Okay, so that’s all of the Mythquake book-project. The chapters, in variously-complete condition, are as follows:

• Mythquake
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

I also have a fairly large collection of research-material in electronic form, and a matching domain-name, mythquake.com .

If someone wants to take over the project, all I’d would ask for is some kind of credit in the final product. That’s it.

Anyone interested? If so, please let me know via a comment here.

The final section of the Mythquake book-project – a book I know I’ll now never complete, so I’m making it available for anyone who wants it.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-9: Possession‘, explored what will probably be the source of the most disruptive mythquake that’s hit human society for several thousand years: the notion of personal property and possession.  It’s the key-stone for our entire economics, much of our politics, much of our systems of social relations: yet in terms of physical fact, it has no more foundation than the equally delusory myth of ‘rights’. Dangerous indeed…

Yet if such mythquakes are inevitable, what can we do about them? How can we prepare for them, so as to minimise the damge they would cause? That’s the topic for this final chapter of the book.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Did the earth move for you?
• Mythquake preparedness
• Everyone’s a winner

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project – a book I’d been trying to write for some ten years, but now recognise it’s time for me to hand it over to someone else (if anyone else wants it! )

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-8: Let freedom reign‘, explored one of the deep-myths of ‘Western’ culture: the notion of rights. Despite the frequent claim that rights are inherently ‘true and inalienable’ and the like, we’re forced to conclude that they don’t actually exist as anything much more than an arbitrary and unsupportable declaration of wishful-thinking – leaving the culture lethally exposed to mythquakes that may be amazingly destructive at almost every imaginable scale. That in itself is worrying enough. Yet there’s one more deep-myth that has an even greater potential for devastating destruction: the concept of possession. That’s what we’ll explore in this final main chapter.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Down to the core
• A property of mind?
• The unwantedness of anti-property
• Possessing or possessed?
• Sustained by belief

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-9: Possession

Richter 9: Rare great earthquake. Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across. Equivalent to around thirty thousand megatons of TNT (Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004). Around one per twenty years on average.

Mercalli XII Vision distorted; ground moves in waves or ripples; objects thrown into air; large amounts of rock move; river courses altered; almost everything is destroyed.

Read more…

Summary of another chapter from the Mythquake book-project.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-7: Sugar and spice‘, covered probably the most controversial class of mythquakes, around cultural, societal, interpersonal and personal definitions of gender. It’s controversial because it’s something every person will experience in daily life, and causes constant friction between the self and the Other – in every sense of ‘other’. Yet though the ‘gender wars’ can often be explosive, and can cause real damage not just to individuals but to entire societies, they’re not in themselves the most serious class of mythquakes: we still have to dig deeper to get to the real tectonic plates of myth. This chapter explores one of those deeper myths, the notion of ‘freedom’ – a mythic structure that embeds a potential for societal upheaval on a truly grand scale.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Freedom-to and freedom-for
• The wrongs of rights
• There are no rights

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-8: Let freedom reign

Richter 8: Great earthquake. Can cause serious damage in areas several hundred kilometres across. Equivalent to around one thousand megatons of TNT (San Francisco earthquake, 1989). Around one per year on average.

Mercalli X: Most buildings, some bridges damaged or destroyed; dams and reservoirs seriously damaged; water thrown out of rivers and canals; large landslides; ground cracks over large areas; railroad tracks slightly bent.

Mercalli XI: Most buildings collapse, some bridges destroyed; underground pipelines destroyed; roads break up; large cracks in ground; rocks fall; railroad tracks badly bent.

Read more…

Another chapter from the Mythquake book-project.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-6: The meaning of life‘, we explored major mythquakes that arise from collisions between ways of thinking – particularly science and religion, as ’social constructions of reality’ that provide definitions of ‘the meaning of life’. Here we go deeper again, to mythquakes that arise from a rather more personal part of the meaning of life – the social construction of gender. Unlike politics or science or religion, whose mythquakes tend to focus around particular rallying-points, the assumptions here are anchored in people’s physical being, and hence distributed much more evenly throughout the social milieu. The result is that when a major mythquake does occur in this domain, its impacts are both locally intense and broadly distributed – creating potential for even higher damage, yet also much harder to identify and to resolve.

The current content of this chapter focusses perhaps too much on Western views of gender, without much link to other cultures – in part a reflection of my professional experience in the work I did in Australia on domestic-violence, and the huge dishonesties around that field and Australian feminism in general, which I also see in perhaps less extreme form in most other Western countries at present. As a result, the chapter-structure probably needs somewhat of a re-think – perhaps an extra intro-section to deal with gender in general, and the complex trade-offs between societal expectations or needs and the biological and anatomical facts that underpin them. I also haven’t done anything here about sexual-orientation (not ’sexual-preference‘, because in most cases it isn’t a choice as such at all); and the chapter probably also needs to address the biological fact that there more than a mere two sexes – current genetic-research indicates that perhaps as many as 1% of the population would need a ‘none of the above’ box for the ‘Which sex?’ question on most personal-information forms…

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …and all things nice?
• Snips and snails?
• Patriarchy and paediarchy

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-7: Sugar and spice

Richter 7: Major earthquake. Can cause serious damage over larger areas. Equivalent to around thirty megatons of TNT (largest nuclear bombs). Around one every twenty days on average.

Mercalli IX: General panic; damage to foundations; ground cracks, sand and mud bubble up from ground; considerable damage to well-constructed buildings; reservoirs and underground pipes damaged.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project – an unfinished book-project that I accept I now need to hand over to someone else, or at least make the ideas more generally available in some form.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?‘, we moved up to the level of mythquakes that can often cause serious damage beyond the immediate locality of the collapse of that specific belief. Here we start to explore deeper beliefs and deeper assumptions that in reality are no more stable than those myths about money – and hence have even greater potential for destruction when they break. The example here is around core cultural-worldviews such as belief in the validity of the purported ‘truths’ of science or religion  - in other words, the generic structures that underpin shared assumptions about how the world ‘really works’.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Science and religion
• The religion of science
• Religious wars

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-6: The meaning of life

Richter 6: Strong earthquake. Can be destructive in areas up to a hundred or more kilometres across. Equivalent to around one megaton of TNT. Around one every three days on average.

Mercalli VII: People have difficulty standing; drivers feel their cars shake; loose bricks and tiles fall from buildings; furniture may break; slight to moderate damage to well-constructed buildings, significant damage to poorly-constructed buildings.

Mercalli VIII: Drivers have difficulty steering; chimneys fall; branches break; foundations may fail; cracks may appear in wet ground or on hillsides; water-levels in wells may change; poorly-constructed buildings suffer severe damage.

Read more…

If the enterprise is a story, what is its backstory? Where does the enterprise come from? What are its deep drivers and experiences that form the foundation for its choices in the present?

This came up last night whilst watching a BBC interview [BBC iPlayer: UK only, until 20 May 2010] with the British character-actor Timothy Spall [Wikipedia, IMDb], talking about his work with the social-realist film-director Mike Leigh [Wikipedia, IMDb]. Leigh’s method for developing a script has some strong resemblances to running a business, in that, as the Wikipedia entry, describes, it’s a mixture of careful preparation for real-time improvisation:

Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over a period of weeks to build characters and storylines for his films. He starts with some sketch ideas of how he thinks things might develop, but does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed. Initial preparation is in private with the director and then the actors are introduced to each other in the order that their characters would have met in their lives. Intimate moments are explored that will not even be referred to in the final film to build insight and understanding of history, character and inner motivation.

The critical scenes in the eventual story are performed and recorded in full-costumed, real-time improvisations where the actors encounter for the first time new characters, events or information which may dramatically affect their characters’ lives. Final filming is more traditional as definite sense of story, action and dialogue is then in place. The director reminds the cast of material from the improvisations that he hopes to capture on film.

Some of that does sound very close to what happens perhaps too often in business: “does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed”. But the real point here, as Spall described in the interview, is that there’s a vast amount of work on backstory – the history behind the character. Leigh often recommends that an actor should pick almost anyone as the base for the character – Spall said that he based one of his key characters on a person he’d once met in real life for little more than half a minute – and then explore every possible facet of who that character might be, what makes them tick. As the actors do this, images come up, seemingly from nowhere, that form a ‘true history’ for each of the characters. The result is something much more ‘real’ than a predefined script.

So, following the same improvisational logic, the same would seem to apply to the collective ‘character’ that is each organisation and enterprise. The surface culture, the ‘espoused culture’ is visible to all, and probably much-paraded via PR and the like: yet what is the deeper culture, the backstory, that drives the real choices, especially under stress? That’s where things get interesting for enterprise-architects – especially if we’re concerned with the structure of the enterprise as a whole, rather than solely the enterprise-IT.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project – a book I’ll probably never have time to finish, so here I’m handing it over to whoever might like to take it up.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…‘, we moved into the level of mythquakes that most people would probably notice within their everyday lives, with politics as the given example. Note, though, that most politics is only a level-4 or thereabouts: despite all of the pretensions of importance, most of it is really little more than arguing about the position of a single deckchair on the Titanic, and for most people, not much – if anything – of real significance will change with each change of government. But here at MQ-5 we do start to get into realms of significant damage, and that do start to affect most people whenever there’s some kind of breakdown – a catastrophic collapse of over-extended assumptions. The example I’ve used here is the comfortably-complacent ‘certainties’ of current economics – and particularly the notion that ‘economics’ is solely synonymous with money.

(Another general aside: yes, we’re currently in the midst of yet another ‘Global Financial Crisis’, and for some countries – and certainly for many individuals – the impacts are occasionally rippling upward in impacts to what might seem like MQ-6 or even MQ-7 levels. But in practice, much of the talk of ‘crisis’ is little more than arguing about what to do about a single broken deckchair on the Titanic: it still doesn’t address any of the deeper issues, and history makes it plain that this is merely the current expression of a regular boom/bust cycle – a repeated pattern of mythquakes that point to much deeper and much more serious fault-lines in the structure of our everyday reality.)

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Managing the household
• A monetary mismatch
• Back to barter?

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?

Richter 5: Moderate earthquake. May cause slight damage to well-constructed buildings, but can cause major damage to poorly-constructed buildings. Equivalent to around thirty kilotons of TNT (Nagasaki atomic bomb). Around two to three per day.

Mercalli V: Doors swing open or closed; small objects move; liquid may spill from open containers; almost everyone feels movement; sleepers awake.

Mercalli VI: People have trouble walking; everyone feels movement; objects fall from shelves; furniture moves; trees and bushes shake; windows break, plaster walls may crack, other non-structural damage in poorly-constructed buildings.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project. As mentioned in previous posts, this is a book that I’ve been trying to write for more than ten years, but it’s time to accept it ain’t gonna happen – not from me, anyway. So I’m placing these ideas up in the blogosphere in the hope that someone else can use them: attribution would be nice, but it’s not essential.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-3: I am what I do‘, we’ve started to move beyond mythquakes that have only a small localised impacts, and into contexts where the mythic breakdown hits a lot more people – and hurts a lot more, too. So when we get to the next level, MQ-4, people in general will definitely begin to notice when this kind of mythquake comes to town – and will often complain about it as a group rather than solely as individuals. Which brings us into the realm of politics – or rather, what is most commonly described as ‘politics’, because in a sense everything is political.

(Note for Brits at this time: yes, this happens to be posted in the midst of the aftermath of a particularly mythquake-full general election – a ‘hung parliament’ and all that. [There are some who would say that all parliaments should be hung, in one sense or another, but given the inanity of the times, the detail of that is perhaps best left unsaid. ] Consider this juxtaposition to be no more than an amusing coincidence: there’s always somewhere in the world that’s dealing with this specific type of mythquake at any given time.)

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …the government got in
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee
• The structure of power

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…

Richter 4: Light earthquake. Noticeable shaking of indoor items; rattling noises; significant damage unlikely. Equivalent to one kiloton of TNT (smallest nuclear bombs). Around fifteen to twenty per day.

Mercalli IV: Dishes, windows and doors rattle; parked cars rock; trees may shake; most people indoors feel movement, as do some outdoors.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project. This is a book that I’ve been brewing for perhaps a decade, but accept that I will probably never have time to write, so I’m placing these ideas up in the blogosphere in the hope that someone else will pick ‘em up and run with them.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-2: The Centre of the Universe‘, we looked at some relatively-minor everyday mythquakes whose impact is usually localised and transitory – such as a two-year-old’s temper-tantrum at broken expectations, and the perhaps even more bizarre emotion associated with expectations around competitive sports. But here we move up into territory where the mythquakes are rather more noticeable, becoming less localised, with impacts that are less transitory and often quite a bit more severe. This levels seems typified by a whole class of mythquakes that can arise whenever we confuse “who I am” with “what I do”.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Doing life
• The end of the world

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-3: I am what I do

Richter 3: Minor earthquake. Often felt but rarely causes damage. Equivalent to around thirty tonnes of TNT (largest conventional bombs). Around one to two hundred per day.

Mercalli III: Shaking felt indoors, though often not outdoors; hanging objects swing back and forth.

Read more…