Inspiration

Christopher Alexander - The Nature of Order

The "Japanese Tea House" generative process we experienced and discussed comes from Christopher Alexander's epic (four volumes) work "The Nature of Order".

Link to a collection of quotes I excerpted while reading this work.

PDF with the Japanese Tea House generative process and some pages around it for context.

Oops, the PDF link seems broken.

How Do We Sing?

This tweet from Richard struck a chord me and resonated with the notion of sound @Alex Rodriguez has been presencing:

https://twitter.com/RichDecibels/status/1287436036549771265

What is our shield?

This also via Richard ... a (some self pun intended) concrete outcome is needed for a generative process to emerge:

https://twitter.com/catalinagaitan_/status/1287218058277216256

Bryan Ungard - Deliberately Developmental Organisations

This is the podcast I mentioned in our call ... loaded with profoundly grounded insights:
https://iamronen.com/blog/2019/12/24/bryan-ungard-deliberately-developmental-organisations/

Rta - Right

This post is an excerpt from Robert Pirsig's "Lila" about the Sanskrit root word Rta and its origins and how subtly present it still is in a distant (in time, geography and culture) language like English:

https://iamronen.com/blog/2010/05/02/reading-lila-rta/

"Nothing disturbs a bishop like the presence of a saint"

Decay from the dynamic to the static, ugh - that uncomfortable place. But at least it swings. Ouroborus eats its tail and the cycle begins again; from static to dynamic and back again. Expansion, contraction, expansion.

Ryan Singer - A Primer on Christopher Alexander

Ryan Singer is head of product strategy at Basecamp and as far as I know one of the only people who has really explored critically, in depth and applied Alexander's work in the domain of software. Yesterday he gave this presentation which is a very good introduction to Alexander. I highly recommend it if the subject matter speak to you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsTZXT0FlM

Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem

As we've been contemplating the unexpected completeness of cycle2 I've been doing two things that suddenly took on a convergence that startled me:

1. I've been re-listening to a podcast mini-series about my birth-country and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It touches me deeply and completes the biased story I was told growing up in Israel. In a way it also speaks to my alienation from Israel and the sense of loss I have in relation to it (family, language, culture, roots ...). It is a long series (almost 24 hours!) but it is rich, captivating, deep, personal and practically informative about the specific conflict and conflict as a wider pattern.. It is good listening in its own right. However I am sharing it here and now because it may, somewhere in an unknowable future, come into play in our work.

2. I've been doing a lot of sacrificial writing (hint: a generative process) in anticipation of where we may go next.

I just sat in the rare (this time of year) and refreshing sun, almost in tears as the 4th episode ended, and was hit wrapped by a sense of potential convergence of these two vectors.

I had the opportunity to listen to the first episode while cleaning at home, and I can tell you that it is the best podcast episode I listened to in my life. I share the view and ethos of the author regarding the conflict, but now it will be much better informed. I did not know all the details he explains, nor the connections of historical facts (some I was not aware that they were related).

The way he exposes the facts shows very carefully a tragic (and also kind of inevitable) generative process. The key question he puts when telling the acts and rationale of the different parts (so many!) is something like "what would you have done in this situation?". It makes me think that my perspective of paying attention to incentives in every step someone has to make a decision during the process made sense. More on that when reflecting on the second cycle. (I think that I usually was the first to speak during the second cycle, and now I would like to be the last, for a change...)