I’ve been tracking emerging trends for a while now, exploring the co-evolution of humanity and our technologies, and building visions of the kinds of futures I’d like to see. Lately, I’ve found myself a bit restless, wondering “what’s next?”

The conferences and gatherings I’m attending are beginning to feel stale, the conversations needing new framings and lenses through which to look at our world and ourselves.

I’ve been on the hunt for a word or phrase that can encompass the essence of what feels important and resonates with me right now.

The search has been prompted by my decision to start a new project — writing my first book. (yay!)

I’ve spent the past few weeks reviewing everything I’ve written so far on the blog, reflecting upon what I’ve observed, what I’ve learned, and identifying the deep values I’ve chosen to serve as a compass and foundation for what is meaningful and significant.

At the same time, I’ve been surveying the landscape to get a sense of what’s being constructed out in the global mind, and see where the two intersect.

The general narrative is that we‘re facing increasing complexity and uncertainty in the world, information overload, distraction, shallowness of critical thought, and a lack of foresight. On the silver lining side, we have an overstock of creativity and imagination, sufficient to level up humanity and change the world and our crumbling systems, if we could only figure out how to unlock and unleash it from our billions of minds.

While some will posit that the ‘solution’ is technological (better algorithms! quantifying trust and reputation! big data! innovation!), I lean to the side that our breakthroughs will occur when we acknowledge and confront our most raw and human issues.

I’m finding that the barriers to our ingenuity are not stemming from a lack of desire, but from a range of cognitive and emotional barriers that have been set in place by most of the systems that surround us and condition us – the media, family and societal expectations, cultural standards, fear in trusting our own intuition, and the ingrained beliefs that any other way of thinking or being could be possible. (to name a few)

These barriers create a rigidity and calcification to how we perceive reality and ourselves, vastly limiting the potential for our inherent genius and heroism to manifest itself.

As I travel across the blogosphere, I notice these sentiments being echoed, in their own language:

In a recent post in HBR, there was a rallying call to the startup community to build companies infused with *purpose* that will bring lasting value to society. A skim of the Management Innovation eXchange reveals posts about embracing one’s inner artist, restoring values at work, and how to mobilize and motivate people. The Innovation Excellence blog categories include ‘build capacity’ and ‘culture & values.’ The most popular talks on TED this month are about happiness, vulnerability, courage and shame, inspirational leadership, and cultivating creativity capacity. Other hot themes out there include storytelling, passion, empathy, play, and design.

After brainstorming a few concepts that might weave together this emerging pattern, I’ve decided to frame it as the rise of culture tech.

:: Culture ::

I found it interesting to discover that the English word “culture” is based upon a term used by Cicero, “cultura animi,” referring to the cultivation of the mind or soul.

In reviewing other origins and definitions, I resonated strongly with the ideas of culture as a pursuit for the highest ideal of human development, the liberation of the mind, and the attainment of freedom through the fullest expression of the unique and authentic self.

The other side of culture, beyond its internal cultivation, is the degree to which it can be communicated and propagated to others.

The American anthropological definition of culture “most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode experiences symbolically, and communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially.”

It might then follow that a conscious effort towards cultivating the self, towards independent and critical thinking, towards direct experience, and hence towards wisdom, would then contribute towards the cultivation of human capacity at larger and larger scales.

Neat. So we need to know what we know, embody it, and then pass it on. How?

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a description for a “self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.” They’re transmitted from mind to mind through writing, speech, gesture, ritual, or other means which can be imitated, replicated, mutated and implemented.

So how do we build new memes – new units for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices – and transmit them through society, at scale?

This is where technology comes in for an assist.

:: Technology ::

“The word technology comes from Greek τεχνολογία (technología); from τέχνη (téchnē), meaning “art, skill, craft”, and -λογία (-logía), meaning “study of-”.”

From fire to the wheel to the internet, technology refers to the tools, processes and systems humans discover and develop to get things done.

Its definitions range from “the practical application of knowledge” to “an activity that forms or changes culture.”

This is where I begin to see a gap.

:: The Need for Technologies of Culture ::

We are awash in data, information, and knowledge.

We can search and find just about anything, and now complain about being ‘overloaded’ with it all.

We want machines that can help us sift through the noise and find exactly what we want, or a predictive set of results that are probably what we want, or a serendipitous series of results that might lead to something we didn’t even know we wanted.

This may be fine for parsing and delivering some types of information, but I question what informs the word “practical” in the above definition of “the practical application of knowledge.”

As an era of machine intelligence approaches, I wonder what ‘practical’ decisions they will be making. For instance, what might we do when a global supercomputer does an analysis of our resource allocation, climate, and global population, and sees an unpleasant trajectory for the human species based on current trends. It then decides that the most ‘practical’ thing to do is to manufacture a biological weapon, targeted to a specific race or haplogroup, and remove 5 or so billion people from the planet. (this being the most efficient way to create conditions to restore us to a sustainable situation, in this scenario).

Perhaps an extreme example, but the point is that the power of our technologies are accelerating at a rate faster than the rate at which we’re developing our capacities for the discernment to use them appropriately or to contemplate their longer-term implications.

In this case, the practical application of knowledge would come via wisdom.

Wisdom is defined as “the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action” — the coordination of “knowledge and experience” and “its deliberate use to improve well being.”

Many quotes about wisdom, whether they be from spiritual texts, philosophers, or public intellectuals, refer to wisdom as coming first and foremost from self-knowledge.

Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.
~ Tao Te Ching

But how many of us are connected with our authentic selves and know who we really are, know what we fundamentally believe to be true, and why we think so?

How many of us have an experience-based reference point that links our theory to practice, before making a decision?

In trying to ‘save the world,’ how many of us live the example of the external thing we think we are trying to ‘fix?’

My ponderings come from a place of self-inquiry and reflection first. Engaging in the cultivation of my mind, combined with the experiments and testing of evidence-based reality against my ideas, have been my most useful pursuits in my process of seeking more expansive consciousness and sapience.

These practices generally still seem to be siloed in the domains of philosophy, self-help or mental therapy, or when discussed in the context of indigenous wisdom or spirituality, are often discredited or referred to as “woo.”

I, on the other hand, see a convergence of science and spirit. As I track the “discoveries” in neuroscience and brain-mind research, I see information that’s been known by ancient wisdom traditions for thousands of years now being ‘validated’ by science.

I think there is an evolutionary impulse to learn and grow, to express and transform ourselves through creativity and love, and to become multidimensional in our ability to perceive ourselves, the world and existence. I think we can become both more intelligent, and wise. We do have the capacity for greater health and well-being, happiness and compassion.

And I think we can fully participate in this process of bootstrapping ourselves.

Hence, I suggest we look to technologies of culture to help us liberate ourselves from old patterns, and become fully conscious agents and participants in our individual and collective evolutionary development.

:: Culture Tech examples & working definition ::

I started thinking about all this more intensely over the past few months, as I’ve been experimenting with a group of people in building an open enterprise.

We’ve talked about building a skills/resources/superpowers database, as both a shared commons, and as a guide for arranging ourselves into co-creation teams around projects.

We’ve come together face-to-face for small gatherings, workshops, and to collaborate on short-term projects.

Everyone wants to be autonomous and sovereign, yet to also be strongly bonded and committed around a shared vision.

It’s a bit tricky.

Again, it’s not really a technological issue. It’s about learning how to become extraordinarily clear internally on what each of us wants, identifying our core values, being able to articulate our intentions to each other, being capable of setting boundaries around our time and attention, and then being about to build a shared vision together that enables us each to provide and receive value towards getting what we want, while also serving the greater purpose. It’s about continuous feedback, iteration, and mutual support.

I’ve found several people who are building these processes at the team level into a kind of art, which they refer to as “culture hacking.”

The premise is that culture can be treated like software — having a viewpoint, an architecture, an internal structure, and some familiar characteristics:

- ease of use
- reliability
- interoperability
- extensibility
- compatibility
- portability
- adaptability
- scalability

Reprogram your techniques, practices, commitments and viewpoints, and you reprogram yourself and your culture.

Jim & Michele McCarthy, authors of Software for your Head & the Core Protocols, have engaged me in some great dialogue (and hands on experience!) around the processes they’ve been developing for this kind of cultural design.

Dan Mezick, author of The Culture Game, has also been teaching me a lot about tribal leadership, agile, scrum, and group facilitation. As he put it, “We’re in the business of culture.”

Social scientist Sebastien Paquet has a nice 5 minute Ignite talk back from 2010 about How to Become a Culture Hacker. His blog, Emergent Cities, casts a wide net around networked co-creation, intentions, and birthing new worlds and social movements.

Other colleagues are working on lexicons and shared language for the new economy, on gift circles and share networks, and on frameworks built on foundations of coherence, alignment, resonance, amplification and manifestation.

I’m seeing a leveling up as we move beyond mapping “social graphs,” and move consciously towards mapping intentions, emotions, capacities, worldviews, desires, value creation, gratitude, and energy.

All of this has essentially been leading me to the same place:

There is an urge to redesign human culture, to construct life and work in a way that enables everyone to ‘follow their bliss’ and show up fully in their gifts and experience. We want to experience higher intelligence and capacities, and to choose what represents meaning and significance in life. We want to do it with style, grace, ease, beauty, and simplicity — as art.

But before we can establish our new collective values, and lay down the groundwork for new societies or paradigms, there is a personal healing and self-awareness process as a critical intermediary (or parallel) step.

While this is still a work in process, I’m defining culture tech as follows:

‘the systems, tools, processes and etiquettes designed to cultivate the full expression of the authentic self, liberate collective creativity and imagination, and foster the expansion of universal human capacity’

I’m looking forward to exploring this sweet spot at the intersection of technology, consciousness and culture!

The next few months will be spent in domestic and international travel, doing interviews, and finding inspiring examples of those on the leading edge of culture tech.

As always, feedback is welcome, and thanks for joining me on the journey.

–

Thanks to the many friends and colleagues for hundreds (if not thousands!) of hours of musings and critical dialogue that informed this post.  I don’t claim any ideas here as original or as my own, simply a synthesis of my own reflections and those mirrored in the bubblings of the global mind.

References

Culture on Wikipedia
Social Technology on Wikipedia
Technology on Wikipedia
Wisdom on Wikipedia
Meme on Wikipedia

image via Christina McAllister, Heart of Wisdom Mandala

I spent last week in an immersive personal development / coaching / business development retreat with a colleague, which spurred me to some new insights and opinions about collective intelligence, co-creation, and the general pursuit of goals and growth in life.

The hosts were the same team that ran a culture-hacking bootcamp at Agile Boston a few months back, who were kind enough to invite us to Seattle to be facilitated through a longer team alignment process together.

I went in with curiosity moreso than expectations, having a general understanding that we would do some kind of work that would clarify our agreements as well as sketch potential business models and strategies. I found myself a bit surprised by the deep dive we took into exploring emotions and desires as the entrypoint for the sessions.

Exploring Personal Alignment

There was a bit of suggested prework to consider before we arrived, including these questions:

1. Contemplate these three things and their relationship to you and each other
a. Wanting
b. Seeing
c. Doing

2. Contemplate these two things
a. Loving
b. Collaborating

3. What is your alignment? (ex. Self-Awareness, Self-Care, Passion, Integrity, Courage, Ease)

<The personal alignment exercise was a fundamental piece of the process. The idea is to penetrate deeply into your desires, find out what’s blocking you from getting what you want, and then choosing a virtue (your alignment) that, if you had it, would shatter those blocks.>

4. What are evidences that you have mastered your alignment in any of the following timeframes:
a. now
b. 1 year
c. 5 years
d. 20 years

5. If you had no blocks, what would you create with your work?

6. If you had no blocks, what would you create with your work together?

7. What blocks you in your work creations?

8. What is a description of how the world would be changed after your work was done? What is your work moving towards, the ideal? (ex. sustainable cities, poverty eradicated, universal free education)

I spent several hours contemplating these questions and drafting out answers, which turned out to be an enlightening exercise into understanding my deep values, and what I want to embody and exude in the world.

As the week unfolded, we dug into these questions and allowed ourselves to be vulnerable enough to talk about the blocks that have prevented us from embracing our greatness — all self-sabotaging fictions: I don’t deserve success, I’m not good enough, people won’t care about what I have to offer, my ideas suck, money is evil, and on and on.

Raising awareness about our cognitive and emotional issues, and being able to identify and name them was stage one.

Evidence of Self-Mastery

The real insights for me came when I chose my personal alignment virtue, and started really applying it over the course of the day every day, and reflecting upon the evidences that I was working towards its mastery.

The virtue I chose was Self-Love. It was the most powerful all-encompassing concept I could think of which, should I master it, would overcome the obstacles that were blocking me most at this time.

The assignment was to write, in specific and measurable terms, the long-term evidence that the alignment virtue was being cultivated. These statements would answer the question: What is being done differently?

My first pass at answering the question returned pleasant, yet abstract results:

“I pursue activities on a daily basis that make me feel alive.”

“I am very clear on what I want, and communicate it effectively to others.”

“I don’t feel guilty when I put myself first.”

“I listen to my body and my energy.”

“I honor my needs for emotional intimacy and passion.”

While these all describe what I would be doing if I were practicing Self-Love daily, there is nothing measurable here. So I went in for a second pass:

“I spend at least an hour 3x/wk doing mind/body self-care (yoga, meditation, hiking, etc)”

“I write down my intentions at the beginning of each week. At the end of the week, I write a reflection of how aligned my actions were to my stated intentions, what I did that worked, what didn’t, and what I’ll do next time to be more effective.”

“I check-in daily with my thoughts and emotions and write them down, tracking the ebbs and flows of my energetic states, and gauging their relationship to my productivity and happiness.”

Much better.

I decided committing to these three statements was plenty for now.

Over the course of the following days, I found myself checking my decision-making against its relationship to Self-Love and my commitments. (“What do I really want? How is this decision serving my highest and best? Will this decision move me closer towards my goals?”)

It was almost shocking for me to discover the amount of actions I take (and thoughts I have) that are in direct conflict with both my stated intentions and my best interest. Furthermore, because I had raised my awareness of this behavior in myself, I began to notice it very clearly in my friends and colleagues as well.

It began to feel like we were all broadcasting a lot more noise to each other than signal.

And so I wondered:

How often do we stand in our own way of getting things accomplished? How clear are we *really* on knowing what we want and how to articulate this information to others?

How does this impact our capacity for fluid, effortless teamwork and collaboration? How does it enable or prevent each participant in a co-creative effort to derive value towards their personal goals and desires?

Ponderous!

A Web of Commitment

The week culminated in a commitment made between my colleague and myself, one that works to address the above questions.

We shared our personal alignment virtue with each other, as well as the evidences we would begin demonstrating towards its mastery. We then made a request, an ask for help, to find out if we could rely on each to be there for us as we worked towards our personal mastery. Essentially it was like establishing a peer-to-peer coaching relationship, or the type of fellowship members of AA make, or like starting a version of the mutual improvement club that was Benjamin Franklin’s Junto.

Though the week was peppered with brainstorming and business model generation, the greatest value was in this social contract created between us. Sealed with a hug instead of a signature, it was a loving commitment to supporting each other’s personal growth and development.

Takeaways

The formula of setting clear intentions, articulating what you want, making choices that support those intentions, and fostering a support network to empower you is a design process that’s certainly not new, but it does seem uncommon as a mainstream practice. We can look for guidance in places like Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, the personal empowerment material by Anthony Robbins, and in literature from ancient wisdom traditions, secret societies, and the occult. It’s a method successful people have been using to manifest things for thousands of years.

My current line of inquiry is in discovering what happens when you gather a group of people who operate at this very conscious level, and bring them together in co-creation.

What kind of creativity and performance can be demonstrated by a team of people who make a commitment to their own development, and to the support of the development of each other?

I’ve been experimenting with a group of around 130 people to form an open enterprise, under the premise that we would all be sovereign and autonomous free agents, then cluster together around projects and initiatives, then disband.

The theory has been a bit different than the practice so far, and I’m positing that it is related to the fact that we are not all fundamentally clear on our personal intentions and deeply knowing what we want, and so it’s difficult to come together and form a shared vision within projects that benefits and brings value to us all.

As a recent example, five of us came together to design and organize an event. Each of us came to the table with our own ideas about what that event could be. These ideas weren’t necessarily well-articulated statements about how the event would accelerate our own personal goals and desires, but rather ideas of what would make a cool event.

Some of these cool ideas were stronger than others, and so a type of coercion and co-opting of vision began to take place. (not with any ill intent, of course, but it happened nonetheless)

Ultimately, because we had been unable to clearly establish what each of us wanted, it was impossible to take that information we didn’t have and co-create it into a shared vision that we could all “buy into.”

The energy wasn’t building or inspiring us, and it began to feel heavy and burdensome instead of frictionless and light.

We abandoned the event.

I’m seeing a relationship now between personal alignment and group flow, and don’t see how we can really have genius-level high-performance teams and output if we don’t each fundamentally know what we want and how to ask for help to be supported in our personal goals.

I’m now starting a new series of experiments with a small group, with each of us very clear on our intentions, and all of us committed to each other’s mutual improvement.

This seems like a wise way to show love and respect for each other, while working towards building something great together.

I’ll keep you posted on progress as it unfolds.

–

images via sacred rose yoga blog & dynamic self mastery

.

The passage below was posted in our Next Edge community group by R.E.F. Fiskin, and I’m compelled to share it.

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late working on personal alignment, deeply exploring my values and desires for life, what I really care about, and what I want to manifest in the world. As I become more consciously aware, identifying what I want, having the realizations that I have choices, and taking responsibility for that knowledge — I see that life can very much be lived as a form of art. We can each choose to become multidimensional, a unique creative expression, a story of elegance, beauty and grace. The cultivating force is love.

Enjoy!

—–

via R.E.F. Fishkin:

It doesn’t just seem simple. It is simple. Life is simple. That is the beauty of it. Narratives define the relevance of antagonistic complexity and the centrality of that which is beautifully simple to us, that which in our universe has become tame to us. There is that which gives us each the kind of strength we need or wish for, and there is that in the world and our world we would do with that capacity if we could. Life is that simple, thankfully.

Between all human beings on the planet. “Being the change you wish to see in the world”– microcosm and macrocosm should model one another for humanity’s definition to not be devalued. Art is creating a narrative that is infinitely local and profoundly global. The import from good micro and export to all macros is the business of being human.

Invest in and become emotionally involved in the narratives that can pay you dividends. Have a narrative for every discipline you care about, every person that you care about, every part of your body, every part of yourself, every idea you bring into this world, imagine the world as it would be without your presence, then imagine if you had infinite love and finite time. Identify an infinite variety of possible quests that relate to the narrative of each, define your diversification strategy so that you seek returns of the right forms of meaning for who you are and who you wish to become, and review the top pages of that list prioritized by feasibility and your own constraints. Redesign iteratively until the parts of yourself symphonically agree that having a specific implication in your world would be an act of art worthy of the identity you would wish to gift yourself. Always be complicit in the feasibility of utopia’s accessibility for the citizens of the world and in particular for those you care about. Know the degree you care about them. Have the right exchange rate within the gift economy of the universe and the people in your life- not transactionally but relationally- so that you can honor all with the economic balance of justice and truth in trade in life.

Leave everything you care about better off to the degree to which it is in your life as a matter of art, the grace of only being traceable by our love and not by the degree to which we are a burden to our world. Be visible only in the love we create in our world so that when we look in the mirror if we see what the world sees then all we will see is love. Speak our truth in all the languages we know so that the parts of our soul that don’t understand English are nonetheless supportive of our life. Learn more languages for truth telling. Learn more truth to tell.

—

image via http://media-cache3.pinterest.com/upload/30117891227545905_dHW8bgNn.jpg

I’m heading out to two conferences next week in San Francisco – the Future of Money & Technology Summit, and the unMoney Convergence.

The latter is an open space event, facilitated by colleague and goddess of user-centric identity and personal data, Kaliya Hamlin. (you may know her as @IdentityWoman). The event is described as follows:

Our goal is to foster dialogue and collaboration among the range of interesting emerging ideas around money and exchange systems and to explore connections with issues of land and property tenure. in addition to topics on alternatives to the current currency systems, we invite all who are looking at new ways to look at land tenancy and stewardship, hard currency versus energy, time and food based currencies. We are looking for synergies between folks who see the need for more grounded, materially based economics and those looking at the spiritual, energetic and values based approaches.

I’m excited to see several familiar names on the registration list, and also a few folks I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time.

To register for the unMoney Convergence, click here → http://unmoney2.eventbrite.com/

I’ll be interviewing innovators at the event for a new project I’m working on, so if you have something exciting to share, come find me!

–

Kaliya Hamlin is the Founder and Executive Director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, Network Director at Planetwork, and Advisor to the World Economic Forum Rethinking Personal Data Project. She is also an unconference facilitator, an dhas been convening and holding space for conversations about alternative frames for money since 2000.

I sent out a tweet yesterday looking for an overview of the most life-changing books you’ve read. Thanks to everyone on Twitter & Facebook who responded!

Here’s a snapshot of what’s stimulating our global mind:

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant – via @markhhsp

The Cave by Jose Saramago – via @garabato_

A Simpler Way by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers – via @jcufaude

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa- via @DegradeEntropy

On Writing by Stephen King & Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke – via @tadbo

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh & The Awakening by Kate Chopin – via @ejyoung67

Turning Learning Right Side Up by Ackoff & Greenberg – via @andreachiou

Interest and Inflation Free Money by Margrit Kennedy and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes – via @marlonortiz

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda – via @AndrisKrislauks

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald – via @anthemis

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac- via @OnlineInvestAI

Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes – via @FDalmau

Linchpin by Seth Godin, First things First by Stephen Covey, Propaganda by Edward Bernays – via @Paradigmes21

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell – via @oletillmann

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – via @mahavivek

The Vision of Dhamma: Buddhist Writings of Nyanaponika Thera, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch- via @GuidoStevens

Bible, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde – via @dscofield

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. – via @daveychrist

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami – via @IoanaGuiman

The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel, The Book of Secrets by Osho – via Drew Illvp Little

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss – via Jordan Lloyd

Dune by Frank Herbert, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card – via James Burns

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord – via Joey Daytona

Watership Down by Richard Adams, Tess of the d’Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy – via Jason Vaughn

Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Satisfaction by Gregory Burns, Aging Well by George Vaillant, Influence by Robert Cialdini – via Jean Russell

The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein – via Matt Richards

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander – via Seb Paquet

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn – via Natalia Radic

The Lankavatara Sutra, Process and the Authentic Life by Jason Brown, Spinbitz by Joel Morrison – via Glistening Deepwater

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, The Element by Ken Robinson – via Inma Vp

On the Road by Jack Kerouac, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig – via John Tropea

Spin Geometry by H. Blaine Lawson – via Eric Weinstein

–

image via http://luthienthye.tumblr.com/post/16045900011

I’ve just finished reading The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, by Harriet Rubin. The book looks at powerful and outrageous women throughout the ages who left their mark on history, and points out the similarities in the strategies and tactics they used to reach their goals. It celebrates women’s unique gifts – passion and intuition, sensitivity, and cunning – and urges us to use them to claim what we want in our lives.

From the foreword:

This book is about war… not the bloody kind, not the kind provoked by Caesar’s hatreds or Sun Tzu’s deceits or Napoleon’s egomania. It’s about the wars of intimacy, where the enemy is close enough to hurt you, betray you, oppose you, whether it be a spouse, boss, client, parent, child. It is about war as a route to power…

In every encounter, one person always has more command over the situation than the other – and may contest you for the things you want. If you lose, you lose your struggle to have a better, fairer, nobler, and sweeter life. Most of us have had no way to express the fight that we keep locked up inside – all those unreached desires – except through tears of frustration or grief, anger, depression, silence, and submission – all of which can mean instant and irrecoverable losses.

I found the book rather timely, as I’ve been pushing myself to move from talk to action, to be the change, and to look for partnerships with others who want to work together on spectacular projects that bring more love and light into the world. In this process, I’m coming head to head with men of influence and power, and uncertain of the role I play here. In a sense, I’m trying to figure out how to be a woman in a man’s world… and then shift that world to the one I envision. It’s disorienting.

One one hand it feels like people want to help me succeed. Plenty of good will, advice, support. On the other, it feels like every time I empower myself a little further, gain a little more confidence, I find myself being tested. Dark forces show up to misguide, manipulate, confuse, divert. It seems all too easy to be pulled off my path, to be convinced of the value of some shiny object or another, to be told who I am or what I should want, all which lead to a loss of clarity of my own reality. (And by “dark forces” I don’t necessarily mean other people, but the darkness inside that is designed to derail – impatience, martyrdom, self deprecation, arrogance.)

As if dealing with these challenges weren’t enough of an effort in and of themselves, having to do it as a woman makes it even trickier.

In many of the conversations I’ve had lately about female energy and leadership, there is a story I’m hearing about what the world will be like if/when more women assert themselves in society. There is a particular story that I hear, mostly from the mouths of men, who tell it with a combination of anger, disgust and fear. In the story, women rise, wrestle the power from the men, and then rule the world as men historically have, while leaving them somehow subservient, stripped of worth, empty.

In my mind, this misses a huge point in what female power is all about, how it’s energetically different than the male-dominated energy, and why women in positions of leadership and inspiration operate on a playing field that is fundamentally different. The story of a world of powerful women does not look the same as a world of powerful men.

I believe in a non-zero sum kind of world, where women “winning” doesn’t mean that anyone loses. In fact, just the opposite – we show that a world of abundance is possible where outcomes benefit all people.

In Rubin’s book, she describes it as “besting surpassing winning.”

She says most women can’t win – not because they’re incapable of fighting strategically, but because no one wants them to win, often including the women themselves. Winning typically means someone else has to lose. But besting is better than winning, because your win does not humiliate the other or rob them of their dignity. Rather, winning is accomplished by achieving the best, offering a clear and inspiring new record (a collective epic win!), a new level of performance, which then serves to motivate everybody.

We demonstrate that our win is everyone’s win, and we model the behavior we want to see in the world.

Ultimately, this isn’t even really about women verse men. Plenty of the men in my network have a deep sense of the possibilities in a world dominated by love, respect, mindfulness and integrity.  But it would seem this mentality is still a stretch for many to believe. As I go from expressing my views safely via this blog, to actually stating them directly to keyholders of ‘the system,’ I’m coming face to face with the dominant paradigm, where corruption, coercion, manipulation, and asserting control are the MO.

I’m finding that as I attempt to describe and live a different world, I’m confronted with old power struggles that will take time to unravel and diffuse.

For example…….

Only a few short weeks ago, I was at lovely dinner with some colleagues and a potential business ally.

The man was successful, by any typical measure, and well aware of the shifting world we’re transitioning towards and the opportunities it suggests. He, like many intelligent people today, wants to pioneer the transition instead of be left behind, and is looking to be a part of the world being constructed by the visionaries and edge riders.

As we enjoyed our appetizers, the conversation turned to the underlying drivers we believe are influencing the shift – the implications of a globally connected species, the self-empowerment of women, the rebalancing of planetary energies, the reacquaintance of our species with healthy emotional intimacy, and the spectrum of feelings we can choose to allow ourselves to experience when we reconnect with our deeper spiritual selves.

He looked directly at me across the table, in the company of the other dinner guests, and said “I’m not going to fuck you.”

I quickly scanned my backlog to see if I had given an invitation, or if discussion of my body were in any way on-topic during polite dinner conversation or business dealings.

I wondered what reaction he’d hoped to illicit from that comment, either from me or from my friends.

I thought to myself, perhaps it’s too disarming to speak bluntly about love and vulnerability in the company of a strategist, and the only assumption to be made is that I wanted to take him to the sack.

Or perhaps it was a power play, a way to signal to the other man at the table that *he* was in fact the alpha male here, that *he* was in control of….. something.

I can’t claim to understand all the games men play. Not yet, at least.

In a state of puzzled amusement, I simply blinked blankly at him and took another sip of my wine…..

Fast forward a few weeks, and I’m reading this book, and the author describes a scenario of a man and woman at a dinner table that had enough similarly in pattern to give me pause.

The man basically says, “I get the feeling you’re brittle, that you’ve been hurt by men, and that you break. And to complicate things further, we’re attracted to one another.”

The author goes on to describe this play as one to make the woman distrust her own knowledge of herself, to be made small through seduction or rejection, and to then conspire in her own destruction.

It makes me ask, both for the sake of other women in this position, but also for anyone challenging the dominant belief structure about “how things work,” how do we go about recognizing these bids for power and neutralize them?

The book calls the women who learn these techniques the “warrior princessas.”

They are both lovers and fighters. They have no need to deal in command and control structures, in aggression, negotiation, compromise. They revel in their emotional lives, in expressing joy, pleasure, and concern. They express their desire with a diva’s virtuosity.  They express a kind of love that creates a solidarity between themselves and everything else in their lives, a transcendent love that implies unity among all. A kinship with every person and object on the planet. There is no “them.”

Rubin suggests a method for “besting” is to play against the tensions of people’s aggressions, fears, and assertions of false authority.
She claims all tensions of a strategic kind are governed by four principles:

They:

1. Intensity feelings

Sink deeply into the emotions you feel, whether they be from pain or from desire. Think through your body and abandon all notions of revenge. Demonstrate what Gandhi called ‘ahimsa,’ or refusal to harm others. Be tenderly alert to the vulnerabilities that will be exposed by those in the old system who choose to shift. Lovingly express heroic expectations of them, acknowledging the strength and generosity that could become more prominent features of their character, when they are ready.

We know that change is painful and will incite attack, and old paradigms will not go down without a fight. Can we have the courage to invite suffering, loss and even humiliation, rather than showing our ego is more important than our goal? Can we embody elegance as we steward in new worlds?

2. Incite others toward a big goal or cause

Rosa Parks’ bus incident was symbolic of a larger war for freedom and civil rights. The goal isn’t just about a personal victory, it’s a much bigger vision for the kind of world filled with decent people, something morally and emotionally better than what exists now. When we talk about the opportunities of social technologies, the promise of a peer to peer culture, the liberation of people’s hearts and minds to pursue their own dream — that is the vision that inspires me.

I had my ‘a-ha’ moment about our ability to change things when I realized the awesome power of networks. This understanding is floating in the collective consciousness and resonates with many, many people. If we are clear about what we stand for, our tribes will quickly find us. Push aside ego, jealousy, and sells-righteousness, and instead be guided by your clear and simple truth.

I’ve found the message of freedom an irresistible one. It’s a message of human agency, of personal sovereignty, of the ability of everyone to follow their bliss, and be supported by a loving network of friends who nurture each other’s conscious evolution and spiritual growth.

3. Invalidate and refuse to accept predominant beliefs

Those that bear the trappings of authority don’t necessarily own authority. Your boss controls your job, not you. Let desire be the guide. It is unnecessary to directly fight power. Instead oppose it by disbelieving in “prevailing” power, and acting as if “your side” has already won. Gandhi didn’t directly fight the British – he acted as if the people of India had already won freedom, and merely had to get the British to acknowledge it.

What if you behaved *as if* the world you want was already in existence? If you behaved as if you had your desires? Would that convince others you have them too? Instead of expending energy fighting against something stronger and unbeatable in a head to head combat, simply disengage. As Bartelby said, “I would prefer not to.” Let others be mean-spirited, vengeful, and cruel. Be vulnerable and allow yourself to be hurt. Continue to be open and truthful where others remain hidden. Our strength is in our convictions and the need to hide nothing. The worlds we are building can and will be done in the open.

4. Engage in blocking or slowing down

Blocking means you act in order to deter the authority’s progress away from his or her own goals. The dominant crumbling paradigm is about self-preservation. There is no inspirational message in it… it is simply trying to preserve the house of cards from toppling. How exhausting. As we the change agents suggest new ways of living and being, we find the most confrontational among us are usually just scared, and seeking to control everything they can. They are frightened by what we represent moreso than us ourselves. And it is fine. Let us become the total embodiment of those fears – femininity, creativity, kindness and openheartedness. When they experiment with this other modality of being, where vulnerability or weakness is shown, they will find no attack. Instead, we infuse them with the courage to change and inspire them with stories and possibility and art. In the world we want to create, no one has to lose anything — we all gain more.

I found these principles interesting, in that it’s how I feel I intuitively already operate. The book goes on with various sections about strategy, tactics, subtle weapons… I admit I’m kind of turned off by the language of the book. Even as it speak of leading from love, it feels a bit too calculated. But, the main message is that we acquire power simply by understanding the existence of love as the best strategy in war.

If we want to change anything for the better, for the benefit of all, love is the key.

I aspire to be a brilliantly disruptive princessa, to demonstrate that these new socioeconomic and cultural paradigms we’re establishing are already here, and to live them. I’ll show that we can in fact live with love in our hearts and to not abuse the vulnerabilities of others when they’re exposed. We can know our deepest truths, can align ourselves in thought word and action, and find allies and collaborators with whom this ethic resonates. And we will birth universes and bring magic into the world together. It’s already happening.

So to the dear gentleman from dinner, if you are reading this:

You’re absolutely right. You are NOT going to fuck me.

AND we both have tremendous value to offer the world and each other, and it can be done in partnership, without a contest to determine who is stronger, who will seduce the other, or who will inflict hurt or pain. I decline playing with you in the old control structures, and instead invite you to explore this side where we can respectfully engage in creating something far greater than ourselves together, and to be friends in the process.

I am a woman. I am embracing my power. The world I’m after is more of a playground than a battlefield, an aesthetic, a form of performative art. In it there is intimacy, play, exploration, freedom, creativity and innovation.

If you want to play, you know where to find me.

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image found at http://katipunan09.wordpress.com/analysis/love-and-revolution/

agency :: the capacity of an agent (a person or other entity) to act in a world

The concepts of individual and group agency are recurring themes around our virtual water cooler discussions of late. As eager change agents, edgeriders, and transitioners to a new world, we’re all more than blessed with big ideas. What many of us lack is the ability to reign in the ever expanding “cone of possibility” into a laser beam, pick a specific actionable project, and execute. Instead of implementing ideas, much time is wasted pitching them at each other, with no discernible path towards action.

How do we break through this inertia and start “getting shift done”??

Well, there are two mantras that might be appropriate here:

1. If you want to level up, ask for help.

2. Our community has within it all the resources we need.

If this is the case, then those of us who have project ideas and a true hunger for manifesting them have a pathway forward. Time for action!

So who’s bent on helping us help ourselves?

I took a quick look around and found that friend and colleague Jean Russell just launched a new initiative, The Agency, to assist us cultural creatives and innovators in bootstrapping.

Jean is a facilitator, coach and social ecosystem designer, and founder of the “thrivability” meme. (Perhaps you’ve seen her Collaborative Sketch, a curated compilation of perspectives from 70 authors on the values, qualities, cycles, and actions that comprise Thrivability. Recommended!)

I caught up with her via email interview to find out more details about The Agency, which she describes as “a vigorous accelerator to catalyze innovative people creating the emerging transition to a more thrivable world.”

Below are her thoughts on how to kickstart your agency engine, and start bringing more magic and light into the world!

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You’ve just launched The Agency. Congrats! How does it work?

I wanted to design something thrivable – an engine that uplifted people and projects to make them better. I am checking every level of activity in it to make sure it generates upward spirals for everyone involved, thus the accelerator term: an engine to create more thriving.

The Agency isn’t a one-dimensional service.

• There are elements of coaching in it.
• And, it is also about accountability – we use a “SCRUM” to say how you are meeting your goals (crucial when we are doing it for ourselves).
• It is also about barn-raising – getting a few people to pitch in, even just for 10 minutes, to get you past your biggest challenge. That might be marketing help, editing, or strategy etc… Whatever challenges you.
• Oh, and I of course do network weaving, as I can.

The Agency requires about six hours each month for an agent, but my sense is the time and energy saved are worth much more than that.

The Build program offers a structured process for getting work done through two core methods: SCRUM and Barn-Raising.

Our Incubate program offers a bespoke yet structured process for getting to what matters and getting what matters done.

For those who want a lighter taste of acceleration, our weekly email stimulates and challenges people, like a coach in your inbox.

We also explore a monthly theme to bust stuck-ness for everyone involved. March was Perspectives. April is Collaboration.

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How do I know if your program is right for me?

We are accelerating people who act on thrivable principles in very practical ways. Are you working passionately to take action that leads towards a more thrivable world? If you want to be bold and pragmatic – as we say on the site – “play for an epic win.”

Nathaniel with his Adventures in New Giving project presents a terrific example. He has decided on a project. He is fundraising for it using StartSomeGood. Collectively, we have been helping him by: reviewing his project presentation, editing his emails, keeping his energy high amid the emotional turmoil of donations (which can lift you up) and gaps to goals (which can be quite challenging).

Several agents are turning successful business towards a more new economy market, so we have been working through those challenges which are both internal (story we have about ourselves) and external (what to say to others).

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You mention you to “Coaching to activate your potential” – what does that mean?

Reduce barriers to success.

People get in their own way. I know I have. And that is something everyone has control over. At The Agency, we get people unstuck. Somewhere in the process from idea to result, people get stuck. To be innovative, we need play and divergent thinking. To implement, we need focus and discernment. And to shift from one to the other, we need solid lightweight structures carrying us from idea to action to tangible outcome. I can be a bit “outcome-focused,” as Art Brock says.

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Tell me why you’re the woman for the job of helping me help myself!

I have been stuck. I taught myself how to get unstuck. I have worked for myself for a decade. When you are a master of knotting yourself, you have to learn how to be Houdini. Whatever the resource constraints, skill needs, or decision barricades, I learned from my failures, and I can help others benefit from that hard-earned wisdom. The Agency feels like the culmination of a decade of learning how to be an effective social innovator. Unstuck. Un-knotted.

I am trained as a coach in Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). How people work totally fascinates me. I learned how to work with what you have to get what you want. As for track record, I coached social entrepreneurs on 4 continents.

Really, much of what the Agency does is a more structured version of what I have done for years: work with people to get stuff that matters done. The Agency itself was built this way. A dozen people pitched in to help me pull it together. I want to help other people be this nimble too! After hundreds of social swap sessions given with people in the thrivable network, I know how to put social capital to work in mutually supportive ways. The Thrivable network knows that already. We did it with the Thrivability Sketch in 2010. 
I know how to activate resources, leverage social networks, manage complex projects with lots of moving parts and people, navigate scope creep, and move through production process to create something that is seen and valuable to many people – all within a short time frame. The Sketch was completed in 3 months! I want to help others get those kinds of results.

For those that don’t know me, I worked for or been in a variety of start-ups, mostly in the tech/social media space over the last 5 years. Clients like Zyozy for a Pepsi project, PeopleBrowsr (Analytic.ly), Sceneverse, OsoEco, Wagn, and Guildsmiths (whose first client was the Gates Foundation). Sceneverse, for example, said:

“Jean Russell is a facilitator like none other. You simply cannot compare her services to any other group facilitator’s work. In the preparation and execution of her facilitation plan for our first corporate retreat, she made absolutely certain that the event would deliver on many levels at once. She prioritized and helped us clarify our strategic needs and key outcomes for the session. She made sure that the schedule was organized to deliver on that promise, and she held us to our own goals throughout the event – making sure that the value she promised us for the event would be the value we received.
We’ve each participated in many facilitated workshops over the years (even been paid to facilitate them ourselves on occasion), but neither of us have ever seen anyone link creative team building to organizational outcomes as deeply as Jean Russell did for us. Her workshop facilitation for us was geared towards actually doing work. She has a unique talent, and if you are looking for a facilitator who will ensure that your collaboration sessions actually help you attain your goals, look no further than Jean Russell.” ~ David de Werdt and Neil LaChapelle, Founders, Sceneverse

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Who else is on your accelerator team of getting shift done?


Everything I do involves the network of people drawn to the concept of thrivability. I love the Social Era! 

To pull together the work on this project so far, I am really grateful for: Pritha RaySircar, Todd Hoskins, Kathryn Bottrell, Herman Wagter, Christina Jordan, Bonnie Koenig, Cassie Robinson, Christelle Van Ham, Christopher Douglas, Nathaniel James, Christine Egger, Gil Friend, Jerry Michalski, and Art Brock. I can’t begin to list all of the people and conversations that got me here, but those are the most recent or significant contributors to this work. Explicitly, advisors who have signed on to help include: Nilofer Merchant, Kevin Doyle Jones, and Kevin Clark. Credits and gratitude listed here: http://agency.thrivable.net/credits-and-gratitude/

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And finally, what is the nature of this “transition” of which you speak?

20th Century models (business, citizen sector, and government) are not working. The breakdown in the economy makes most of us feel how real that is. How do we make bridges to the new era? The Agency at Thrivable is here to catalyze bridge-building. We need to make a transition. We can help each other do that.

The transition is where we use what works from the past, discard what doesn’t work, and build toward what will work better.

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Thanks to Jean for taking the time to share about her new venture. Best of luck!!

To find out more details about The Agency program, check out the FAQ and follow updates on twitter at @thrivable.

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Jean Russell, Catalyst at Agency.Thrivable.Net

Jean Russell is a facilitator and social ecosystem designer. As your guide to a thrivable world, Jean takes entrepreneurs, social innovators, and business builders on tours of network culture. She navigates clients through the crucial questions of creating and nurturing teams and networks to develop healthy, productive collaborations.

Jean’s dedication to shifting our collective awareness from sustainability (where we seek to eliminate social, financial, and environmental harm) to thrivability (where we contribute meaningfully to a deep cultivation of natural, financial and social systems) provides a rallying point for those interested in systemic change.

Demonstrating collaboration, she curated, “Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch” in 2010 with 65 inspiring people. She currently writes passionately about “Breakthroughs for a World that Works.”

With 15 years experience in writing and editing, together with the study of cultural theory and NLP, her coaching and facilitation approach focuses on the flow of communication and interpersonal dynamics. Jean leads strategy retreats and social benefit conferences, collaborating with colleagues in fields ranging from social media/networks to philanthropy, currencies, green/sustainable design, community development, and human rights.

Jean Russell co-founded Thrivable Inc and Inspired Legacies. A blogger, speaker, facilitator and mom, Jean blogs at thrivable.net and agency.thrivable.net, and tweets as @thrivable and @nurturegirl.

This bio is crowdsourced.

Resilience is often described as the ability to adapt to change.

A lot of people are talking about it these days, but what does it look like in practice?

One of my personal goals for 2012 is to increase my personal integrity by supplementing all my talking and pontificating about changing the world with the actual learning and doing to make it happen.

For me, resilience starts with the liberation of our minds – reclaiming our sovereignty over ourselves as thinking humans capable of making intelligent decisions, and expanding our capacities with conscious purpose and intention. It means dropping the narratives and mental models that have been imposed upon us or that we’ve told ourselves, if and when we realize they are not serving our highest and best selves.

From there, it’s about reconnecting with each other and building authentic relationships, forming community, and making work and learning into joy and fun.

I want to be resilient via cultural and environmental design – creating the contexts where I can be adaptive, engaged, curious, exploratory, creative and blissful. I want to enjoy these curated peak experiences with people I trust and love.

So, last week, I went on my first sausage making adventure with some friends.

This is my favorite talk I’ve given so far. No notes, no real prep… just sharing my views about the web, the co-evolution of humanity and our technologies, and where we might be taking ourselves.

“Fall Conference 2011 Introduction and Social Media and the Evolution of Consciousness, Presented on 10/15/11, Venessa Miemis
Venessa Miemis is a writer and digital ethnographer, exploring how social media is transforming communication, collaboration, and commerce in a network society. She is currently Executive Director for Contact, a participatory festival that highlights opportunities for new forms of p2p culture, governance, and collective action. Her recent projects include The Future of Facebook, a 6 part video series, and Open Foresight, a methodology for engaging experts and the public to create collaborative visions of the future together. She authors the blog, Emergent by Design.”

@ Austen Riggs Social Media Conference

This is a guest post by Bernd Nurnberger. The original on his blog – Community of practice and trust building

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A few days ago I shared my crude model how we go from words to trust. I strung it along: word, definition, context, grammar, meaning, concept, understanding, salience, insight, trust, reputation. I believe each prior step must be present and perceived by both partners in an interaction before the next step gets good traction.

Being in the people business of establishing technical trust – as I am – is an interesting combination of challenges: engineering, salesmanship, diplomacy, organization and administration, combined with awareness for the needs of future users of what we test and certify, and the needs and expectations of society.

Seeking a competitive edge in this usually means working without a model, or just making one up and test it, see what sticks and build on that. We might see whether we get closer to the goal. That matters. Insight into what’s best comes with routine, where do we have that at the edge?