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“Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

Last year, I took my first crack at Tiago Forte‘s Building a Second Brain, a cohort-based course designed to help students organize digital notes- and also, as it turns out, to better understand themselves and what matters.

One early assignment in the course is to come up with your own favourite problems. These are the things you return to again and again in what you read, think about, and wake up in the middle of the night pondering (at least in my case). These reflect, ideally, not a moment in time, but something persistent and nearly intrinsic. That said, I will be curious if my future self will still be thinking about these things in a few years…

My Favourite Problems

(in no particular order…)

1. What are the implications of social connection on us, from the evolution of the brain and consciousness to our current well-being?
2. How can the practice of listening affect every aspect of our experience?
3. What can I do to foster a sense of belonging for myself and others?
4. How does the design of digital technology affect our brains?
5. How can I be more present?
6. What is the best way to develop products that are actually meaningful to people as well as ethical?
7. How can I stay in the space of curiousity and foster curiousity in others?
8. How do groups (made of people) work best?
9. How can I play a part in changing systemic inequities for people?
10. How do systems play into culture, economics, biology, and individual experience?
11. How does learning work in humans?
12. What is time?
13. What is the most effective way to tell stories and convey ideas?
14. Is it true?
15. How much can I embrace the feeling of entropy, powerlessness, smallness, AKA reality? How can I be in acceptance and not in the suffering of “things should be different”?
16. How am I willing to be known and risk exposure so my experience and synthesis can benefit others?

What if I wrote every day in 2023? There’s only one way to find out.

To expectation-set (for you? for me?) I’m not trying to make this the best writing I have ever done, or to make some grand unifying or even coherent collection of concepts and ideas.

Enough disclaimers!

Today is January 1, 2023 and it does not have the patina of a holiday, except insofar as it is a relatively normal day after a few weeks of family and travel, and there are hints of sun after a rather soggy December. No champagne was opened here. Which is not to say I don’t feel celebratory, exactly. I am grateful for the way the last year has unfolded despite it being rather amorphous. My stepson said he thinks something really terrible will happen in 2023, and you know, he is certainly rational in that pronouncement, the only question is how close the terror will be.

I had no idea I’d go in this direction. What I want to tell you is that I (for whatever reason) feel like optimism of some kinds is also rational, and possibly even necessary. Where this comes from is love, the spaces that are held, that I co-hold, the spaces that do not proscribe any particular kind of excellence or achievement, but celebrate the momentousness of shifts in thinking, in behaviour, in each person’s individual framing of their own experience. Seriously, these places are amazing.

Reading today: The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber. The essay on science fiction and games in particular, which are good companions to the rollicking conversation Graeber had with Peter Thiel. I’m so late to this party but there are still plenty of people dancing. The layers of the system, the bureaucracy backed by violence, the indoctrination into the belief in the need for such bureaucracies, the fashioning of a financial system that requires the enforcement of these beliefs and behaviours, and all of it something to wake up and believe in again every day. I’m way too vague in this description but how can I sum it up succinctly?

This year my intention is to collaborate to build technology that has enough openness to allow for spaces to emerge that don’t require violence to manage as well as enough structure and design to encourage practices of coming together that foster belonging, mattering, and choice. Saying this, I guess I’m making this a special day, even if setting that intention really isn’t any different from any of the days of last year. Saying things out loud. Let me pour it into the hole I’ve built for it to hold up everything else, as concrete as it can be, and hey, here we go, twentytwentythree.

This morning I had a few thoughts related to creating containers, which is how I think of an approach to designing technology to support transformation:

Freedom among people requires structure. As much of that structure that can be emergent as possible rather than dictated leads to self-responsible interaction,. For that to happen successfully, the container must be created with some constraints and intentions. The space must be named as a place for being self-responsible. Those who create the space do not control it.

Spaces are structures.

Spaces shape structure.

Maybe it sounds like a strange thing to build a business around, but I think this way of thinking about things creates a ton of value for any group that wants to make change, at least change that has an element of personal and collective transformation.

Jo Freeman’s essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness helps to frame the direction of transformational space design. We need the small, intimate, conversational experience to help us learn how to be together and to feel a sense of meaning and mattering. And we do need structures that support interdependent action. Neither is optional if we want to develop spaces where we’re not practicing dominance over our friends and allies.

To quote liberally from the essay, these are the specific practices that our spaces (in this case, digital spaces) should support and even encourage:

1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.
2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.
4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person’s “property” and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.
5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of “apprenticeship” program rather than the “sink or swim” method. Having a responsibility one can’t handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one’s skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.
6) Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one’s power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion — without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.
7) Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members’ skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.

(Underlines in original, bolding my own emphasis)

When we create spaces that allow people to matter, we don’t erase all of the ways that systemic power, culture, and lived experience shape us. Reverend angel Kyodo williams said this morning that we have to be intentional about shifting the loci of power so that these factors don’t reinforce status relationships that come from systemic inequities.

When we’re working in the context of transformation, we can be aware that growing up with certain advantages based on race, gender, or other statuses may mean some people may have certain skills or more money due to their opportunity to access. The group can choose to welcome these skills or resources without making them what confers power or governance within the group. You don’t need to be disappeared or feel pressured not to contribute because you’ve been seen more readily in school, work, (or even on social media) before you joined the group.

In Al-Anon, which has welcomed millions of people from very different backgrounds into decentralized groups with rotating and distributed governance, members are encouraged within meetings to “avoid outside issues” which can be things like profession, religion, or whether they are also members of other 12-Step fellowships.

We can go further by inviting ourselves to consider how our own way of supporting inequity might play into a space, even when that support comes in the form of believing limiting or negative things about ourselves. If our space leads us to feel like we should hide aspects of ourselves, we probably are perpetuating unbelonging in our collective.

We can also notice when we might be able to step back, know we are not ‘the only one who can..’, and hold space for those whose voices may not be as forthcoming. I’ve noticed that for me, I often feel reluctant to be vulnerable at first, but once I feel more comfortable, I need to pay attention to my pause and hold space for other people. I’ve also experienced people with more power pushing me to stay quiet, saying ‘you don’t know how much influence you have.’ In all of these situations, the solution is a mixture of self-awareness and structure, when there are roles and rotation of responsibilities.

In making technology that can support structures like this, which apply to most communities of practice, support, and changemaking, we can inform the options of a space (which technology always constrains and mediates) to support both intimate and trust-building communication and processes that allow for more inclusive, distributed, effective means of non-domination-oriented leadership and action.

What does this look like in actual design? Working on it! Of course I would love your thoughts or feedback.