I am finishing out my term with finals this week.  ‘Twas the best. ‘Twas the worst.  Now, I am casting my line into the river that runs through my life and three fish strike at my fly.

1. The Knowledge and Learning Transfer Problem

2. Betting the Spread on Inexorables

3.

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The first is the source of my text and image. The second is from Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter “Breaking Smart”. The third is from James C. Scott, author of the acclaimed, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

There is a river that runs through them. I am fishing it. The current is swift and cold as it runs off the high sierra.  I wait,  creel ready with a few salmon already inside.

Here are a three gems, all shiny and sleek rainbows

Venkatesh Rao, “Here’s the basic truth about planning: you cannot plan better than you can predict.”

Charles Jennings, “The incessant desire to hear about ‘best practice’ is really a need to hear about good practice and emerging practice. In other words, people are actually asking ‘tell me about the things that work for you. They might give us some good insights if we can apply them in our own way’. There is no ‘best practice’ where there are different environments and processes.”

James C. Scott, “The condensation of history, our desire for clean narratives, and the need for elites and organizations to project an image of control and purpose all conspire to convey a false image of historical causation. They blind us to the fact that most revolutions are not the work of revolutionary parties but the precipitate of spontaneous and improvised action (“adventurism,” in the Marxist lexicon), that organized social movements are usually the product, not the cause, of uncoordinated protests and demonstrations, and that the great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below . ”