Practical Collective Sensemaking

Hello everyone, this is Active Inference Guest Stream 70.1. It's February 9th, 2024. We're here with Jerry Mikowski, and this should be a great presentation, discussion, conversation, knowledge experience. So, Jerry, thank you very much for joining, and please let us begin however you prefer. Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here with you. And I feel like what you were reading a moment ago was like a stardate, into it a stardate entry, and like we're cruising off to some interesting new horizon. And what I want to do is build some conversational background here by showing what I've been doing for 26 years with a quirky mind mapping tool called the brain, and then how that cuts into or crosses into or blossoms into topics of interest to both of us and hopefully to people who are watching. But at first, I think I want to say, set a little background just for what this is. I used to be a tech industry trends analyst. I spent 11 and a half years with a little company called New Science Associates, which I have in my brain over here, and I'm just going to use the brain for a moment to show you what it is. I was with New Science back in the day, and I started two of their seven research services. So in 1990, I started a research service called Intelligent Document Management. And then a couple of years later, I started a research service called Continuous Information Environments. And if you were to look at the Intelligent Document Management scope diagram, which I drew back then in 1990, we used to refer to this as the bubble chart. And at that time, our major competitor was Gartner Group. There were a couple other analyst houses like Biscamp and IDC and a few others. But everybody's pitch documents to clients were bullet points. Here's the list of the technologies we cover. And I drew this diagram. The founders of New Science had asked me to create a service based on electronic imaging. And I went to and looked at electronic imaging. I was like, wow, this is really a dumb technology. We're going to scan checks and things like that. We're going to put them on optical storage and then try to bring them up and reprint them onto somebody's printed Amex invoice kind of thing. That was the most famous imaging thing at the time. So I looked around databases and moving objects around networks, and I assembled a service that I called Intelligent Document Management. And this service cut across a bunch of categories that Gartner didn't know how to cut across. Because if you were a Gartner client, you either had to call the mid-range or the PC or the mainframe service or the word processing service or workplace automation service. And so within a year or two, Gartner and everybody needed to have a conceptual map of their service. And also a lot of others needed to start reconfiguring their offers because our offer happened to be pitched to the problems clients had as opposed to the structure of the industry. And then I will also add that if you look at here and squint a little bit, you'll see the beginnings of the World Wide Web, which I had no knowledge of. I had no inkling that there was any research going on about the World Wide Web. But I have document recognition and SGML and a couple other things in here, which later become really important components because the World Wide Web is HTML, which is a skinny down version of SGML. And we've got document architectures, complex documents, things like that. And then if you squint and look at the continuous information environments research service, you will sort of see smartphones on the horizon. And I'm doing this. I'm not really good at self-promotion, but I'm doing this to say that I'm pretty reasonably good at sniffing at what's coming. I usually don't name it the right thing, but I'm poking in the right directions. And I've kind of done this a bunch of times in my career, and I have sort of trusted that these things just show up over time. And one of the things that helps me keep…