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?
Asking Questions
by ThriverWe must be careful about asking old modernism questions of the new era. The answers do not compute. This includes things like “why isn’t there a static finite answer to questions about what makes us thrive?” or “why aren’t women successful in traditional male fields **using masculine terms of success**?”
Why can’t we answer with a finite static answer the question of how to thrive? Because the answer changes over time. The system is adaptive. And the answers have to evolve as the systems evolve. What we have learned from Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions is that even when we think we have figured things out, we haven’t. We continue to evolve how we believe the universe works. So if we **know** that the answers will evolve – in fact, when that is the most stable thing we can know, then we can embrace that evolution and stop the hubris fantasy of having come up with some finite and static answer that will be true for all time. Instead, we can embrace the answer that seems best right now and continue to seek ever more refined answers. It is the questions we can get attached to, rather than the answers we get now.
This is especially true of questions like, “what does thriving look like?” or “what does it take to thrive?” We have learned that our best efforts to address problems for society in the last 100 years may have improved things on the factors we were trying to improve (think child mortality, disease rates, poverty) but there are unintended side effects. Each effort to make the system better can result in new problems that we find just as pressing as the ones we were solving (overpopulation, for example). Thus, there is no solid or static recipe at the intervention and tactic level. Instead, we need to keep pressing on in our quest to answer how humanity can thrive without killing off the ecosystems on which it depends.
Similarly, in my research on creativity and innovation, I keep seeing the outcome of civil rights and affirmative action in terms of women and other minorities performing on masculine terms of success. It looks like a form of covering to me. For example, women are seen as achieving equal levels of creativity by achieving equal levels of awards, press mentions, etc. However, this is judging women on masculine terms, obscuring what it is even is to succeed in more feminine terms. Feminine terms of success might be better found in growth of community, number of enduring relationships, quality of relationships, network support, peer appreciation and cooperation, etc. Look for where there is cooperation rather than (or in addition to) competition.
The other crucial place I see this misguided judgment of the new by terms of the old is in leadership within generations. Older generations keep bemoaning the lack of leadership from the younger generations, when in fact it is that they can’t perceive what leadership even looks like for the younger generations.They continue to look for it as command-and-control models. And forget, the younger generations saw JFK and Martin Luther King get shot. Younger generations believe in starfish leadership by catalysts rather than spider models of top down leaders. (See starfish and spider.)
These mismatched conversations have us talking past each other, the new world inexpressible to the old. And the old world, nonsensical to the new.
Hold Space
by ThriverRecently a friend commented on how crucial holding space is. It needs unpacking. What do we mean when we talk about holding space – both interpersonally and in groups?
A room holds space. A circle of chairs holds space. My arms around you hold space for you.
The foundation of a house holds space for the house to be built. It touches the ground. It makes the house stronger and more resilient. But you don’t go looking at the foundation unless you are buying the house or it seems to have trouble.
Holding space seems invisible. It is hard to see, but you can sense it is there. When it isn’t there or isn’t strong, the lack of it is very noticeable.
As a facilitator, holding space for a group of people to do something together involves:
In one on one dynamics, holding space for an individual to do something transformative, vulnerable, or bold mostly involves:
Does the individual feel safe – physically, from distractions, eavesdropping, etc?
Holding space for someone is not about responding to the emotions or words and gestures. It is about observing the emotions with the individual. Being beside them in the experience they are having, not as a respondent (even if it is about you), but as a companion in the experience.
And this can make holding space for someone really really hard for us. We have to move out of ourselves and into a space of an objective compassionate observer.
When you make a chair or a house, there is a tangible visibility to the work. You can see it happening, measure it, check against specs, and watch it function over time.
When you are holding space, there is a very intangible and invisible quality to the work. Conspicuousness in holding space shows a lack of grace. You can’t see the “magic” of it. You can’t touch it. When space is well help, people feel at ease, as if they can be themselves. At the highest level, it can be about stepping deeply into another person to experience with them what they notice and feel, which requires an incredible amount of vulnerability on their part.
And this is magnificent gift, when space is well held people can bring forth their best self.
Adventures in New Giving
by ThriverI am super excited to see Adventures in New Giving http://www.adventuresinnewgiving.com/. And perhaps a bit jealous. If I could focus the time and energy, I think Nathaniel is doing what I would do. (see his video here: http://vimeo.com/37718193 ) For years, I have lived a double life working in traditional progressive philanthropy to pay rent while working on bootstrappy social enterprise as a passion. In my consulting work within traditional philanthropy, we talked about the democratization of philanthropy. However, I did not see much of it in practice.
That seems to have come from somewhere else. Tech start-ups culture maybe? Socent pragmatism? Microfinancing brought home? Whatever the path, it has been interesting to watch the birth of efforts like kickstarter and startsomegood.
It seems aligned, naturally, somehow with the collaborative consumption “Mesh” culture. All of which seem part of a larger movement toward network production. So I am super excited to see Nathaniel capture the stories of this practical democratization of philanthropy.
I am also curious to see how this will hybridize with traditional philanthropy. I have visions of foundations and philanthropists using crowdfunding as part of their due diligence. Something of an early market testing and reliability assessment before or as part of larger funding efforts. Picture a foundation giving a matching grant – matched via startsomegood. This could be really a good time saver for family foundations with intentions to give and little time for sorting through applications.
I can’t wait to see what Nathaniel does with Adventures in New Giving.
I can’t wait to see how we all play together in evolving new giving.
To help fund our awareness of ourselves in this evolution, pitch in at
http://startsomegood.com/Venture/adventures_in_new_giving/Campaigns/Show/adventures_in_new_giving
Pragmatism
by ThriverBack in September at SOCAP, I was speaking with Whitney of Culture Counts. She has a personality assessment tool, and pointed out that I was primarily someone driven to learn, share, and do what matters. This, of course, flattered me, so I decided it was accurate.
At The Agency, which we just launched, I talk about being bold, pragmatic, and inspired. I carefully chose these three things because I think each alone is a lost cause, but together they are an unstoppable force.
Pragmatism is about creating a feedback loop from practice to theory and back to practice again. Looking at whole sections of my life, I can see my drive for this. Like when I decided to leave academia because it wasn’t enough about practice in the world at large.
There is a figure eight, cutting back and forth between getting things done and reflecting on what is the right thing to get done based on what has worked.
I can only tolerate so much debate and minutiae before I have to ask: what are we doing? But then, I can only tolerate so much doing before I have to ask: is this the best approach? Is this thought through carefully? Are we using what is known to inform wiser action? I love process, but only process that leads to results and action. Being, and mindfulness feel very important to me. And yet, if being isn’t leading to doing, then it seems like a pretty narcissistic practice.
Dance. Hold the tension between. Watch for indicators of being too far in one direction or the other, then correct course.
Getting what matters done requires a solid focus on getting things done, and a wisdom to know what to do and how to best do it. And that is what The Agency is all about catalyzing.
Women: Up Down and Around
by Jean RussellI have been watching the “women’s issue” for many years. Today Malachi shared this tweet with me. It links to an Inc article, The Face of Success, Part 2: Where are all the Female Tech Geniuses?
My thoughts are too lengthy for a simple tweet. The most important of which I never see spoken of. There are several movements or methods for women today. The old guard is the one most of us are familiar with. It is rooted in social justice – where do women not have access and let’s count them and fight to change the numbers by bringing visibility and accountability on the issue. This is a movement about access and choice – women ought to have access to just about anything men have access to – and then have a choice about whether to participate – as women. What this usually looks like is women parading around as men, taking on male traits to succeed on masculine terms in a male-dominated space. Back when this movement had its peak women even wore shoulder pads to physically appear more masculine. It was an important effort, and today many of us, of the female kind, stand on the shoulders of giants who pushed for this form of equality. This acting-as-if we are men is part of the insideous practice called “covering” which many minorities are forced to practice in order to operate with those in power. (Thanks to Kate Ettinger for pointing me to the book on Covering.) Some might argue that all of us perform covering to some degree.
But there is another form of feminism in the generation of women that followed. I think I fit in this group. For us, we were raised with the idea that we could choose any career. Few of us were told (and if we were told, we didn’t take seriously) that we couldn’t do the career of our choice because of the simple biological fact that we were women. We assumed access. Many of us are ambidextrous. Well, make that androgynous. We know how to demonstrate traditionally masculine traits quite well, but we also could use our more feminine traits. Most importantly, few of us wanted to be the “first woman” to do something. We wanted to be successful on our own terms and as individuals with specific skills and abilities. We didn’t want preferential treatment for being a woman.
One woman I spoke with that fits this space is a journalist. She said she didn’t want to be a “female journalist” she wanted to be a “journalist” who happened to be female. We don’t want to use the “woman” card to gain special access. Tokenism. While tokenism gains some ground for the cause of social justice, it hardly feels rewarding to win on grounds that shouldn’t be considered to begin with. Tokenism means it is still about whether you are a man or a woman, and we will toss in some people by choosing them based on their sex (or race, etc). It isn’t about the ability of women to compete – regardless of their sex, and succeed because sex is not a filter. In fact, it highlights sex as a filter.
Women in this group don’t want to attend “women’s groups” or have events or panels for, by, or about women’s issues. We go so far as to nearly deny the biological reality that we are women. Make it a non-issue. Ignore it. Shhhhhh.
I have a sense that there is a younger generation that is moving beyond this urge to silence the sex issue. These women are embracing their experience as women and realizing that being a woman brings strength and ability that is crucial in today’s world. I have a few books on my shelf that point to this new embracing of the value of women. The first one I read, many years ago, was entitled, “How to Succeed in Business without a Penis: Secrets and Strategies for the Working Woman.” Another is “Web of Inclusion.” I would love to know your favorites books and articles in this space.
There are many things I admire about this emerging movement for women – mostly millennials – as they begin to solve some of the complications of past movements for women. I also see some ways there are unintended consequences. The value judgment is mine, and I own it. Sexual and romantic relationships for young women seem to have been adversely impacted. Women’s image of body and self hardly seems to have improved. That all seems like a lengthy topic in itself. But let’s get back to women in business for now, where progress has clearly been made.
As the article in Inc. mentions, women by the numbers are successful in achieving equality (or surpassing it) in education. And, where women are present, there can be “higher ROI” and better “capital efficiency” and so on:
The women who make it past the sexist barriers and glass ceilings can be even better at business than men. As these stats become known, having a woman involved in your business becomes a business strategy instead of a moral imperative. Will the new tokenism be less moral and more pragmatic? I hope so.
For now the women’s movement feels more complicated given that a large segment of women don’t want to have their bodies sexed and their identity tied up in the sex of that body.
What can we do? Let’s move toward more integration. At SXSW last year I was on the only panel that was all women that was not at all about being a woman. Let’s acknowledge that women have an expertise and an identity beyond that of their sexed body. Include women not as tokens (perceived as a deficit attached to a moral obligation) and instead include women because they are capable, perceptive, agile, hardworking, insightful, or whatever traits are needed in these uncertain times. See us for our strengths and not the “lack” of a penis.
For event organizers, put women on panels – not because you want to have a good ratio of men to women but – because you want to have a valuable perspective on a new approach to success. We enter the Relationship Economy, as Jerry Michalski calls it, and women, in general, navigate the world of relationship with profound perception and intuitive grace, achieving very useful business results. If you want to be successful in todays uncertain world, put women on your team, your board, or your panel.
ps. as for you women – the few – that demonstrate the seemingly female traits of backstabbing, destruction and gossip – who want to masquerade as men by denigrating other women, your selfishness undermines the work we all do as humans to evolve. It makes you appear short-sighted and shallow, and alienates you from authentic connection, trust, and alliance. We are angry with you, collectively. We will forgive you, but please go get some therapy! If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at this garbage: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2011/07/25/why-women-shouldnt-go-to-tech-conferences/
Note: I speak here only about women…some issue may overlap with race and other “minority” positions. However, I can’t speak to those and trust to those whose experience of those movements is more informed or more personal. I do have a rant I can write later on how we each have some form of privilege or power, and the social justice practice of focusing on where we lack power is a self-destructive way of navigating the world we share. If each of us stand in a multi-faceted identity and acknowledge our power and lack thereof, we develop sympathy and alliance with others.
Prediction for 2012
by ThriverPrediction for 2012: A year of unimaginable extremes. The fiction of wall street broken by the occupy movement will see a broader decrease in trust in the economy and corporations. Jobs will be lost. Free agents will struggle as the economy to support them hasn’t gained ground yet. Depression will be the word of the year in many circles. Politics in the US will seem chaotic and highly unpredictable.
At the same time, trust in neighbors will go up along with bartering. As the middle class dies a begrudging death, the sleeping giant of America awakens. Survival will be about connecting to people around you. Quality of life will start to improve in dark contrast to economic stability. You will rate elements of the year either a 1 or a 9.
There will be at least 3 and likely 7 major catastrophes, some weather related and 2 or more economic black swans. Fear will not be about terrorism, it will be about the chaos and structure change by the amassing disenfranchised. (When 65% feels disenfranchised, there will be change, and it won’t be pretty)
Major factor in making it, from a business perspective, will be how trustworthy are you. Some iteration of “micro” will be seen everywhere. Set directions but not destinations. Push decision-making to the edge or you won’t be nimble enough to adjust to extreme economic climate.
The divide in the US will grow larger. On many axis. Short term thinking will result in short term gains that never add up to long term endurance. Think and be like a marathon runner. Drink lots of water. Meditate. Act small with a long view.
If you let go of all your assumptions and the story you had about your life, your business, and your world, and instead focus on your confidence in responding in this moment to what is before you, directing yourself and your business toward a direction you believe in; then you will end the year grateful. If you resist…well, the infrastructure collapses with or without you in it. Make quality of life your mantra. Seek the path you can be in with grace.
I was asked on Facebook what mechanisms I was using to think of this. This is my quick answer:srnels.people.wm.edu/ and on blockage – http://thrivable.wagn.org/wagn/Book+blockage )
1. studying currency design, trust and radical economists (money is a collective agreement to pretend there is value in a number. The number 1435 has no value as anything more than a number, but if I say you have that much money, we can do something with it. Context matters. Don’t trust the context? Value goes up in smoke – start bartering and find other ways to exchange value.)
2. conversations with economic historian and reading about transitions in smaller scales (http://
3. watching what is working – what is and has been making communities more resilient
4. playing with models in my head – what if there is more of that… or less of this… what would happen then?
5. Swarm behavior and complexity science – looking at meta stable states, phase changes, slime molds as metaphor of individual/collective.
Influenced also by: Age fo the Unthinkable – http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/unthinkable/index.html which I recommend highly.
Transparency and Living Well
by Jean RussellWhat is a good life? What is it to act with intention on the life you want for yourself? What matters? What doesn’t? When are you thriving? Are you contributing to thriving around you – in your family, community, and the world?
My whole life I have been gnawing on questions like this. And perhaps I have become so accustomed to acting on my answers without any fanfare that I didn’t stop to think it might be useful to anyone else. I don’t know how you are navigating these changing times. I will be transparent here. If it is useful to you, then I am honored. Everyone must come up with their own solutions, and I worry that this will seem self-righteous (which would offend me). So I qualify – again – your answers are yours. Great. Do that. I am not a better or worse person for my choices. I was triggered to write this post by something Vinay Gupta wrote about what he called the “Precariat” or people living on the edge of the capitalistic system. And then by Venkatesh Rao on Ribbon Farm writing about leaving the middle class. So here is my story.
Deep history. I grew up in the country on some acreage my father took a lot of risk in buying. Our money, tied up in land, with four kids on an assistant professor salary was tough. We took to growing our own food, planted an orchard, and avoided any more loans. When my parents did spend money, they bought as high a quality as they could afford. As intellectuals, my parents were considered upper middle class. As income earners, I wouldn’t think so. That said, my home – which my Dad built himself – looked like something in Metropolitan Home. Always ready for a photo. Immaculate. Designed. Elegant.
I never thought too much about the strange dissonance of living in such elegance while never having new clothes and using the dozen toys we had. (My kids have more toys under their bed than I remember having in my entire childhood, but more on that later.) So I guess I have always straddled the middle class by having certain things be high quality, and the rest be either forgone, DIY, or budget. This is what Venkat and others are calling Trading Up.
Early Independence. I started running my own financial life at 13. When my parents divorced that year, they decided the child support checks would go directly to me. I put it in the bank. When I started my sophomore year at 17, I used the money – not only to pay for college myself – but to get an apartment near campus. I was, for the most part, a saver, and I continued the Trading Up approach. It was almost a game to see how long I could make it last. Money was independence. And I was going to make sure I had independence. Then the child support stopped when I turned 18, and I had to shift to earning a living and using my savings.
Anti-Capitalism. By 21, I was in love with a much older man. A theater director. He wasn’t quite a marxist, and said simply that he was anti-capitalist. Consider it personal tutoring in the pitfalls and consequences of capitalism. The world was unveiled for me, as a new narrative about the system and poverty wove into my thinking. I was losing any desire to be rich as I saw that the rich of the past made their money off the poor people’s labor. After eight years of this sort of thinking, I was tired of being in a head space of theory. I needed to see for myself. I left the art world for international finance – the belly of the beast. [If only they had known that I was, at the same time, getting published in a marxist literary journal!]
The Beast. Within a few months, I could see that the income ladder was a drug. The more you got, the more addicted you were to having it and dependent on it. It was never enough. There were so many wonderful and good hearted people around me, who were totally addicted to this drug – money. I decided not to play the game that way. It was 1999. I got married. We were cash poor, house rich on the North side of Chicago. I was making $800 car payments, which would have been enough money to live on each month in the 90s for me when I was in college for a decade. I married a man who had bought a house at 28 and started fixing it up. He was a hoarder too, but he hoarded stuff where I had hoarded money itself. We went to garage sales every weekend and the flea markets too. Most of our disposable income went toward “investments” in goods. I had the feeling that I could have anything I wanted, if I waited for it to show up. Not because we had a lot of money, but because the pricing in this backyard economy was so reasonable. The 1900 square foot house underwent renovations DIY style, while it also began to fill with stuff. We were way ahead of most of our peers in our “adult-like” activities – having kids, house, car. But they had money to have a nightlife. We didn’t. Were we middle class then? I don’t know. Probably, but not in the usual ways. What else would you call it?
Cashing Out. In 2003, we decided to sell. Our second child was born in ’02, and we wanted to be closer to family, get out of the money pit of the house, and real estate was peeking. (If you need help with drywall, wood floors, cabinet installation, siding, painting, etc, I can probably be useful.) We sold for well over twice what we had bought for. It was like finally getting one big check for all the hours over years laboring on the house. We bought a 4000 square foot monster of a house near where my family lived. It needed no work. There was plenty of room for stuff. And 3.5 bathrooms to clean. There were things I loved about it: the dental work, the two story bay window, the master bath. Upper middle class luxury down to the wood trim. We bought it with cash – no mortgage. We paid off any debt. We bought mid-century modern furniture and a home theater. We had landed. We intentionally stepped off the ladder. We hardly needed to make any money at all. 20K would have cleared our living expenses. I ramped up my business (writing and design work), and we focused on our two kids.
Integrity and Guilt. A few things happened in quick order. I was online and began meeting social entrepreneurs. I was writing, for work, about child survival issues in Africa. And my environmental awareness kicked up a notch. I got training as a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) coach thanks to my core client. My marriage had been struggling for years at this point and finally collapsed. I had a crisis of integrity. Yes, I had felt like everything I had been doing was intentional and aiming toward a good life, but my perspective had been narrow. I went through a massive overhaul toward a much deeper level of integrity. And along with it suffered a great deal of guilt.
The guilt was accompanied by a lot of gratitude, so I never would have spoken of it as guilt at the time. I was grateful for what life had given me. But underneath that was a guilt over the privilege I felt.
I walked away from the house and my marriage. Did I really want another pinball machine when we had 8 arcade games already? Could I raise my children in a house where their own bedroom was the size of entire homes for millions of people in the world? Could I really have my house be the largest part of my carbon footprint? No. I can make it seem clean in hindsight, but it was messy at the time. Lots of learning. Lots of beating myself up over my choices and their outcomes. Lots of feeling that it was all a wicked mess. And the guilt masked as pride at my frugality, haunted me, driving me toward ever greater frugality.
I rented a small apartment. Took only what I needed from my past life. And switched gears in my work and lifestyle. Since 2005, I have lived off 15-25k a year, supplemented in 2010 by the finalizing of my divorce and cashing out of the house. At first my ex just took care of the kids while I worked on my business and paid child support (which fully supported him). My kids now have nearly every video game console made since Atari came out. And most of the games. A near endless supply of movies and music. Every toy they can dream of (just not when it comes out, they have to wait until it shows up at a garage sale). They have such a state of abundance it is hard to come up with things they want or need. They cycle through things in order not to be crowded out of their giant bedrooms.
After 2 years, I decreased his dependence on me, and he started selling all the stuff he had been hoarding all those years. He now seems to make a decent living as a seller on ebay. He lives in the backyard economy. And I have been living in the gift economy. And I feel guilty of that too.
Appearances. The outward appearance of my lifestyle seems vastly richer than my actual living. Trading Up again. I fly to NYC, San Francisco, New York, and Boston regularly – as in about one a month. And sometimes I fly to other places around the world and country. It looks pretty jet-setting. Few would realize that most of this is paid for by clients or other people and that I can travel at far less expense than the usual middle class person. I stay with friends instead of hotels. I avoid taking taxis. I am humble enough to graciously allow others to buy my meals (and then try to treat someone else so I can keep the karmic flow going). I rarely attend an event that I have to pay for. I ask my network to pitch in to help me financially when I need it and can see value for them. I buy organic, fair trade, lifestyle products, but I may hardly eat for several days. I get frustrated when someone in my network asks for my financial support, and I can’t give it when I want to because there is no such thing as “spare” for me now. I can go days without spending money, and I gawk at the goods for sale wondering how anyone else can be buying all this stuff. Or why they would.
I have learned how to stretch resources out. I know how to live a very frugal life – and live it well. I could write a book on how to move to a town and set up a home in 30 days on $150. I could give classes on finding serenity when you don’t know how next month’s few bills will be paid and you have cut everything out that you could.
But I have become so good at it and stopped chasing money so long ago, that I am now at the opposite end of the spectrum. I don’t seem to remember what abundance feels like. I would feel guilty for having it anyway. I don’t feel like I am thriving. I feel like I don’t catalyze abundance in the network around me either, as I use the spare resources I have learned so well to ferret out. I worry that I lessen the resources available to others doing important work.
I don’t think thriving is just about getting beyond the middle class defaults and money-drug-ladder addiction. I don’t think it is about being so frugal that you wither away into nothing. I think thriving is about making more out of less for more people. Life enabling more life. But maybe someone else has a better idea of how to answer it. I need new answers, of that I am sure. I Traded Up a lot. I still need to be mindful not to “Act Dead” too.
Questions. What I wonder now is how I can be responsible with the gifts I have been given? I have talents that are valuable in the world which others would pay to have access to. And I have denied myself and these people those talents for some misbegotten sense that I was acting with integrity by living so frugally and with what I looked at as high standards. I have a great deal of disdain for sales. Even of my own work, even when I think it is very valuable.
I wonder what it would look like to use what I have and earn what I can and be responsible to myself, my family, and my network with what that brings me.
Any suggestions? Some rebalancing would be really useful, before I start selling my furniture in the name of some grand notion of the boot-strapped entrepreneur.
Time Horizons
by Jean RussellMuch of what I do has to do with generating perspectives that are useful in offering us new information that enables wise action. And one of the most crucial in this area is time horizons. I have written in the past on zooming – that we can zoom in and out of a perspective, but when I wrote on that I focused on physical distance rather than time.
We can zoom through time as well. I can focus on the next five minutes or on the next century or millenium. When I was developing the thrivability cards (which in part became the Table of Contents for the Thrivability Sketch), I had a suit that was about time, because it is so valuable to move through time horizons.
If you are in a stuck place or holding a view of catastrophe, one very effective strategy is to expand a sense of time. Another is to shrink it. Let’s look in practice.
photo credit: Moe-tography
I can look at the current economic dynamics and become very depressed at the breakdown in our systems and the suffering that this is creating for millions of people. Pretty daunting. Very sad. If I think about it in a two year time frame, I might feel like screaming at people to do something – anything even – that will shift what is happening. Which is what I see Umair Haque doing a lot of.
To escape the fear, threat, disaster experience and focus on something productive I can do, I might look at a longer view. What if I consider it from a twenty year perspective? Can I imagine that the path in the short term might be quite painful, it will enable us to do something we could not have done otherwise? What would that be? What can I do now to catalyze that?
If I look at a hundred year flow. Can I look to the past and see how we have experienced challenging times before and had it work out for the greater good? Can I imagine, in another hundred years, people telling that same story about us – that we went through a challenging time and came out better for it?
Let’s say I can’t do that. (You know I can, but others may not or may think this is escapist thinking). Given the gritty reality before me, and my negative expectations of the future, what can I do in the next five minutes to make this one wild and precious life worth living for now? What can I do with this one day? While I have this moment in time, what will I make of it? The future will be what it will be, but we are not there yet. No, we are here, in this moment and only ever in the present moment. And the only action I can take is in this moment. So what do I want to make of this very moment?
Do I have ideas about how I want the succession of moments to be? Who am I? Start being who you want to be right now, because there is no other time but right now. So be the change you want to see in the world — already. Now. Not soon. Not in progress. Now.
Zooming in or out of our time horizons frees us from the fear-ridden anxiety of the uncertainty we face to hold a view that enable calm, intentional action. Make a choice. Be proactive about the perspective you hold. Don’t let fear blind you to the alternatives in time horizons.
Sharing and Intellectual Property
by Jean RussellA contested space in sharing is intellectual property. Can I share a song that I bought with all my friends? If I have a paperback book, I can share it one friend at a time. If I have a digital copy, can I share it with all of them at once? Does my sharing take away from the rewards the creator and producer get? The manufacturer doesn’t get any funds when I sell something at a garage sale or donate it to a cause. Should the maker of intellectual property continue to get revenue when the property is shared?
In a world of sharing, how can and will we reward the makers? If one person were to pay me to write a book (and they got one copy they could do anything with), it would costs them tens of thousands of dollars (what it cost me to write it). If hundreds or thousands of people all get copies, then my time and energy can be distributed across all of them, making the book affordable to each.
photo credit: tsakshaug
I haven’t seen any strong solutions to the intellectual property debate. The sharing economy seems fantastic in many regards, and it doesn’t solve an age old issue of how to reward significant effort toward often intangible non-rival goods. In the very potential of real abundance and infinite sharing in the space of intangible non-rival goods, our incentive system seems due for revision and no clear compelling and convincing answers emerge yet to reward the makers financially.
Looking again at how technologists address the issue – the business models tend to be: develop the software and offer it for free, add a premium version, and then do consulting and customization for a fee. For writers, this is also the model most often practiced – write the book and make little to nothing on it. Give away to lots of people. Make a living from the consulting and speaking that comes from that.
If Rich Dad and Poor Dad is right, and we should be seeking the passive revenue stream, then we are going in the wrong direction as producers. Trapping ourselves in hourly wage work after producing something with a lot of man-hours that we aren’t paid for and that could have generated passive income.
What ways will we create to support creative and innovative people for the often non-rival – easily shareable work they generate?
What models for future practice exist? For example, in the fashion industry, designers can get top prices, but they can’t copyright their designs or lines. Where else is this flourishing?
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a note on non-rival goods. Rival goods are things that if I have it you can’t have it. My coffee maker is mine. If I give it to you, it becomes yours. But I can’t give it to you and also keep it for myself. We tend to assume everything works this way. Scarce commodities. Scarce time. However, there are a group of goods that either don’t diminish by being shared or even increase in value. My cheesecake recipe is mine, but if I share it with you, then we both can enjoy making cheesecake (and eating it! Yum!). The recipe is non-rival. If I share it with hundreds of people in a community, someone might even contribute some improvements or variations. Then it gets even better. Partially rival goods are things like roads – they can seem non-rival until they hit a threshold of use then they become rival.
The Great Unfolding
by Jean RussellThe 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?