Imagine, Possible, Test, Prove

by

Questions

I was trying to understand a paper by a friend who does evolutionary algorithms. I approached it several times and finally it was clear enough in me to spark a new awareness about the world. It was one of those moments where I saw so much more clearly how the very things in front of me relate to each other. Was this already obvious to all of you?

Prove it.

So a map of information in my head shifted. Are evolutionary algorithms within the domain of science or math? It uses both. Lots of science uses math, of course. But what I didn’t feel clear about was that math has different criteria than science. Math is deductive. Math is axiomatic. It is a field built of arguments on what is self evident, becoming ever more abstract, perhaps, but always building on what can be logically proven from what is self-evident. Math is a field for what is absolutely proven. And thus the old doesn’t get tossed out when a new piece of math becomes accepted. It is accrued and should continue to be logically coherent. Math is evolutionary by accrual.

Test it.

Science is not. I am not saying science is not logically coherent exactly. Oh wait, yes, I am. We can see that in how the explanations that we currently accept about large scale objects (astronomy) are not consistent with the explanations on the small scale (particle physics). Science is about developing explanations of the world that can be tested. Science is inductive. And current science theories are accepted under the condition that, when another theory gets presented that applies in more cases and especially in more edge cases, then the new explanation should be adopted as a more thorough and useful one. So science will replace old explanations with new – more nuanced – explanations.

These explanations are called theories. And they are built of hypothesis that are then tested using specific criteria determined by the field and traditions of science. Science is itself evolutionary by repair or replacement, not just accrual.

Sums

So Math is the realm of what is proven. And Science is the realm of what is tested. I was deliberating on that distinction, which started to seem obvious to me – as if I had known it since I was a child. Somehow as an adult, the information seemed like a revelation.

Great, but I want to know how this is useful.

For example, if we are discussing climate change, and you want to have the conversation from the criteria of math, then I need to make some computations that can be derived from self-evident axioms. And once those are known, then they are true. Period. Not up for debate, really. The proof is there or not there. But if we are discussing climate change, and I want to have the conversation from the criteria of science, then you need to form a hypothesis about some observable phenomenon, and then we can test it. The more times I can test it and get the same result, the more my explanation will be taken seriously. Right now climate deniers are denigrating climate science by saying that it fails to meet the criteria of Math – proven. And the scientists are at a loss, because of course man made climate science is a theory – a story we are testing out that isn’t proven or even provable. It is “just a theory” like gravity is “just a theory” too.

Possibilities

I was contemplating all this when I picked up “Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology“ by Žižek to read on the plane to Paris. As one does, of course. Žižek is perfect plane reading (not). Watch his videos instead. I like his RSA Animate as a gateway to his work. In any case, he is ranting about philosophy and critical theory, and he says philosophy is about the possible. Again, click. Here I am a philosophy major, and I had not thought of philosophy being about how we explore what might be possible. But now it makes sense to me.

So then I started to imagine that Logic might exist on a plane or dimension between Math and Philosophy. And that Epistemology – the study of what can be known and how we know – might exist on the plane between science and philosophy. A foam of fields started to emerge in my head, all bubbly.

And I wondered what might be missing.

Imagine

Art is the realm of what we can imagine. It doesn’t have to be proven or tested or even be considered as possible. It orients toward imagination. The Art world is having a large conversation about imagination across cultures and time periods.

Imagined, Possible, Tested, and Proven

Imagined, Possible, Tested, and Proven

 

Jay Standish has developed an alternate visual at open door.

Now what?

Chewing on all this and not seeing where to bring it up at the Climate Science event Transformations, where I was speaking in Europe, I continued to mull it over. After several conversations with people in San Francisco (Keki Burjorjee – the Evolutionary Algorithms person, John Hagel, and several others) I am sharing it with you here. What I gathered from those additional conversations is how to apply this understanding.

1. What conversation are you having? If you are struggling to make progress on a conversation, ask which domain each person is coming to the conversation from. See the climate science example above.

2. What narrative do you want to be creating? Is your narrative about tests, provability, possibility, or imagination?

3. What is the dominant narrative or where do you put yourself on the various planes? For example, I primarily come from a mix of philosophy and science. I like to consider what is possible and then I like to test it. I am only interested in the possible that can then be tried out. It is a bit like a personality quiz.

 

Organizational Heartbeat

by

I am working on a book about agency, and the power and requirements for transformational change. This comes out of about a decade of writing about philanthropy – both for effective donors and the sector as a whole.  Today, Eugene Kim posted to Facebook a link to a groupaya post, How Can We Make Nonprofit Consulting Transformational? And this reminded me of Geoffrey West’s TED talk on The surprising math of cities and corporations.

My sense is that the larger the organization, the slower the heartbeat of the organization – AND the less it is capable of transformational change. This is all about efficiencies of scale. And you know from previous posts that I have an allergic reaction to scale as a lauded idea in and of itself. It always, to me, requires clarification. Mostly because people act as if scale operates as a power law – when I think it is a sigmoidal function. Probably because of that West TED talk, of course, since I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination.

Sigmoid Curve via Wikipedia

West makes clear is that companies grow on a sigmoidal curve – an S curve. You grow on an s curve too. And then you stop growing. These economies of scale are not infinite. At a certain point the energy required to transmit information throughout the organization and engage all the people in it exceeds the effectiveness gained by adding more people to it. [See also what West says about cities not being sigmoidal.]

Let’s be a little more clear about this scaling thing. The Long Now has a lovely essay on West’s work, which I pulled this quote from:

Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability. (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber’s Law.) Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale. If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line. From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it.

But the proportion is not linear. Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use. Only a tripling in energy use is needed. It’s sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4. Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us.

With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life. A shrew’s heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human’s 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute. The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative. Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life.

Picture a mouse trying to do a startup pivot. Now try to imagine your favorite large scale organizational gorilla trying to pivot. The larger the company, the more difficult it is to turn the entire company on a single point and do something related but quite different.

Startups often go through multiple transformations of what they do, how they do it, and who they do it for. Their organizational heartbeat is fast and their scale is small. (And some of them get successfully gobbled up by the larger organizational bodies, but we can talk about that another day.)

You can have nonprofits, whose social mission talks about transformational change, hiring consultants to help them do that as much as you want, but they won’t be very good at it. The kind of organizational heartbeat needed for transformational change – that leading edge early adopter game changing innovation in the social sector – well, it isn’t going to happen in the large organization. (We could talk about how big donors impede that, how organizational mission moves from “change” to “keeping the org alive” or how larger orgs attract stable-present-focused people who aren’t keen on transformational disruption, etc… but understanding the why doesn’t change that it happens. And we ought to just be honest about it and stop speaking transformational change in organizations that don’t do it.)

Do you think organizational scale relates to ability to be transformational? Or not? If not, why not?

ps. the antidote or innovation that can disrupt this exists – organizational slime molds… crowdfunding transformational change experiments, etc. I don’t have clear answers on how that all works, but I am deeply curious about how it is connecting.

Find Awakening

by

…whever you are.

It is that time of year when those of us who know burners get to watch our social media feed fill up with photos and anecdotes about this year’s burn.

I have never been. I hear it is transformative. And last year a friend who has been a burner gave the best advice, I thought. She said, “Jean, people go to Burning Man to see and be a part of something that they didn’t think was possible – so many people functioning together in gift economy and with agility.” (okay, something to that affect) And then, “But Jean, you already believe in that and you already live in the gift economy all the time.”

DSC02369
Creative Commons License photo credit: Ashley Steel

And I think this was fantastic insight. (And part of why I fear getting vastly disappointed if I went to the burn). It is not the thing itself that is all that phenomenal by itself. It is how it transforms and awakens those who come to have the experience.

I politely decline when friends invite me to this transformative retreat or that one. Not because I don’t think my friend was transformed by it. I believe that was their experience. But I don’t go because I have to find my own.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” – Zen saying

It is not the burning man experience… or going to an ashram in India… it is not about a jungle adventure in the Amazon or going to Africa, India, or somewhere else. It is not about a spiritual retreat or a personal development methodology. It is about you coming to your own awakening – through whatever portal is available at the time you are ready.

It is about getting out of your own sleep to see something you haven’t seen and do something you haven’t done to keep yourself awakened. To discover awe. To explore what is possible that you didn’t know was possible. Find what awakens you – and do that. And then find the next thing that awakens you…

At some point, you begin to build the muscles of the mind and spirit to be awakened by awe. And then – it is not burning man or Marrakech… it is the light in your window and the flower in the garden that brings you to new levels of awakening. Because you know how to awaken.  To perceive anew. To refresh yourself.

 

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

 

Action Spectrum

by
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.

Innovation Types

by

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

by

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.

Breakthroughs for a Thrivable World Part 2

by

Entry Point 1: Individuals

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

Behavioral Economics

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

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

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

Positive Psychology

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

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

Multiple Intelligences

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

Conclusion

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

Breakthroughs for a Thrivable World Part 1

by

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

Introduction

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

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

Backstory

Modernism: Order, Structure, and Form

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complexity Science

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

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

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

Today

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

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

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

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