There are no existing videotapes which match these 5 short documents which Warfield planned for seminar talks during the 1986-1987 calendar year. We know from Warfield's VITA that his “Influences” seminars continued for two years, 1986-1988. There should have been at least twenty videotapes of the "Influences" seminars in such a long time period.
The videos were lost during the upheaval that occurred in 1989 when The Center for Interactive Management was discontinued. Christakis left George Mason University. Warfield's office was moved to a small building on the edge of the university campus. During the relocation a colleague assisted in the dismantling of the Center for Interactive Management office space. He thought he was being very helpful when he sent many of the old Center for Interactive Management (CIM) videotapes to recycling, to be used (and overwritten) in student video classes and studio television programs. This seemed a logical step since there would be no space for all the videos in Warfield's next office. When Rose discovered the videos were missing she went hunting for them and fortunately was able to reclaim most of them from the video recycling bins on campus. But she was too late to find and rescue all of the tapes, some of which are gone forever, including an unknown number of the "Influences" seminars. Rose took the dozens of remaining video cassettes home and stored them on shelves in a basement closet. The cassettes stayed there in the Warfield basement closet for ten years, until the year 2000 when John Warfield donated them to GMU's Special Collections & Archives. That is how it happens that 5 abstracts with no videos, and the 7 video cassettes with no matching abstracts seem to be all we have left of the Warfield “Influences Seminars.” These are the titles of the abstracts:
October 30, 1986 - "Inability of Social Systems to Self-Design for Results"
March 17, 1987 - "Organizational Strategy for Progress: Error Embracing"
March 24, 1987 - "Organizational Strategy for Progress: Reconciling Variety, Parsimony and Saliency"
March 31, 1987 - "Organizational Strategy for Progress: Dual-Basis Organization Design"
April 14, 1987 - "The Role of the Engineer in Building and Destroying Societies"
(r.w. August 2007, updated October 14, 2012)
[OK]
