Dr. David E. Martin
Chairman M·CAM
Managing Partner, Purple Bridge Mangement
Head of Innovation & Transformation, Melbourne Polytechnic
Executive Director, Centre of Applied Innovation at Melbourne Polytechnic
CEO & Chairman, eSurface
Batten Fellow, Darden
Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia
On a blustery afternoon at Oyantatambu in Peru, a group of
us stood next to the massive stones cut with inconceivable precision marveling
at the megaliths left by civilizations past.
“How did they do it?” was the refrain echoing through each mind as we
looked upon the complex geometry that stood before us. A dutiful guide, certified by the Peruvian
antiquities authorities, explained the Occidental method involving llama
tendons and sand. Most of the group
nodded their head with a mix of incredulity and awe and moved on. I stepped around one particular stone that,
on its face, was rough cut. On the back
side of the stone was a partial cut. It
was highly irregular – clearly not the product of a drawn cord or saw. In fact, upon closer inspection, it appeared
that the grooves were melted in a pattern consistent with the crystalline
structure of the stone. There was no way
that the cut I observed could have possibly been the work of a linear slicing
mechanism. If I had to guess, my
immediate thought was that it was cut with light or heat. A laser, possibly?
What’s the point of this story? Our current education and social systems are
oriented around explaining perspective, not critiquing it. We “know” that the Inca didn’t have the tools
we use to manipulate the world so we impose linear historicism on their
experience assuming some lesser state.
While the prima facie evidence
points to capacities to manipulate matter and energy in unimaginable ways, our
narratives rely on modernity to be “more advanced” than some previous
condition. When the evidence through
observed phenomenon clearly point to an alternative hypothesis, we come up with
llama tendons. We don’t teach the
synthesis of observation and multi-factoral data. We don’t teach for nonlinearity. We don’t teach for complexity. Our deductive processes have become
increasingly reductive and, in so doing, we stifle our capacity to adapt and
integrate transformative impulses. We
need to engage critical thinking with radical new modalities.
Occidental education has been thus labeled for its aspirational
social quality. From the earliest form
of enculturation – the use of language to encipher and decipher social
communication – the role of education has been largely focused on the
establishment and maintenance of conformity and consensus. Approved narratives, methods, and inquiries
achieve their status based on their utility to efficiently produce surrogate
dependency and indentured utility. The
former arising from the reification of “authoritative paradigms” and the latter
celebrated as the employable, governable masses. Punctuated throughout human history are a few
radical inflections where, through cultural memetic collisions or through
existential threat at scale (most typically war or conquest), the didactic
mandate has been subjected to near paroxysmal alteration. One can consider the Yongle Empire in China
and its massive cultural navies that are thought to have played a role in the
Renaissance in Europe; the Silk Road which intermingled Asian, Persian and
Mediterranean cultures; the intrusive colonial impulse of the Industrial
economy pitting immigrants against native cultures across the globe. More recently, the modern academy was heavily
influenced by Germanic institutions of industrial servitude. Society offers the cognitive power of its
youth and, in exchange, receives industrious citizens. Scholarship often turns on the degree to
which social memes are re-narrated with greater precision or conviction. Regression – the hubris of sets of knowns operating at deterministic scales with the passing acknowledgement of Standard
Error or Deviation – is the exclusive agency of sanctioned inquiry.
Digital or multi-variate serial regression produces marginal
and incremental adaptations. At best, we
strive to remove unexplained variance from our powers of observation building
ever greater confidence in our metrics and their application. And while we train our mathematicians and
statisticians in the assumptions underpinning our regression obsession, we quickly
dismiss these as “unattainable” or “untestable” ideals and blithely proceed in
the misapplication of our models. In
short, we avoid critical inquiry at all costs and then lament the
“unexplained”, the “Black Swan”, the “unexpected”. We reduce the creative and the innovative to
the subtle alteration at the margins and pay no attention to possibility that
radical alternative dimensions of inquiry exist outside the “expert” models of
our times. Genuine invention,
innovation, and creativity are sacrificed to the inertia of consensus. We shun non-linear dynamism in favor of
linear, progressive historicism.
How would we contemplate a different educational system in
which Innovation and Critical Thinking underpinned the essential experience of
the participant? What attributes of the
existing institution would remain and what would require radical transformation
or transmutation? What core technologies
– both social and physical – would support this transformative model? In the pages that follow, I am setting forth
a proposal for M·CAM’s (and my) contribution to the School of Innovation,
Analytics, and Critical Thinking.
Learning Re-contextualized
The capacity to engage in life-long constructive adaptation
is inadequate in today’s educational paradigms.
From the post-World War II obsession with STEM competencies, scholarship
has been bifurcated into two equally ineffective tracks. Economic and social reinforcement for
“research” is held to be the pinnacle of professional achievement at the modern
academy. Teaching and relevant application
is subservient to research. While many
seek to emulate models of research and education practiced in the U.S. and
German educational systems, limited explicit critique is given to these
approaches. The competencies demanded of
the academy reinforce the centrality of research assumed to be relevant based
on the capacity to have such research funded.
The mechanisms for such funding – largely peer-reviewed grant
applications or corporate engagements – dictate the narrow fields of
inquiry. The alliance between State and
Corporate patronage insures that only that which is aligned to a fundable
objective advances. If you are a
researcher, your job is to advance the linear disciplinary track of consensus
dogma. If you’re a teacher, your job is
to produce vocationally competent participants in the labor force. In neither instance does the academy critique
the context in which extant activities – both social nor technical – are
operating and challenge context or student in a meaningful inquiry.
Over the past two decades, M·CAM has pioneered a global
initiative called Innovation Literacy.
Within this program, we have three sub-components. The first is called Heritable Innovation Trust
(HIT). The HIT program was developed to
allow students to have immersive, non-interrogatory experiences of living in
Communities of Persistence (more conventionally called “Indigenous” or
“Aboriginal”). Living as members of
these communities, engaging in their entire social fabric, students were
required to live without questions.
“Where is the bathroom?” “What
time is dinner?” “How do you catch the
fish?” All of these inquiries were
explicitly forbidden in favor of allowing the communities’ practices entirely
“teach” alternative modes of activity.
Observation and documentation – much like the Natural Philosophy
disciplined observation of 150 years ago – are the only technologies introduced
into the students’ experiences. And
these engaged only in moments of private reflection. By teaching non-interrogatory engagement,
pre-conditioned assumptions are set aside (that hygiene = bathroom; that time =
meals; that humans sit atop natural systems; etc.) and alternative narratives
are apprehended. HIT serves as the
foundation of our Innovation Literacy program.
It has been adapted to corporate internships, public policy
apprenticeships and the like. The key
outcome of HIT is the power of Contextual Intelligence and Observational
Adaptation.
The second Program is Global Innovation Commons
(GIC). GIC is the repository of over $2
trillion of funded research resulting in patents or publications covering
fundamental human requirements of food & nutrition; infectious and tropical
disease treatment; petroleum alternative energy; and, potable water management. These patents and publications come from
M·CAM’s unique global archive of innovation – the world’s largest – including
patents and publications from over 168 countries from the 1700’s to the
present. This archive of human ingenuity
serves as a fertile catalyst for relevant systems engineering training. From practical engineering skills of
replication of technologies across the centuries to synthesis training (putting
together inter-disciplinary solutions to new contexts), the GIC provides the
applied curricular basis for teaching fundamental STEM principles all done in
immediate application and relevance.
Examining notions of efficiency, stability, reliability and utility as
key learning objectives, with GIC, over 250,000 individuals, institutions and
enterprises have repurposed human ingenuity for current commercial and social
use. This also radically alters the
illusion that the future of the world is digital and data. The analogue needs of humanity are brought
back into centrality and you’re more likely to see a new water filter as you
are to see an iPhone app.
Finally, the third component is Strategic Innovation
(SI). SI is the organization of over 88
million patent-protected expressions of human ingenuity on a platform called M·CAM
DOORS®. This system is built
on the backbone of linguistic genomics – a dynamic intelligent machine learning
system that uses genetic algorithms to surface explicit and tacit linkages
between concepts and interventions.
Realizing that all systems are inter-disciplinary, SI affords instant
heterogeneous contextualization of every human undertaking and archives the
same across over two centuries. Rather
than imagining disciplines as ever more constricting specialization, SI
explicitly shows network and node effects of interconnectedness well beyond
conventional “interdisciplinary” constructs.
These three pillars of our Innovation Literacy program seek
to achieve several core objectives:
1.
Explicit Contextual Intelligence – rather than
training people in digital question / answer linear processing, Innovation
Literacy provides immediate applicability of contextual intelligence. By understanding responses to varying
impulses towards ingenuity, relevant learning skills can be apprehended.
2.
Non-interrogatory Observation – critical
thinking skills are inaccessible if “thinking” presupposes all “known”
conditions and ontologies. Immersive
learning contexts engaged without pre-supposition teach powers of observation
and synthesis. Most of all they train
the mind to adapt as an intelligent system in which all senses are explicitly
conscripted.
3.
Network Activation – by seeing the omnipresence
of ingenuity, the myth of the individual is set aside in favor of the
intelligence of the network. When one
sees that a variety of interventions have been manifest by a heterogeneous set
of “innovators”, the myth of unique and individuation is deconstructed in favor
of collaborative models of synthetic application.
Integrative Assessment
For decades, we have used the technology of Integral
Accounting as a means to explicitly measure the “all-in” consequence of
human activities. Rather than measuring
the relevance of scholarship and research through the myopia of the “funded”,
we adopt an approach that explicitly acknowledges all forms of value exchange. What follows is an excerpt from the Integral
Accounting practice document.
For the past two millennia, many of our consensus human
systems have reified
Dominion and
Control as the basis for understanding
our ecosystem. In his 1776 opus,
An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of
the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith buttressed the 1,000 year-old Christian
rites embodied within the Doge of Serenissima’s Marriage of the Sea in which
all nature – including human beings – are “resources” over which structures of
power must exert dominion. In the
Bible account of Creation, the story
records the stated hierarchy: “Let us make man in Our image, after Our
likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping
thing that crawls upon the earth.”
From these seemingly innocent threads,
manacles of indenture have been woven (and worn) and are now strangling our
umbilical to life. Rather than bathing
in the cosmic ocean of abundance, we have built systems that manage scarcity
(time, resources, order, control, and money) while allowing our power to be
transferred to surrogates who construct and maintain their position by the
manufacture and perpetuation of fear.
The very word “livelihood” implies that without participation in the
prostitution of human energy and effort, life itself would be impaired or
impossible.
We can observe the unsustainable essence of domination and
its agent of reinforcement, denomination.
We observe the frequent incapacitation of effort that is stymied by
inadequacy projected on our impulses. We
would act but for lack of resources or access thereto. We would adapt but for communal support or
inspiration. We would engage if we only
knew how. We would endeavor if we had
the funding. We would strive if we had
the right tools. We would passionately
live if we felt better. Is there an
isomorphic system that would unleash our unfettered humanity in persistent,
generative action? May it be the case
that we merely lack a coherent framework in which we can perceive, discern, and
engage the abundance in which we’re enveloped and through which we could fully
manifest our incarnate potential?
Integral Accounting and our experience in its application suggests that
demonstrable, empirical, reproducible regeneration of the human condition is
accessible, completely.
The Process:
In our experience, we often begin the process of Integral
Accounting with a discussion of light and magnetism. The Sun, the literal and precise metaphor for
persistent, generative, energy and light is understood to be a massive nuclear
reactor in which matter is converted into energy which is emitted for the
sustenance of all the observable world.
This discussion provides a vital metaphor for our final process which we
call “Fusion” inspired by our Sun, nuclear fusion and the work of
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
. To unleash a fusion reaction, charged
particles in the context of a magnetic field are afforded the capacity to ‘overcome’
their individual charges – the natural forces that keep them in opposition.
To demonstrate the sentience derived from Source, we hold a
bar magnet over iron filings. Gradually,
the bar magnet is lowered towards the iron filings until the first filings
appear to animate, subtly standing on their ends moving towards the
magnet. Slowly, the magnet is then held
at that altitude and passed over the filings to demonstrate that different
filings respond variously to the positive and negative poles of the bar
magnet. This demonstration opens a
dialogue into non-dual sentience. Each
particle, discerning the field elects to respond or not to the moving charge
passing above it. Then the magnet is
lowered a bit closer to the iron filings demonstrating that each filing, at its
own discernment, elects to attach to one or the other pole without judgment or
symmetric bias. The shape of the filings’ attachment are described by the
observers to open the discourse around charges serving an agnostic, sentient role
in visibly discerning magnetic fields
.
We use this demonstration to open a simple,
wonderment-filled space for the beginning of the Integral Accounting Audit.
To begin the process, we recommend introducing the six
dimensions of value [Commodity; Custom & Culture; Knowledge; Money;
Technology; Well-being] using the written summaries that are available
on-line. They are summarized as:
Commodity – elements present in communities which, through cultivation,
production, or value-add, can be used to generate means of social or commercial
engagement. Some examples of Commodities are potential energy, food, water and
raw materials.
Custom &
Culture - practices and
expressions of individual or community held values and traditions which create
a context for social interactions. Some examples of Custom and Culture are
expressions of social values, gatherings, interactions, art, music, and
ceremonies.
Knowledge - information and experiential awareness which can be transmitted
through language, art, or other expressions. Some examples of knowledge are the
transfer of information and the expansion of understanding through literacy,
marketing, negotiation and stories.
Money - a mode of
transmitting and recognizing value exchange using physical or virtual surrogates
including currency, systems of credit and barter and engaging any artifact
constituting a consensus of recognized value exchange which, itself, is devoid
of the value it represents. Some examples of money are currency, trade credits,
debt, equity, futures, bonds, and contracts.
Technology - artifacts or schemes by which value-added experiences and
production can be effectuated including any action, process, thing, or utility
which allows for the manifestation of spatially and temporally defined tangible
or intangible artifacts or event. Some examples of technology are appliances,
tools, logistics, processing, communications, power, and infrastructure.
Well Being - the capacity for any person or ecosystem to function at their
optimal level where conditions are suitable for a person to be at liberty to
fully engage in any activity or social enterprise entirely of their choosing as
and when they so choose. Some examples of well-being are health, sanctuary,
medicine, inalienable rights, equitable and gainful engagement, fellowship, and
fun.
To begin the auditing process, we find it helpful to provide each
participant six sheets of paper, one representing each of the six value
attributes. These become a helpful
visual cue for the first organization of abundance impulses.
1.
Integral
Accounting Audit: Identifying
Abundance sounds like it should be simple.
For most people, life has made this process subject to considerable
filtering. For the purpose of the
Integral Accounting Audit, we encourage people to reflect on everything that
they have in their field that exists in abundance. Abundance is neutral. A person may have a lot of money and friends,
and, in the same instance have a lot of fear and sense of isolation. All of these “abundances” are explicitly
welcome.
Abundance is recorded in writing
and is best manifest in an individual, reflective process. Each thing, attribute, sense, or experience
that comes to mind is written on the colored sheet of paper intuitively linked to
the value dimension instantly recognized.
It is important not to over think this first
classification. If you think that ‘love’
or ‘computers’ are instantly recognized as ‘Well Being’ and ‘Technology’,
respectively, follow the impulse. The
key thing is to write down everything.
Upon completion of the first
attempt, stop and reflect on two common errors.
We tend to associate Abundance with ‘Good’ and Scarcity with ‘Bad’. This binary classification is prone to
fallacy. Free from this judgment
duality, invite a reconsideration of the audit to assess whether there are
attributes or things that exist in life that are not on the page. Put them on too.
2.
Polarizing
the Optics: The colors of the
Integral Accounting system are intentional.
Each color assists in reflecting wavelengths of energy historically and
esoterically associated with the elemental energy represented in each
value. Once filled with identified
Abundance, each colored sheet is arranged in the order of the wheel: Yellow, Blue,
Purple, Green, Grey, and Red. Beginning
with the Commodity (Yellow) list, each item assigned to that classification is
now recast in each of the other dimensions.
A matrix is formed in which each Abundance is described as each other
value unit. In Figure 1 (below) you can
see a simple example of the optical matrix which affords the ability to reflect
on the energy of each Abundance and its capacity to manifest in other
dimensions of value. It is essential to
stay unattached and non-judgmental in this phase too. Nothing is ‘Good’, ‘Bad’, or any other
attribute. The invitation is to simply
see Abundance diffracted through multiple perspectives. Having done the full diffraction, you return
to the first order classifier and offer gratitude for the pathway it illumined.
One can readily see that for
maximum value, this experience is engaged over an extended period of time and
thoughtful reflection.
Figure 1. Audit
with Optical Polarization
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Commodity
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Custom & Culture
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Money
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Well-Being
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C
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Tree
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Assembly point
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Record of weather
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Landscaping
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Photosynthesis respirator
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Aesthetic beauty
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C&C
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Corporate relations
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Know
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Statistical modelling
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Money
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Access to Credit
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Tech
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Websites
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W-B
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Meditation Koi pond
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3.
Polarizing
the Charges: Once the matrix is
fully populated, we move to the second type of polarization – polarizing the
magnetic charges. This is where we
engage intuitive judgment in impulsive expression. A positive (+) or negative (-) sign is placed
next to each Abundance in each classification to create the ‘bar magnet’ field
which allows choice and action to emerge.
This process begins to inform the perceived net energetic impact of each
Abundance. By allowing each charge to
manifest without deep reflection, the intuitive and reflexive senses inform the
audit without attempting to force social projections upon the process.
It is informative to spend some
time considering any value dimensions in which excessive charges (either + or -
) manifest and allow the observation to open up consideration as to the roots
of that hyperpolarization.
4.
Activation: Using the fully polarized (optical and
magnetic) and charged field, you now have a map of First Order Action. This First Order Action is the single
dimension, abundance, or impulse when, if invited to change its ‘charge’
(positive to negative or vice versa), can unleash persistent, generative action. Like the iron filing dancing into connection
with the bar magnet, allow the field created by the audit (the iron filings) to
respond to the field (your magnetism or the magnetism formed in collaboration
with others) to unleash sentient action.
Several graduate schools have now elected to adopt some or
all of the Integral Accounting framework into their core curriculum as it
addresses both the needs to increase the social responsibility of the academic
pursuit as well as create context for applied STEM awareness. Using the 6-D model of ecosystem engagement,
students are given explicit tools to engage their endeavors holistically.
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