Innovation Types

There is a lot of energy around innovation as we struggle between old economic structures and systems and new ones. Are we really talking about the same kinds of innovation or not? In working with a coaching client who catalyzes innovation, I developed the following chart and typing (borrowing from a dozen models I found in various domains and with the help of several practicing innovators including my collaborator Herman Wagter).

Let’s explore, across these types, where innovators focus their attention, what is required, the timelines usually involved in implementation and adoption, and some examples within business model, marketing, product/service, and process.

Disruptive Innovation

Here, we are looking at game-changing innovation. These innovations offer an unexpected new value proposition. This type of innovations requires: deep creativity, long term market building, and has trouble creating market (because people don’t even know they want it yet).

To be disruptive is deep creativity – coming up with something that no one else is doing or knows they need. They aren’t inward facing: “how do we do what we do better?” They aren’t outward facing: “how do we do something better than what others do?” They involve lots of random play in a nonlinear process. Attention focuses on where there is complacency or “accepted wisdom” that no one else is questioning in the market. Highly emergent, networking is everything. To be disruptive, you must see a striking new perspective on a existing problem. To win the market by being disruptive you need to execute on a bold plan. To be successful, you have to invite people to make a trade off in what they think is valuable. You create a different value proposition where that market validates the trade off as an improvement.

Combinatory Innovation

Welcome the the world of mashup innovation. These innovations take something that is working in some other domain and transport it into a new domain or they take existing offers and bundle them in better ways. This type of innovation requires: broad awareness outside market zone and short-term market building.

To be combinatory, innovators look outside their domain of known expertise for ideas that work. Partly emergent, you have to be able to see what is not there yet. This is a world of allegory. Find systems like your system and use what works there. Alternately, take several things that work and combine them in new and more effective ways. The value proposition is enhanced: more, wider attributes.

Efficiency Innovation

These innovations focus on refinement. They offer iterative improvement on existing technologies by reducing waste. These types of innovation require: engineering creativity and competitive market building.

To be efficiency innovators, look for ways to refine what is. This is about control and limitation. What about what is there now is not critical? What about what exists really matters and what can be left behind? Remove what is not highest value adding. What would a simpler way to do it be? The value proposition stays the same, it is offered with better speed/cost/options.

What form of innovation are you doing? What type do you want to be doing? How are you going about achieving that?

What examples would you add?

Ruined: The Crush of Enlightenment

The more I learn about systems, the more I feel I am ruined now. Like any good enlightenment, once it happens, you can’t ever quite go back to thinking the way you did before. I can’t go back to thinking the world has single/independent problems or single solutions. I can’t believe in single causes. And when I look for what led to events that are transpiring, I can’t blame a single source. Instead, I am always looking for the complex interweaving of causality. David Harvey’s fantastic “Crisis of Capitalism” shows the causes of economic collapse from 6 different explanatory perspectives:

  • Human Frailty
  • Institutional Failures
  • Obsessed with a False Theory
  • Cultural Origins
  • Failure of Policy
  • Systemic Risk

And, I look at this list Harvey has, and I realize, yep, I have, at one time or another, played a sort of blame game with each of them. However, now that I think in multiple perspectives about interlocking complex adaptive systems that operate beyond simple linear singular causality…I am no longer able to come up with simple easy answers like: Vote! March! Go around! or Change policy! I guess I do still have a fondness for “Avoid toxic ossified institutions” and “Beware of Systemic Risk.”

The trouble with ideas that enlighten us is that we can’t go back. We might want to. It might be an easier life back there. The answers appeared more obvious (because the perspective dictated them).

I once had a contract cancel – basically, simplistically – they said something to the effect of: you are a breakthrough person and we already decided on breaking down right now, so we brought in someone who does that. And you see this all the time – we look for what we already think the answer is and we seek reinforcement of our belief. And usually we don’t have to go far to get it (that old lure of homophily) I call this mirror-thinking. We go looking in mirrors to see our existing beliefs are true, and sure enough they give us our beliefs right back to us.

The more you think in multiple perspectives, the harder this sort of mirror-thinking becomes. I return regularly to Donella Meadows’ work on Intervening in a System. It stands as a reminder not to get trapped in solving system issues from a single perspective.

However, I warn you. Should you pursue the path of seeing through multiple perspectives a world of interlocked complex adaptive systems… you can’t go back. You can never go back to that serenity of simplicity in problems/solutions/interventions or views.

As you begin to step into the various positions and stories people occupy, you may fill with compassion, seeing each operate under their beliefs with positive intentions. There is something incredibly uplifting recognizing that all people operate from a love for someone or of something. It is love behind everything, even war and violence. And there is something incredibly depressing recognizing that this is what we get as a result despite all that love. Try not to get lost. I have gotten lost in compassion or in understanding one element in the overall system.

Because to really perceive what is happening requires a deep both and. Both the details and the context. These details and those details. This context and the context of that context. Don’t get dizzy. It is easy to get dizzy zooming from perspective to context to culture to cultural context and then back into another perspective. Take something for the SEE sickness. Ginger is good.

Brain science is revealing that Westerners are very focal-point centered. We Westerners want an object in the middle of our pictures. People from other cultures value context. Think, for example, of the elaborate etiquette systems of China, India, and Japan, where behaviors are dictated by context and even the slightest contextual clues provide information for effectively navigating culture. Students from countries like China will focus their eyes on the context even more than the object in the center of a picture. Learn to do both. Flip back and forth in rapid succession from one to other until you can hold both at the same time. Learn to soften the edges of your eyes and see from your periphery. (I learned how to do this over the summer while I was in Australia – mind-blowing!)

Once you learn to see from all these perspectives, you can never fully occupy any of the places as if you were unaware there were others. You are stuck always transcending any given place/space. And while experiencing the rush of the enlightenment to perceive – deeply perceive – what is happening and why and where to make a leveraged action for yourself or those you love – you are also crushed out of who you thought you were and into someone else altogether. Your very being begins to exist in all these perspectives more and more of the time. Your very being becomes distributed experiencing the world from different perspectives nearly simultaneously. This can be disturbing, and no, you probably don’t need to see a doctor. You are already ruined now. 🙂

Don’t lose yourself to existential bedazzlement. Stay on, stay steady. Grow your multiple perspective skills. Grow your ability to hold both the particulars from different perspectives as well as their context simultaneously. Because, while you can never go back, it is also the most amazing awe-inspiring view I have ever imagined. Crushing or not, like all tremendous experiences they hold the space where anxiety meets wonder in an exquisite dance of perception.

**warning: using multiple perspectives may harm or damage feelings of self-righteousness. Side effect can be greater levels of creativity and innovation.

Facets and Heterogeneity

Evangeline

Do we wear many masks? Or just one? Are they really masks? Or can we perceive them as facets of a multi-dimensional self?

Masks has a connotation of being false. Thus it is hard to pair a mask with authenticity. I have been using the words – facet or aspect. And I tie it to a metaphor of a gem – we are one crystal with many facets. Each facet faces a different tribe. A few people close to the edges of these facets may see a more than one of our facets and connections to more than one of our tribes. Some of us are pretty translucent gems, while others prefer to be – or need to be – opaque.

This is deeply tied into a model of a human we use when designing social software. When we presume that a human is an integrated whole who shows all people the same depth and dimensions of our being, we create too superficial of a tool. And we end up with several dilemmas.*

  1. Show the whole self and bombard people with TMI (and later get held accountable for your intimacy).
  2. Show only one dimension of the self (and get accused of not being authentic or of not being a part of one of your tribes)
  3. Create multiple identities (and then try to keep track of them and which facet you display in each… and later get pushed out by “real names” social software.)

quartz crystal

We are too often seen as a single facet (race, religion, work, location, affiliation, purpose, etc.) when we are many. Social Network Analysis, of which I am an avid fan and advocate, still usually only maps for one dimension of the self. Imagine the real social network map – the layers and layers of connections and the participation in the many tribes we belong to and participate in. This map may be so full of links and nodes as to be unread-able at anything but perhaps the most local scale. (and of course overwhelming if we move the static map into active motion of real-time interactions) (Let’s not even begin to talk about degree of association/depth of connection which adds another layer/filter to what we share and who we share it with.)

20110825-NodeXL-Twitter-ASA2011 Graph

Network maps have yet to really reveal this inter-lacing because they draw links, usually, on one facet or connection type. But, in practice, most tribes are deeply interlaced. (Cults try to diminish this interlacing – by reducing other tribal affiliation and thus increasing dependency on the cult.) For example, I may live in a blue state, but I have relatives that are red voters, which keeps me informed of other positions besides the blue I seem embedded in. This is the counter argument to homophily and the risk of sameness that some are recently arguing the internet encourages (you filter for that which you are already a part of and thus only reinforce your beliefs).

Our resilience rests in our heterogeneity which brings us the diversity of viewpoints we need for a better, more complete view of our world. We build relationships by focusing on a sameness, however that need not obscure how we may be different. For example, Alexis and Xavier connect because they both believe in building better local economies. Alexis has a background in marketing. Xavier has experience developing collaborative conversations. Together Alexis and Xavier create an event for local businesses and potential entrepreneurs to meet and discuss with local government figures how to support developing local economies. As Valdis Krebs says: “connect on your sameness and benefit from your differences.”

* To keep things light, I only mention the design of social software, however, we also limit people in our in person social interactions by presuming an integrated human as if they only have one persona in their minds. Voice dialogue offers a powerful process for letting us open to the multiplicity of voices we have within us and act with greater awareness of the dynamics between those inner facets of the self.

A Thrivable World Emerges

Thrivable from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

Gratitude to Symbionomics and Alan Rosenblith for content and production.

Play with me!

Last year when we created the Thrivability Sketch, I zoomed through the project. Why? Because people motivate me.  Being in touch with and inspired by others is a major driving force for me. Thus, coordinating contributions from over 65 collaborators and compiling a book were the most pleasant 16 hour days I have had in my working life.

So when I was encourage to write something of a manifesto for thrivability, I forgot that what drives me and brings the most wisdom out is the connection with others. And thus I tried to be something of a hermit when writing. What a different experience!

When I was in New York city speaking with Amy Sample Ward about the Breakthroughs book and my effort to write and fundraise, she reminded me to connect into the network. So let’s shift direction on this. I invite you to play with me and others who believe a thrivable world can breakthrough now.

Get involved in a chapter that you find compelling or join in for the whole process. yes, of course your name will be included and attribution given, but we know that isn’t why you want to play. You want to play because, like me, you enjoy the process of emergence that happens when playing with others. Come play!

It is almost that easy. However, to get this done and do it right, I need to devote time and attention to not only the writing but the community engagement. So I am asking for a small administrative donation to give me dedicated time to nurture and guide this gathering. $25 to play per chapter. A chapter takes roughly a week. $200 grants you access to play in all the chapters.

Click here to see chapters to play with and brief descriptions of them.

See a sample chapter on thrivable.org.

Chip in your $25 for a chapter and get the schedule on when we are working on it.

Or sponsor the whole effort!

Current Champions:

  • Manar Hussein
  • Herman Wager

 

Integration

This is a time of convergence and integration. Re-integration actually.

It is like that tip of a fractal pattern where it no longer pushes out and starts to turn a corner and draw back in. We have been specializing and specializing and valorizing the specializing for a long time. Some of this knowledge and new understanding pushes us further away from what is known and what is known in related fields. I saw this image a few months ago and had to laugh. I don’t remember where I saw it, so please forgive the replication from memory. Let’s say for example, that the core body is biology, the specific domain is Cellular Biology, and the graduate paper is on the some process of mitochondria.

knowledgeExpands

And while this is expanding our knowledge ever outward, it doesn’t pull us back into core knowledge to shift our basic understanding of the world. It is knowledge that resides in ever smaller numbers of people, applicable and valuable only to them. It is the 18th Century Literature scholar who becomes so deeply specialized in a particular poet or time period that their sphere of language centers further and further out from our common tongue until they become nearly unintelligible to someone in a different field of study. It is the Theoretical Physicist whose language of quarks and gluons seems like an alien or imaginary world to the Sociologist they sit with at the campus-wide faculty meeting.

And yet there is another way that knowledge expands when two related fields develop something near their intersection. And example here might be Biology –> Cellular Biology –> Process of RNA transcription which uses a lot of Chemistry. (These are elementary examples, because you and I do not share enough deep expertise for us to point to some recent edge being expanded here in enough detail!)

KnowledgeIntegrates

Here we begin to find the overlaps between fields, weaving them together into a larger cohesive picture of the world. And as the gates to the intersection open, it continues to expand out, often until the intersection of the knowledge space becomes a field itself. Neurobiology, computer science, sustainability are a few more recent developments that arose as intersections of one or more domains. However, this doesn’t draw us back toward fields that aren’t peripherally connected. It doesn’t take the revelations from statistical math and begin to apply them to organizational design. It doesn’t take a strand of physics and link it to spiritual traditions. These radical connections between fields of seemingly quite different areas is where some really interesting work emerges that can reshape what many of us see about the world and do within that world. These radical connections shift the intersections at the center of our knowledge and open up new axis of information.

And this…. this is where radical innovation happens. It is where most people think you are crazy until all the sudden it pops and knowledge feeds back into the core of our shared understanding shifting many of us.

InnovateKnowledge

And just for some background on the drivers behind this, some of my view here is coming from conversations about Adam Smith and divisions of Labor and Specialization… That we have reached points in the expansion of knowledge by which they hold value to so few people that they can’t attract more to specialize further into that space. And instead, when we pull back to reintegration of knowledge we expand the value of the development of that information so that it serves a broader audience… And thus knowledge expands and reintegrates like the breathing of a giant collective organism.

 

Freedom and Responsibility

Before I dive into Freedom and how it relates to responsibility, I have to confess that George Michel’s Freedom! song runs through my head as I type. In it he sings “you got to give for what you take.” and while much of the song might only poorly relate to what I am about to play with, this line certainly does.

I typed into twitter yesterday, “Thinking about the connection of freedom and responsibility. To thrive are they correlated?”

A little background. For a long time, I have been irritated and judgmental (feelings I try to avoid). I have been irritated and judgmental about Ayn Rand and her whole Objectivist thing. A few weeks ago, I was reading about Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand. Yes yes, exactly, I was thinking. We love it when we find things that validate or resonate with what we already believe. However, I can also see that between the right and left – the libertarians and the liberals – are two seemingly polemic forces – one side all bloated with self-interest, cries “Freedom above all else!” and everyone who follows that belief can join that side… And the other side righteously declares, “Equality for all!” and everyone who believes in that gathers around. Both sides hold their chests high and have some sort of moral indignation with the other.

First, let’s acknowledge that Ayn Rand attracted a following because there is a tension between the collective and the individual. And there is something deeply satisfying about believing in individual agency. And America (and Australia too) has a love affair with the cowboy – the lone agent, the entrepreneur, the solitary genius, and the self-made man. And sure, if the collective just looks like someone else’s self-interest being served and not honoring the whole or even the other parts, then sure, pursuing your self-interest instead of theirs makes a good deal of sense.

However, it is also the case that except for the wild ones that have left society completely and live alone on the land (and these unusual creatures do exist even if only for short periods of time)… except for the wild ones, we are all intricately linked. So while Rand might have been right to disavow communism, the Objectivists are wrong to neglect our responsibility to the networks we depend on. Freedom and responsibility are intricately linked.

If I have little or no freedom – you have imprisoned me, let’s say; then we can’t really hold me responsible for much (except my thoughts and perhaps my words). However, if I am unshackled and given freedom, I can’t hope to maintain that freedom without supporting the conditions that allow for it. For me to be free, I have to care for the context I am in and the people I engage with. I am never purely autonomous – especially after globalization entered the picture. And for the agents of equality, let me add – if we encourage equality, it may be in our own self-interest – or our belief therein. It is that sense of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” As well as the same kind of thinking that prevents lower to middle class people from voting to tax the rich, “that could be me, and I don’t want to be taxed when I get there.” And, when my freedom interferes with other people being free, I am responsible for navigating that tension (as are they and those around us). We call this process “Court” and the decisions are “justice” not just for us but for all in like positions. I am hoping there is a court jester in there to keep things lively and light-hearted.

Okay, okay, I get the overwhelm that ensues when we try to be responsible for our actions. Taken to the extreme this can mean accounting for where everything I use and enjoy has come from, who was impacted by the making of these things, what the making did to the environment, and what impact any of all of this can have on me and my descendants or legacy in the future. Just how responsible am I? And how can I feel free when these responsibilities begin to inhibit my actions?
Well, that is the dance we do. Don’t mistake feeling free for being free. We take responsibility where we can today and hope our choices, made to the best of our knowledge, will enable us to be free in the future. We ask not, “what all am I responsible for?” but instead, “where else can I take more responsibility today than I took yesterday?” And asking that, we take a step and action toward increasing our ability to be free tomorrow. Freedom after all is not just the ability to do whatever we want and damn the consequences, it is the ability to make a choice given the consequences we can perceive.

Freedom and Equality are not opposite ends of some spectrum but qualities acting in dynamic tension together.

Responses to my query on twitter:

greghartle Greg Hartle: @NurtureGirl In my opinion, with any freedom comes great responsibility.
ahesse Arno Hesse: Freedom implies living up to your responsibility. RT @NurtureGirl: Thinking about the connection of freedom and responsibility
elizlk Elizabeth Krueger: @NurtureGirl connected by moral sense so that freedom for me isn’t hurting someone else; w/o morals freedom isn’t shared
What do you think?

Nurturing Change: Metrics Matter

Summary:

We live in a complex emergent world. When you put energy into nurturing a larger space – one beyond your control and possibly even your influence, be wary of assuming causal connections. Look for probabilities and correlations.

When looking for metrics: use multiple perspectives to help develop measures that go beyond your assumed (and blinders on filters). Think through time. And Be sure to track data that allows you to have quick feedback on blue oceans and black swans.

Article:

In an uncertain world – one where emergence from complex adaptive interacting systems is the way most things operate (to a greater or lesser degree) there are things you can control… a broader range of things you can influence/guide, and an ever larger sphere that you can nurture or care for.

Using network theory, we suppose that the impact you can have through the things you can control is small… it operates in the world of Gaussian curves – what Taleb calls Mediocrastan of sorts. And the things we can nurture can possibly (or are more likely to) result in power law dynamics – what Taleb calls Extrimistan. Thus, the impact you can have through nurture has the potential to be much larger.

However your risk and your “authorship” influence this as well. In the world you nurture, it is much harder to attribute outcomes to your actions… there are probabilities and correlations rather than causal connections. I can trace the causal chain on donating $100 to feed the homeless. Did they get fed? How many? Is that where my dollars went? I can’t say that my advocacy of a ban on texting while driving saved lives. I can say there is a correlation of texting while driving and car accidents. And then I infer that reducing texting while driving may reduce car accidents.

And the risk of planting seeds in the nurture space is larger (you have less control and thus less assurance of having a particular outcome). I convince my neighborhood to have an annual potluck and I lead the committee to make it happen. Does this make my neighborhood safer? Reduce crime? Increase sense of meaning and connection?

Transformative philanthropy operates in this nurture space – having potentially larger impacts over time, but it is harder for any change agent working in planting transformative seeds to give direct impact measurable results to funders.

Similarly, if you work in social media (or advertising for that matter) this dynamic of probabilistic correlation but not causal connection makes it rather tricky to say your campaign led to x, y, and z results (through your specific efforts alone). What is that saying? Something like “We believe 50% of our advertising is effective. We just aren’t sure which half.” or something like that.

We can come up with metrics to see if we are achieving the goals we set for ourselves – from products sold to child mortality. However, it is an illusion to think that we can attribute success in these ways to activities we conduct in the nurture space. We campaigned on twitter. Did that increase sales? How can we be sure? In the short term or long term? Did more children survive? Was it because we built a well, gave soap, covered them with nets, increased access to health clinics? Are we sure it was our intervention that made the difference? Or is it the convergence of interventions that tipped impact?

Creating metrics that show your goals are being achieved is level one. Being sure those metrics help link our activity to the outcome is level 2. Being able to look over longer and longer spans of time is level 3 (our action might have delayed or long term impacts which don’t show up in the short term funding calendars). And level 4 is being able to look outside of our own perspective to create metrics that allow us to notice a blue ocean move or a black swan.

My friend Manar, in our conversation on this, gave the example of Nescafe. They were very rigorous in their metrics on grocery store sales of coffee. What they couldn’t see or expect was Starbucks, with an existing brand, moving their coffee into grocery stores and having intense escalating success. Nescafe was blindsided. If you ran a bookstore, how would you have been using metrics that would have helped you anticipate Amazon.com impacting your business?

*** This post is part of the series for the Breakthroughs book. Please see Contribute to Book for more. ***

Help Others Thrive

Helping others to thrive sounds lovely and idealistic, right? Turns out to be hugely practical.

If you are developing social software and looking for investors, you can be sure they are going to ask how you are building community. Who has done this well? Those who created a space for others to thrive.

I was recently reading Power of Pull. They tell a wonderful story, and John Hagel tells this story when he speaks too, about the industry shift to container shipping. A guy running a trucking company built from the ground up realized there had to be a better way to ship things. He designed shipping containers, and he patented it. Only he opened the patent to everyone. Then he convinced all the players in the system of the benefits of using these containers to make shipping easier and more efficient. The net result is that he evolved the market, did well financially, and probably made the cheap transportation of goods that led to globalization possible. Industry shifting.

When we look at the well scaled social websites such as facebook and twitter, we see a similar creating of shared space with a small corner of that space being profit for the creator of the space. Facebook’s apps allowed other people to make a profit on top of their application. Twitter enables a whole market of vendors, applications, advisors, “experts” to make a living on top of their platform. Viola… other people come to play. Apple and Android with their apps markets do this as well.

Create a space for a collective. Select a small tangible and profitable corner of it that respects the free flow of the community while allowing you to collect a “tax” for high-end service in the collective.

A lot of open-source software also follows this model. Allow others to play and add and evolve the collective space while charging for a subset of activity in that community. Getting this right is of course harder than it may sound. It doesn’t work at small scales. Communities are highly sensitive about what is owned, controlled and profited from. Revenue may come in the form of voluntary contributions or pay for service forms. And it can be much more difficult to control the flow – you may have to support the community until it reaches significant scale to support you back. Whereas usual fee for service models allow you to restrict service if fees are not sufficient for support, these community spaces don’t have easy on-off switches. You have to trust.

And thus, for success, you see two things. One, that they start with small or focused collectives and then open up to larger and larger communities as investment allows for expansion. And two, with significant promise, they take in large amounts of funding with years of delay expected between investment and payout. They can be slow capital.

How can you create a play space that helps others to thrive? And how, by doing so, can it feed back to help you thrive over time?

*** This post is part of the series for the Breakthroughs book. Please see Contribute to Book for more. ***

Towards Coherence: Interview with Jon Lebkowsky

In this series of Wednesday conversations, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Jon Lebkowsky has been an Internet professional for two decades, during which he’s provided community leadership and developed significant expertise in online community development, social media consulting, project and production management, and future studies. He is an author and blogger, as well as cultural strategist and social commentator.  There’s more about Jon at Wikipedia.

Todd Hoskins:  In what context does thrivability evolve, individually or collectively?  Is it all about the distribution of knowledge?

Jon Lebkowsky: Thrivability is a concept requiring social and political coherence, and we’re in a polarized society right now. We don’t have the kind of clear shared vision for the future that we’d have to have in order to thrive as a society. We need a context that gives us that sort of shared vision, and that requires strong leadership. I think it’s very cool to imagine a world where we’re all configuring our own environments and building our own realities to some extent, but we can also be too polarized or fragmented to build the commons, and I think we need a strong commons or commonality as a foundation for a thrivable future.

Todd: What does strong leadership look like?

Jon: A strong leader can catalyze a coherence of perspective in others who follow her lead or respond to her influence, and this can potentially result in synchronization around a common vision.  While there will still be variations in thinking – everyone has a unique perspective – when we’re led to a shared understanding, there will be less conflict about fundamental realities.

Todd: The polarization is evident across the globe right now, but we also see collaboration happening when there is a commonly held vision.  How do we address the social challenge?  What can we learn from the revolutions, as well as the systemic stalemates?

Jon: When people revolt it’s because their needs aren’t being met . . . you actually have to push a society pretty far before you’ll get the kind of explosion we’re seeing in Egypt. They sense that the regime in power is working against their interests. We have that in the U.S. to a pretty great extent right now, but we’re still committed to our civic processes for mediating power. I think we’d have to feel a real sense those had collapsed before we would erupt, but we do have what you might refer to as systemic stalemates. In both cases there’s a sense that the seat of power is not in touch with the base, and I would say the base is unclear and confused. We need strong leadership, but that’s not enough. I’ve been considering how you would work a transformation from the bottom up. I’ve always been interested in the grassroots. Grassroots movements can be somewhat more effective now because connections can form and messages can be shared with very low barriers to communication. However the distributed communications architecture tends toward fragmentation of groups and messages. It’s harder to build strong coherent movements in this context. I think it requires a lot of groundwork from the bottom up. I think a network of physical meetings that bring people into a real understanding of context and opportunity could be very powerful.

Todd:  The growth in participation . . . you’ve worked within the medical, government, publishing, and tech sectors – possibilities are changing, business models are changing, behavior is changing?   What has to shift for these transformations to truly take shape?

Jon: The thing about being in the moment and being creative about it is that you can see so many possibilities and levels of action.  The ideal shift would be in consciousness, and would be evolutionary, but you don’t make or drive or force evolution, and we can’t necessarily control what possibilities manifest even if we have some sense of what they are.   I think there are some people who are experiencing a change in the way we perceive and live in the world, learning to be more cooperative and collaborative. The Internet facilitates a democratization of knowledge, and sharing has become a predominant metaphor within online social networks. So perhaps we’re learning to work together better, and we have access to more knowledge and more meta-knowledge – knowledge that facilitates knowledge. So what has to shift is shifting.

Todd:  You started Plutopia with the mission of creating events rather than publishing white papers.  What is it about events that gets you excited?  What possibilities do you see in facilitating an experience rather than writing a book or releasing a record?

Jon:  We’ve seen an evolution of media from conversations around campfires to conversations mediating by writing, then publishing, then mass broadcast media. Most of us grew up in a world informed by the latter, the broadcast mode, where our experience of culture was largely mediated by various forms of publishing and broadcasting. This is somewhat alienating – experience through media is limiting. We all want a visceral human connection and an experience that engages all our senses. That’s what we produce at Plutopia Productions.  We have the concept of the sense event – “a produced entertainment or educational affair that engages participants in an amplified multi-sensory experience and results in enhanced associated memory formation.” These are accelerated culture-building, convergent experiences that can be extended through media. I think it’s a more raw and engaging form of culture-through-experience. By engaging us fully, it can be transformative.

Todd: What can we do, at an organizational and personal level, to allow for consciousness to evolve?

Jon: I was reading a lecture by P.D. Ouspensky, who was inspired by the work of George Gurdjieff. Ouspensky discusses how we have the potential to advance our consciousness but most won’t, because they don’t want it. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky consider the normal state most of us are in most of the time as a kind of sleep. Which is to say that, by default, most of us are born into various degrees of consciousness that are beneath our true capability; we’re like automatons. In Buddhism we talk about karma and conditioning, which is also about living without real presence and consciousness, in a state that is not mindful and awake at a level that is possible for human beings. Many accept this state, thinking that we are what we are, and lacking aspiration to explore further and deeper. There’s no effective argument with this. You ask what we can do to allow consciousness to evolve – I don’t have a pat answer. I think the evolution you ask about is very difficult, and the best we can do is be present and be exemplary. I know teachers who are effective by getting people to take small – very small – steps. Small and subtle things can change our energy and our consciousness, and perhaps there’s a gradual change.

Todd: How can we encourage the growth of the commons?  Find coherence?  Amplify the shift?

Jon: The growth of the commons emerges from an attitude of sharing. It’s hopeful that the metaphor of sharing is so common in social media, and I’m also hopeful as I meet so many people who don’t seem to be at all greedy or attached. In sharing we also find coherence – as we share ideas and perspectives, we become aligned. And by sharing we amplify the shift, attitude can be infectious.

Todd: Closing thoughts?

Jon: When I meet someone who seems to be more awake, I’m hopeful. One wakeful person suggests the possibility of objective consciousness for all of us.

Todd: Thanks, Jon!