‘is so’, rather than engage in actual debate? Notice who calls on spurious ‘authorities’ to dismiss the work without any actual experience of the specific tasks in question? Notice who sarcastically rejects every item presented by the other, asserting a position of purported superiority, without giving any evidence for that rejection other than, circularly, the purported ‘superiority’ itself? Notice who calls on other people to join in with the mockery of the other? In all of those, you’ll notice that it isn’t me. So perhaps it might be you?

So yes, perhaps just in this dialogue (if that’s the right word?) there’s evidence enough to warn you of this. If you’re willing to notice that fact. Which seems unlikely, unfortunately; more likely that you’ll put me down yet again instead. Yet in addition to some appropriate colloquial epithets that describe those kinds of behaviours, there also are some standard psychological terms for it that, by custom and by law, require serious personal responsibility and serious personal action – but no doubt you’d dismiss all of that as ‘psychobabble’ too? Which is kind of worrying.

At the very least, you’ve successfully proven that although there are plenty of our professional colleagues who *do* understand what I’m perhaps rather falteringly trying to describe, there’s no point in my trying to work with you. Well done! Congratulations! An excellent outcome for you! But kind of sad, really, because the only one who’s really losing out in this is you.

Your choice too, of course.

So wipe out that bit of silliness and I’ll given you the benefit of the doubt on spiral dynamics. I’m afraid the psychobabble and pseudoscience statements stand until I see some evidence to the contrary. Avoiding those positions is critical to realism, and to finding solutions to the problems of areas such as Guatemala.

What’s frustrating in all of this is that ten minutes of enquiry with people you know who know me – people like Shawn over in Aus, or Sally B here in Britain – would give you the clear fact that whilst I may be an eccentric of sorts, I ain’t no new-age flake. A quick trawl of your own memory of that Cynefin course back in Sydney would remind you of the same. One quick search on my website would show you several detailed in-depth critiques of Spiral, complete with several references to the said Mr.W, each preceded by the adjective ‘odious’. And there’s plenty more besides – and you *know* all of this. So c’mon, give me a bit of benefit of the doubt, will you? Then I can do the same for you?

As for the Green Feathered Serpent bit, um, well, yes, I’ll have to admit that I did come back from a tour of part of the Maya country in Guatemala just last week. Sadly, it wasn’t nice pretty-pretty new-agey stuff, though – in fact it was high-end enterprise-architecture work (including a small smattering of Spiral, as it happens) with the senior execs and line-staff of a major multinational bank, a large credit-union and an automotive-industry manufacturer. I’ll admit that there was some visioning work in amongst that lot, but hardly what one would call ‘new-age’: more like about how to ensure business survival and business growth in very hard times. And let’s just say that Guatemala City is, um, *interesting* in the wrong sense of the word, shall we? – saw my first body-bag lying in the street on the first day there, to give you some idea, and it wasn’t the last body-bag, either. Armed guards with pistols and pistol-grip shotguns absolutely *everywhere*, in every shopping mall, every side-street; most street-side shops have heavy grilles to reduce the risk of armed robbery. Not much new-age ‘all sweetness and light’ there, I can tell you. And yet people adapt, life goes on somehow, because it has to: that’s the most interesting point, isn’t it?

So let’s just drop the accusations of psychobabble and pseudoscience on both sides for a while, shall we, and drink to realism instead? Might be a bit more constructive in this Happy Holiday Season or whatever it’s called?

Enjoy?

Please don’t introduce spiral dynamics as well. Another set of witch doctoring, with another commercial split and Ken Wilber to boot. Are you a turquoise person? After all only those who have obtained higher levels of enlightenment can truly speak with wisdom. God help us all, its even more bullshit than NLP and that is saying something. And before you ask, yes I have studied that one as well. I have a general interest in cults and their ability to seduce intelligent people.

Your language in this later post is now the language of cults by the way. You are not understood, you can’t really explain the concept to an unbeliever, you are in a different place (possibly with turquoise coloured walls). People who do not agree with you are not listening so you will have to withdraw from the argument. You are the possessor of disciplines that prevent you falling into error, lessor mortals who do not appreciate this are dogmatic, they disappoint you. Come to think of it you may be mirroring Wilber. So I can preserve some thread of belief in a rational future please tell me that you are not taking the return of the Green Feathered Serpent God of the Mayans in 2012 seriously as well?

I do not want to be a thinker, valuable or otherwise in a world of new age pseudo-science and pscho-babble. Sorry about that, but I have but too much thought into the nature of knowledge of the years to fall into that particular trap.

What I’d described would be an ‘anything goes’ relativism if there were no disciplines behind it. As you would know from your work around shamanistic communities, the definition of ‘the real’ and ‘the possible’ can become usefully fluid under those circumstances – but without some pretty solid anchors it’s easy to get a long way adrift. (That’s one of the reasons I insist on visioning-work as a first stage of enterprise-architecture.) Beyond that, I don’t think there’s much point in trying to explain this specific usage of the term ‘magic’: to quote an old Dr Johnson story, about two women yelling at each other from house-windows on either side of the street, “they can never agree, for they are arguing from different premises’.

Same applies, I suspect, to our respective understandings of ‘science’, ‘technology’, or even ‘complex’. (FWIW, the theoretical base is use for understanding science is writers like Beveridge and Feyerabend – “the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is ‘anything goes’” – plus a decade working in Australia’s Aeronautical and Maritime Research Laboratory; for technology, it’s nigh-on forty years of practice in a wide range of industries. I don’t have anything like your amount of high-level consulting experience, but I’ve used my time well in other ways, shall we say?) And yes, I can quote many classic examples from the history of science – “chance favours the prepared mind” (Pasteur), for example, or “gentlemen, we must learn to dream!” (Kekule). But the sad thing is that it still seems unlikely to get the point across. You’re clearly not listening, and not willing to listen, so there’s no point in continuing on with this. I’m disappointed, to say the least: closed-minded dogmatism is depressing at any time, but especially when it comes from someone like you, whom I’d previously regarded as one of the more valuable thinkers in this field.

What I find frustrating is that you’re so quick to dismiss subjects of which you appear to have little or no knowledge – quote “this quaint concept you have of ‘magic’”. Go read Feyerabend, for example: ideology is not a substitute for thought, and a very poor guide for action. But your choice, of course. Best leave it here, I think?

I don’t buy the truth/value dichotomy you are creating, sounds like an excuse for total relativism
However reading the rest I think you are happy with an anything goes relativism which you want to term”Magic” (although having spent some years of my life working on shamanistic knowledge I don’t think you would find much support for your use of the word in those communities).

It is total nonsense to say that safe-fail experiments are hard systems not soft systems (which is a dubious distinction anyway). It is, I think, foolish to ignore the test for coherence. An experiment is an experiment, it may be social or whatever. Its a principle of action by the way, the addition of “only” is your POV not my view.

The history of scientific advance is not one of randomness, there are accidents, but trained people pay attention to those accidents (Fleming). There are mavericks, but they base their work on sound theory (Harrison).

You create another dichotomy between technology and magic – a near medieval delusion. Technology is a tool, few human processes or activities are not tool dependent, but they are not tool determined.

A complex system by its nature has constraints, without constrains there is no evolution. Yes you allow and encourage a freedom to wander, but that freedom should be free of basic constraints. I actually think you are really limited the complex domain by equating it with this quaint notion you have of “magic”.

“Astrology is nonsense”: depends what you mean by ‘nonsense’, or even more what you mean by ‘sense’. Agreed that in current scientific terms it makes no sense at all (e.g. action-at-a-distance, scale etc), and in my opinion any literal interpretation (“what sign are you?” etc) is usable/valid only as a conversation-gambit. Symbolic interpretations, though, can have real value, much like any symbol-rich framework such as the Shakespearean-period ‘Art of Memory’ (Frances Yates) – it ‘makes sense’ in terms of its *use*, not its ‘truth’.

I *strongly* disagree with “KM needs to move away from pseudo-science” – not the statement itself, but the implication that KM should or even can be assessed and validated in scientific terms alone. The ‘science-versus-pseudoscience’ dichotomy only makes sense in the ‘truth’ domains, which would only make sense here if we assert that KM is only about ‘truth’-based systems such as IT – which I know you wouldn’t agree with at all. You would agree with me, I’m certain, that KM needs to cover all of the Cynefin domains – which means that we need to balance ‘truth’-based assessment (science etc) with ‘value’-based assessment (technology/’magic’ etc – much as described in detail in Beveridge’s ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’). If we don’t get that balance right, we actually *create* pseudoscience in the attempt to reduce it – much like IT-centric ‘KM’ turns any real KM into a complete shambles.

On Cynefin and the complex-domain, I’m well aware that you’re Cynefin’s creator, but remember that one of the characteristics of pseudoscience is a body-of-knowledge that belongs to a single person. I’m trying in this article to show you something different about the complex-domain, which you seem to have skipped straight over because it wasn’t what you expected and isn’t how you use it in your own practice. If, as you say, “the principle is safe-fail experiments” only, we’re right back in the hard-systems worldview, with little if any space for soft-systems etc – and no space to assess the experiments to arrive at the design etc of those experiments. Within the latter, it *does* mean that “any belief is valid” – or may be valid, rather, if only as an intermediate step to something that is more valid in a practical sense. Just about the only difference between technology and magic is that the former tends to cling onto the safety-line called ‘applied science’, whereas magic frequently doesn’t bother. (Paradoxically, magical-thinking often works best under conditions of secrecy – the exact opposite of technology’s retreat to ‘best-practice’. Which can also be problematic, of course. If you’re interested, there’s more detail on that, and why secrecy is important, in the book ‘SSOTBME’. Just don’t ask me to explain the long-winded joke in the book’s title, though. ) This ‘freedom to wander’ is especially important for the idea-generation phase (i.e. Chaotic-to-Complex rather than Complex-to-Complicated) where pattern-entrainment is such a serious problem. Magical-thinking allows us to play deliberate games with belief, to break free of that entrainment: as psychologist Stan Gooch put it, “things have not only to be seen to be believed, but also have to believed to be seen”. I really do believe, from working with Cynefin over the past half-dozen years or so, that there’s a lot more in the Complex-domain than you seem to be willing to allow for at present: might be worth a discussion over a pot of beer somewhen?