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Breakthroughs for a Thrivable World Part 2

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Entry Point 1: Individuals

What is the story we tell about people in this Darwinian world where capitalism dominates the ideology? Traditional western economics, dating back to Adam Smith describes humans as rational self-interested creatures. Being kind to others is assumed to be driven by selfish motivations, for example, creating obligations of reciprocity. However, neuroscience reveals the phenomenon in the brain around empathy and generosity. Humans are wired to be kind. The fields of behavioral economics and positive psychology radically alter the story of who we are as individuals and how we interact together. A thrivable world is more possible when we operate under the belief and assumption that people care, act from a place of empathy, and seek meaning-making. We also become self-aware of how predictably irrational we are, allowing us to adjust our systems to nudge us toward the outcomes we consciously want. The increased wisdom in how irrational we are allows us to be more intentional about how we do what we do.

Behavioral Economics

We are driven by much more than greed and profit. In fact, we are predictably irrational, easily swayed, nudged, and influenced. What we may learn and adapt about ourselves is priceless. We even discover new ways to navigate cheating and stealing! (video link)

Dan Pink tells us in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (video also) that while financial rewards may motivate better performance on mechanical tasks; they don’t on creative tasks. Instead, we are driven by our desire to be autonomous, masters of our work, and full of purpose. We do things for a reason we believe in. We like to get better and better at things we do, and we want to be self-directed. If we know this about ourselves and others, what will that enable us to do now that we could not do before?

Iain McGilchrist describes the consequences of how our brains work and what that has produced in the world with his book, The Master and His Emissary where he points to how left-brained linear rational actor thinking has led to the world we have now. Dan Pink also talks about a Whole New Mind, naming six right-brained abilities we need to evolve for the economies of the future. They are: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.signaling (animated)
Creative Commons License photo credit: Genista

Positive Psychology

After ages of focusing on illness, psychology has refocused (at least in part) on positive psychology (the scientific study of human flourishing). Recent research reveals more about altruism, The Compassionate Instinct, and authentic happiness. In fact, Jonathan Haidt proclaims that we are Wired to be Inspired.

We also understand more about the conditions we need for productive and joyful work or flow experiences from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and the Evolving Self. (video also)

Multiple Intelligences

For a century or more, Intelligence Quotient (IQ) has been a primary measure of a person’s potential. However, it has both shown that high IQ does not produce happiness or success. It has also been shown that emotional intelligence and other forms of knowing also influence an individuals potential. Howard Gardner’s work on Multiple Intelligences point to many ways intelligence appears in individuals. Dan Goleman focuses specifically on Emotional Intelligence, although more recently he has written about Ecological Intelligence. Recently science has shown that brain cells are not only located in the head, but this tissue is also present in heart, gut, and other areas of the body. What world can we create when we acknowledge the full spectrum of our intelligence and awareness? Does the recognition of multiple forms of intelligence entice greater curiosity and creativity? Learning how to make our brains more plastic fosters transformation through increased flexibility, growth, and integration. What thrivable world becomes possible with these expanded and acknowledged capabilities when we honor and embrace them?

Conclusion

Understanding ourselves as empathic and connected beings in search of meaning and purpose enables us to design our world in new ways. While there will still be zero-sum games and times when we act from greed or scarcity, there is a growing possibility of acting from trust, altruism with autonomy for a greater purpose operating from a place of abundance. We tap into a greater sense and breadth of our intelligence. And we know more about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

Breakthroughs for a Thrivable World Part 1

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The purpose of this series is to frame the shifts culture, business, and the world move through now. We present a story about how we arrived here, what breakthroughs we notice, and how this creates the greater possibility of a thrivable world at this time. We invite your feedback, because, as we will explain later, feedback enables generativity.

Introduction

We are working under the assumption: We humans are driven (by our nature) to increase choice and evolve our complexity through creativity and innovation. This requires balancing creativity, collaboration, and self-regulation. (Nods to social philosophy of the Ostroms.)

What you won’t get here: dire predictions. Yes, there is a gritty reality to face. And foundationally we believe you (and us together) will be creative and resourceful beyond measure. We enter an age of transformation, of intentional evolution. Welcome. Play in possibility. Manifest your utmost potential.

Backstory

Modernism: Order, Structure, and Form

Western culture opened the 20th century with modernism: a belief that we could reduce the world to its parts and create formal taxonomies. Truth was knowable. It was a self-conscious era. Recognizing the world as complex, many attempted to make sense of it through reducing the complexity to its component parts. While it brought us major advances in culture and science, it also had limits.

Post-Modernism: Inside-Out Structure, the Formless, and Chaos

Post-modernism laughed with a hearty right-brained playfulness (and in some cases deep cynicism) at this attempt to create order, fought the concept of a single global narrative and objective truth, and turned structure inside-out. While Post-modernism has run its course of criticism, a coherent -ism about (at least Western culture) current and future precepts has not been named and generally adopted. We may have troubled the assumptions of Modernism, but we still haven’t formulated a broad pattern of what replaces it. Is there a global narrative? Or have we fractured through identity politics into a plethora of narratives, tribes, and truths? Post-Human criticism posits:

“The posthuman is a being that relies on context rather than relativity, on situated objectivity rather than universal objectivity, and on the creation of meaning through ‘play’ between constructions of informational pattern and reductions to the randomness of on-off switches, which are the foundation of digital binary systems.”

To answer questions about our global narrative(s) and intersubjectivity, let’s review emerging ways of perceiving ourselves and the world (which influences what we notice and take action upon).

First, a simple demonstration of how reductionism fails and Complexity Science begins to explain.

Toasters, Cats and Snowflakes While we can take a toaster apart and put it back together – thereby understanding it, we can not do so with cats. The modernist/reductionist approach to understanding ever more granular parts fails in organisms and systems that are greater than the sum of their parts. Parts do not produce aliveness.

Complexity Science

Systems with a lot of interaction between interdependent nodes are called complex because the non-linear variations go beyond the scope of our mathematical tools: the sheer size of their potential behaviour defies brute force computational attacks to get a glimpse of the possibilities. They show emergent behavior (not possible to predict its behaviour by studying its components ) and surprisingly adaptive behavior when circumstances change. Markets, genetics, social interactions, maybe even life itself may be a result of complexity.

Human interactions are more complex than we had imagined in the 20th Century. Fanatical about science as a route to objective truth, metaphors from science permeated modernist culture. A vital part of the cultural narrative was constructed around Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest. And while few read his writing, many touted competition and predatory activity as nature’s great process! All the while, culture urbanized, shifting from rural farm communities to more competitive environments of the city and the marketplace. While capitalism freed man from his “destined at birth” status, the meritocratic approach encouraged individualism and zero-sum games. Where there is conflict over resources, one of us had to win and the other had to lose, like a game of tug of war.

There are games that don’t generate zero sum outcomes. Or more directly, there are games in which we win and lose together. Non-zero sum games seem, at first, nearly invisible in capitalistic systems. Issue like Climate Change, at their highest order, become non-zero-sum. Collectively, we will address climate change and everyone wins, or we won’t and we all lose. Collectively we take care of our common pools of resources like water or air quality, or we all lose access to healthy water and air. Over and over again, at the upper level of a system, we win together or lose together.

Today

The world seems riddled with catastrophe thinking. We have focused on what is going wrong (and thus been drawn into it). We have measured what is wrong (and noticed then the rise in that). We face catastrophic failures in our systems with convergent crisis environmentally, financially, and culturally. Disaster planning, risk management, and even sustainability planning focus on increasing our resilience as the world we once knew falls apart. Some of our greatest breakthroughs in these times contribute to the breakdowns we face. For example, John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation) spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum in June of 2010 about how the internet and social media which helped Obama get in office – these very models are what flood the tiny District of Columbia, adding to the US government being overwhelmed and breaking down.

Like a boat without a rudder, the last 40 years of post-modernism have focused on moving away from what doesn’t work without providing a vision to work toward. We paddle frantically to get away from the rocks of crisis, while having no consensus or vision of where to direct this spaceship earth to.

Thus, we offer thrivability. A vision of integrating the breakthroughs, building on what works, and moving toward a world we want.

As we move toward a more thrivable world, what does that mean? Can we see the breakthroughs helping us move even as we feel the breakdown of our past financial, cultural, and environmental systems? There are breakthroughs on the individual level, the collective social level, and the system level. These are uplifted and expanded by breakthroughs in our ability to reflect on ourselves using metrics and feedback as well as breakthroughs in our process of innovation, increased understanding and capability in creativity, and greater rates of generativity (compounded by breakthroughs at all three levels). The next sections explore each of these five points and the relevant breakthroughs, we believe, to the emergence of a thrivable world at this critical time.