Copyright 2011 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported LicenseBetsey Merkel and The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), 2563 KingstonRoad Cleveland OH 44118Phone: 216-220-0172 Web: http://i-open.posterous.com/

Interview and transcription December 31, 2008

Bruce LaDuke, Question Scientist, Integral Futurist and Managing Director,Instant Innovation, LLC, Indianapolis, IndianaOverview of Integral FuturingIntegral Futuring: a process approach to Knowledge AdvanceOverview of Integral Futuring

Hi, my name is Bruce LaDuke and I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana. I work here inIndianapolis in a full time capacity in a large global corporation, but part time I’m a manof many hats. I work in several disciplines to help folks understand the problem space of escalating knowledge and the change of volatility associated with that; I call that space“HyperAdvance” – I have a blog by that name. I want to help you deal with theHyperAdvance that’s going on right now, today. In that context, we’re going to talk aboutseven different areas: the first area is questioning. I’m going to explain what questionsare, not really looked at very much today but when you understand what the question isfully it takes you to the next space which is creativity and helps meld all creativemethods, innovation methods, all the different creative approaches into one methodwhich is based on questioning, and then that can be scaled up into knowledgemanagement which is a view of how you work knowledge cooperatively around thiscreative method, how does everybody cooperate together in one accord; and then Iscaled that up into a philosophy which is a global view of how all humans workknowledge and how all humans cooperate around knowledge, so it’s a knowledgephilosophy, and then that piece can scale up into Futuring which is the impact of thatknowledge working process, how do we cope? The whole change is happeningexponentially, how do we cope with that change? Finally, knowledge is nothing withoutapplying it, so all of these boxes below really support and enable enterprise, and I’ll talka little about enterprise and how this flows into enterprise and some approaches for thatand ways to think about it. Finally, AI, or Artificial Intelligence. If you understand theprocess humans use, and again it’s a process, if you talk to Artificial Intelligencescientists, a lot of them have a mathematical view, some of them might have a

biological view of that particular discipline, this view I’m going to present today is aprocess driven view. If you understand this entire process, the discipline of AI kind of changes your thinking about it changes, it can be mapped the same way to the wayhumans do it; so, I’ll show you how humans do it and then show you how a machinemight be able to do the same thing and tie those two things together which is reallywhat’s one solution. Hope it’s a fascinating journey for you and I do appreciate youtaking the time to view it.

Integral Futuring began in 1983…[00:03:09]

I’m going to start with a simple method that I created in 1983 when I first got out of College, it’s called “Direct Categorization.” I was involved with graphic design and tryingto come up with creative solutions for advertising, and my Professor at that time, KatyKennedy, she’s very much a driver on more creativity, stronger solutions, how manycreative ideas can you come with and how fast? All of that got me into a very strongfascination with this term “creativity.” So, I started to look at creativity across differentdisciplines, platforms, groups, and educational silos if you will. I studied many differentdisciplines and tried to understand different views on what creativity was and how itworked and at the end of all of those studies, hours and hours of study, I realized thereis a two-fold thing going on: one is, everything we know if categorized, and I am usingthe categories who, what, when, where, why, how, as a kind of sample, but if you try tothink of one thing you know that is not categorized. Just one thing, its impossible.Everything you know is categorized because knowledge is categorization. This is afundamental premise to start with. If you say, I know something, well, what you know isa structure of thought, you know categories of information and all of that informationbeing categorized is also one. Knowledge is not some broad thing that is scatteredeverywhere, although today you might argue that’s what it looks like. In reality, it wantsto come together in categories and become one. That really is a different way of thinking and if you put the problems we’re having in our world today in perspective tothat, you can see people are not treating knowledge as one, they are treating it as manythings. This method then goes through and says, well, if we have all knowledgecategorized, we also have things we know and things that are unknown. So, the knownworld, for example in this context I used it to come up with advertising solutions. In acertain format, what are the, for example if we were trying to make a diaper advertisement what are the knowns about that problem? What things are being doneand what things are already being done? What are the approaches they’ve taken? Whatformats? What type of lighting? What type of media? All the different things that relatedto that problem statement that exists. So, you have knowns and then you havequestions, or unknown. Questions really are the key that most folks in general haveoverlooked. If you look up the word “question” in Webster’s it defines it as “to ask aquestion.” Well, to ask a question is a question, it makes no sense. What is a question?Well, what I’ve learned in the process of digging into this method I learned was really

knowledge in general which is one exists as categories and that category if we know itit’s structured, its categorized, and its all logical. However, today we may have silos for all that that want to come together into one, but in general there are categories for known information and everything we know can fit in there just nice and neat. Questionsare out here on the leading edge of all the things that we know when we ask questionsabout reality. So, we’ll say, “Well, I don’t know that” or “I don’t know this” – there’s aquestion related to something that we know. Questions are seen today as individualthings, but if you think of them as a field of questions that are juxtaposed againstknowledge that you have like a ying and yang affect where knowledge is on one endand questions are on the other end as they cooperate, they co-exist, that’s really whatthis direct categorization method says. It says questions and knowledge are in thiscooperative infrastructure together and if I can learn how to structure questions, Iliterally create knowledge. That’s the fundamental premise behind everything,everywhere that’s ever done in terms of creativity, innovation, problem solving, all thesewords that are used are really about structuring questions. It sounds simple, but thatthing scales up into this massive set of solutions. I’m going to take you throughgenerally how this works.

[00:08:42] Diagram: Knowledge Creation – A Five-Step Process

This slide talks about it in a little more detail. There is a single process that all creativemethods, all innovation methods, everything works by this single process in terms of creation of new knowledge. I would say, for example, a new painting is actually newknowledge, it’s a new approach to how to do an artistic solution, its an advance from thepast solutions, so I’m not limiting this to technology or social systems, its everything.When I am talking about knowledge creation I am talking about any problem and anysolution. It’s a Five-Step process where you define, it starts with a definition/solution or structure, again all knowledge is categorized and then that’s your context, everyproblem has a context, I think everybody knows every problem has a context. Whatpeople tend to miss is every problem also has this mass of questions that are related tothat context, and by structuring those at the leading edge of this knowledge structureyou actually create new knowledge. That’s how knowledge creation works. There’s alogical operation to structure it – connect/ structure/ define – and the result is a new,advanced definition/solution or structure. So when you take those varied questions andyou structure them into a new knowledge context you’ve advanced society, you’vecreated something new that people didn’t know. Some people would say if I takesomething somebody knows over here, and something somebody knows over here andI bring those two together that’s knowledge creation. That’s actually what’s calledcompiling where you take knowledge in silos and bring it into one category, or onecategorical structure. Knowledge creation if you think of it as the sphere on the poster,knowledge creation is more of a new knowledge, or making the sphere bigger, makingknowledge larger. Taking those questions that are about things that don’t exist, not