The Great Unfolding

The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding tells of the impending and unavoidable crisis financially and environmentally and offers a grand plan to change course. The Big Shift proposed by Hagel and Seeley-Brown tracks shifts in financial viability, argues for talent engagement, and describes a new world of Pull methods. There are many namings for the future before us. No matter what we call it, there is a convergence of crisis at hand that involve a breakdown in the growth-focused form of capitalism. You don’t have to be a Marxist to perceive this, all you have to do is look out your windows and see the infectious #occupyeverywhere movement peopled across the political spectrum who say, “we have had enough.”

The Great Disruption might describe the short term picture. The Big Shift offers a longer view. Personally, I believe it could be useful to call what’s happening the Great Unfolding. It isn’t just the tremendous infrastructure that has aged and crumbled, it is the systemic infrastructures our society lives upon that are disintegrating from their own weight and internal contradictions. Financial. Political. Social. As they collapse, breakdown, or transform, they pull on the warp and weft of our flatland, opening new dimensions. It is as if we have been living in a two dimensional world, and another dimension must open to extract us from the dilemma of our dualisms and unfold a greater possibility.

While much of what is laid out here may apply broadly to many places in the world, I focus specifically here on the unfolding from a US-centric position (what I know and sense more tangibly). However, the world becomes so interconnected and intra-dependent that what impacts one ripples out to impact us all. A shift in capitalism itself transcends, in many ways, the boundaries of a nation-state. While the politics remains necessarily tied to the state itself, political memes spread beyond the borders of countries.

The polarizing marketplace tensions of the twentieth century — capitalism and communism; and the their drivers: the political left and the political right — fall away as useful but limited improvements on what came before: feudalism. Communism may have fallen first from its inconsistencies and poorly designed incentives, but Capitalism – as we have know it – teeters precariously too. We have learned much from both as we evolve through systems that better enable autonomy, mastery, and purpose – what Daniel Pink claims as the three keys to human motivation. Capitalism enabled a greater degree of these keys. It enabled much more autonomy than feudalism as well as deeper specialization (which brings with it a sense of mastery). However, it is time to improve on the human drive for purpose that goes beyond the self and harkens toward purpose for something greater than one. And we have before us the perfect storm for triggering a sense of purpose: convergent catastrophes across numerous domains: environmentally, economically, politically, and socially.

What has been touted about capitalism, markets, and endless growth — that consumptive abundance leads to human progress and betterment — turns out to be a myth. While many argue about what the limits to the environment for supporting economic systems based on infinite growth are, a more concise argument exists, one that proves the fallacy of the logic itself. The Death of Demand shows solid long-term data revealing that growth rates rise once and fall once in a very consistent pattern. All companies experience two growth trends during the life cycle – an uptrend and a downtrend.

“After experiencing a period of ever-increasing growth rates, a company hits a wall at which time growth rates turn south at ever-decreasing rates,” says economist Tom Osenton and author of The Death of Demand. “At this point, revenue as a profit driver loses steam and in its place cost-cutting grows in importance in order to deliver what Wall Street demands – ever-increasing earnings. However, just as revenue as an earnings driver has its limits, so too does cost-cutting. This illusory dance can continue for many years – but make no mistake about where it’s headed. And it’s very important to remember that cost-cutting and job-creation are enemies that cannot possibly co-exist – especially at a maturing organization.” So growth-decay companies are effectively starving themselves of resources to give the appearance of continually expanding margins. Who is in growth decay? The majority of companies listed on Wall Street.

Increasing rates of growth are something of the past for too large of a portion of Wall Street. Too many of the companies traded there have past their growth peak. Wall Street was meant for investment in businesses that were growing and now contains too many companies that no longer increase their rates of growth. The whole system becomes untenable. Unless a new sector kicks off, there isn’t enough mass in the early growth stages to counter the tremendous size and scale of those entering the late stages of growth decay. We have become so effective at growth that the time from “start” to “growth peak” is getting significantly shorter. Instead of long slopes of growth like we see with a company like Procter and Gamble over 100 years, we have Microsoft in 20 years, and Groupon in a couple years. The time to peak is so short in fact that even products or companies a decade old can be past their growth peak.

The illusion of infinite growth, like the Emperor’s New Clothes, is maintained by the Emperor. The citizenry see something naked and ridiculous which can’t be sustained. Much like the housing crisis and the dot-com boom/bust, the Wall Street Empire is revealed as naked, even to the emperor himself. #OWS has already succeeded by one measure, they broke the shared fiction about Wall Street for all of us.

As the incentive system of Wall Street – financial rewards for growth – demands what too many companies can’t provide. We should not be surprised that the ethics of companies decline to feed the “valuation” beast. It isn’t as simple as a few bad actors; rather, it’s a system that places such high demands on post-growth companies that bad acts become the only means to satisfy traders. As a result, bad becomes good in the lens of efficiency as marked by survival and marketplace robustness. The ultimate end result? A decay of trust in the systems themselves as people intuit how badly the system functions. This then undermines what the entire system requires – faith and trust – the root catalysts for financial and political action and transaction.

We begin to understand that what we consider to be the epicenter of capitalism turns out to be not just unsustainable but self-consuming even cannibalistic. Starving for the opportunity to meet stockholders/shareholders with growth by any means, corporations use ever more drastic, illusory measures to hide declining rates of growth. They truncate their lenses to short-term thinking and short-term gains/results. We can trust them to devour themselves as traders watch and gain, but we can’t trust them to serve the needs of citizens.

Is there hope? Where will we go? The center of the business universe implodes. And this is a very big problem. Are there options? Where is there stability in these changing time?

Outside Wall Street, small and medium size business don’t face these issues. Many businesses don’t focus on infinite growth. For these companies, what matters is staying trim enough to be agile and thick enough to stay alive in lean times. Non-publicly traded companies focus on providing goods and services in profitable ways. The local mom-and-pop restaurant isn’t trying to put more tables in the room, more seats at every table, or more meals in every day (or whatever scaling innovations corporations create to prop up their rates of growth). They understand that there are natural limits within their systems. They suffer no illusion about infinitely increasing their sales. Small business isn’t serving stockholders/shareholders of Wall Street. Small business is accountable to owners – to people who live in and engage with their communities. The feedback cycle between small business activity and their communities – is usually tight enough to ensure integrity in most small businesses who want to endure. An increasing demand for transparency, even in non-publicly traded companies can ensure the work of the invisible hand. True: the profit margins on these smaller businesses may not be significant enough to afford their executives or owners multi-million dollar bonuses. Oh, well, I guess that might have a secondary effect of reducing the extreme and increasing disparities between rich and poor. If you want a glimpse into what this might be starting to look like, explore the Slow Money movement, BALLE, and all the Go-Local endeavors. (If you don’t think income “diversity” is an issue for you, check the data from Richard Wilkinson: How Income Inequality Harms Society)

More than this, a new sector is coming to life. B corporations, L3Cs, and other ways of indicating For-Benefit Corporations, Social Enterprises, other blended models open the way for a hybrid of business and social benefit. While this movement has roots that are decades old, the scale and scope of the market is rapidly expanding and offers, perhaps, an opportunity to evolve our current form of capitalism to one that is more human-centric, impact-aware, and community-oriented. Marketplaces for social business expand daily with businesses that are still young enough to be in their upward growth cycle, prime for investment. And the returns are financial as well as social/environmental.

There is, of course, another disturbance beside the economic one. It is a related political one. Mostly because politics has morphed into corporations as a result of campaign finance reform – serving corporate needs. (State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012’s top battlegrounds by Jane Mayer http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_mayer?)

What was once a useful distinction between the left and the right has become artificially crafted polarity of two sides to the same position. As both the left and right have tried to sway the margins of the opposing group, they have moved closer and closer to the center. The political center becomes a gnarly knot. This is the entanglement of the current political scene that serves funders (read as corporations). The majority of the left and the right have come so close to the center to serve corporate interests and woo uncertain voters, that they collapsed into each other in a meaningless muddle.

The interesting question becomes: Is there something else emerging? Yes. And it isn’t just the Tea Party. (Because parties that fight AGAINST things rather than FOR things are not creative. They have no center of being once their demands are met or become irrelevant — they implode without something to resist – because they are not creating, they are opposing. This is yet another reason why the fear-mongering of the current republican and democratic parties is killing both sides.) Is there an emerging political energy that is elbows deep in making a community of voters and politicians that stands for something? Is there a force emerging that counters the tangled middle?

One way I imagine this could look: The Libertarians meet the Green Party or Pragmatic Progressives. On the left are pragmatic progressives focused on social justice, social change, and driven by a moral code bound to equality. The Pragmatic Progressives may value justice over business, but they know business can be more just and support causes making their efforts more resilient and financially self-stabilizing (rather than grant-dependent). On the right, we find Libertarians instead of Liberals. The Libertarians, valuing freedom, small government, and free markets want to show that we can bootstrap ourselves and make it on our own – the vision of the rugged individual – autonomous. They feel that business – not government or philanthropy – is the solution to social ills.

Both sides show up together in a place called social enterprise. Attend events for social entrepreneurs, and you will see these people who, under the old model of politics, are at opposite ends of the spectrum, rubbing shoulders, making deals, and agreeing vigorously on a path forward. They could rally under the flag of Agency. Agency for individuals – that we have each the right to act with agency in our lives.

Look around them to the larger group tied in there. Take a walk around Silicon Valley or much of San Francisco. Peruse the funding models of Skoll, Omidyar, and other dot.com mega-millionaires like Tim O’Reilly – a big advocate of Open Government. They are a strange blend of Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue and self-made millionaire geeks. This is not a small group and those in it wield significant financial and cultural influence.

Weave together the Pragmatic Progressives and the Libertarians, if we can even use these outdated terms. The old poles of politics disappear, and new poles of tension emerge. Oh, and the Slow Money, BALLE, and other emerging indicators of the new financial space? You will find a similar political “crossover” or alignment when you visit them too.

Even more than that, this group – the Social Entrepreneur party, you might say – often closely aligns to another group – the Pirate Party, aka the Open Government/ Transparency Party, emerging now in many parts of the world. Pirates are interested in shifting how we handle intellectual property, strengthening individual privacy, and also increasing government transparency.

In the old forms, identity was constructed by what we bought or what party we belonged to. In the unfolding, identity is made by what you make or create and whether others can share and build on that. In the Unfolding, politics will continue to drive toward greater transparency. As people move away from the collapsed political center, it may be that the unfolding brings with it a party focused on enabling agency at the individual and community level. We may even see Elinor Ostrom’s notion of polycentricity become more prominent in political discourse.

For now, the Great Unfolding is about the promise of the new systems we can step into as we move beyond the polarization of the old systems that have proven to be useful but limited. The future is already here, it simply hasn’t scaled nor been mapped yet. The edges move toward each other as the center collapses. It folds in upon itself. It unfolds a new era.

It is not a question of whether you are blue or red, or whether you prefer Pepsi to Coke. It is a question of moving toward new systems that have successful pilots or trying to salvage a broken, limited past. And we already know what the past gets for us. And they are protesting it around the world – from the Arab Spring to the #occupyeverywhere action.

For Liberty and Progress, we unite to step into the unfolding together.

What do you sense that might look like?

Catalyzing Creativity

While I am not sure I quite agree, a recent article in The Atlantic proclaims that there are two ways to save the economy: innovation and inflation. Inflation sounds like a postponement of the issue, so let’s focus on innovation. As I wrote Innovation Types a few weeks ago, I had in mind the processes that we use to go about these different types.  Before we explore how they are different, let’s look at the conditions for creativity and innovation that they share.

Conditions. Not a formula. This is about emergence. It doesn’t happen in a linear fashion. It isn’t clearly causal. It is something that we can increase the probability of rather than directly ensure. Creativity could happen without these conditions, but most of the time it happens with some of these conditions. Increase the conditions and you may increase your chances.

My insights here come from conversations with Valdis Krebs and Steve Crandall among others. Valdis approaches the subject as a social network analyst, watching for the characteristics of networks that give rise to creativity. Steve… well, Pip Coborn says of Steve that he “is one of those rare Bell Labs genuises that when I was growing up people spoke of in hushed tones.” My relationship with Steve is as an amazing friend rather than a creative collaborator/innovator/partner. And, I am aware that he has given significant attention to what gives rise to creativity and has deep experience creating very forward thinking innovations. I have heard his stories. I will share a few with you.

So when Venessa Miemis asked

I knew it was time to write about what I have learned from Steve and Valdis. There are two other groups I also learned from – conversations here and there over the last five years with many people and a deep devouring of written information. And then, my years in the creative fields of art, theater, and literature.

Let’s begin. What conditions contribute to creativity and innovation? My response to Venessa was:

And Valdis added:

In no particular order, then:

Randomness – I say randomness because things, even in hindsight, seem to look a bit random. Steve talks about developing the idea for MP3 technology by trying to figure out how mother bats can find their baby bats in a cave of thousands. Ah…they screen out sounds other than the sound of their baby. Bats? When I first heard this story, I was shaking my head, thinking who would have guessed that bats led to MP3s? The path to innovation is not a straight line or a clear flow chart. It is a jumble of odd experience that a creative brain makes note of and creates meaning from. Creative people are ones who can take the random bits and make something from some of them. Encourage randomness. Go for walks in nature and notice things. Visit an art museum or take an odd dive into history. Look elsewhere than right in front of you.

Time – Innovation doesn’t happen on pre-determined timelines. In fact, time pressure can undermine creativity. Time pressure and monetary incentives both trigger analytical thinking instead of creative flowing. Time also works in two ways for creative outputs. There is often a tremendous amount of time gathering all the information relevant to a creation. It is as if the warehouse of the unconscious mind must be filled with all the relevant parts but you have no list of relevant parts to be adding to the warehouse, so you can’t know when what you need is in stock. However, the moment where those things are in stock and meaning is made – creation happens – can feel instantaneous. Sometimes the ideas emerge fully formed and plop into the conscious mind ready for action. That can’t be scheduled.

The other crucial element to time is having long enough stretches of it. When interrupted from deep mental activity, it can take 20 minutes to return to the same headspace. For creative activity, turn off phones, put away social media, and reduce your chances of being distracted. Steve says there are institutions that actively encourage this “offline” time for deeper creative activity. Give yourself the time to explore without distraction. Go deep into the warehouses of the mind and play there.

Right mix of Sameness and Difference – Valdis drew a Gaussian curve for me and said – I think the left side of the curve is something where people are so different they can hardly communicate at all. And on the right side of the curve, people are so similar that adding another person doesn’t increase information available – the homophily doesn’t generate creativity. He said he wasn’t sure what the numbers were or what the curve was precisely, but somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum there is enough sameness to enable communication & trust and enough difference to generate something creative that the people involved couldn’t come up with on their own. Think of that warehouse metaphor above – if you have difference, then you have more inventory to be pulling from. And he had this nice phrase to go along with it: “connect on your sameness and profit from your difference.”

Play (lightness) – This might be the most important condition. A significant portion of creativity involves trying many different combinations of things together. Steve has this wonderful expression: innovation is like throwing yourself at the ground over and over again until you finally miss the ground and start flying. If you take yourself too seriously in the act of throwing yourself at the ground, you won’t take enough risks to generate something really creative. Instead you will try 100 small variations in a very methodical process. If you are afraid of hitting the ground, you won’t really throw yourself at it. Tickle the fear out of yourself and play with possibility and with your collaborators.

Steve also tells stories of Friday creative jams at Bell Labs. He and several others would gather together. One – a catalyst – would listen and encourage them, then, later in the session, sort and summarize their best ideas. I call it a jam because, like jazz, it was each person knowing how to play with others and giving forth their best pieces in a space of play. The vast majority of the ideas generated were tossed away. We should ask Steve for some of the outcomes from these jams. When he describes them, he is focused on how much fun they were and how creative they could be instead of what they led to. This is a sign of play – that the process is alive and enjoyable (even when challenging).

Aesthete (deep sensitivity) – Steve was explaining to me, after many conversations about creativity and innovation, that serendipity is not only the seemingly random connection of things in a meaningful way, it is also noticing that the connection is significant. If you create something incredibly original, but no one realizes it including you, then it is lost. What does it take to notice that a new connection is made that could be significant? A deep sensitivity. I surround myself with really brilliant and creative people. And what I notice about them is that they are “noticers” by which I mean they are giving their attention to details – the flavors used in foods, the unique sound combinations in music, the way light moves through a water glass. Whatever their passion, they devote significant time to building up that warehouse of data in their minds using a great deal of discernment in their sorting. They have a deep awareness of and sensitivity to the topography of their interest areas.

Trust/Safety – Whether this is trust and safety we perceive in ourselves or between us and our collaborators, the trust and safety acts as the ground of creativity. If we don’t have it, we can’t try things. We become afraid to fail or look silly. Our mind-time focuses on social dynamics instead of playing with ideas. If we happen to be in groups where trust is missing, the only course is to trust ourselves. But trust must be there. Question everything…but not all at once…and not without trusting yourself to figure it out. Safety is also important. Sure, I mean physical safety as possible. But I also mean things like financial safety.

Deep curiosity – I almost forget this one because I tend to have it as a pre-requisite for people I share time with. When I was in the humanities, I noticed that those most dedicated to their work shared a trait – a deep curiosity about some question or another. Curiosity is the fuel for exploration. It is what feeds us in a space of profound un-knowing – the vast realms of unmapped possibility. We ask “why?” And the asking leads deeper into the question. Steve says the best questions lead to more questions. Only the deeply curious are willing to go there. One of my favorite quotes is an anonymous one: “go out on a limb, that is where all the fruit is.”

Network poised for Serendipity – As mentioned above, serendipity plays an important role in creativity. A network poised for serendipity is more likely to generate creativity. Steve talks about how the buildings at Bell Labs were like a labyrinth. It was easy to get lost. People of different backgrounds were mixed together and chalkboards filled the halls. This encouraged random interactions between people with differences and tools for them to brainstorm together. Steve also says another creative organization he has worked with designed their building with too few bathrooms to encourage waiting in line so interactions happen with unexpected people.

Some luck – Creativity and innovation operate in that space of probability. We can’t methodically try all possibilities (this would take much too long). There has to be some sensitivity to what could work and an ability to catalyze innovation to increase that probability. Whether it is the humility of those I have spoken to who are deeply creative or truly a matter of what is required, it seems luck has a hand in innovation. (Mind you, I am a big fan of the Richard Wiseman’s research book: The Luck Factor.)

And with that, I wish you luck. Innovate!

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.

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