Steve Barth | Reflexions

Koan Zero?

Learning is breathing in

Creating is breathing out

Knowing is holding your breath

I've always been most interested in how knowledge management can facilitate personal and organizational learning as a way to improve understanding, decisions, actions and outcomes.

Although I've never seen it defined that way, I think that's the good intention behind most of our efforts. Too quickly, however, expedience redefines KM as analysis and explication, economics reduces KM to technology, rhetoric deludes us to believe that rules can change cultures and behaviors, and we forget that the quest to master knowledge is as old as consciousness itself.

Without being able to articulate the reasons why, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the goal of "knowledge creation" (so creating, above, would be creating value, I suspect). In fact, using the word "knowledge" makes me uncomfortable. For one thing, I don't think people actually act on what they know so much as on what they believe to be true (objectivity is overrated). But more importantly, I've come to believe that knowledge and learning are less interrelated than opposite and mutually exclusive concepts.

Characters Welcome

"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life." Henri Cartier-Bresson

I want to see the natural trail the way Helen Levitt or Henri Cartier-Bresson saw the urban avenues of New York and Paris. I never look for a landscape or still-life. To me, every photo is a portrait trying to capture the character and characters of the neighborhood. When I am traveling, buildings and statues get this treatment. Last summer I shot Yosemite's Half Dome in the same last-light as I once took wedding portraits.

As a post-professional photographer, I don't want to be an elitist, especially while hiking. A leaf or lizard has as much nobility as an endangered pitcher plant or a bull elephant. And a backyard trail has as much wonder as Mt. Kenya or Machu Picchu. An 8oz river stone is as solid as a 5000ft massif.