On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.” —@TerryandRob

“To think critically is always to be hostile — thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.” —Hannah Arendt

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” —Marie Curie

“The knowledge you take for granted could be life-changing for someone else. You owe it to the world to hit ‘publish’.” —@JustinSaaS

“One of my most important learnings as a facilitator has been that, to move forward together, agreement isn’t required as often or on as many matters as most people think.” —Adam Kahane

Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives & Hypercompetition

“If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity. Academia and federal agencies should better support science as a public good, and incentivize altruistic and ethical outcomes, while de-emphasizing output.” —Environmental Engineering Science 2017-01-01

COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless

To an epidemiologist, an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling. More precisely, it means that the proportion of people who can get sick balances out the ‘basic reproduction number’ of the virus, the number of individuals that an infected individual would infect, assuming a population in which everyone could get sick. Yes, common colds are endemic. So are Lassa fever, malaria and polio. So was smallpox, until vaccines stamped it out.

In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.

How The “Uber Economy” Is Killing Innovation, Prosperity And Entrepreneurship

The arrogance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seems so outrageous—and so childishly naive— that it is scarcely hard to believe. How could an industry that has produced so little in terms of productivity seem so sure that they’ve been “changing the world” for the better. And how have they made so much money?

The answer lies in something called increasing returns. As it turns out, under certain conditions, namely high up-front investment, negligible marginal costs, network effects and “winner-take-all markets,” the normal laws of economics can be somewhat suspended. In these conditions, it makes sense to pump as much money as possible into an early Amazon, Google or Facebook.

However this seemingly happy story has a few important downsides. First, to a large extent these technologies do not create new markets as much as they disrupt or displace old ones, which is one reason why productivity gains are so meager. Second, the conditions apply to a small set of products, namely software and consumer gadgets, which makes the Silicon Valley model a bad fit for many groundbreaking technologies.

“In a network, the best place to store knowledge is in other people.” —John Kellden

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” —Dorothy Parker

The primary work skills of the past century can be summed up as — compliance, perseverance, diligence, and intelligence. These skills were needed for routine work and standardized jobs. Historically we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is a decreasing requirement for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

While the industrial economy was based on finite resources, a creative economy is not. There is no limit to human creativity. We have to make a new social contract — not based on jobs — but enabling a learner’s mindset for life.

The skills required to live in a world dominated by complex and non-routine work requires — creativity, imagination, empathy, and curiosity. The core skill is curiosity. Curiosity about ideas can foster creativity, while curiosity about people can develop empathy (not sympathy). We get new ideas from new people, not the same people we see every day. We get new perspectives from people whose lives and experiences are different from ours. We cannot be empathetic for others unless we are first curious about them. We cannot be creative unless we are first curious to learn new ideas.

Our close-knit social groups do not give us the diversity of knowledge and perspectives we need to navigate the complexities of our networked world. Simple solutions, or worse, those that reflect our peer groups, will fail us. We can learn about other people by engaging with them. With social media, we can actively avoid algorithmic recommendations on who to connect with and make up our own minds. The opportunities to connect with people we do not know are greater now than any time in history. Unfortunately, too many of us prefer our little comfort zones instead.

Some people seem to be naturally curious. Others work at it, while some just lack interest in learning. You can notice this when traveling. Some people can describe many aspects of their local vicinity while others don’t know anything about why certain features exist. They say that the most interesting people are those who are interested in others.

Empathy puts us in other people’s shoes. We try to understand their perspective. Empathy is a requisite perspective for the network era. Empathy means engaging with others. The ability to connect with diverse perspectives and experiences is the human potential of the Internet.

Here is an example of how curiosity about others yields understanding. B.J May shared ‘How 26 Tweets Broke My Filter Bubble’, which enabled him to see the world beyond a workplace that he described as, “All men, all heterosexual, all white”. He decided to follow Marco Rogers’ advice to use “Twitter as a way to understand viewpoints that diverge from your own”. At the end of this experiment, May turned this into a permanent practice.

“Every one of my opinions on the issues at hand had been challenged, and most had shifted or matured in some way. More importantly, however, was this: The exercise had taught me how to approach a contrary opinion with patience and respect, with curiosity and an intent to learn, with kindness and humanity.” —B.J. May

Would B.J. May have been able to learn as much through solitary reflection? His reflection was directly linked to his engagement with others, often fully so. It hurt to learn. He learned socially, as we have for millennia. We need time for reflection, but even more so, we need experiences to reflect upon. This makes our learning personal — felt in our gut. Real learning is not abstract. Curiosity drives real learning.

In 2020 we developed a program called Working Smarter @ Citi — I published a short case study about it. The program was based on my PKM framework and it is now being rolled out across the enterprise. The feedback has been quite positive and I think the key to its success is the first of the four modules — sparking curiosity. First we found out what people wanted to learn more about. The next three modules then provided ways to learn more and connect better in order to feed people’s personal curiosity. One external example we provided was how the Chairman of Nokia used his curiosity about machine learning to develop a comprehensive presentation for the entire company — helping make the network smarter.

Networks are made up of nodes (people) and relationships between them. Curiosity and learning can create new connections between people and ideas. If we put our efforts into promoting learning (not schooling) for life we just might be able to create better ways of organizing our society. Constantly learning fractal beings can make for more resilient knowledge networks.

Bruno Marion in Chaos: A User’s Guide describes a ‘fractal being’ as a person who can hold opposing views and multiple valences of understanding. I would also say it’s a person with an acceptance of life in perpetual beta.

“A more fractal being will assimilate and unify all these elements in a better way: curiosity, rebellion, infinite dreams, awareness, responsibility, detachment, and wisdom at each moment of his or her life. The fractal being will preserve the curiosity of the child in adult life, the capacity for rebellion and indignation of youth, and always aspire for the greater wisdom that comes with ripeness.” p. 97

Finding ways to increase curiosity, make connections, and see coincidences is one aspect of the personal knowledge mastery discipline.

Curiosity yields insight.

“Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.” —Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall)

The recent research report — the rise and fall of rationality in language — shows a significant shift to emotion in the published public discourse  during the 1980s, after 130 years of predominately logic and reason.

After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.—PNAS 2021-12-21

This trend accelerated again in 2007 according to the researchers. They go on to observe that social media may have played a role in this shift.

The spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories may be amplified by social media, as the online diffusion of false news is significantly broader, faster, and deeper than that of true news and efforts to debunk. Conspiracy theories originate particularly in times of uncertainty and crisis and generally depict established institutions as hiding the truth and sustaining an unfair situation. As a result, they may find fertile grounds on social media platforms promulgating a sense of unfairness, subsequently feeding antisystem sentiments. Neither conspiracy theories nor the exaggerated visibility of the successful nor the overexposure of societal problems are new phenomena. However, social media may have boosted societal arousal and sentiment, potentially stimulating an antisystem backlash, including its perceived emphasis on rationality and institutions. —PNAS 2021-12-21

The researchers conclude that the post-truth surround is a danger to society but also that it can be addressed.

Clearly, the surge of post-truth discourse does suggest such a shift, and our results are consistent with the interpretation that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking. If true, it may well be impossible to reverse the sea change we signal. Instead, societies may need to find a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and emotion, while at the same time making best use of the much needed power of rationality and science to deal with topics in their full complexity. Striking this balance right is urgent as rational, fact-based approaches may well be essential for maintaining functional democracies and addressing global challenges such as global warming, poverty, and the loss of nature. —PNAS 2021-12-21

I discussed how we can confront the post-truth machines in 2019, as well as the potential for prebunking conspiracy theorists in 2020. I concluded that critical thinking requires us to constantly question assumptions, especially our own. To develop these skills, questioning must be encouraged. But this runs counter to most schooling and training practices. When do students or employees get to question underlying assumptions of their institutions? If they cannot do this, how can we expect them to challenge various and pervasive types of ‘fake news’?

The elites — government and market — cannot have it both ways. They cannot have an educated citizenry as well as a compliant workforce. In addition, with the wide use of consumer social media, and their dark sides, we need to actively engage in proactive messages on a continuous basis. Waiting for the conspiracy theorists to act first is a grave mistake. Their influence is greater than their numbers.

The term —Agnotology — “the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance” is introduced by danah boyd in an excellent piece (2019) on what lies beneath the flood of fake news.

“You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it. You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.” —danah boyd

The digital information ecosystem extends emotion through an ongoing series of manufactured media spectacles. Traditional journalism — with its attempts at presenting both sides — is obsolesced by the very nature of its assumption of a neutral point of view. Return to nature movements — such as we are seeing with anti-vaxxers during this pandemic — retrieve the pastoral impulse for an imaginary kinder and gentler society. We are left in a state of constant doubt as conspiratorial content becomes easier to access on platforms than on solid scientific information, especially online and only a click away.

We are in an information war. Understanding this is the first step in fighting for democracy.

On 26 January I will be presenting on — The Power of Social Learning: Building Knowledge, Community, and Trust — hosted by Valamis LXP. Several questions have already been submitted by some of the over 150 participants registered so far and I will not have time to address most of these. Instead, I will try to answer these here — by topic — though they mostly do not directly reflect the content of the presentation. Some of these questions would require much more contextual understanding to give an adequate response and others could make for a month-long consulting assignment.

Connections & Boundaries

Complex work requires strong ties and high levels of trust to enable work teams to function. On the other hand, innovation needs loose ties and a wide network to get diverse points of view. In these loose networks, cooperation (sharing freely without direct reciprocation) is the order of the day, not collaboration (working together toward a common objective).

We cannot focus only on networks and complexity and ignore the rest, however. There is no single answer on how diverse a work team should be, or the right balance between time spent with loose networks and time spent focused on projects. It’s not as simple as tacking on 20% time. Work and learning are in dynamic tension at all times. While some action and coordination in the workplace can be automated with performance support systems, collaboration and cooperation are still intensely human and require continuous learning.

A third space is required — communities of practice — which connect social networks and teams. These communities — internal and external — are safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. A primary role for learning & development staff is to find and support these communities. It’s a community of practice if it changes peoples’ practices.

Image: sensemaking’s secret weapon

Getting support for a learning budget in tight times

I have often been asked how to convince organizational leaders of the return on investment (ROI) for workplace learning. However, if executives are asking for the ROI of an initiative, it really means they do not believe in it, and are sending you off to stop bothering them for a while. If they really think something is important for the business, they seldom ask to see any ROI.

If those in leadership positions are to really promote workplace learning — not just compliance courses — they have to believe that it is good for them. In order to truly understand any inherent value, executives have to already be practicing cooperation in knowledge networks and developing emergent practices. For executives to believe in workplace learning and support frameworks like personal knowledge mastery — necessary for the rest of us — they have to see it for themselves first. All of the effort put into preparing business cases for organizational learning initiatives should instead be focused on getting the leadership to adopt new practices. After that, there is no longer any need to sell the idea. Justifying ROI is selling to the wrong part of the executive brain.

Sometimes — if the investment is small enough — nobody cares about ROI, and that is what Trojan Mice are for.

Sustaining virtual communities going forward

These are lessons I learned ten years ago about online communities and they are still valid in my experience. Virtual communities are not a new thing since the pandemic started. Many people have a lot of experience in fostering communities, such as Rachel Happe.

• A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
• Only a small percentage, ±10%, of members, will be active.
• If facilitators can seed good topics and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
• If you use a very gentle hand in controlling members/learners, some will become highly participative.
• Design for after any formal training, using social tools that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
• Create the role of ‘synthesizer’ from the onset, who will summarize the previous week’s activities.
• Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

However, there is a dark side to communities as well. They can strengthen bias and help hate groups to not just form but take action. Communities can reinforce prejudice. Large communities can also make hate socially acceptable. Seb Paquet noted that social media enable “ridiculously easy group-forming”. Not all groups are for the good of society. Not all communities are there to promote democracy. We should all be aware of the dark sides of communities.

Image: Shared by Ian McCarthy on Twitter

Models and practices for peer learning groups

I’ve had success in asking senior leadership how often they learn and exchange information using social rather than formal mechanisms. Once they put their own learning experiences into this context, they are often more likely to accept the value of social mechanisms.

A professional learning community, with its redundant connections, repetition of information, and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed professional development program can be. The bottom line is that learning faster is not about taking more courses or consuming more information. It’s about having better connections. Well-managed professional communities of practice with a good vision and a compass for the future can provide a trusted environment for making these peer connections.

Image: @rhappe

Is there a place for social media in social learning?

Complex work and work in complex environments require faster feedback loops. We need to get data, information, and knowledge quickly, and cannot wait for it to be bounced up and down a chain of command. Social networks, which are comprised of people that we trust in some way, can enable us to connect to someone who may be able to help. However, to do this, we have to already have that connection. Social media allow us to initiate and nurture relationships with many people in different organizations. The quality of our networks becomes critical in enabling us to do complex work. Social learning is the enabler.

Social media help people find and connect with each other, based on some shared interests. With complex work, our challenges are now highly contextual and good or best practices just don’t cut it anymore. We need someone who understands the nature of our problem who can use human reasoning to help us. We have to be connected to that person though. That’s why we need to engage in online social networks, but these are not created overnight. We develop them one conversation and one interaction at a time.

Simply put, they help create networks of multi-way trust to share ideas, advice and feelings between people who care. Social networks have been shown to be the principal way that learning spreads in organizations.

Individual learning in organizations becomes irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Based on McLuhan’s Laws of Media

How can we thrive in a broken system? This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges many of us face today, whether it be where we work, the institutions we deal with, or the governance systems that control us. Geoff Marlowe explains that how we perceive the situation and what type of humour we use, are critical in getting to a point where we may be able to take constructive action. Neither apathy nor cynicism will get us there, only irony may.

Ironic humour is often misunderstood and maligned by the positionally powerful because it challenges the deference they can assume is their due …

Which raises the question that if irony is so vital in maintaining a positive state in the face of an aspiration / actuality gap, why not just focus on humour?

That’s because without honesty and humility, any humour intended as ironic runs a real risk of sliding into sarcasm – literally “tearing off the flesh” of others.

Humour deployed as a form of violence isn’t going to contribute to the collective sense making, decision making & action taking that’s vital in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. —Thriving in a broken system

A related article explains that three key roles can have a significant blocking influence on value-creating relationships — Decision Maker, Expert, & Resource Controller. But when these players broaden their perspectives — through humility and honesty — then “distributed, iterative sense-making, decision-making and action-taking” are enabled.

Active, wide scale involvement in sense-making will bring wellbeing benefits, as employees will a) be protected from social isolation by these ongoing and meaningful dialogues, and b) find agency and purpose in their activities, which massively correlate with wellbeing. —Adaptive Cultures

Kieran Egan, in The Educated Mind, describes five levels of understanding — Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, & Ironic. The last is the most difficult to master and many are not able to get to this level of understanding. It’s like George Box’s adage — “All models are flawed, but some are useful.” — or F. Scott Fitzgerald stating — “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  Irony is a powerful sensemaking tool.

Ironic — it involves the “mental flexibility to recognize how inadequately flexible are our minds, and the languages we use, to the world we try to represent in them”; it therefore includes the ability to consider alternative philosophic explanations, and is characterized by a Socratic stance in the world.

Ironic understanding and ironic humour may be the keys for us to progress into a meta-modern future.

In July 2018, one hundred years after the influenza pandemic began, Extra Credits started a 6 part animated series to explain what happened. Little did they know what would happen 18 months later. The series is great for all ages and does simplify many aspects of a complex situation but I think they have done a good job. This series seen in light of the current pandemic shows how human behaviour, power elites, and vested interests have not changed in the past century. We have a better understanding of the science than we did in 1918 and our tools are much more sophisticated but we are acting pretty well the same as they did then.

Episode One covers the initial cases discovered in the USA and Canada and how these were covered up by authorities. Remember, there was a global war still going on.

Episode Two examines what happened in the trench fighting in Europe and how it was only when the disease hit neutral Spain, which did not censor the press, that it became known as the Spanish Flu. If you want to give it a geographical name, the North American Flu would be more accurate, even though it may have originated in China.

Episode Three highlights the military and medical responses, mostly in the USA, showing how established hierarchies blocked the flow of knowledge about this disease, and they eventually ran out of coffins.

Episode Four highlights the enormous death toll of the virus and also how it advanced the progress of the nursing profession beyond merely as orderlies for physicians. Nursing care was more effective than the medical treatments at the time.

Episode Five shows how the virus spread through global transportation networks, infecting most parts of the globe, with an interesting comparison of how two governments differed in their reaction to the pandemic. American Samoa locked down its port and suffered no deaths. Nearby Western Samoa remained open and 22% of its population died from the flu.

Episode Six is particularly interesting. We learn that there are no monuments to the medical heroes of the pandemic anywhere in the world. It was as if society had suffered collective amnesia. Today’s situation may be partially due to society’s inability to talk about and learn from the influenza pandemic. I once asked my father-in-law, a historian born in 1927, if he had ever heard the previous generation discuss the flu pandemic. He had never heard about it while growing up in Nova Scotia.

Finally, there is an afterward — Pandemic Lies — where the host reviews all the errors and mistakes in the series.  I recommend not to read any viewer comments until you have watched this last episode.

Doctor, years ago I had a foreman who taught me a great deal. He was quite a philosopher. One day he said, “William, you must learn from the mistakes of others—you will never live long enough to make them all yourself.” —Harry Myers & Mason M. Roberts (1932) Human Engineering

Emergency Hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas during the influenza pandemic— Wikimedia

Value Network — “A web of relationships that generates economic or social value through complex dynamic exchanges of both tangible and intangible benefits.” —Verna Allee

I participated in my first value network analysis (VNA) workshop in 2007. My impression at the time was that humans work in complex environments and we are by our very nature unpredictable. The result of a VNA allows us to ask better questions but it doesn’t give specific answers (it’s not a tool for bean counters). I felt that VNA was an excellent change management tool. I could see the use of VNA and the resulting concept maps enabling better communication within organisations, with clients, with funders, and throughout communities. These perceptions have not changed

VNA consists of Process Analysis plus Organizational Network Analysis and puts people at the centre. It examines Roles, Tangible Assets [e.g. goods, services, revenue, contracts, invoices], and Intangible Assets [e.g. knowledge, know-how, trust, reputation]. Value network analysis requires no specialized technology. It is best done in small groups and is especially useful if several groups analyze the same system and then compare their results.

Source: Ocean Tomo — “Within the last quarter century, intellectual capital has emerged as the leading asset class.”

VNA is a tool to see our how our organizational systems really interact.

“The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network — it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work.” —Verna Allee

I once used value network analysis to help a steering group in a global pharmaceutical company see their community of practice in a new light. For the first time, they saw it mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions instead of listening to their community. As a result, they decided to change their Charter on the spot, and develop more network-centric practices.

Value Network Analysis Workshop 2011

In 2021 I conducted online VNA masterclasses to first explain the process and then provide support to small groups as they mapped their networks using a collaborative diagramming application. After one session, participants are able to use this experience to conduct subsequent analyses, either on-site or online. I don’t provide the fish to eat, I teach people how to fish so they don’t need a guide any more. A single session — of 2 to 3 hours — is usually sufficient.

Book an online value network analysis masterclass for your organization this year — $(CA)3,500 | $(US)3,000 | €2,500 — for up to 15 participants.

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I fell in love with what now seems to be called web1. It was limitless, open, free. We now seem to be rushing towards the opposite of that with web3. Needlessly replicating the problems of the real world online. Scarcity, exclusivity, even eco-destruction. I don’t get it.” —@iamharaldur

“If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house. Networks connect; communities care.” —@mintzberg141

Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ [British Medical Journal], one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta … Rather than investing a proportion of Meta’s substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task.

Slavery as free trade

“… the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise … Slave labour supplied the cotton, sugar and other vital commodities. The profits from the sale of slaves created fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic. And, in a disturbing paradox, the founding fathers of laissez-faire saw the slave trade as a showcase of liberty.”

“I view the market as a useful tool applied in the right contexts. I don’t agree with abolition of the market (communists) nor replacement of society by the market (neoliberals). I’m more the Smith / Keynes / Hayek school (non US version).” —@swardley

There is a story, told in various forms, about the blind men, or monks, and the elephant. These men are sent away by their ruler to find out what this creature is and to report back to him. Each only feels a part of the elephant so each one reports a different description and they argue with each other. In the Buddha’s version, he concludes, “Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing…. In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus.”

I have often told this story, and then ask — What if a group of women were sent instead? I would wager that the women would have talked about their experiences and come through consensus to a more complete description of the elephant. Who knows and perhaps our future really lies in being networked and more feminine.

We have a similar situation with this pandemic, the nature of the virus, and how best to address the situation. Barry Hunt, is founder of Prescientx, a company that manufactures medical devices and he has been active in promoting better air filtration and exchange systems for indoor spaces. On Twitter, Barry commented, “I’ve been advocating for engineering & standards for air, water & surfaces in healthcare facilities to lower disease transmission for over 30 years. The irony of being accused by out-of-touch ID/PH/IPAC/Epi of epistemic trespassing before & during the pandemic is gobsmacking.” [ID/PH/IPAC/Epi = Infectious Disease, Public Health, Infection Prevention and Control Canada, Epidemiology]

I have mentioned the conflicts between professional disciplines in yes, it’s the system and connections trump expertise. Basically, our scientific and technological disciplines came out of the Enlightenment and fractured knowledge and understanding into many silos that do not speak to each other, communicating using their own special technical jargon. As the posts listed above show, aerosol scientists such as chemists and engineers have been systematically excluded in presenting their knowledge and findings on this virus by the medical experts and committees of the WHO. The blind monks are running the show.

As Gillian Tett has shown in The Silo Effect, there are ways to connect silos. Tett writes that, “You do not need to be an anthropologist to get that insider-outsider perspective … We can temporarily jump into a different world by changing the information and news we consume, moving our location, talking to different people, and trying to imagine how life might look through their eyes.” This is a core part of personal knowledge mastery — “we can either be mastered by our mental and structural models or we can try to master them instead”.

It’s time for all disciplines, but most importantly today the medical profession, to open their eyes and their windows and start connecting with the rest of human knowledge. Let me quote E.O. Wilson, who passed away this week at age 92.

“Scientists and scholars in the humanities, working together, will, I believe serve as the leaders of a new philosophy, one that blends the best and most relevant from these two branches of learning.” —The Origins of Creativity

Let’s hope they do — for the sake of humanity.

[Annotated] Blind monks examining an elephant, an ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724).

The past 20 months have witnessed a global crisis in leadership. We will not distribute vaccines to poor countries because we are letting the market lead our pandemic responses. Public health officials have held on to droplet dogmatism in spite overwhelming evidence that the SAR-CoV-2 virus is airborne. Schools have been kept open while many children have not been able to get vaccinated. This pandemic has become a crisis in network leadership.

One design problem of almost all organizations and institutions is the inability to quickly change who is in charge. In dealing with complex challenges the best organizational form, according to Verna Allee, is loose hierarchies and strong networks. I also advocate for ways to enable temporary negotiated hierarchies for working and learning in the complex domain.

After five decades of observing leadership in its various forms [I took my first leadership course in Army Cadets when I was 13], I have come up with three principles of leadership in a connected world, all based on the foundation that leadership is not a position but rather self-discipline.

1. There is only one way to lead — by example.
2. Leadership is helping make the network smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions.
3. Cooperation is the optimal behaviour in a networked world, and this requires what have traditionally been viewed as feminine leadership attributes.

Simon Wardley is even more specific about attracting female leadership talent,

“Find women in your organisation who’ve been building guilds (i.e. World of Warcraft / EVE online) and fast track them to executive positions. Representation and diversity are far more important than many imagine in this new world. You need to quickly move towards a more inclusive environment and that means overturning past privilege.” —battling elves & building civilisations

One person cannot lead in a connected world. If they try, they become the knowledge bottleneck. Making our networks smarter is one aspect of leadership in our digitally connected world and so is convening the best parts of our networks in order to address complex issues and make decisions. In crises, sometimes perfection is the enemy of the good, so having a diverse, knowledgeable, and experienced group of advisors becomes critical.

Leadership today should be a temporary privilege and a permanent responsibility.

Only in the past month have public health authorities in Canada acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 is primarily spread through the air, after more than a year of prevaricating by ‘Droplet Dogmatics’ in face of the evidence.

“Since March 2020, Ontario [Province of Canada] public health guidelines have stated that droplet precautions are adequate to guard against COVID-19 transmission. According to the province, airborne precautions, such as N95 masks, are needed only by those performing aerosol-generating procedures, such as intubating a patient [in June 2021].” —CBC 2021-06-20

COVID-19 is an airborne disease. Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer only publicly acknowledged airborne transmission this November. But many protocols to control fomite transmission continue, such as plexiglass dividers and surface washing conveyor belts in supermarkets.

In view of overwhelming evidence, our structures — workplaces, schools, eating establishments — still do not change to adapt to the evidence. Peter Drucker is attributed for the saying that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Or perhaps Robbie Burns said it best when considering what happens to our ‘best laid schemes’.

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
—To a Mouse

Helmuth von Moltke said that, “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. And whatever plans we made to deal with the assumed fomite transmission of this virus have not survived either. Admitting this is the first step in taking action.

“Every policy that is predicated on a fomite/splash risk to the exclusion of airborne inhaled aerosols is simply inept and not fit for purpose. Start again with the correct foundation of transmission risk, build from there and the structure will be robust.” —@MicroLabDoc

But we have to look further back in time to when we understood that fresh air is a prime determinant of public health. Florence Nightingale promoted the importance of clean air, “The very first canon of nursing … is this: to keep the air [the patient] breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him.” At one time, our hospitals were designed for air flow, but we became enamoured with technology and now have hospitals where contaminated air is recirculated and windows do not open. Our techno-centric healthcare systems have lost touch with the reality of pandemics.

Like all crises that reveal cracks in the system, the pandemic has prompted a public reckoning with the role of buildings in shaping our health. Recent reporting is waking up to the crisis of breathability in buildings, raising questions about our dependence on mechanical systems and the lack of access to fresh, natural air. Why are so many buildings filled with inoperable windows? How did we not foresee the dangers of creating an airtight seal around entire city blocks? Is it really acceptable that our built surroundings are entirely dependent on evermore complex mechanical systems that pollute the environment and, if they should fail, prevent us from breathing? —The secret to hospital design was solved 150 years ago. Why did we ignore it?

—

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack
A crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen (1992) Anthem

Yes, it’s the system, stupid. First we have to understand the system, and then change the underlying foundations. Even penalizing those in change or replacing them will not change any system from which they emerged.

In 2018 I wrote that we need to change the system, not the leader and create organizations based on diversity, learning, and trust so they are better prepared to hack uncertainty and hedge risks, especially in crises like pandemics. Leaders can then emerge who have access to a diverse range of ideas and opinions — such as epidemiologists learning from engineers — from which they can learn. For example, at the WHO and at the national public health policy boards, aerosol science was ignore by medical experts, “Aerosol scientists—typically, chemists, and engineers—representing the heterodoxy were systematically excluded from key decision-making networks and committees.” —Orthodoxy, illusio, and playing the scientific game

Leaders must influence through their reputation, not position, to make their networks and communities stronger, so that we can all keep on learning. As Rachel Happe says, “Control is for amateurs”. Today, in a networked and tightly integrated world — work is learning, and learning is the work.

Image: RedForty2

I am quite certain that distributed work is here to stay. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci at the US CDC is surprised at how long this pandemic is lasting. With the highly infectious Omicron variant becoming dominant in many countries, it does not look like it will be over soon. In a few months time, some people will have been working distributively for two years, not at their request, but having found new work norms to get things done. I have spoken to many people who will not go back to a carbon-intensive work commute.

Here is a review of some thoughts on distributed work throughout 2021.

Not remotely working — Not allowing fully distributed knowledge work may not last for long. As this pandemic winds down, it may get difficult to attract and retain talented people unless they have a degree of control over where they spend their time, especially if competitors offer work from anywhere.

Optimizing distributed work — The distributed digital workplace lays waste bare. The time for learning and reflection at work is already there. “Research suggests that in an eight-hour day, the average worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes.” Working smarter requires safe places to work, connection to diverse knowledge networks, and the support of personal sensemaking.

Distributed work —  is people working from anywhere. There is no centre. This is what we have seen explode during this pandemic. Some people think we will go back to the ‘old normal’ of clustered work as soon as — or if — this pandemic is over. I don’t.

Leadership in a distributed workplace — The job of those in positions of leadership (you are not a leader if people don’t willingly follow you) is to help make their networks, communities, and teams smarter and more resilient. Why networks and communities as well as teams? We all work in a connected world. Making our network smarter helps us.

Social learning powers distributed work — Supporting workplace learning in distributed workplaces is much more than pushing content or creating courses. Social learning is about people in trusted relationships sharing and building collective knowledge.

The social sweet spot — As distributed work becomes the norm, other shifts in how we work and learn will be required. Competition is now global and a lot of work is viewed as a commodity, pushing down wages for any type of repetitive work. Knowledge workers will have to find professional communities to stay current and these may not be in their organization. They will need to connect through digital networks.

During this pandemic and various lockdowns  there have been many discussions about the need for physical contact and how it supports creativity.

The writer and scientist, Isaac Asimov, reflected on — How do people get new ideas? — after a short stint at an MIT spinoff company in 1959. New ideas are not often received well by those in positions or power or influence Asimov noted.

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

Asimov felt that isolation is required for creativity.

A different conclusion was made by Professor Katherine Giuffre in — Half the Right People: Network Density and Creativity — while examining the social networks of Emily Dickinson, Paul Gauguin, and Charlotte Bronte — legendary loners. Giuffre defines creativity as either an attribute, an action, or an outcome, and focuses this paper on the correlation between creativity and social networks, specifically the density of social connections while creative, as evidenced from the correspondence of the three writers.

Based on the different network properties, we can conjecture that it was not when the artists were alone, linking wildly different ideological worlds, that they were most creative, but when they were attached to others in a more moderate way and when those others were close to each other, although, again, not so close as to form one cohesive group.

There seems to be a ‘sweet spot’ between not enough and too many social connections to encourage creativity. Dickinson’s creative period of 1859-65 bears this out.

Image: Half the Right People — Network Density & Creativity

Giuffre uses the content of many letters that stood in for face-to-face conversations, as these often asked for critical comment.

While the contents of the letters are interesting and indicate how the artists were sharing ideas about their work with others in their networks, I emphasize that for Dickinson, Gauguin and Brontë, the letters were an important substitute for many face-to-face interactions. The letters are a record of interactions – both the content and the pattern. That record would not have existed if the artists had been in positions to have more casual connections to their networks.

Giuffre concludes that creativity is rather social, similar to the conclusions of Christakis & Fowler, “As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.”

By thinking of outcomes, rather than individuals, as creative, this paper argues that it is possible to compare creative with non-creative time periods in the individual’s life in order to make a case that there are indeed attributes that correlate with creativity. These attributes, however, are social rather than individual. Creativity is correlated with a social attribute, but is also conceived of as an action that has an outcome. The correlation with particular network patterns suggests an explanation for the life-course findings about changing creativity over time: social network patters are changing over the life course. The changes in the shape of the networks may also be tied to external changes, from the changing nature of the art market to the possibilities or pressures to join an artistic movement.

The challenge in doing creative work is having just enough regular social connections with just the right group of trusted, but diverse, people. I doubt there is a magic number but one can log their creativity and compare it with their social connections. Not enough? Time to reach out. Too many? Time to self-isolate. At least we know there is a correlation. Now we can start watching for patterns.

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better.” —Etienne Wenger

“Communities of practice emerge in the social space between project teams and knowledge networks.” —Verna Allee

It is not the size of our networks and communities that matters but how we engage people with diverse opinions and experiences. Networks help us see opportunities and new ideas. Communities give us a place to discuss and learn about these. We need to engage in both.

Networks give people a ‘vision advantage’ in terms of seeing and developing rewarding opportunities. But the lack of spillover from a neighbour’s network implies that this advantage comes not from having access to new information, but rather from having to juggle diverse bits of information. This is the key shift that Ronald Burt emphasizes in his book — Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal. “It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other,” says Burt.

A core part of our ongoing sensemaking is translating between groups. This becomes our secret weapon — the ability to perceive situations from a variety of perspectives.

Here is a basic practice structure to make sense from our communities and networks.

• We can seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships.
• We can make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our colleagues.
• We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks.
• We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.

“By seeking, sensing, and sharing, everyone in an organization can become part of a learning organism, listening at different frequencies, scanning the horizon, recognizing patterns and making better decisions on an informed basis.” —The Best Leaders are Constant Learners

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” —@taylorswift13 in Innovation Lessons from Taylor Swift by @skap5

Reg Revans — “Unless your ideas are ridiculed by experts, they are worth nothing.” via @ShaunCoffey

In the Pursuit of Knowledge, There Be Dragons

“Data are never neutral. They are biased. They are rife with uncertainty and limitations and all sorts of other imperfections. But for data to be legitimate in the eyes of non-technical actors, data must be performed as precise and objective and neutral. This creates a conundrum from anyone whose practice relies on communicating data. When high-powered people want to rely on data as truth, they don’t want to be faced with confidence intervals or error bars. They want to be told that the data are reliable, by which they mean accurate, by which they mean a perfect representation of whatever they wanted to measure. Ignorance is bliss. It’s also political.”

“If you focus on sickness, you’re going to end up with doctors as the key actors. If you focus on well-being, you’re going to end up with communities as key actors.” —@CormacRussell

Buurtzorg: the Dutch model of neighbourhood care that is going global

“The principle underpinning the model is that the nurse acts as a ‘health coach’ for the individual and their family, emphasising preventive health measures but also delivering necessary care themselves or calling on others to do so. The golden rule is that nurses must spend 61% of their time in direct contact with the people they support.”

“Expecting the mainstream media to rescue you from fascism is like expecting the person who left you in the dark woods to come back and give you a ride home.” —@MarkJacob16

How Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Gwyneth Paltrow Short-Circuit Your Ability to Think Rationally

• Narrative Laundering
• False Equivalence
• Faux Intimacy
• Appeal to Misplaced Authority
• The Big Lie
• Appeal to Fear
• Butterfly Attack
• Data Voids
• Black Propaganda

“Put all the bad drivers on bicycles, and nobody dies.” —Jeremy Vine

Image via @VanderbiltLibraries

One way I keep up with this pandemic is from 12 experts who share their insights on Twitter — my pandemic list. As we enter a fifth wave of the novel coronavirus, let me share some of these insights from the list and elsewhere.

Droplets

“The question of whether SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted by droplets or aerosols has been very controversial. We sought to explain this controversy through a historical analysis of transmission research in other disease … Resistance to the idea of airborne spread of a respiratory infection is not new. In fact, it has occurred repeatedly over much of the last century and greatly hampered understanding of how diseases transmit.”
—Echoes Through Time: The Historical Origins of the Droplet Dogma and its Role in the Misidentification of Airborne Respiratory Infection Transmission in SSRN 2021-09-21

Air Filters

“Research at a hospital swamped by people with COVID-19 has confirmed that portable air filters effectively remove SARS-CoV-2 particles from the air — the first such evidence in a real-world setting. The results suggest that air filters could be used to reduce the risk of patients and medical staff contracting SARS-CoV-2 in hospitals, the study’s authors say … And the scientists found that the filters don’t only protect against SARS-CoV-2. When the filters were switched off, the air in both wards contained detectable amounts of other pathogens that cause infections in hospitals, such as Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Streptococcus pyogenes. The filters largely removed them. These organisms are not typically thought to spread through the air, but ‘this study suggests that these infections may also spread by aerosol’, [Dr.] Fisman says.”
—Nature 2021-10-06

Trust in Institutions

“Trust remains critical to ending pandemics. Achieving it requires transparency, openness and willingness to embrace uncertainty. This may be the most critical challenge for post-Covid-19 societies, including in Denmark. Let’s hope we can trust one another enough to approach this challenge openly and honestly.”
—Denmark’s Hard Lessons About Trust and the Pandemic, NYT 2021-11-14

Transparency in Healthcare

“An investigation by The Intercept reveals that in the first months of the pandemic, only a small number of the more than 6,000 hospitals in the U.S. let journalists inside — and when access was permitted, it was usually limited to a short time span. The upshot is that most hospitals, citing safety and privacy concerns, turned themselves into vaults that hid the strongest evidence of the virus’s lethality. Doors were shut so firmly that an award-winning documentarian even gave up on his effort to film in the U.S. and instead made his documentary about a country where he could get access to Covid patients: China.”
—The Intercept 2021-11-13

A Third Dose

“Evidence provided to the [UK] government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) found that the protection against symptomatic Covid offered by all vaccines began to wane 10 weeks after the second dose, falling significantly after four to six months.”
—Financial Times 2021-11-15

The TIMN model developed by David Ronfeldt states that people have only organized in three basic forms — Tribes, Institutions, Markets — and that a fourth form appears to be developing in societies — Networks. I have suggested that new forms appear and are adopted when the dominant form of communication changes. Institutions developed with the advent of Writing. Markets grew to dominance with Printing. It looks like digital (electric) communications are pushing us toward Network forms.

I use Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media and his tetrad for sensemaking to understand the effects of new communication technologies.

The development of the printing press helped to fuel the Protestant Reformation as the bible was printed first in German and then other languages, as opposed to Latin. Individual interpretation of the bible became a cornerstone of most Protestant religions. The obsolescence of manuscripts made them luxury goods, snapped up by collectors. Print enabled long-form reading and the creation of the novel. Ubiquitous print, especially in the form of newspapers, reversed into yellow journalism and propaganda.

“Yellow journalism was a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. During its heyday in the late 19th century it was one of many factors that helped push the United States and Spain into war in Cuba and the Philippines, leading to the acquisition of overseas territory by the United States … Nevertheless, yellow journalism of this period is significant to the history of U.S. foreign relations in that its centrality to the history of the Spanish American War shows that the press had the power to capture the attention of a large readership and to influence public reaction to international events. The dramatic style of yellow journalism contributed to creating public support for the Spanish-American War, a war that would ultimately expand the global reach of the United States.” —US Office of the Historian [It’s interesting to note that ‘Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations’ was terminated during the Trump administration.]

Digital media are changing how we communicate, now in real-time and often with a global audience. The atomized electric media offer instant self-publishing and extend our emotions. They obsolesce the linearity of print and the nuance of long-form writing. As a result, too often, people feel that their opinions equal facts. Digital communications retrieve the orality of the Tribal form, before the advent of writing. In a network society, these become borderless liquid narratives.

“Liquid-modern culture feels no longer a culture of learning and accumulating like the cultures recorded in the historians’ and ethnographers’ reports. It looks instead a culture of disengagement, discontinuity, and forgetting.”
—Zygmunt Bauman (2005) Liquid Life

But as these media are pushed to their limits we already see them reversing into constant outrage and intolerance while a global orthodoxy also develops. Just think of the many topics most people would not discuss on social media, fearing an attack from the Right, Left, or elsewhere. In many ways, we already live in a time of constant doubt and outrage.

Instead of accepting this Reversal state, we have to start discussing these effects of the new media. Then we have to find ways to counter this reversal. Finding online communities outside of consumer media is becoming an essential part of democracy in the Network era, and Facebook is not a trusted space for these communities. It’s only by discussing what is happening with this new communication medium and how it is influencing us that we can develop new network forms for markets, institutions, and communities.

Terry Yu discusses the perils of creating online content and distributing it via consumer social media platforms. Here are the highlights of Yu’s Twitter thread discussing survey data from 150 ‘creators’.

1. 90% are burnt out
2. 71% are considering leaving social media
3. 51% say it is taxing to make a living on social media

The main contributor to this pressure is of course — the algorithm. Creating on social media media looks very easy at first but then the pressures of competition and changes to the algorithm ensure that the platform makes the most profit. With consumer social media, the house always wins.

These social media creators are participating in what amounts to a crowd-milking scheme. Of course it’s not easy finding new market niches but betting on the next social media platform from Silicon Valley is definitely not a good option. The only way to make our talent profitable in the network era is to turn it into a highly specialized capital asset. Feeding crowd-milking platforms is not a sane small-business operating model. It’s better to find your own cow than be milked by someone else.

In 2012 Ross Dawson suggested that “in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity”. This is becoming obvious today. What will mark the successful people in this emerging network era economy are — Expertise, Relationships, and Innovation. Social media platforms are not our friends. They also make for pretty sleazy business partners.

Content creation should be a labour of love, not a constant treadmill of pushing stuff across platforms. As Yu notes, “Creators must clock 71+ hours minimum across social platforms to stay relevant.” I have discussed this in platforms and the precariat showing that the robber barons of the 21st century are the platform owners controlling much of the economy today. I would say it’s time to get off that treadmill for anyone who wants to build a sustainable business. Since 2003 I have managed to write and build a business without becoming a ‘content creator’ on any platform but my own. I wonder how Hercules would have done as a creator?

The Twelve Labours of Hercules — Wikipedia

Several times over the past year I have been asked to conduct online masterclasses to help organizations with their internal change initiatives, such as digital transformation, distributed work, or online community building. These sessions are usually two  hours and have from 20 to 60 participants. Each one is focused on the needs of the client which we discuss in advance. Here are the various components that we have used.

• Network mapping exercise
• Value network analysis
• The PKM framework
• Managing in the complex domain
• Network leadership
• Understanding communities and networks
• Innovation and social learning
• Understanding media

One of the results of these masterclasses is a common framework and language to accelerate knowledge sharing.

Each masterclass includes an activity before the live session and a pre-reading assignment. Each live session can include presentations, plenary or small group discussions, polls & questionnaires, questions and dialogue. A video & audio recording  and a chat transcript are provided for internal use. I follow-up with any suggested references as a result of our conversations.

There is no size limit but 60 seems to the largest group size that works to date. These masterclasses have a standard fee for 2021/2022, no matter the number of participants — $(CA)3,500 or $(US)3,000 or €2,500.

This is a presentation I am giving to Sackville Town Council.

Thank you for allowing me to address council this evening. I would like to discuss active transportation in our town. I am not an expert in this field but I have cycled over 125,000 kilometres since moving here in 1998 and much of that distance has been within town limits. I know our roadways — intimately.

Bicycles are not the only form of active transportation. Town council has recently allowed skateboards on our streets. In addition, there has been a significant increase in the use of electric bikes, often by older adults. This trend will likely continue given what we are seeing elsewhere.

As you know, Sackville recently won the ParticipAction active community challenge for New Brunswick. As the town has claimed, Sackville is a different kind of small town. We have a continuing history of unique road users — horses, hay wagons, logging trucks — and we usually use the roads in harmony. Vulnerable road users — walkers, runners, cyclists, skateboarders — are fellow citizens using our public thoroughfares.

As more people engage in active transportation, there are more possibilities for conflicts with the predominant road users — motorists. We have an opportunity to be proactive in this shift. Education programs and public service communications could help everyone, including motorists, in better understanding how best we can share our roads.

I would also encourage council to consider active transportation in all of its public infrastructure projects. For example when Lorne Street was renovated, the sidewalk remained the same width and no bike path was established, though dozens of parking spots now line the entire street.

My objective this evening is not to provide a list of how best to support active transportation in small towns and make them safer. There are professionals who can advise Council and they should be engaged.

I would like to focus on one factor that can save lives, and make active transportation more accessible — SPEED.

In my 23 years in this town, I have been hit four times by motorists, while on my bicycle — each time on Bridge Street. Luckily I was not seriously injured, as the collisions occurred at low speeds. But the speed limit on Bridge Street is 50 km/hr and many drivers exceed the speed limit on our roads, as evidenced by the recent data from Pond Shore Drive.

Did you know that a human hit by a car at 30 km/hr has a 90% chance of survival?

A person, hit by a car at 40 km/hr has a 60% chance of survival.

Your neighbour, hit by a car at 50 km/hr has a 20% chance of survival.

Your friend, hit by a car at 60 km/hr has no chance of survival.

Image: Edmonton Journal

These are the statistics for cars. Being struck by an SUV or pickup truck doubles the risk of death.

Given that most roads in Sackville have a 50 km/hr speed limit, our vulnerable road users have an 80% or higher risk of death if struck. These are not great odds and we should do better to protect our fellow citizens.

Ellen Watters — a professional cyclist — returned home to New Brunswick for the holidays in late 2016. While on a bicycle ride in Sussex, Ellen was hit from behind by a motorist. No charges were laid because the only living witness was the driver. Ellen died from her injuries on December 27th, 2016.

On July 1st 2017, ‘Ellen’s Law’ came into effect. It was the result of a community lobbying effort to require that motorists give 1 metre clearance when passing cyclists. To date — over 4 years later — no charges have been laid under this law.

I decided to mark the day of Ellen’s Law coming into effect by riding around town with a pool noodle strapped to my bike, extending almost 1 metre to my left. Several people stopped and asked what I was doing. Many were surprised at how long 1 metre is. While cycling on Bridge Street, an oncoming motorist made a left turn across my lane and then drove into me, pinning me against the curb. Even with bright clothes and an orange pool noodle, he did not see me in the middle of the day. Luckily, once again, his slow speed kept me from being injured — story on CBC.

This is how long one metre is.

I would like to cycle another 125,000 km in this community, but as the population grows and vehicles keep getting bigger, safety is a critical concern. Could this council make our community safer for all vulnerable road users by starting to reduce speed limits? Ask residents on each of our streets if they want speed limits reduced. If the majority want this, then let’s do it.

This town already has a mandatory bicycle helmet bylaw. The four times I was hit, my helmet was never damaged. Reducing speed limits — and enforcing them — would be much more effective in making our roads safer.

The city of Paris, population 2.1 million, has reduced speed limits on almost all of its streets to 30 km/hr. This measure is in line with an appeal issued by the World Health Organization. I am sure Sackville can do this as well.