September 2010

• 2010-09-23

  Motivation through the ages

  While rewriting Working with Stories I’ve been making the rounds through some old projects and visiting some of my favorite patterns. One particular pattern has come up in so many projects — ten? fifteen? — that I think it might be of interest to others. It has to do with generations, organizations, and motivation. This… Read more

• 2010-09-16

  George Williams

  I was saddened today to hear that George Williams had recently passed away. George was one of my advisors at Stony Brook and a big influence on me. When I say I’m a slow thinker and proud of it, I always think of George. I used to sit with him in his office, pose questions,… Read more

• 2010-09-15

  Uncanny 2.0

  I’ve been thinking all week about the uncanny framework I wrote about last week (it seems to want to be called that). I have to say, this has been a slippery beast to fight/dance/play with! I keep being reminded of Jacob wrestling with the angel, and of holding onto greased pigs, and of fish slipping… Read more

• 2010-09-09

  Deeper confluence: Explanation in the uncanny world

  I’d like to introduce yet another new framework for sensemaking in this post, one I’ve been pondering for a while. This morning I woke up and said to myself, “It’s time.” So here we go. EDIT: The framework described in this post has been superseded by an even better, shinier framework described in the next… Read more

• 2010-09-04

  Complexity/chaos stories: Butterflies, keystones and climbers

  This blog post has been revised and published as the paper “Are We Ready for Complexity?” in the Journal on Policy and Complex Systems, Spring 2018 issue. You can also read this PDF version of the published paper. (It fixes an editing error that bothered me.) If you want to read the original, unimproved version… Read more