Interesting synchronicity of posts that have caught my attention in the last 24 hours
Yesterday I blogged Suw Charman’s thoughts about being a generalist / polymath, in particular the tendency for useful real-world knowledge to come out of the unique overlaps between fields created by the particular experiences of one person.
Earlier today I linked to Tony Goodson on Butterfly Moments and Bricolage (archive) (inspired in turn by Johnnie Moore) – his experience that general tinkering about across various subjects and ideas often leads to unexpected benefits at later times.
And now I’ve just read George Por writing on How local meetings with global experts can boost CI in which he advocates cross-fertilization of generative ideas and transformative practices, across organizational cultural and geographic boundaries
and goes on to advocate horizontalization of learning in a given domain between those who have been giving more or less attention to explore and contribute to that domain
– that to me sounds like conversations between specialists and generalists …
George ends his post by extolling the virues of asynchronous methods such as blogs to make the best of face-to-face conversations.
So what is the link between these entries?
For me there are several:
- Generalist / Polymath learning exists, contributes knowledge and helps the horizontal distribution of knowledge;
- The public, linked, asynchronous nature of blogs and related technologies both exposes conversations to a wider pool of people and helps the ideas start to flow before any face-to-face meeting;
- The benefits of any specific piece of knowledge are not always forseeable until the right combination of circumstances and other people arises – in other words unpredictable emergent behaviour;
Update
[bliki]Fragmentation And Wholeness[/bliki]
