The abaci - Recommended Reading

The books we recommend are as follows:

• Barabasi: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. Plume (2003).
• Brown and Isaacs: The World Café. Shaping our Futures through Conversations that matter. Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2005).
• Chambers: Revolutions in Development Inquiry. Earthscan (2008). Reviews history of participatory approaches in projects over the last 50 years and draws some pragmatic conclusions about why HQ managers have different perceptions of complexity when compared to those 'in the field'. Shows how this leads them to use different techniques. Makes recommendations.
• Davies: The Cosmic Blueprint. Order and Complexity at the Edge of Chaos. Penguin (1995).
• Diamond: Collapse. Penguin (2005). How societies choose to fail or survive. Offers various useful criteria / principles for characterising societies and their complex environments.
• Kao: Jamming. Harper Business (1996). Principles / approaches for creative, agile and dynamic enterprises. Excellent summaries.
• Levitt: Freakonomics. Penguin (2005). Fascinating examination of the insights you can gain with a different mindset.
• Lewin: Complexity. Life at the Edge of Chaos. Phoenix (1993).
• Lovelock: Gaia and Ages of Gaia. Oxford University Press (1979, 1988). Necessary prelude to understanding what a Digital Gaia might be.
• Nicolescu: Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. New York Press (2002). The understanding of the present world cannot be accomplished in the framework of disciplinary research. Reality exists on many levels and only a transdiciplinary approach can deal with the dynamics of several levels of reality at once.
• Nisbett:The Geography of Thought. Nicholas Brealey Publishing (2005). Explains how and why Asians and Westerners perceive the world, situations, and themselves with respect to others differently, and what this means to the approach to problem recognition and solving in the various cultures.
• Smuts: Holism and Evolution. The Macmillan Company (1926).
• Stoll: The Cuckoo's Egg. Pocket Books (1990). Recounts how early attempts to hack the Internet were foiled. [See also Hafner and Lyon (1998): Where Wizards Stay up Late. Origins of the Internet as a complex digital ecosystem].
• Tapscott & Williams: Wikinomics. Portfolio (2008). Describes the vibrant, open and novel nature of collaboration via the Web. Show how new niches, ways of working and value systems have revolutionised 'enterprise' (in the digital ecosystem).
• Thompson: Organising & Disorganising. Triarchy Press (2008). Describes the five main ways that people 'organise' and shows that they are interdependent and necessary to each others existence: how interactions between the different worldviews drives the overall dynamics and that this provides 'useable' insights.
• Turner: The Geography of Hope. A Tour of the World we need. Vintage Canada (2008).
• Zander & Zander: The Art of Possibility. Penguin (2000). Develops ways of thinking about possibility that maximises option space. Provides examples from education, music, business and personal development. Useful principles and strategies.

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18 Oct 2009