The Hummingbird and the Poison Tree

Yoda says "always in motion is the future, difficult to see."

The Hummingbird was an inherently positive metaphor and his book traces dozens of examples of beneficial evolution in systems and society. But there's an inverse effect that he never touches on, where a dark idea or negative trait takes root and leads to destructive changes in systems and eventually to their death and decay. I call it the Poison Tr... See more

When you start from a lie all your decisions afterwards are poisoned because you started from nonsense information.

Any relationship is a delicate equilibrium between dark and light, often intimately intertwined. Everything is a balance and the slightest missteps can tip the balance in one direction of the other.

The Dunning Kruger effect where stupid people overestimate their own intelligence and push forward boldly into more and more mistakes.

Marriages, relationships, societies, systems and nations live in a constant and ever-shifting delicate balance. Every system has wise people and vicious people lurking inside them. Every relationship, whether they're as small as two people, or as big as a billion, have the power to bring tremendous balance or great suffering.

Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point. That's a point when ideas and events in a system hits critical mass the system surges up or down dramatically in a way that's virtually unstoppable.

The Hummingbird Effect may sound a lot like the Butterfly Effect from chaos theory where the flap of a butterfly's wings starts a typhoon in China. But the two ideas are totally different. Chaos theory tells us there are so many variables in life that you simply can't trace the chain of causality backwards because it's too complex. A small change l... See more

Ian Ross, who worked on transistor development in the 1950s: “So often the original concept of what an innovation will do frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”

Bell Labs as the first true think tank and it had many of the characteristics of the growing and thriving organization, whose benefits ripple out and affect adjacent domains all over the world. They had a flexible hierarchy that allowed people to be creative and put those ideas into practice. The Labs leadership put together theoretical thinkers, m... See more