Recently the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, chose to share his latest insights into the nature of information sharing through social connection. According to Mark, the amount of information shared between people will double every two years. This insight has been termed Zuckerberg’s Second Law by Nicholas Carr.

However, Mark has clearly forgotten anything he ever knew about power laws, Chinese emperors, chess inventors and rice harvests. And even though the volume of information steadily increases, it is almost inevitable that its quality will decrease until we are all panning for micronuggets of meaning in the torrents of spammy infostreams.

Most social networks are developed by focusing on the quantity of users and shared information, rather than the quality of the information and the significance of the connections that people make, so they inevitably result in gigantic data farms rather than a resilient web of genuine relationships.

Just because you wear sandals doesn’t make you a prophet…and it may never make you a profit.

In a follow up session to our visit to Inchcolm Abbey, we were exploring the fact that many of the islands in the Firth of Forth are known as Inches. In this context, the name Inch is derived from Innis, the Gaelic word for an island, and so Inchcolm is Gaelic for Columba’s Island.

As we drew more Dreamwork Maps, more and more islands representing different parts of the enterprise appeared, and these Inches were named correspondingly. Later in the session, as we worked our way through the strategic topography, the phrase ‘Inch by Inch’ kept being voiced.

The challenge that the innovation team was facing was one that often appears in large enterprises. Although nominally the same enterprise, organisations usually form internally into islands of self interest and intention. These self focused islands then become defended with entrenched opinions in the same way that Inchcolm was once fortified.

The group realised that the way to move beyond this damaging silo mentality was to somehow connect the island dwellers. Attempts had previously been made to try and integrate and unite the islands of interest in the organisation. However, these had all ended in further alienation and animosity as the islanders felt that they were being forced to integrate and as if they were losing their unique identities.

A story began to emerge about connecting the enterprise Inches together, one Inch at a time, and this culminated in a viewing of Al Pacino’s wonderfully inspirational speech in Any Given Sunday. In his role as coach Tony D’Amato, Al powerfully articulates the true nature of a winning team.

Tony D’Amato understands that a team is not an homogenous entity or an integral holon; it is a collection of individual inches which are fundamentally connected. These inches are all around, and when all those inches are added up, that’s what makes the difference between a team winning and losing, between an organisation living and dying.

During a recent Dreamwork Maps session with group of innovators, a recurring Common Ground feature was a research facility on an island. As we started exploring the imagined research facility using Dreamwork Stories, it inevitably started to emerge as something in the same archipelago as Tracy Island.

However, by the time everyone was wearing Thunderbirds black bushy eyebrows and realising that they all looked like Alistair Darling, and we had explored who was really pulling the strings, we moved on from Thunderbirds are Go to Thunderbirds are Gone.

The group decided that what they were really looking for was possibility space, rather than technology derived from futuristic misadventures. They felt that they needed to go back to first principles and the phrase a priori was used by a number of the participants.

In Dreamwork, we often use the phrase ‘from the archetypal to the specific’ when we connect a fundamental pattern to a particular idea, and so the group came to the conclusion that they would like to experience a priori in an archetypal possibility space. Perhaps in a real ecclesiastical priory. On an island.

As often happens when an intention is stated in possibility space it soon begins to manifest in reality. Just a few miles from where we were working was Inchcolm Abbey which had been used as a priory until fairly recently. It is located in on the island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth.

We sailed out to Inchcolm on the Maid of the Forth and began to explore and experience a priori in a priory. The abbey is a very peaceful place and one of the key insights from the group was that it provided a sense of grounded possibility. This theme was developed further in a series of Story Fragments. As the story emerged the group realised that the fundamental platform for their research and innovation was a solid grounding of intentions, needs and perspectives, rather than fetishising the latest technologies.

The island that had appeared in Common Ground was no longer an improbable puppet state, but a solid and tangible foundation for their vision, rising forth from their oceans of experience.

A recent Japanese school production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves explored new artistic ground by featuring 25 Snow Whites and no dwarves. The directorial strategy behind this sidekick free initiative was that every child who took part in the story should play the part of the heroine.

Although the visionary dramaturg who orchestrated this innovative performance may have been under great parental pressure, the resulting production accurately reflects the approach taken by many business schools and leadership initiatives.

On any leadership course, one of the first questions to be asked is ‘What is the most important attribute of any leader?’. Various responses are given and elicited, usually along the lines of ‘courage’, ‘vision’, ‘integrity’ and so on. However, the one attribute that any leader really needs is rarely identified, if ever.

The key attribute that all leaders need is followers, but many leadership programmes are encouraging a generation of Snow Whites to stunt their own growth by ignoring the value of others in developing their individual potential.

In Dreamwork, we recognise and encourage both Heroes and Helpers. Instead of fixating on the Hero’s Journey with its single hero and anonymous helpers, we work in Heroic Space, where all participants have the opportunity to be both Heroes and Helpers, depending on their intentions and needs.

Many organisations and institutions now have a gender balance agenda, in which gender discrimination is actively pursued in a doomed attempt to balance the numbers of men and women in leadership positions. However well intentioned this may seem, it often does not produce the intended outcome.

The main reason for this is that a woman who is parachuted into a leadership position in a group of men often ends up behaving like those men, and to all intents and purposes has become a man. In some ways this can be even worse than having a man in the position as the woman may find it difficult to own and assimilate her own masculine energies.

These disowned energies and their potentially destructive aspects are then projected on to others with undesired outcomes. Usually the woman begins to lose the asset that was most valuable in the first place, her feminine perspective, and begins to behave like a Drag King.

The corollary of this situation also occurs frequently, and can be just as potentially destructive, where a man is challenged with voicing and recognising his feminine energies. A man’s skill in voicing his feminine aspects does not require him to be known as ‘Mandy’ at the weekends, or to join the increasing ranks of Travelodge Trannies. Instead, he should perhaps pay attention to archetypally feminine attributes such as intuition, empathy and compassion.

Carl Jung described a man’s feminine energies as his Anima, and a woman’s masculine energies as her Animus. For an individual to grow and develop into their most authentic potential, these energies should be in a healthy balance. Rather than decreeing target numbers based on external gender assessment, perhaps organisations should focus their energies on encouraging the inner balance of masculine and feminine energies. What happens inside, happens outside.