Nature by Numbers - No numeric structure = not Nature

via willpate.org

Nature is not random - what appears at first glance to be messy has deep order. This wonderful video reveals much of this. HT Will Pate.

But we tend to organize with no sense of order. That is why so many of our organizations are so dysfunctional.

Take school - what is the theory behind class size? There is none except to have smaller. But no one in Education knows anything about the natural organization of human groups. You will see these numbers in the first minutes of the video.

Why is there bullying in schools? It is not because kids are bad - it is that schools violate the social norms of numbers. Ask a teacher or a Dept of Ed person what are the key social numbers that will ensure that a school will be bully free and they will look at you blankly - they don't know and they dont know that such numbers exist - but they do and have been used fro ever in the military.

All those Social Media "Experts" pushing to have thousands of "friends" It's pathetic. Based on what? They simply think that more = better. What losers! There has to be a numeric structure or its not natural. What is it? It's the same as for all social structures for humans - watch the video carefully.

All those that want to have better functioning organizations of all types - what is your structural plan? Oh yes spans of control! Based on what? Bullshit.

What has happened is that we organize as the Ptolemaic universe was organized - we have a wrong theory (Then that the Earth was the centre of the universe) and we force the world into this fallacy.

The Copernican Revolution of our time (That the Sun is in the Centre of the local system) is that humans are optimally organized as nature intended. That we are designed to live in a Fibonacci sequence where:

8 is the core unit of intimacy

34 is the optimal team to get complex work done

144 is the upper limit of any group that can function in a trust bond

These are the building blocks of trust and high functioning for all humans no matter what culture. They are our nature - as immutable as the laws of light and gravity. We ignore them at our peril.

History of Humans in 6.40 mins - Where did we come from - Where are we going

via vimeo.com

It is easy to give up hope right now. But for all my Doom Saying - I am very optimistic.

This video will show you why. It is the basis of a book I am writing where I do my best to show that we as a species may be living through the stages of development that a person will.

It is our relationship with Food primarily that drives each stage - with help from our prevailing use of energy and our communication system.

Newparadigm2

My call is that we are ending our Narcissistic Teen Age and entering the New Parent Age where we Partner with Nature to create the best future of our children.

I was lucky and spoke second - what was amazing was that nearly every talk that followed - none had spoken to each other before - made the point of using Nature as our guide.

Sustainable Architecture: The Importance of Place

via vimeo.com

Aaron surprised us all by not talking about wind power, voltaics etc but going to the heart of a more sustainable house - PLACE. It is how you set a building up in a place and what you make it out of that has the most impact.

Our own house is set facing south with major wind breaks on the north and seasonal shade on the south. The Palmers did a fantastic job of locating the building in the best possible place.

In our next home we will go as far as we can to use the principles that Aaron talks about here - all are common sense and all will save you money.

The New Org Design - It's Here Now - Convergence has occurred

 

What is value? Usually it is something that is scarce. What is scarce today? Certainly not content which is why all the attempts to make content pay are doomed. Content has never been more plentiful. In fact we are approaching the point where content is all but infinite.

The Value point then becomes finding content that means some thing to each of us. So Search is a Holy Grail here. And it is very valuable. But can we rely only on algorithms?  I do not think so.

This week two people that I respect and trust a lot Craig Newmark and Jeremiah Owyang have put their own stakes in the ground saying that ironically it will be a screen of named people in our social orbit that will be the final layer of screening for meaning. That our impersonal transactional world will return to a personal world where reputation is key. There is enough convergence to call it now I think.

What you are about to see is how the world will be organized in the future. It's official now!

This is the new Org Chart.

fibnumbers

The Inner Circle is your Trusted Space - moving out from this is a gradient of Trust and Intimacy - These rings have numeric boundaries. The Inner Circle is limited to 8. The next ring for you is 34. The outer ring is of course 144. If you look up to the diagram above the "Donut", you will see the Fibonacci Curve. There you will see that these numbers are the boundaries of the curve - this is how nature organizes all complex systems. The Dunbar number is 144. (Not 150 by the way) We know that 8 is the ideal team size. We know that 34 is the ideal large team.

To the left I have added the "Permaflower" - this is the organizing model for Permaculture. I think that this may be the model that we use to organize the Natural Organization.

Here is how Craig opens his piece:

People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.

This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we're living through it now.

Everyone gets a chance to participate in large or small ways, giving a voice to what we once called "the silent majority."

Here is how Jeremiah describes it:

jorings

Here is how a Permagarden is layed out:

permagarden

Here we see the idea of a gradient in the hierarchy more clearly. Inside the network are of course sub networks. In Permagardening, these are called Guilds. They are reinforcing groups of diverse species. Toby Hemenwayis the source of these lovely garden images.

permaguild

Talking about guilds here is how Chris Allen has shown us how Guilds form in WOW.

teambuilding blocks

In this slide you can also see the leverage that the Fibonacci Sequence can give you. Imagine your 8 inside the Trusted Space. Imagine that you have 4 good friends in the next circle who have 4 friends who have 4 friends and then 4 more - that is 4,096 people. A group of 34 with 4 friends gets you 1.3 million. 144 gets you 429 million.

A small group can have huge social leverage. Enough I think to so anything.