1. Distinguishing decision arenas

One of the dangers in advocating "new thinking" is the easy implication that everything that preceded it should be scrapped as inadequate. It is therefore useful to clarify the arenas in which conventional decision-making remains appropriate in contrast with those arenas where new approaches may prove more useful.

Table I is a tentative exercise in isolating 12 decision arenas or contexts. These are grouped into three clusters:

This section provides commentaries on discontinuity related to the Transformative Approaches to Social Organization area of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

Related Sections

It is no longer widely believed that society has the collective ability to organize collaborative projects of a type capable of making the breakthroughs called for. There is a suspicion that the challenge calls for quite another approach that makes greater, and more imaginative, use of the information tools that our society has created in order to counteract the tendency for collaboration to become tokenistic. Failing that, projects run the significant risk of being undermined by dynamics with which many are already all too familiar.

1. Conceptual keystones

1. Data mining

1. Acceptability of network maps

1. Software challenge

This note is concerned with presentations of information which will be possible once a particular computer software problem has been solved. The problem can be illustrated by three examples:

1. Topology and non-physical spaces

In every current use of interactive graphics there is some notion of geometry and space, but the geometry is always the three-dimensional conventional space. There is no reason why "non-physical spaces" should not be displayed instead - and this is the domain of topology. The argument has been developed by Dean Brown and Joan Lewis:

This section provides commentaries on visualization related to the Transformative Approaches to Social Organization area of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

Related Sections

On this page are a selection of problem loops (see commentary) which illustrate the detail of the interconnections between individual problems. . In these cases, each problem aggravates the problem immediately below it, with the last problem in the chain aggravating the first, thus indirectly aggravating itself.