I witnessed something interesting this morning at breakfast. (I am in a hotel in Columbus, OH). Normally people who know each other share tables, and most of the conversation tends to happen in those groups. Today, however, a conversation suddenly sprung up across tables. In fact several tables joined in. That is something we do not often see. The topic of course was the Wall Street bail out. (There I go, I too am using the word - 'bail out'. There was some comment somewhere this morning about how the choice of that particular word evokes a particular emotion and therefore influences choice.) It got me wondering - Here were people, perhaps strangers, spontaneously jumping into a discussion. There was more than interest - there was a passion, they all had a common base of information of course, and somehow they must have felt it safe to share opinion on something so potentially polarizing. Perhaps, people are more interested in finding a solution than hanging on to their positions here.

Jonathan Haigt, has an interesting talk posted on TED, about the differences between the left and right in politics, about the stereotypes and where they come from. He identifies five basic attributes, that are common across all cultures in the world, and how people differ in those attributes. He then comes to an interesting conclusion, about how people in the East reconcile their polarizing beliefs into an inclusive approach to reality. In any case, that is a must watch in my opinion. (While you are there, you might also want to look at Steven Pinker's talk on "The Blank Slate").

I have edited my post yesterday a couple of times since I put it out there. I have now decided to change that cryptic I came up with to X~N.g. This I believe is the more general form. The engineer and architect in me still cringes at doing anything that is not timeless in some way. That might be anathema to the way we think things should be done today. But, that I believe is a misunderstanding about what it means to architect. However futile the effort to build timeless things might be, I do believe that the notion of realizing purpose in a sustainable manner, requires giving thought to the notion of what might happen in future. OK now, before I digress too much into favorite topics such as architecture, and purpose, let me get back to the X~N.g. It occurred to me that the key idea behind that cryptic is transformation. What interests us in any of these discussions is the impact a new technology or any driver for that matter, will potentially have on the system X. The more transformational that impact, the more interesting it is.

If collaboration among people is what we are interested in, then it is those aspects of the system X, that the technology can hope to impact. Systems are notorious in the fact that one driver alone will not get you the transformation, though it could make a big difference under certain circumstances. That is where the fun begins.