Painting of the Day Landscape Under a Stormy Sky by Vincent Van Gogh 1888

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Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don’t notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I’d had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I’d had the incremental. Director Walter Salles on his movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, “I always thought of this film as if you were walking under gentle rain. After two hours of being exposed to it, you would be wet but without having felt the heavy, imposed dramatic effect of it.” Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi said the same thing, more or less, about spiritual endeavors: “After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little.” The Faraway Nearby Rebecca Solnit

The Future of the Left, with Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky discusses the media, the Republican party, Biden’s successes and failures so far, and how change happens–with Natalie Wynn. The Stoa  June 28, 2021 June 28th, 2021 Noam Chomsky and Natalie Wynn return to The Stoa to have a conversation about the future of the left. SUBSCRIBE AND DONATE TO RISE UP TIMES Truth is not fake news. Justice is not fake news. Rise Up Times needs your help…

Tuesday’s Temptation: Perfection

It seems that every group I am involved in is working for social change. Things like:

changing the justice system

changing the church

changing the educational system

Yeah. Those kind of changes. Things that are hard and cranky and slow and O.M.G. resistant.

I expect resistance from the structures we are working with but I am often caught by surprise by the resistance within my own people…

Determining which small, incremental changes — if any — would actually move things in the right direction.

Are any such changes actually possible in the current political environment?

Even if so, is there anything I can do in my local community to contribute toward achieving that?

Kaizen Vision focuses on small things we can do to make our life’s better.

Kaizen is a Japan­ese phi­los­o­phy that embod­ies small incre­men­tal con­tin­u­ous improve­ments for the bet­ter­ment of the whole. It seeks to elim­i­nate excess and opti­mize effi­ciency.

Three Problems That Let The Air Out of Effective Incremental Change

Where did the air go?

The overwhelming choice of process improvement specialists is incremental change.  The 21st century has seen an explosion in the use of incremental change methods, not just in process improvement, but in software development and maintenance.  Techniques and frameworks like Scrum, Extreme Programing and Kanban are just a sample of methods that are being used.  The support for…