Not so much fun lately. Brain weighed down. Brane wayd down. Way waydown.

I don't mean my real brain, but the imaginary brain that holds my thoughts and ideas and images like a big server. "mind" is what they used to call that interpretation of "brain".

Review of limited retention of .... forgot the name. Wait a second. OK.
(My apologies if you dislike the stream of consciousness, such as it is).

Review of Managing the New Realities of Risk, from GBN's annual meeting.

Abstract: In this episode I review a pdf I found online about a risk-management seminar. I think I'm grappling with the conflict between corporateness and humanity. Or else I'm going through the process of giving in to corporateness. Hopefully this is only to quit worrying about it.

Drawings improve the presentation. All in all it's an interesting story of all these corporate and like bigshots talking about how to "manage risks", corporatespeak for "how to stay in control". Risk is one of the buzzwords du jour, but interesting in its admission that the world is a fearful place. Risk is the rationalist's explanation of fear.

Risk of what? Fear of what? Nowadays "...fear itself" demands this answer. We are not such abstract thinkers any more.

We? That's bad, I meant that I'm not. But I also have this imaginary idea that "people in general" or "our culture as a whole" are more specific-minded and less given to grand generalizations. Still bad.

About risk, the aim of this discussion I read, participants seemed to be at least concerned with risk management, both in the business / societal frame and on a personal level. Risk-averse might be a fair characterization. However, risk-aversion is only one end of the scale that risk-taking is on the other side of. Corporate mentality favors slightly risk-taking over risk-aversion, as long as one is successful. Non-threateningness or "like-me-ness" cradles the discussion, encouraging participation.

The discussion was a living example of people working together to understand a problem and gain insight, as well as foster continued social relationships. Speakers came from business, global finance, and academia. Risk was conceptually described, fact-finding was reported, practical risk-management stories were told, and the psychology of risk was explored. Finally, group participation experiments were conducted, both through a contrived game "the maze" and a more well-known game Texas Hold-'em.

Well, what did I get out of it? One big point for them was the greater importance of self-critical thinking for corporate leader types, perhaps a Darwinian differentiating factor in that environment. For me I guess I don't care if they succeed or fail, in fact I don't really wish for them to be too much more successful than they already are. There's some need for them to get out of the way, just as some philosophize government should. So I might fear knowing about this kind of thing, where the corporate leaders of the world get together for "fun play time" and compare notes about staying in control of things. However, I also can learn from this knowledge and perhaps manage my own fear.

Fear of Them is a classic post-modern feeling. Now that post-modernism is only around to wait for a decent replacement for itself, "Other-ness" sounds especially obsolescent. Nobody knows if it means anything any more, vague and abstracted, despite that the definition is well-known. Fear of Them is pretty much the same thing; "Other-ness" fails as an idea because it's nonspecific. Despite sounding cool, Fear of Them fails unless you have a specific "Them" in mind. Fear of China is a real thing, Fear of Viruses likewise, and Fear of World Leaders at play.

The GBN forum cited China, avian flu, and CO2-based climate change as popular external risk areas. Later in the discussion the topic moved inward to denial, repression, "magical thinking" (belief in the causal efficacy of one's imagination), response fatigue, and seeking certainty, in one presentation. It's striking how individualistic the image of identity presented throughout the forum differs from the group-friendly cooperative attitude the participants seem to have. What I mean by this is that in all the presentations the confident maker of important decisions is the hero of the story, ready to take on feats such as managing climate degradation, fighting epidemics and the like. "This is how we are" is the implicit message. On a personal level, the hero of the story is still the rationalist, albeit with compassion and other feelings, understanding his or her emotions in order to control them. The real learning appears to take place in small group exercises, where success comes from managing neither of these.

All management seminars end up with scheduled group play activities. This can occur in the form of meals, drinks, or other such entertainment, but also in scheduled "educational games," which can be either fun or humiliating depending on one's level of comfort at management seminars. The GBN forum was no exception. These exercises function to break down individual mental barriers, make players slightly uncomfortable, and give them a shared experience through which they can bond. A sense of "like-me-ness" within the group is important to feel if one is to move from individual discomfort to a level of trust. The mental process of allowing trust to develop is an important outcome of this ritual. An individual trying to withstand the exercise rather than giving in to it is likely to be regarded with diminishing value to the rest of the group. For those who naturally tend toward taking charge of a group and those who tend to listen and manage small group games are tests of effectiveness.

Different personal risks attend small group participation than do leader roles in structured organizations. Emphasis shifts away from the high activity level and high structurability of individual work and decision-making, and toward processing a wide variety of shifting variables less emphatically, producing less overall result but communicating more (hence the caricature of the manager who does no work but talks about it constantly). Internal feedback loops become augmented by external ones. In both situations, however, managing external risks and paying attention to external events is important.

Nothing really outrageous was reported to have happened at the GBN forum, so apparently nobody took any real extreme risks. Does this indicate the world is in the hands of mentally healthy, easygoing rationalists who believe themselves altruistic? Are we better off for that?

I said "we" again, still projecting my ego onto an abstract notion of "all people everywhere in general." I must be envious of all those corporate schmucks gathering in big resorts to sit in meetings and play games. The horror!

GBN is Global Business Network, a vaguely sinister-sounding group of people who collectively think about stuff and disseminate some of what they come up with. The group was founded by Stewart Brand, and seems consistent with his general mission to assist human survival (and maybe to determine its course a little bit) through cooperation and shared collective-problem-solving.