Why the optimism?

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In the face of all the catastrophe thinking and story-telling, why the optimism of thrivability?

This optimism is not blind idealism or the search for some dreamy utopia. A thrivable world will exist (and has existed) in a strange balance and tension where there is more health and generativity than illness and destruction. That does not mean there is not destruction. Old orders must fall, become the compost of new life, and cycle through. Ideas get refined and transcended. A thrivable world is not static. It is not the end of suffering or the birth of a hedonistic paradise. Instead, think of a garden or better yet a meadow.

So, let’s be pragmatic. What is the basis for being optimistic about thriving given stories of catastrophe and crisis. I will merely mention these – you can find more easily by digging deeper on any of it. This is the big picture overview. Also, it is not comprehensive. I offer here only a half dozen examples of why optimism is warranted.

  • communication – never before has communication been so possible – over distances, between languages, across cultures, etc. Information can flow. There is talk of a global brain (although at times that brain may seem primitive and dumbly focused on sex, superficiality, or bad news). It still remains – never before have we had such access to each other. (nods to Deanna Zandt)
  • cognitive surplus – never before have so many had so much liesure time. Not saying we are effective with it, but the possibility of people contributing their time, wisdom, and resources has never been greater. (nods to Clay Shirky)

Yeah, you heard those before….but it is working? What about people who are dying!

  • hearts break as we read of children dying, but what is the trajectory? UNICEF says:
  1. “Research and experience show that six million of the almost 11 million children who die each year could be saved by low-tech, evidence-based, cost-effective measures such as vaccines, antibiotics, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices.”
  2. “While global immunization rates have risen from less than 20 per cent in the 1970s to about 74 per cent in 2002, millions of children must still be reached.”
  3. “In its sixty years of existence, UNICEF has seen a fifty per cent reduction in under-five mortality between 1960 and 2002.”
  • Peace on the rise. I know it seems like the opposite. But let’s look at some charts to see what the numbers tell.
    via systemicpeace.org

    via systemicpeace.org

    We can see from figure 8 that the conflicts that do exist produce more refugees and exist in poorer states and thus require more humanitarian relief. However, note, “The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, had an equally dramatic effect on the general level of armed conflict in the global system.” A couple key points:

  1. “Separate research indicates that the increasing level of societal war results from the protractedness of societal wars during this period and not from a substantial increase in the numbers of new wars.”
  2. “At the peak in 1992, nearly thirty percent of the countries in the world were experiencing some form of major political violence. This percentage of the world’s independent states (with total population greater than 500,000 in 2008) has dropped by nearly one-half since the peak, registering at slightly more than 15% with major episodes of political violence in 2008.”
  3. “There has been substantial improvement in general resilience in the global system since 1995.”
  4. “Global gains are observed for seven of the eight fragility indicators; only “economic legitimacy” shows no improvement, indicating that there has been no substantive shift away from primary commodities production toward manufactured goods in the world’s more fragile states.”

There are a few counter-trends to be wary of (see end of page)

Okay, so kids are more likely to live (but we can keep improving that) and there is a downward trend in warfare/armed conflict. We can communicate better and have more time to make the world better (or be entertained or both). But what about the environment?

Let’s try wikipedia this time:

In 1999, the United States EPA replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and Ozone standards.

The effects of these laws have been very positive. In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions:[48]

  • carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons
  • nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons
  • sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons
  • particulate emissions fell by 80%
  • lead emissions fell by more than 98%

Please don’t take this to mean that we are done. We are not. AND, when was the last time you heard that we had made progress?

So we have been making some progress, and actually there are some positive trends. Now let’s add in a few juicy additions:

  • Purposeful or meaningful life pursuits are on the rise, in fact there is a convergence. Millenials – in general – prefer purposeful work and play, GenX is interested too, and the Boomers who made money so they could have a meaningful life later – well, that later is arriving. What happens when you have multiple-generations with a growing interest in living on purpose, with intention, and therefore being conscious about doing more good in the world?
  • Social entrepreneurship (probably in part as a result of the previous) is on the rise – a very hot trend with many subsets and variations in making money by or for doing good. Let’s call corporate social responsibility one of those variations.
  • A paradigm shift in leadership and collaboration is underway. Beginning a few decades ago with the birth of servant leadership, and reinforced by books like “Outliers” (which shows the supporting factors that go into supposedly independent genius)… now we have open source, crowdsourcing, and so much more. How we think about working together is changing. And that change makes more successful collaboration possible.
  • Green technology. Some of us find it so incredibly sexy. And sometimes it really is. Sometimes it is wishful thinking or innovation many years from implementation. However, I can count 4 wind farms on my 120 mile journey to see my family. I sense some potential black swan like shifts if some clean green energy or technology comes to market… whether that algae that eats pollution or cars run on the biofuel made by your food waste… I have hope that something out of the bright green movement is going to come to fruition in a way that changes the world dramatically.
  • I’ll close my brief list with metrics… we have been improving our metrics (and our intelligence in how those metrics can be used to tell different stories). The better our metrics – and the better we are at realizing what to measure, the tighter and more useful our feedback loops become. From using social network analysis to map out which congresspeople are being lobbied by what organizations (and who is paying them)… to stats on child mortality, the environment, and energy consumption and creation – we know more about our world than ever before. And that empowers us to do more about it.

These are just a few of the things that make me optimistic in the face of catastrophe stories. What are yours?

On twitter–

@jhagel: More cause for optimism – we are having fewer children and living much longer – great visualization of global trends http://bit.ly/c93ven

Fiscal Futures

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This evening I attended (with a brand new twitter friend) the MacArthur Foundation and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s America’s Fiscal Future: Making Difficult Choices event.

Oh, I have lots of thoughts to share, but sharing them usually only gets half done… so I am shifting modes and sharing with you just a light dose of the questions and notes that I jotted down in my notebook as I listened to the panel. Think of it as live blogging. Does it provoke anything interesting for you? I would love to hear if anything sparks for you.

This talk seems to be focused on the deficit…with a lot of concern about how in debt the government is. (Oh geez, what about all those families who are in debt? hmmm….)  Debt is actually quite difficult for families but at the governmental level, it is a floating issue (the being in debt isn’t so bad, it is the lack of confidence others have in the dollar that is troubling)…

Yikes, we have a debt-based currency, so please don’t tell me debt is bad. All our money is based on that!

I wonder what these panelist would say if we talked about the depression of 1873 and how that crisis in confidence was resolved through regulation (which lasted fairly well until computers made complex math easier and thus derivatives possible).

How much of this is fear-mongering. Really? They aren’t speaking to some current crisis (which we actually have on hand) but threaten some future crisis with terrible things like “triple digit” …was that inflation or interest rates or something?

I wonder, in a system of debt-based currency, as the economy grows, how does that work, really? Is that dependent on the growth of debt? Who holds that debt? Doesn’t something have to give?

I hear a lot of “uncertainty” but not yet a recognition of black swans and a system living in extremistan… How do these complex adaptive systems respond? How can you possibly predict them? I am so often frustrated by long term thinking that assumes some consistent or steady trajectory.

While there is acknowledgement of the Baby Boomer issue (how can we pay for all these people about to enter retirement age?) – do we understand that this is an issue in many other countries as well?

Fiscal responsibility is getting framed as if government manages a pocketbook like a family does. URgh… it is NOT like that at all. And framing it that way feels like a pretty nasty way to DUPE people.

Huh, fundemental tax reform. Suggesting two tiers 10% and 25% ... hmmm… by the way, in case you didn’t know your tax history, I looked it up again for you:

“By 1917 a taxpayer with only $40,000 faced a 16 percent rate and the individual with $1.5 million faced a tax rate of 67 percent.” then… “By 1936 the lowest tax rate had reached 4 percent and the top rate was up to 79 percent.” oooh, and if you think that was high, check out “By the end of the war the nature of the income tax had been fundamentally altered. Reductions in exemption levels meant that taxpayers with taxable incomes of only $500 faced a bottom tax rate of 23 percent, while taxpayers with incomes over $1 million faced a top rate of 94 percent. These tax changes increased federal receipts from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945.” And numbers of people paying count too, so “Beyond the rates and revenues, however, another aspect about the income tax that changed was the increase in the number of income taxpayers from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million in 1945.” http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml

And where oh where did this gigantic deficit come from…

“By 2001, the total tax take had produced a projected unified budget surplus of $281 billion, with a cumulative 10 year projected surplus of $5.6 trillion.” http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml

Oh never, mind, those deficit deniers are crazy…

One option is to phase in a carbon tax. Hmmm, interesting… Another is focusing tax increase on consumption rather than income (and especially tie this to healthcare)

Healthcare costs keep going up! Oh my! Let’s really call this ILL-care, because the costs of keeping me heathy are not so bad, it is the cost of being ill and treating illness with hospital and medicines that is expensive.

Should there be an income cap on Social Security? Hmm, I don’t know. I guess I have grown up expecting that social security won’t be around when I get to retirement age. So I just shrug at this. There might be an age hike for full payout… great, add a few more years and decrease the number of people that can live to retirement. And let’s not even begin to discuss what that does to employment issues… (especially in an information age where many of these people don’t intuitively navigate computers)

How will State and Local governments be impacted by our deficit issues? Well, expect more unfunded mandates. (ouch) and if they raise taxes at the federal level it will be harder for States to raise their taxes. If we create federal consumption taxes, those hurt States too.

Sure our treasury is allowed to borrow at low rates- we are the best looking horse in a glue factory. No, really he said that.

If you look, he says (it doesn’t matter which him- the antiquated white guy at the front of the room pontificating) – if you look at the history of deficits in many countries over hundreds of years, you can see that it often looks like borrowing is fine… then everything collapses fast. There is so much uncertainty. (Which is about as close as they got to admitting these are complex dynamic systems that a panel of old school “experts” would not be able to predict or sufficiently analyze (in time).

Haven’t we been living on mortgage debt for a long time? Is that what grew money in our economy? The issuance of debt to families?

He admitted the system is broken! Yeah!!! Now we get somewhere!

Huh, it won’t compromise national security to cut some of the defense budget, but… ummm, it does impact jobs (which can be tracked to a specific district making those cuts politically very unpopular no matter how obsolete or irrelevant the defense product is).

A great question – one that was mentioned on my European tour this summer – Is immigration something that can help solve the deficit and social security? Antiquated white guy says – well in the short term maybe, but in the long term they pull out from the system too… and anyway we just want bright enterpreneurial innovators as immigrants – that helps the economy. Okay, maybe that wasn’t in one sentence… but the parts were all there! <insert invective of choice>

Another question is about the recent G20 meeting and their commitment to lower deficits by 50% by the year 2013. Aggressive! Answer: well, some of those countries are emerging economies growing very quickly, which makes it easy to reduce debt.

Huh, you didn’t mention that before – that emerging economies grow quickly and that makes it easy to reduce debt. Why don’t we do THAT?

Another wonderful question from the floor… uh, sir, so we have all these subsidies for corn… and corn products are what leads to obesity and diabetes… which are major healthcare costs… so um, would it be prudent to reduce subsidies? (answer: well subsidies blah blah blah…. umm, yes)

Someone else asks about unemployement issues, to which they say – we didn’t look at that. What? You didn’t look at how unemployment impacts the economy, taxes, and the deficit? What experts are these?

Enough, I am out of here…

Collaboration Mixing Board

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This morning I read a RT from @jhagel:

Open source trumps crowdsource – by @cdgramshttp://bit.ly/bIn1at

And an idea that has been bubbling in the back of my head came to the surface begging to be set free. Collaboration and Cooperation are complex processes. Setting up them as rivals diminishes the value each provide us. One is not better than another as much as one may be more or less appropriate for a particular issue. And there are a bunch of knobs and dials to adjust based on what we have to put into the system and what we would like to have as output.

My initial “Mixing Board” points to several of these knobs and dials and some of the measures we might watch. I hope you will consider these and contribute to a revised version that holds greater rigor and collective wisdom. 🙂 Collaborate with me!

CollaborationSThis is the basic mixer. We have 3 areas: the Dials – things that feel measurable and adjustable, the Knobs – things that feel like a spectrum, and the Lights – things that we can sense but probably not directly adjust.

The Dials:

  • # of contributors (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • # of beneficiaries (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • degree of facilitation/quality control (none, light-handed, moderated, tight, regulated)
    1. none – for example – the ability to co-create the internet approaches NO facilitation and NO quality control.
    2. light-handed – co-creating youtube is light-handed (as is most major social media space) with very simple rules.. and very little quality control
    3. moderated – wikipedia has a process for including content, a system for elevating reputation, and a fairly advanced peer produced quality control system and standards
    4. tight – most blogs (from harvard business blogs to Daily Kos) where several people have permission to add posts (the comment option might be handled lightly to not at all however) and the quality control is high (even if the quality is not high – the control of it is)
    5. regulated – let’s talk wall street stats or sports numbers collecting on websites – there is regulation about the information to control the quality and the facilitation is more in the realm of bureaucracy
  • feedback loops – do stakeholders/creators have ways of getting feedback on the collaborations? For example, couchsurfing ratings. I presume that collaborations in which people know they are successful via tight feedback loops encourage more collaboration. This is simply my assumption. 🙂

Then we have The Knobs or Spectrums:

  • cooperation – from collective to collaborative (to what degree are people creating/generating through interaction with each other? Is it the number who show up or the output of their engagement with each other? CarrotMobs are about the number (collective) and team sports are about the combined output and interaction (collaborative).
  • granularity – from single output to many outputs that can be added together. A single output could be a logo design or a designed t-shirt… where an additive output is something like Linux – composed of hundreds or even thousands of pieces where individual authorship of the granule still allows for collective production of a larger work.
  • governance – from benevolent dictator to consensus, who manages the collaboration? An individual, a leadership circle, a revolving/evolving group, or full consensus of all involved, etc.
  • field – from commons to market – what does the output create in total? Does it create a market for individuals to succeed (or fail) within or a commons for all to share?

Finally we have The Lights – given the settings of the Knobs and Dials, what can we sense?

  • emergent – does the collaboration create the conditions for emergence? To what degree?
  • creative – does the collaboration enable creative effort or stifle it?
  • quality – does the collaboration produce high quality results/outputs? (by whose definition?)
  • resourceful – does it optimally engage the resources of those collaborating?
  • beneficial – does it create benefits? (one could ask for who?)
  • speed – how long does the collaboration take?
  • adaptable – how able is the collaboration to make adjustments in response to the environtment
  • scalable – can the collaboration expand? to what degree? (not that scaling is always ideal! it isn’t!)

WonderWomanGang

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Yesterday I was missing my friend @rachelannyes – so I looked at her twitter feed to see what she has been up to and get a sense of how she is doing. I found a lovely post:

@rachelannyes: What the world needs now is a Wonder Woman gang.

Absolutely.

So I hereby nominate for the Wonder Woman Gang the following amazing women. Please feel free to nominate those who inspire you and seem to have super powers in transforming our world.

@rachelannyes @randomdeanna@CDEgger @juneHolley @HildyGottlieb @amoration@amyrsward @VenessaMiemis @kanter @caseorganic@p2173 @kitode @ruby @silona@samsweetwater @wseltzer @rmchase @nilofer@deborah909 @sgleason @kristinwolff @staceymonk @joguldi @christinasworld@identitywoman @mariadeathstar @lizstrauss@ruthannharnisch @ladyniasan @beandlive @sheriherndon @nancywhite@alizasherman @CreatvEmergence @slboval

Then I asked for other nominations.

@kg posted: @NurtureGirl I nominate @sloane@beautifulthangs @ericaogrady@ShaunaCausey @willotoons@emgollie @khartline @Rapetzel#WonderWomanGang 🙂

plus: @kg posted: @NurtureGirl Are so many! @coachsizzle @nspilger @avivamo@realize_ink @snesbitt @susangordo@suzboop @penguinasana too 🙂#wonderwomangang

Who do you nominate? And when you think of wonderwomangang, what comes to mind? What super powers do you think these women have?

Catastrophe Thinking

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I am pretty sure my entire life has been lived under the hovering cloud of the apocalypse. Sure there were moments of possibility – the fall of the wall, the election of Obama, the end of apartheid in South Africa. But mostly the global events we hear about focus on the end of civilization as we know it, albeit in small chunks at a time. It is still framed as disaster…. we are losing what we had and aren’t moving into a better world (except in small isolated ways). From AIDS to Bird Flu, from Rwanda genocide to Sudan and Burma, nuclear proliferation, the Gulf Coast disaster 2.0 (and Katrina as 1.0), Haiti (and so many other earthquakes, mud slides, volcanoes, and other weather/geological disasters for humans) – plus economic crisis and climate change, the extinction of so many species, and the war on terror (which just grows fear and terror) all converge – even for those of us who don’t watch the news. There is overpopulation, sex slaves, and child mortality issues as well as deforestation, crumbling infrastructure, and coach potatoes living in suburban nightmares. There are activists working cancer into their bodies with their martyr-like dedication. There are those in sedated near oblivion – zombie-living. There are hedonic wealth-seekers facing doom with greed and opulence. This is the story of crumbling and disintegration. Our globalized post-modern world tumbling through catastrophes.

We tell this story, and we have been telling this story, for my whole life. And the fear-mongering started long before I was born – the the cold war threatening nuclear annihilation for half a century.

I am tired of this story. I am tired of seeing faces worn down with the contraction of fear. I am weary of the negativity and desperation driving people to hate, divide, hoard, and fight. I am sick of finding out my government is justifying killing people in order to obtain more resources (because, I guess, we are in such a state of lack!).

We victimize ourselves, and in that suffering, we victimize others with our trauma.

Enough. Put it down. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t fight for a world you already gave up on.

Look for the flower emerging in the sidewalk – life pressing through without complaint or blame to assert its urge for sunlight. Nature is incredibly resilient and adaptive. Work within the world we have to co-create the world we want. Focus on what is going well and right, and encourage more of it. Breathe and be the serenity prayer.

Do not deny the brutal facts before us, but know that you see those facts through a filter of the story you are telling yourself (and others) about the world. You can transform that story and see those facts in a fresh light – from a different vantage point. Turn on the thrivability light, and recognize that life gives rise to more life. Never before in human history have we known a greater wealth of possibility.

After three days in Philadelphia discussing philanthropy and philanthropic strategies for transformation, I feel deeply convinced and inspired by a model I can see of thrivable philanthropy. Gerard calls it evolutionary philanthropy, and there might be some subtle distinctions. However, let me explain. And then I hope it will be more clear why our stories about our world could shift to transform our experience of it and the world itself.

Let’s call charity the work that we do to address immediate needs of others who can not, for whatever reason, care for themselves. It is as if you are standing on a riverbank, see a baby floating downstream, and you rush out to save the drowning child. Only, there are not enough people pulling drowning babies from the river, and the babies have suffered from being in the river. Our hearts break open. Some savvy volunteer wonders aloud – “who is tossing babies in this river?” And a crew of helpers decide to go upstream to find the cause. And they discover a system out of balance allowing babies to land in the river. They decide to change the system and set up programs to help mothers and advocate for social justice. We call this social change and social justice work. Still, babies are floating down the river. The philanthropist supporting this work starts to wonder – huh, what impact is my giving having? I want babies to stop ending up in the river – this is madness! And the social justice worker says – well, we think we have decreased the number of babies in the river, but this is a complex adaptive system so I can’t name all the causes and effects! I can’t clearly attribute your dollars having saved babies without acknowledging other programs and the dynamic changes in the system in which our town operates, babies are born, the economy shifts, and nature takes her course. We might have even changed our baby counting practices in a way that changed how many babies we can account for, which skewed the numbers giving an artificial bump. But we are not sure.

Then a thinker stands up and says – it is the very culture and beliefs in which we operate that give rise to these systems that aren’t taking care of all these babies. And the philanthropist has to choose now – either fund better metrics to know whether there is an impact… or fund cultural shift. And there are still babies in the river, and everyone’s hearts break open knowing it and seeing it. And they are sad.

Transforming culture takes longer, it is harder to measure, the complex dynamic system of it all makes it next to impossible to attribute agency clearly. And, it is where the greatest possibility for creating a culture that ever more deeply transforms itself, cares for each other and the whole, and enables the world we want.

Change your story.