My annual creative insight thinking runs from September to January. It always has for my entire life although I only recognized the cyclical nature of this gift at about age 30. During my navy career I would generate and propose big ideas during this time frame that I would subsequently be tasked with implementing for the rest of the year. The rest of the year I did not have the keen insight to the complex problems that I had when I came up with some broad approaches or solutions to them during the cyclical window of insight. I struggled to deliver! Sometimes I wished I had kept my mouth shut and just done my routine job of managing the existing operation. That however, is not what I viewed my job as a navy officer to exclusively be. Charging ahead into unknown challenges with confidence, courage and daring was what being a navy officer was all about.
My insight peaks around Thanksgiving then tapers to New Years. Then for the rest of the year I struggle to see with clarity what I saw then and do something with it. It is one thing to get grand ideas, another to implement them. Not remembering clearly the ideas, I shift to doing physical things. Implementing work projects. New ones but generally ones undone. I have increasingly progressed on installing the glass floor over the entrance and installing in the laundry room the old cabinets taken from the remodel of the kitchen 5 years ago. Those cabinets have been sitting on the floor of the laundry room and in storage since then.
My creative thoughts during the last three month have taken me hither and yon and I have followed the main stream of thought; the monetary system, as well as the side thoughts related to it that have taken me elsewhere with connections to the main thought that only I see. It has been fun, challenging, revealing, educational, and leading to greater insight in so many things.
Wrapping up all those thoughts is what this blog post is all about.
Our information systems are the best current model for organizing our conceptual structures. Everything from monetary systems to religion. Monetary systems and other major social systems like politics, law, the practice of medicine as opposed to the science of medicine, international relationships, etc. Religious reforms as a function of information and knowledge structures not coming until the end of this century. They must come and will be the last to come because traditional religion has not changed to adapt itself to our society which is becoming information and knowledge based in structures that serve us. They do not serve us as well as possible now, the Money System being the current biggest problem. That however is a problem that our information systems will solve -- or we will enter a new dark age, which I sincerely doubt. There is no going back to that, we would only fail to progress for awhile as the worst case scenario. Falling back to clinging to guns and bibles making the leap to a new paradigm more difficult and delayed. I hope that is not what it takes to get there.
The model is the information system. While we see the physical presence of the system in computers, our computer based media devices, business devices, the social institutions that increasingly employ computers in their functions. The progress of computer application to our world has been one from functional application to do things to object orientation to structure the conceptual design in which those things are done.
Object Orientation theory and practice is the reduction of complexity to simplicity that will carry us to a new age of enlightenment.
Some can see that now. It is perhaps not just chance that one of the last things that I have chosen to write about is consolidation of of the Object Oriented paradigm to a single basic foundation for the entire system.
I find myself at the same place I stood conceptually when I bought two technical books in the early 80's that became foundational in my development of shipyard supply system design concepts at Naval Sea Systems Command. That was my last and most demanding assignment in the navy. The last assignment, Defense Depot, Ogden was a pay off retirement tour chosen by me instead of accepting the assignment of Supply Officer of an aircraft carrier leading to promotion to Captain. It was time to get out. While the conceptual thinking was there at the time to do a major restructure of the shipyard supply system, the real ability to do it was not. Only the reality that ideas were ahead of their time and it was not the battle that I wanted to fight without the existence of hardware and software systems to fight it.
The two books I bought in the early 80's were "Language as a Cognitive Process" by Terry Winograd and SmallTalk-80 The Language and Its Implementation.
From these two books, one presenting the beauty of our natural language to organize and express our conceptual thoughts and the other the beauty of expressing the fundamental object oriented nature of machine structured language to do the same from the simplest to the most complex level of abstraction.
The technical refinement of our natural language as well as our machine oriented language to express complex concepts as well as reduce them to simplicity for comprehension has come a long way as they have come closer together in structure and function. They are now the model on which to build new systems in an information age beyond those they created in an industrial oriented age.
The essential "take away" from this cyclic period of creative thought is the conceptual structure of the information age that is to be applied to our social structures in this century:
Kernel
Operating System
Application Programs
All three in the broad harmony of Computational Trinity
If I can't clearly recall every insight over the last three months, some of which I have written in this blog, these things will remain as my point of entry to the Problem Domain when I pick up on the challenge during my next insight cycle.
Until then I will seek to apply this point of entry and the insights I have gained to some kind of practical implementation to solve the monetary system problem and any other problems the basic methodology of organizing information and knowledge might solve....which is just about everything!
Simple!
Mom had the greatest gift of reducing complexity to simplicity. Her precious words words echo in my mind:
"Praise the Lord I have lived so long to learn so much!"
and;
Good enough is good enough!
No comments:
Post a Comment