Freedom and Responsibility

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responses to my query on twitter:

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

Nurturing Change: Metrics Matter

by

Summary:

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

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

Article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directing Change: Interview with Malachi Leopold

by

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

Malachi Leopold is an award winning film director who runs the full service production company Left Brain/Right Brain Productions.  His 2009 short documentary, 22 Years From Home, followed the return home of Kuek Garang, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Seeking to have his company embody his personal values, Malachi has been proactive in communicating the company’s mission to enact positive social change.  By inspiring others to overcome adversity, combating poverty, advancing education, and taking care of our planet, we can make a living and make the world a better place at the same time.

Disclosure:  Left Brain/Right Brain Productions is a client of Thrivable, Inc.

Todd Hoskins: With the diminishing returns of “messaging” and the return to more authentic “storytelling,” where does film fit in?

Malachi Leopold: Well, I think that it’s a really cool way that humans continue telling stories from generation to generation.  But in essence, they still function as part of a society’s or culture’s way of communicating a vision, passing on values, relating humor, rallying people to a cause.

It’s an interesting question because, in my opinion, there are a lot of films that are very much geared towards a “messaging-oriented” audience.  A 90-minute feature film that is created for an audience with a [perceived] attention span of 30-seconds.  I think that approach often leads to films (actions and comedies, especially) which feel much more about special effects, gimmicks, and so forth rather than substance – less about the craft of storytelling and more about 90 minutes of eye candy.

There are films that have a bit of a “guy talk” (“American Pie”) or “girl talk” (“Sex and the City”) vibe, others that have a more serious, parable kind of tone (“Michael Clayton”, “Children of Men”);  others that simply spark the imagination (“E.T.”, “Inception”), others that document history (“Saving Private Ryan”) or collective history (“Social Network”).

I think that we can see trends that point to greater appreciation and usage of telling great stories.  From traditional :30 TV advertising to the increased popularity of documentary films, I think there’s an awareness that telling a great story that inspires people is a great way to connect them to your cause, your brand, your product or service.

Todd:  How do you balance or shift from working commercially to working for a cause in which you believe?

Malachi:  I want every day to be spent driving our mission of creating positive social change.  For me, it’s not about “giving back.”  I don’t want to spend my time working and then “give back” what I have left over in terms of time or money.  So we proactively seek out relationships that allow us to support the missions of others, and through those relationships we leverage our impact.

For example, I could volunteer once a month with an organization and it could make a difference for perhaps one person or perhaps a handful of people.  Important?  Absolutely.  Meaningful?  Without a doubt.  But what if I spent my time collaborating with an organization that takes the work of the volunteer organization further?  What if I create an actual change, a shift, that is sustainable, big?  It’s now a true, sustainable change.  And I believe that, for myself, to create sustainable change, it has to be my day to day – it has to be my life’s work.

And there is another dimension to it.  If we’re doing a TV ad for a fast food company, someone might say, “How is that promoting a cause, creating change, etc.?”  It’s a good question.  Here’s my answer to that – I believe in active engagement.  If I won’t do business with someone, I’ve effectively put a stop to a possible dialogue, a possible conversation about sustainability and food systems, nutrition and so forth.

But if I am open to doing business with them, I have the chance to build a relationship and potentially have a strong influence on a company that has enormous reach, and enormous consequences connected to the decisions of their day to day operations.

Todd:  So, your mission remains the same regardless of who is financing the project?

Malachi:  Yes, we don’t really separate working commercially and working for a “cause.”  To me, it’s not so much about “cause” as it is “this is just what I do.”  My day to day is about driving mission.  Creating change.  If it’s a TV ad about carpet or a documentary about sexual violence in the Congo, I’m actively finding ways to make the world a better place.

Todd:  You have been working on projects in the Middle East and Africa.  In a war-torn or impoverished region, is there thrivability?

Malachi:  There is evidence of a unique development of a civilization in the Niger delta where, for about 1600 or so years, a complex society of specialists collaborated for mutual benefit in relative peace and prosperity.  I say it’s unique because the traditional way I think we in the West have thought of the development of civilizations and urban centers has been more about exploration and conquest, conquering, victors and spoils, a concentrated few ruling over many.  However, this was an example a “thriving” society that occasionally had evidence of clashes, but not the type that we think of today as “ethnic rivalries” or “inter tribal warfare.”  In fact, there seems to be a lot of evidence of there being an emphasis placed on the importance of differentiating oneself and one’s culture through pottery, music, food and food production, dance, weapons, tools, physical marks, clothing, while at the same time celebrating and appreciating the diversity and benefits of other cultures and societies and ways of life.

The only way I could see “thrivability” in action in some of the places I have been would be more in terms of being at peace with one’s circumstances, finding peace within the midst of an impoverished situation.  However, I think it’s too easy to sort of romanticize a “pastoral” way of life, a “simpler” way of life.  Living off the land, producing only what one needs, “in harmony” with the environment.  The reality is, that life is extremely difficult.  Every day a struggle.  It’s survival, and difficult for me to think of as “thrivability.”

In the post-conflict and impoverished regions of the world, I think it’s usually about survival.  I look at thrivability as holding a vision of what is next, another branch of our evolution.  But I think the reality on the ground is that, with billions living in conditions of poverty, war or post-war or could-be-war-at-any-time, disease, lack of economic opportunities or means – sustainability doesn’t even enter the picture, much less thrivability.

For example, one of the things I noticed in Sudan was a large amount of trash just blowing around some of the villages we visited.  For me, coming from an environmentally conscious city and way of life, an impulse happened – I judged. I thought “Oh, this is terrible – littering, polluting the environment.” I start picturing birds tangled in junk, animals rummaging through garbage in search of food.  Humans encroaching on the environment around them.

But it’s just an entirely different type of situation.  How can someone worry about recycling a bag when they’re not sure if the one meal they need to have that day is even going to happen?  Or wondering if a violent clash is going to break out?  I’m not saying let’s trash everything, but I do think it’s difficult to address issues such as that when someone has hunger pangs.  Or when someone has been a victim of violence, or lives with a daily fear of being bombed.

Todd:  Kuek, featured in 22 Years from Home, is a resilient man.  What qualities have made him thrive?

Malachi:  I think the quality that allowed him and the rest of the Lost Boys of Sudan to survive was a strong sense of family and community.  Coupled with a will to live, to overcome the adversity, and then to come back and make things better.  A generosity of spirit.

Todd:  So, what would be your dream project?  What would you love to film?

Malachi:  If I could be sitting in a theatre next to Terrence Malick, and at the end of my film he turns to me, nods his head, and with a smile says, “That was pretty good.”  Whatever that film is, that’s my dream project.

Todd:  Thanks, Malachi.  I look forward to viewing more of your storytelling.

Something Great Together Again

by

Thrivability is participating in something great together again.

Thrivability asks us – what might we achieve together that is great? What might we do to flourish? It asks us to move beyond the contraction and fear that resides in “sustainability” framing and create something fun, engaging, lively, creative, agile, resilient, enduring, and evolving.

We teeter on the precipice of the now, look back at all human culture and evolution itself has generated. Do we level up? Or do we fall over? Do we have it in us, together and individually, to co-create something worthy of that legacy? Or are we shame-faced at the errors of our past and retreat from our own creation and the consequences thereof?

If we step forward together, what is it that we create? How do we use what we have to create something more than what is there now? And do so responsibly? Responsibly to our ancestors? Responsibly to our future? Responsibly to each other? So we can collectively gaze back in the mirror on some future day and say we are proud of what we have done?

  • Did I connect people in ways that enriched their sense of meaning and purpose in the world?
  • Did I give them the information they need to make the best choices for our collective outcome?
  • Did I make a meaningful contribution to society? Did I improve the human condition?
  • Was I and am I a part of the breakdown or the breakthrough?
  • Did I dance gracefully with my follow beings and bring laughter and delight to human existence?

I have many questions. The answers are given each day, by each of us, knowingly or unknowingly.

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.

COSI10 in Chicago

by

I am super excited to be organizing the Chicago event of COSI10. We will be gathering on November 6th and 7th to learn, share, and breakthrough together. We welcome social innovators from nonprofits, for profits, and blended hybrid efforts as well as those who champion social innovation. Together, we will discuss the field of social innovation, our networks in Chicago, our own efforts. Share your skills. Learn or develop your skills. Find collaborators and champions. Register today!

See our fresh flyer below!

Why the optimism?

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

    via systemicpeace.org

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

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

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

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

Let’s try wikipedia this time:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On twitter–

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

Collaboration Mixing Board

by

This morning I read a RT from @jhagel:

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

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

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

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

The Dials:

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

Then we have The Knobs or Spectrums:

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

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

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

WonderWomanGang

by

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

Then I asked for other nominations.

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

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

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

Catastrophe Thinking

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change your story.