Lifespan of Social Metrics

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Unlike metrics of simple systems, the metrics of complex adaptive systems have a life span. They grow in value over time. And then they decay in value as well.

Take twitter. At first it was follower count – and that still matters some. But over time, people found ways to gain followers that didn’t coincide to the value that they provided, so it started to lose usefulness as an indicator of value from the tweeter.

Jane McGonigal, @avantgame, just posted a series of tweets about how Amazon rating system is being gamed.

Interesting, my book seems to have been targeted last year by some conservative group, individuals encouraged to post negative reviews

a cluster of extremely negative reviews with a conservative POV posted at the same time with weird (untrue) criticism of my biography…

here’s a recent NYT article on partisan groups attempting to one-star bomb books on Amazonnytimes.com/2013/01/21/bus… …

“Here’s what I do: I go to Amazon.com + search for ‘liberal book’. I give 1 star, 1 star, 1 star”youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uu…

“Then I search ‘conservative book’ and give 5-star, 5-star, 5-star.” From a tea-party Internet training meetup youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uu…

apparently one trick is to purchase book so your review appears “verified”, then cancel order before books ships

Note: I took out a few tweets in the series which were just about her work, rather than about the gaming the stars method she points to.

Knowing that people are giving a count of stars based on their ideology rather than the quality of the work, I am now less likely to put stock in the star count on a given project, especially when it is politically polemic material. Thus the usefulness of the stars decrease for me (and for others) and then for the whole system.

With twitter, we first looked at “follower” count, and then that was gamed. Then the metrics had to start considering other factors like RT count to demonstrate influence. Now we rely on twittergrader, kred, klout, etc to take a great number of factors into weighted consideration to produce an “influence” or reputation score. This amalgam of factors evolves over time.

You might think this is just the way of social media, since it is a fast feedback loop. But actually, I think that a lot of measures of complex adaptive systems work this way.

What comes to mind is Scott Nelson’s story from Blockage in the Thrivability Sketch.

…It was during the crisis of 1857 that the previously ignored insights of a long-haired mathematician, abolitionist, and utopian socialist named Elizur Wright were finally recognized as critically valuable for economic stability.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Wright had tried to convince the state of Massachusetts that life insurance needed reform. As a mathematician, he had been asked calculate the present value of any given policy based on the premiums paid in, a calculation that British mathematicians had called impossible. He created a rule-of-thumb called “net present value” (NPV) to determine the value of a flow of resources in a single instant (present value) and then to subtract operating costs (net).

But the more Elizur calculated, the more troubled he became. Many companies by his calculations spent so much on advertising that they could never pay off their policies. Others profited by canceling policies for those who missed a single payment. The effect was often to end a policy a year before death, leaving families with nothing. Wright fumed, but in vain. In the go-go 1840s and early 1850s, no one would listen to his criticisms and only a few would accept his principle of valuation. But through the 1850s he returned to the Massachusetts legislature with a blueprint for reform. When the Panic of 1857 hit with the failure of a bank called Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, Elizur was prepared. This blockage of trade and transport, Wright declared, was a result of distrust. Insurance companies needed reliable accounting practices that would allow Massachusetts to calculate net present value, and internal rate of return. When trust returns, Wright assured them, the blockage will be over.

Unconvinced but without options, Massachusetts adopted Wright’s blueprint, preventing any company from selling insurance in Massachusetts that did not provide complete financial information. NPV offers transparency of obligations.  The panic was short-lived, and Elizur Wright’s accounting principles became the basis of what we now call Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, adopted by millions of companies, states, and non-governmental organizations throughout the world. MBAs take credit for it, but a long-haired radical gave us cost accrual accounting.

Wright took advantage of blockage to identify its root cause – a distrust of opacity. Increased financial transparency was the solution; trust collapses without it. Blockage can let us make institutions open up and make them thrivable.

If the metrics we use in our economy are also being created (even at a very slow pace) they may also be declining in usefulness. Elizur’s methods didn’t anticipate the complex financial instruments to come over 100 years later that obscured the “trustworthiness” of the things our measures aim to reveal.

Consider how the measures you use can be gamed, where they may be in their lifespan of adoption and decay, and what other indicators might be emerging to reveal what matters – the territory and not the map.

Resilience Ain’t Enough

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It isn’t enough to repair the damage our progress has brought. The unintended consequences of our efforts to improve quality of life for humans has repercussions and requires action.  Yes, and. It is also not enough to manage our risks and be more shock-resistant. Now is not only the time to course correct and be more resilient. It is a time to imagine what we can generate for the world. Not only can we work to minimize our footprint but we can also create positive handprints. It is time to strive for a world that thrives.

As I am wont to do, I had a gathering while in SF. This time it was a brunch filled with amazing people I wouldn’t have a chance to see one on one during my time there. I always enjoy seeing friends meet friends and discovering connection. A couple guests brought someone with them. And one guest took up my twitter invite and joined even though she didn’t know me yet. Everyone brought something to share. Yum. It felt warm and delightful.

Then we got in a debate about resilience and thrivability. Of course I appreciate the friends who not only stand by me but also stand behind thrivability. And, it was really exciting to have someone who wasn’t converted to the thrivability team challenge what it is we mean and to say she didn’t like the term. Juicy.

Where there is a bit of friction, you can get traction.

As a facilitator, you can always be sure I have paper and pens around, so I started sketching it out. Since then, I put together a chart, showed it to a few collaborators, and here it is narrowed down to key points for you. It isn’t enough to strive for resilience, and it won’t motivate enough of us. When we strive to thrive, we create a story of greatness that invites everyone to contribute their very best to making a world that not only works, it also produces joy, delight, and awe.

Comparison chart for Thrivable

Thrivability transcends survival modes, sustainability, and resilience. Thrivability embraces flow as the sources of life and joy and meaning, adds to the flow and rides the waves, instead of trying to nullify the effects. Each layer includes and also transcends the previous layer, expanding both interconnections as well as expanding system awareness as each layer hits limits and discovers that more forces are at work than can be explained within their purview. Also, this is not a progression, where you need to move through one before beginning another. You can have aspects of yourself or your organization in multiple places in the chart and movement within the chart can be from any one area to any other. It is not a spectrum of progression. It is a spectrum of viewpoint. And most of us are like electrons, leaping about from point to point and sometimes seemingly nowhere at all… until you look and ask.

Please allow me to amend with gratitudes:

Thank you to attendees of the brunch that triggered action on the chart, especially: Sarah Brooks, Evonne Heyning, Scott Albritton (photos of chart from brunch), Thomas Kriese, David Evan Harris, Jeanie Kirk, Kimberly Olson, Mair Dundon, and Nicole Lazzaro.
Thank you to thrivability champions for assistance in development and refining: Michele Holliday, Irma Wilson, Joshua Foss, Herman Wagter, and Kathryn Bottrell.

DIY Economy

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I have just returned from an incredible event in Asheville, North Carolina on the DIY Economy. I helped facilitate two sessions on building the coalition for the DIY Economy that Josh Middleman convened. Here are my notes and drawings with brief explanations for those who were not there.

Together, we are building a new, Do-it-yourself style economy. Or maybe a Do-it-ourselves economy. And some of us are taking up the work of building bridges from the old economy to the new economy.

A key, suggested Grace Kim, from GOOD magazine, to forming coalitions is a clear shared goal. After doing much of the work below, the draft statement of our goal is: Acting together to create ___ economic ecosystems grounded in people having agency. We coldn’t fill in the blank in the time allotted. Maybe you can help!

I suggested, reflecting on a values exercise from the first day, that there were three main camps attracted to the DIY Economy: those who value autonomy, those who value social justice, and those who strive for resilience. All of those camps share an interest in individual agency. Together, we discussed. (You could call autonomy the more libertarian or pro-business group, but the value they are honoring is autonomy.)

To encourage us to think beyond our own values to include others, I shared the following graphic from my work with Gerard Senehi on Evolutionary Philanthropy. The evolutionary change with the highest opportunity for impact includes all the other approaches, because it perceives them as pieces contributing to the health of the whole ecosystem.


Change chart

To work at this Evolutionary level, we must appreciate our differences while bonding over our similarities. Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com uses the phrase, “connect on your similarities and profit from your differences” to capture the idea that if we are too much alike, we don’t add to our creativity by connecting. My ideas are like your ideas. If we have too much difference, we can’t find common language, perspective, or understanding to be creative together. However, the middle range, enables us to use the friction of our differences to increase our creative ability. Thus, by coming together, whether from social justice work, resilience, or from autonomy, the creativity of the whole can be increased.

 

Creative Zone

 

So how do we get more creative together in building the DIY Economy? We can borrow from the strategies being employed by others and merge them – mashups –  with our own. Here is a draft map of some of the ways people are practicing and innovating in the DIY Economy.

 

To move forward together, we need to continue this conversation, building out our shared goal and the diversity of the tools and strategies. We have several audiences to reach – not just the general public. Here is the map of the spectrum of people for us to be speaking our DIY language with and to:

The next steps for coalition building from here could be:

  • organizing strategies by which camp and making a more exhaustive list
  • discovering and mapping specific examples of the strategies
  • creating a DIY Economy toolkit or game with selections from strategies
  • map the strategies across domains, for example, which ones are through the legal system and regulation?
  • inviting event attendees to tell stories on blogs and in magazines, answer DIY economy questions on quora, using the language of our shared goal and being clear which audience from the engagement spectrum they are speaking to.

Much gratitude for all who attended our session including: Josh Middleman, Caroline Murray, Robert Leaver, Rachel Berliner Plattus, David Brodwin, Grace Kim, Mark Frasier, and who else did I miss? Eli?

 

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Some of this harkens back to the work I was fascinated with: Field Building – Digital Media, Play, Persuasion, and Field Building, Motivating Participation, and What is Field Building.

 

Action Spectrum

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History

For the last year or two I have been working on this Action Spectrum model. It started with conversations with Herman Wagter, who offered the basic elements and configuration. Then it evolved in conversations with Valdis Krebs, discussing the social network applicaitons. Concurrently, I was in dialogue with Gerard Senehi discussing transformational philanthropy. I have presented it in conversations with philanthropy professional, social change agents, and thought leaders of various disciplines. I continue to be surprised and delighted by just how powerfully people respond. Hours later, I find people sketching the concentric circles and speaking into them. I hope you find it useful too.

Fit
To me, the Action Spectrum is a framework for understanding the choices we make about the actions we take. It enables us to see these actions as a portfolio where we can perceive risk and understand metrics to expect.

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” – Darwin

Fit, to me, is not about strength. It is about right placement. The three-toed sloth is not the strongest creature, it simply fits with the environment it lives in, and thus endures.

I am very keen to steal the term “ecosystem-based adaptation” from the climate change contingent and apply it to business ecosystems. Let us point very directly to what pivots are all about – improving the fit in the ecosystem, for example. I believe the action spectrum is the framework for helping us develop our fit and take appropriate actions within our ecosystems.

Intention
This fall I intend to write another book, at the urging of Grant McCracken, this time on the action spectrum, what I call multi-membrane organizations (or living business ecosystems), and risk management. Christelle Van Ham and I are discussing her risk management framework and how she and I can do that work together. Goodie! A writing partner!

Enjoy! 
I would love to hear how this feels to you, where you can use it, and what stories you see as examples.

Asking Questions

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We must be careful about asking old modernism questions of the new era. The answers do not compute. This includes things like “why isn’t there a static finite answer to questions about what makes us thrive?” or “why aren’t women successful in traditional male fields **using masculine terms of success**?”

Why can’t we answer with a finite static answer the question of how to thrive? Because the answer changes over time. The system is adaptive. And the answers have to evolve as the systems evolve. What we have learned from Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions is that even when we think we have figured things out, we haven’t. We continue to evolve how we believe the universe works. So if we **know** that the answers will evolve – in fact, when that is the most stable thing we can know, then we can embrace that evolution and stop the hubris fantasy of having come up with some finite and static answer that will be true for all time. Instead, we can embrace the answer that seems best right now and continue to seek ever more refined answers. It is the questions we can get attached to, rather than the answers we get now.

This is especially true of questions like, “what does thriving look like?” or “what does it take to thrive?” We have learned that our best efforts to address problems for society in the last 100 years may have improved things on the factors we were trying to improve (think child mortality, disease rates, poverty) but there are unintended side effects. Each effort to make the system better can result in new problems that we find just as pressing as the ones we were solving (overpopulation, for example). Thus, there is no solid or static recipe at the intervention and tactic level. Instead, we need to keep pressing on in our quest to answer how humanity can thrive without killing off the ecosystems on which it depends.

Similarly, in my research on creativity and innovation, I keep seeing the outcome of civil rights and affirmative action in terms of women and other minorities performing on masculine terms of success. It looks like a form of covering to me. For example, women are seen as achieving equal levels of creativity by achieving equal levels of awards, press mentions, etc. However, this is judging women on masculine terms, obscuring what it is even is to succeed in more feminine terms. Feminine terms of success might be better found in growth of community, number of enduring relationships, quality of relationships, network support, peer appreciation and cooperation, etc. Look for where there is cooperation rather than (or in addition to) competition.

The other crucial place I see this misguided judgment of the new by terms of the old is in leadership within generations. Older generations keep bemoaning the lack of leadership from the younger generations, when in fact it is that they can’t perceive what leadership even looks like for the younger generations.They continue to look for it as command-and-control models. And forget, the younger generations saw JFK and Martin Luther King get shot. Younger generations believe in starfish leadership by catalysts rather than spider models of top down leaders. (See starfish and spider.)

*Note I see this in my own work, as my older gen nonprofit partner in philanthropy keeps wanting me to study under a nonprofit leader and points me to old model sustainability people. It was a pleasure this week to point her to my honorable mention on the EnrichList where I am placed next to some of her own heroes. It is as if my work on thrivability since 2007 seems nearly invisible to her, because it doesn’t exist in her world the way other organizations do… the network and visibility of the work doesn’t register as significant on her measures (dollars in the org, donors, placement at old model conferences, etc.). Instead, the measures of network reach, meme spread and adoption, dispersion across multiple sectors and networks, and such measures matter most to me. Success with the term thrivability has always meant, to me, “how many people are turned on by it and shift their way of seeing and being in the world because of it” and not how much money moves through the organization or wether the old guard adopts it. It is about awakening and activating people, then trusting them to do what will lead to more of our collective thriving.

These mismatched conversations have us talking past each other, the new world inexpressible to the old. And the old world, nonsensical to the new.

Adventures in New Giving

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I am super excited to see Adventures in New Giving http://www.adventuresinnewgiving.com/. And perhaps a bit jealous. If I could focus the time and energy, I think Nathaniel is doing what I would do. (see his video here: http://vimeo.com/37718193 ) For years, I have lived a double life working in traditional progressive philanthropy to pay rent while working on bootstrappy social enterprise as a passion. In my consulting work within traditional philanthropy, we talked about the democratization of philanthropy. However, I did not see much of it in practice.
That seems to have come from somewhere else. Tech start-ups culture maybe? Socent pragmatism? Microfinancing brought home? Whatever the path, it has been interesting to watch the birth of efforts like kickstarter and startsomegood.

It seems aligned, naturally, somehow with the collaborative consumption “Mesh” culture.  All of which seem part of a larger movement toward network production. So I am super excited to see Nathaniel capture the stories of this practical democratization of philanthropy.

I am also curious to see how this will hybridize with traditional philanthropy. I have visions of foundations and philanthropists using crowdfunding as part of their due diligence. Something of an early market testing and reliability assessment before or as part of larger funding efforts. Picture a foundation giving a matching grant – matched via startsomegood. This could be really a good time saver for family foundations with intentions to give and little time for sorting through applications.

I can’t wait to see what Nathaniel does with Adventures in New Giving.

I can’t wait to see how we all play together in evolving new giving.

To help fund our awareness of ourselves in this evolution, pitch in at

http://startsomegood.com/Venture/adventures_in_new_giving/Campaigns/Show/adventures_in_new_giving

Pragmatism

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It may seem like I am an optimist and the whole thrivability effort is full of utopian idealism. I am sure, for me, that is not the case. I am a pragmatist. While I love exploring, if the exploration doesn’t result in something that matters and gets tangibly completed, I feel like I wasted the time. And I abhor wasted time.

Back in September at SOCAP, I was speaking with Whitney of Culture Counts. She has a personality assessment tool, and pointed out that I was primarily someone driven to learn, share, and do what matters. This, of course, flattered me, so I decided it was accurate.

At The Agency, which we just launched, I talk about being bold, pragmatic, and inspired. I carefully chose these three things because I think each alone is a lost cause, but together they are an unstoppable force.

  • Inspiration – infused with spirit, from a refreshing perspective, forward-looking.
  • Bold – a real stretch or leap, requires courage and fearlessness, significance.
  • Pragmatism – getting it done, working with what is.

Pragmatism is about creating a feedback loop from practice to theory and back to practice again. Looking at whole sections of my life, I can see my drive for this. Like when I decided to leave academia because it wasn’t enough about practice in the world at large.

There is a figure eight, cutting back and forth between getting things done and reflecting on what is the right thing to get done based on what has worked.

I can only tolerate so much debate and minutiae before I have to ask: what are we doing? But then, I can only tolerate so much doing before I have to ask: is this the best approach? Is this thought through carefully? Are we using what is known to inform wiser action? I love process, but only process that leads to results and action. Being, and mindfulness feel very important to me. And yet, if being isn’t leading to doing, then it seems like a pretty narcissistic practice.

Dance. Hold the tension between. Watch for indicators of being too far in one direction or the other, then correct course.

Getting what matters done requires a solid focus on getting things done, and a wisdom to know what to do and how to best do it. And that is what The Agency is all about catalyzing.

Prediction for 2012

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Prediction for 2012: A year of unimaginable extremes. The fiction of wall street broken by the occupy movement will see a broader decrease in trust in the economy and corporations. Jobs will be lost. Free agents will struggle as the economy to support them hasn’t gained ground yet. Depression will be the word of the year in many circles. Politics in the US will seem chaotic and highly unpredictable.

At the same time, trust in neighbors will go up along with bartering. As the middle class dies a begrudging death, the sleeping giant of America awakens. Survival will be about connecting to people around you. Quality of life will start to improve in dark contrast to economic stability. You will rate elements of the year either a 1 or a 9.

There will be at least 3 and likely 7 major catastrophes, some weather related and 2 or more economic black swans. Fear will not be about terrorism, it will be about the chaos and structure change by the amassing disenfranchised. (When 65% feels disenfranchised, there will be change, and it won’t be pretty)

Major factor in making it, from a business perspective, will be how trustworthy are you. Some iteration of “micro” will be seen everywhere. Set directions but not destinations. Push decision-making to the edge or you won’t be nimble enough to adjust to extreme economic climate.

The divide in the US will grow larger. On many axis. Short term thinking will result in short term gains that never add up to long term endurance. Think and be like a marathon runner. Drink lots of water. Meditate. Act small with a long view.

If you let go of all your assumptions and the story you had about your life, your business, and your world, and instead focus on your confidence in responding in this moment to what is before you, directing yourself and your business toward a direction you believe in; then you will end the year grateful. If you resist…well, the infrastructure collapses with or without you in it. Make quality of life your mantra. Seek the path you can be in with grace.

 

I was asked on Facebook what mechanisms I was using to think of this. This is my quick answer:
1. studying currency design, trust and radical economists (money is a collective agreement to pretend there is value in a number. The number 1435 has no value as anything more than a number, but if I say you have that much money, we can do something with it. Context matters. Don’t trust the context? Value goes up in smoke – start bartering and find other ways to exchange value.)
2. conversations with economic historian and reading about transitions in smaller scales (http://srnels.people.wm.edu/and on blockage – http://thrivable.wagn.org/wagn/Book+blockage)
3. watching what is working – what is and has been making communities more resilient
4. playing with models in my head – what if there is more of that… or less of this… what would happen then?
5. Swarm behavior and complexity science – looking at meta stable states, phase changes, slime molds as metaphor of individual/collective.

Influenced also by: Age fo the Unthinkable – http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/unthinkable/index.html which I recommend highly.

Transparency and Living Well

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What is a good life? What is it to act with intention on the life you want for yourself? What matters? What doesn’t? When are you thriving? Are you contributing to thriving around you – in your family, community, and the world?

My whole life I have been gnawing on questions like this. And perhaps I have become so accustomed to acting on my answers without any fanfare that I didn’t stop to think it might be useful to anyone else. I don’t know how you are navigating these changing times. I will be transparent here. If it is useful to you, then I am honored. Everyone must come up with their own solutions, and I worry that this will seem self-righteous (which would offend me). So I qualify – again – your answers are yours. Great. Do that. I am not a better or worse person for my choices. I was triggered to write this post by something Vinay Gupta wrote about what he called the “Precariat” or people living on the edge of the capitalistic system. And then by Venkatesh Rao on Ribbon Farm writing about leaving the middle class. So here is my story.

Deep history. I grew up in the country on some acreage my father took a lot of risk in buying. Our money, tied up in land, with four kids on an assistant professor salary was tough. We took to growing our own food, planted an orchard, and avoided any more loans. When my parents did spend money, they bought as high a quality as they could afford. As intellectuals, my parents were considered upper middle class. As income earners, I wouldn’t think so. That said, my home – which my Dad built himself – looked like something in Metropolitan Home. Always ready for a photo. Immaculate. Designed. Elegant.

I never thought too much about the strange dissonance of living in such elegance while never having new clothes and using the dozen toys we had. (My kids have more toys under their bed than I remember having in my entire childhood, but more on that later.) So I guess I have always straddled the middle class by having certain things be high quality, and the rest be either forgone, DIY, or budget. This is what Venkat and others are calling Trading Up.

Early Independence. I started running my own financial life at 13. When my parents divorced that year, they decided the child support checks would go directly to me. I put it in the bank. When I started my sophomore year at 17, I used the money – not only to pay for college myself – but to get an apartment near campus. I was, for the most part, a saver, and I continued the Trading Up approach. It was almost a game to see how long I could make it last. Money was independence. And I was going to make sure I had independence. Then the child support stopped when I turned 18, and I had to shift to earning a living and using my savings.

Anti-Capitalism. By 21, I was in love with a much older man. A theater director. He wasn’t quite a marxist, and said simply that he was anti-capitalist. Consider it personal tutoring in the pitfalls and consequences of capitalism. The world was unveiled for me, as a new narrative about the system and poverty wove into my thinking. I was losing any desire to be rich as I saw that the rich of the past made their money off the poor people’s labor.  After eight years of this sort of thinking, I was tired of being in a head space of theory. I needed to see for myself. I left the art world for international finance – the belly of the beast. [If only they had known that I was, at the same time, getting published in a marxist literary journal!]

The Beast. Within a few months, I could see that the income ladder was a drug. The more you got, the more addicted you were to having it and dependent on it. It was never enough. There were so many wonderful and good hearted people around me, who were totally addicted to this drug – money. I decided not to play the game that way. It was 1999. I got married. We were cash poor, house rich on the North side of Chicago. I was making $800 car payments,  which would have been enough money to live on each month in the 90s for me when I was in college for a decade. I married a man who had bought a house at 28 and started fixing it up. He was a hoarder too, but he hoarded stuff where I had hoarded money itself. We went to garage sales every weekend and the flea markets too. Most of our disposable income went toward “investments” in goods. I had the feeling that I could have anything I wanted, if I waited for it to show up. Not because we had a lot of money, but because the pricing in this backyard economy was so reasonable. The 1900 square foot house underwent renovations DIY style, while it also began to fill with stuff. We were way ahead of most of our peers in our “adult-like” activities – having kids, house, car. But they had money to have a nightlife. We didn’t. Were we middle class then? I don’t know. Probably, but not in the usual ways. What else would you call it?

Cashing Out. In 2003, we decided to sell. Our second child was born in ’02, and we wanted to be closer to family, get out of the money pit of the house, and real estate was peeking. (If you need help with drywall, wood floors, cabinet installation, siding, painting, etc, I can probably be useful.) We sold for well over twice what we had bought for. It was like finally getting one big check for all the hours over years laboring on the house. We bought a 4000 square foot monster of a house near where my family lived. It needed no work. There was plenty of room for stuff. And 3.5 bathrooms to clean. There were things I loved about it: the dental work, the two story bay window, the master bath. Upper middle class luxury down to the wood trim. We bought it with cash – no mortgage. We paid off any debt. We bought mid-century modern furniture and a home theater. We had landed. We intentionally stepped off the ladder. We hardly needed to make any money at all. 20K would have cleared our living expenses. I ramped up my business (writing and design work), and we focused on our two kids.

Integrity and Guilt. A few things happened in quick order. I was online and began meeting social entrepreneurs. I was writing, for work, about child survival issues in Africa. And my environmental awareness kicked up a notch. I got training as a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) coach thanks to my core client. My marriage had been struggling for years at this point and finally collapsed. I had a crisis of integrity. Yes, I had felt like everything I had been doing was intentional and aiming toward a good life, but my perspective had been narrow. I went through a massive overhaul toward a much deeper level of integrity. And along with it suffered a great deal of guilt.

The guilt was accompanied by a lot of gratitude, so I never would have spoken of it as guilt at the time. I was grateful for what life had given me. But underneath that was a guilt over the privilege I felt.

I walked away from the house and my marriage. Did I really want another pinball machine when we had 8 arcade games already? Could I raise my children in a house where their own bedroom was the size of entire homes for millions of people in the world? Could I really have my house be the largest part of my carbon footprint? No. I can make it seem clean in hindsight, but it was messy at the time. Lots of learning. Lots of beating myself up over my choices and their outcomes. Lots of feeling that it was all a wicked mess. And the guilt masked as pride at my frugality, haunted me, driving me toward ever greater frugality.

I rented a small apartment. Took only what I needed from my past life. And switched gears in my work and lifestyle. Since 2005, I have lived off 15-25k a year, supplemented in 2010 by the finalizing of my divorce and cashing out of the house. At first my ex just took care of the kids while I worked on my business and paid child support (which fully supported him). My kids now have nearly every video game console made since Atari came out. And most of the games. A near endless supply of movies and music. Every toy they can dream of (just not when it comes out, they have to wait until it shows up at a garage sale). They have such a state of abundance it is hard to come up with things they want or need. They cycle through things in order not to be crowded out of their giant bedrooms.

After 2 years, I decreased his dependence on me, and he started selling all the stuff he had been hoarding all those years. He now seems to make a decent living as a seller on ebay. He lives in the backyard economy. And I have been living in the gift economy. And I feel guilty of that too.

Appearances. The outward appearance of my lifestyle seems vastly richer than my actual living. Trading Up again. I fly to NYC, San Francisco, New York, and Boston regularly – as in about one a month. And sometimes I fly to other places around the world and country. It looks pretty jet-setting. Few would realize that most of this is paid for by clients or other people and that I can travel at far less expense than the usual middle class person. I stay with friends instead of hotels. I avoid taking taxis. I am humble enough to graciously allow others to buy my meals (and then try to treat someone else so I can keep the karmic flow going). I rarely attend an event that I have to pay for. I ask my network to pitch in to help me financially when I need it and can see value for them. I buy organic, fair trade, lifestyle products, but I may hardly eat for several days. I get frustrated when someone in my network asks for my financial support, and I can’t give it when I want to because there is no such thing as “spare” for me now. I can go days without spending money, and I gawk at the goods for sale wondering how anyone else can be buying all this stuff. Or why they would.

I have learned how to stretch resources out. I know how to live a very frugal life  – and live it well. I could write a book on how to move to a town and set up a home in 30 days on $150. I could give classes on finding serenity when you don’t know how next month’s few bills will be paid and you have cut everything out that you could.

But I have become so good at it and stopped chasing money so long ago, that I am now at the opposite end of the spectrum. I don’t seem to remember what abundance feels like. I would feel guilty for having it anyway. I don’t feel like I am thriving. I feel like I don’t catalyze abundance in the network around me either, as I use the spare resources I have learned so well to ferret out. I worry that I lessen the resources available to others doing important work.

I don’t think thriving is just about getting beyond the middle class defaults and money-drug-ladder addiction. I don’t think it is about being so frugal that you wither away into nothing. I think thriving is about making more out of less for more people. Life enabling more life. But maybe someone else has a better idea of how to answer it. I need new answers, of that I am sure. I Traded Up a lot. I still need to be mindful not to “Act Dead” too.

Questions. What I wonder now is how I can be responsible with the gifts I have been given? I have talents that are valuable in the world which others would pay to have access to. And I have denied myself and these people those talents for some misbegotten sense that I was acting with integrity by living so frugally and with what I looked at as high standards. I have a great deal of disdain for sales. Even of my own work, even when I think it is very valuable.

I wonder what it would look like to use what I have and earn what I can and be responsible to myself, my family, and my network with what that brings me.

Any suggestions? Some rebalancing would be really useful, before I start selling my furniture in the name of some grand notion of the boot-strapped entrepreneur.

 

 

 

Time Horizons

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Much of what I do has to do with generating perspectives that are useful in offering us new information that enables wise action. And one of the most crucial in this area is time horizons. I have written in the past on zooming – that we can zoom in and out of a perspective, but when I wrote on that I focused on physical distance rather than time.

We can zoom through time as well. I can focus on the next five minutes or on the next century or millenium. When I was developing the thrivability cards (which in part became the Table of Contents for the Thrivability Sketch), I had a suit that was about time, because it is so valuable to move through time horizons.

If you are in a stuck place or holding a view of catastrophe, one very effective strategy is to expand a sense of time. Another is to shrink it. Let’s look in practice. Neon Time
Creative Commons License photo credit: Moe-tography

I can look at the current economic dynamics and become very depressed at the breakdown in our systems and the suffering that this is creating for millions of people. Pretty daunting. Very sad. If I think about it in a two year time frame, I might feel like screaming at people to do something – anything even – that will shift what is happening. Which is what I see Umair Haque doing a lot of.

To escape the fear, threat, disaster experience and focus on something productive I can do, I might look at a longer view. What if I consider it from a twenty year perspective? Can I imagine that the path in the short term might be quite painful, it will enable us to do something we could not have done otherwise? What would that be? What can I do now to catalyze that?

If I look at a hundred year flow. Can I look to the past and see how we have experienced challenging times before and had it work out for the greater good? Can I imagine, in another hundred years, people telling that same story about us – that we went through a challenging time and came out better for it?

Let’s say I can’t do that. (You know I can, but others may not or may think this is escapist thinking). Given the gritty reality before me, and my negative expectations of the future, what can I do in the next five minutes to make this one wild and precious life worth living for now? What can I do with this one day? While I have this moment in time, what will I make of it? The future will be what it will be, but we are not there yet. No, we are here, in this moment and only ever in the present moment. And the only action I can take is in this moment. So what do I want to make of this very moment?

Do I have ideas about how I want the succession of moments to be? Who am I? Start being who you want to be right now, because there is no other time but right now. So be the change you want to see in the world — already. Now. Not soon. Not in progress. Now.

Zooming in or out of our time horizons frees us from the fear-ridden anxiety of the uncertainty we face to hold a view that enable calm, intentional action. Make a choice. Be proactive about the perspective you hold. Don’t let fear blind you to the alternatives in time horizons.