Had a tweet this morning that is apt here:

Work in 2018 https://t.co/R6GiBu0ga0 .For those who’ve practiced connected learning,@jarche sums up our needs:The organizational design innovation we need today is connected people doing human work in organizational structures that promote self-determination. #clmooc #pkmastery pic.twitter.com/d6PhFqbhwa

— Terry Elliott (@telliowkuwp) December 27, 2018

In a comment to Sheri Edwards’ post about dots and lines,   I am trying to connect Harold Jarche’s post about work and connection.  Instead of dots, Jarche has Venn diagrams of overlapping connection.

Funny how metaphor can control our framing of the world so utterly. Are we dots connected by lines or circles connected by their overlap? Both and more, I reckon. We just have to be aware that both metaphors have blindspots and limitations, the map never being the territory and all that.

Jarche goes further: we should use a compass to guide us, not a list of what the skills of the future may look like. So subtle a difference with this metaphor. It asserts that we are better off being ‘drawn toward’ some lodestone rather than driven by some engine.  What engine? Some checklist manifesto?

One term we should all be aware of is Jon Husband’s term,  ‘wirearchy’.  He defines it as “a dynamic two way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”  As a connected force (#clmooc, #modigiwri, el30, our blogs and social media) we are practicing and learning and mapping.  I suppose we already have a wirearchy, it’s just hard to see what our purpose is beyond this illegible set of metaphors we adopt.

I think of all of our work as trying to approach the messy wicked challenges of learning.  These challenges are life and death now.  If we can learn together, if we can be drawn toward this lodestone of wirearchy/connected learning, if we can drag others with us in this gravity well of connection, I suppose we might make a go of this planet.

Perhaps our true north is John Donne’s Meditation XVII:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Until we feel, until we empathize, until the joy and pain of others is real to most of us, we will remain in a ‘doom loop death spiral maelstrom’, heading toward that undefined bottom.  Let’s gather together, break from this dark funnel and create joy loops in the face of planetary ponzi schemes.  Let us be drawn by the better compasses of our nature toward an undiminished future.