How - Dov Seidman [10]
A single synapse in the brain, just like the space between people in a stadium, connects to many different neurons, like an intersection where many roads converge. This allows it to receive action potentials from many sources simultaneously. Subjected to these multiple simultaneous stimuli, even a weak synapse can be coaxed to pass along messages. In a stadium, we experience something similar. The combined stimulation of a lot of people doing the Wave often sweeps up and involves those less interested or connected to the cheer. In fact, what we colloquially call a “brain wave” is an electroencephalographic impression of a bunch of neurons all firing together, sending their action potentials across synapses weak and strong to get things going—essentially, the brain doing the Wave.
By analogy, in the realm of human behavior, everything that affects the spaces between us affects our ability to get things done. Put 60,000 people in a stadium blindfolded with earplugs, and making a Wave becomes extremely difficult. Ask them to whisper something from person to person while the organist plays at full volume and the message becomes unrecognizable before it leaves the section. Introduce a complicated emotion between two people and everything they say to one another can get misconstrued. To make Waves, then, to begin to generate the sorts of interpersonal interaction that can carry our initiatives throughout an organizational entity (like a brain, a stadium full of people, a team, or a business), we must not only understand the power it takes to start them, but we must also understand the things that affect the spaces between us, that make our interpersonal synapses strong or weak.
On October 13, 1994, Netscape Communications released the first version of its World Wide Web browser, heralding the dawn of the popular Internet and effectively spawning the information age.2 At that moment, the free flow of information began to radically alter how we fill the spaces between us, bringing changes so significant as to have almost completely reshaped how the world works. Our understanding of these changes, however, has not kept pace with their rapidity. To adapt and succeed in these new conditions, then, we need a new framework, a new understanding of how we have been and how things have changed.
In this first part, we explore the recent (and not-so-recent) past to connect the dots between a series of disparate events that have shaped and informed our present world. We begin with the birth of the information age and the shift it brought from a command-and-control business model to one of collaboration and sharing. Then we look at how technology trespasses into the synapses of our relationships, both helping and hindering us. Finally, we talk about the shifts in our world that have intensified the importance of how we do what we do.
The next three chapters chart the geography of a very different world, a world of HOW, which requires new powers and new skills to traverse. By the end of this part, it is my hope that you have a greater understanding of the radical ways our landscape has changed, our critical need for a new lens with which to see our way through it, and the way HOW can guide us on our journey.
CHAPTER 1
From Land to Information
Where is the wisdom we have
lost in knowledge? Where is the
knowledge we have lost in information?
—T. S. Eliot
Sometimes, to look ahead we must look back, in this case, way back, to feudal Europe circa 1335 A.D. In the 1330s, England needed wine. It needed wine because in the century before, Norman fashions had become all the rage and your average noble Joe had given up his daily pint of beer for a glass