THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700
rodwelch@pacbell.net
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:12:44 -0800
03 00050 61 05011301
Mr. Henry van Eyken
Webmaster
Bootstrap Institute
6505 Kaiser Drive
Fremont, CA 94555
..
Subject:
Fleabyte ABC 3-layer Architecture
Dear Henry,
Glad to see
Doug Engelbart's
1992 paper proposing a new way of working
providing a foundation for launching Fleabyte again.
.. Perhaps the "opening salvo" for Fleabyte contemplated in your
letter today, shown below, will flesh out how to transcend the
box of IT in order for the cycle of intelligence to propagate
through education, government, and industry, i.e., into society
at large, where need compounds daily?
..
Recall that Doug described the
ABC
method as a new way of
thinking and working, reviewed on December 22, 1999.
..
Doubtless this process has a broad societal sweep, noted in your
letter, because civilization, per se, arises from human
thinking. Anything that strengthens, or otherwise augments,
intelligence must lift civilization as a rising tide lifts all
boats. Discussions with Doug over the past years seem to me to
endorse your vision for Fleabyte.
..
Last year, in a call on October 4, 2004
the "Enterprise Architect" at Boeing observed that
merely citing a need for improvement does not yield solutions.
This suggests that people on the job are wary about accomplishing
meaningful advance toward a "knowledge" solution, with the result
that many, who claim to seek the rosette stone for improvement, are in
fact stone deaf, and willfully blind to advance, noted in your earlier
letter
on November 26, 2000 asking folks to implement an ABC new way of thinking.
Note that Doug calls out in his 1992 paper for
pilot testing
to enable transformation. Doug further describes people
transitioning gracefully
to a new way of working. It turns out however, that
graceful transition is an oxymoron, because, as Grove notes at
Intel, reviewed on March 7, 1998,
people like work on familiar things in familiar ways,
and leadership "loathes" change...
..
That's a threshold challenge, even more difficult than Eric's
letter on 000503 disclosing difficulty thinking "out of the box"
to differentiate information from knowledge in a way that
technology can implement. That's why I mentioned transformation
the other day, as a good target for the "opening salvo" of
Fleabyte.
.. This arises most prominently in the linking issue. In the past
few years there has been progress by Eugene and others on adding
links to email,
called out in Doug's 1992 paper and restated in his
letter to the OHS/DKR team on April 5, 2000. Eugene cited
requirements for linking in a letter on November 26, 2000.
..
However, Eugene also noted on November 26, 2000 that linking
in daily communication is
difficult
with familiar tools, even for experts in computer technology. Two years
later, Murray Altheim pointed out on August 20, 2002 that experience shows
people don't like to add links that save time using a
paperless office construct even when the record is full of
explicit links that make it fast and easy to augment the
millions of links (i.e., intelligence) that
people generate innately. Murray's analysis is
supported by a case study a few weeks earlier on August 12, 2002
showing that even those who
advocate a new way of working to augment intelligence by adding
links using granular addressability in fact
don't use links in communication
to improve accuracy and expand span of attention.
.. Could it be that people fear responsibility for loss, through
traceability with links, more than we fear the actual loss? Does
this explain
tragic events
September 11, 2001?
How then to overcome inordinate
fear that
paralyses productivity
noted by Eric on October 3, 2001
and at SRI earlier on May 22, 2001?
Is this the lesson of
Prometheus
learned again in the 21st century?
.. For example, correspondence the past few days on launching
Fleabyte has nary a single link showing correlations,
implications, nuance, and alignment (i.e., accuracy) from among a
group of talented people who strongly support the grand vision.
This presents a transformation dilemma, one of among many, which
the "opening salvo" of Fleabyte might address. How can continual
bumbling, endemic to
bureaucracy
(reviewed on February 3, 2004)
be transformed into continual
learning embodied by the ABC method, and called out by the
Tofflers,
Friedman, Senge, Drucker, and others? (reviewed on
September 11, 1995)
.. Who is working the problem? Anyone at the CIA, Microsoft, IBM,
Harvard, anywhere? What is the evidence? Anyone producing a
linked record showing causation based on chronology and context.
These seem like good questions to launch Fleabyte, now with an
older, wiser readership.