An exploration of their significance for development policy-making

Subseqently incorporated into Policy Alternation for Development (1984), pp. 175-202. Formed the basis of the section on metaphors in the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential.

1. Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps. Networking; the first report and directory. Doubleday, 1982

2. Paul Feyerabend. Against Method: outline of an anarchist theory of knowledge. Verso, 1978

3. Ivan Illich. Medical Nemesis; the expropriation of health. Pantheon, 1976.

4. Jacques Attali. L'Ordre cannibale. Paris, Grasset, 1979

5. Jacques Attali. Les Trois Mondes; pour une theorie de l'apres-crise. Paris, Fayard, 1981

6. Nicholas Rescher. Cognitive Systematization; a systems-theoretic approach to a coherentist theory of knowledge. Blackwell, 1979

The current difficulty is not so much with answers but with the lack of any operational perspective on the relationship between answers. The impotence of the current approach is unfortunately disguised by the plethora of studies on "motherhood" problems like "population", "energy", "environment", "food", and "health" whose limited significance nobody dares to challenge. On the other hand academic work does not seem able to move beyond its propensity to be satisfied with pretty patterns of categories within specialised frameworks.

The transformative right-hemisphere step advocated in the previous section can be advantageously complemented and challenged by a left-hemisphere focus on innovations in structured information processing. As argued in an earlier paper (58), the information systems currently installed or envisaged facilitate, in the Club of Rome's terms, maintenance (adaptive) learning but not innovative (shock) learning. This applies particularly to the development information systems promoted by the intergovernmental community.

This paper has stressed the limited value of various conventional modes of expression. These arguments necessarily apply also to papers of this kind. The question is whether it is possible to devise some means of by-passing the desperately slow learning cycle associated with research-education-policy formulation-implementation in a world in which the education gap is increasing rapidly. If the current crisis is to be taken seriously, people must acquire access to an appropriate response by some other means. The problems of doing so have been reviewed in earlier papers (27, 67, 68, 69).

The approach to learning discussed is too basic for it to be possible to derive much of significance that can be applied directly to organisations. The problem lies in the Western bias discussed earlier in favour of a learning "zigzag" in an essential linear direction. If the zigzag is considered as occuring around a learning cycle however, marrying in the Eastern bias towards recurrence, this cycle can then be subdivided into sufficiently detailed elements to be of significance for organisational operations.

In such a social condition of "structured fluidity", observers can no longer usefully assume that they are standing on solid ground around which events flow (for their intellectual delectation). Such an assumption merely temporarily defines the observer (or an aspect of his personality) as a rigid element in society, within which he is not currently undergoing a process of developmental transformation. In this sense observers are, momentarily, non-participants in the process of human and social development.

It appears from Fuller's work that cycles interlock with greatest facility (i.e. minimum energy condition) in such a way as to form configurations of modes in relatively simple geometrical patterns (e.g. spherical tetrahedron, octahedron, etc) according to the number of cycles. The modes correspond to answer domains effectively stabilized into sets by standing wave interference effects. The portions of cycles linking such modes are then the transformation pathways between them which favour information transfer and learning.

Revolutionary patterns of alternation Prigogine, Jantsch, Attali and, in effect, Feyerabend conclude that it is necessarily impossible, if not anti-developmental, to define an organized, rational structure to bridge across discontinuity. The only "solution" being to adapt more spontaneously or aesthetically to the processes in relation to discontinuity (The relationship between the argument here and Prigogine's concept of "order through fluctuation" and "dissipative structures" (38, 39) needs to be further developed. The relationship to Jantsch's work (21) is also underdeveloped.).

A major strength of Alexander's pattern language is that it is a deliberate attempt to provide a means of giving form to that core quality which makes life meaningful and a delight to live. He very carefully shows how this must necessarily be "defined" as a "quality without a name" (36). It is only partially expressed through each of the words bandied about in social policy-making discussions. (This recalls the preoccupations of Jantsch and Prigogine noted above.) In his view the quality can only be adequately captured or "contained" by use of a pattern language.