Here’ an important message to our leaders and decision makers:
Assume that your truths and beliefs are an Illusion.
.
Consider how our brain works …
Watch what happens to your belief system as you stare at this image.
1-Follow the moving pink dot: What do you see?
2-Look at the middle black cross. Now what do you see?
3-Now star for a few seconds at the black cross. What happens?
This should be proof enough that we don’t always see what we think we see.
If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, the dots will remain only one color, pink. However if you stare at the black ” +” in the centre, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black ” + ” in the centre of the picture. After a short period, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see only a single green dot rotating. It’s amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot , and the pink ones really don’t disappear.
This short video gives me that spinal shiver we humans get when ‘awe’ is present. When’s the last time you’ve felt it? What moves you? What draws on your desire to be in life? Who are you not to stand up to what is your own momentum into amazing, incredible, awesome!
How does one go about building social innovation and creating social capital?
Creating more grounded transformative work is done by formulating a collective research process that builds shared capacity. If done well, an emerging social system moves itself (self adaptive) into momentous collaborative action.
CREATING SOCIAL INNOVATION – RESEARCH STAGES
Asking powerful questions within dynamic interactive feedback loops is key to establishing a foundation for the collective to stand on. Some general advice about how to do social research is as follows:
Inquiry: Starting everyone of my questions with ‘open ended’ question words including the 6 ‘W’s: WHY is it this way, WHAT is it exactly, (w)HOW does it work, WHO is involved, WHEN is it enacted, WHERE does it reside or show up. In this way, your research will expand from isolated assumptions into broader understandings and improve data outcomes.
Clustering: The next step is reducing the content you have found by clustering or mapping common synergistic principles or concepts into groupings.This can often be found by creating keyword maps and phrase streams that appear and link across your data.
Synthesizing: The last stage is integrating your results into something meaningful and valued. This happens by testing some of your new gathered insights “with others”. In other words ‘meaningfulness’ is key to a social movement and thereby social action, and this can only occur through interaction and feedback.
These are my 3 stages for developing new insight and interpretation for social innovation. They are based in the understanding of collaborative learning and design.
Next you will need to put your research to the test; not just proving whether it is true or not, but also (and even more important), using your synthesized research to enable social action – a community of practice.
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING – TURNING INFORMATION INTO SOCIAL ACTION
A more challenging but (in my view) more fun part of development, is enabling your research into a ‘social performance’ process for creating social capital and social innovation. This is done through 3 phases as follows (note ‘phases’ are different than ‘stages’):
Imagine a new way of thinking regarding what government is …
Rather than government being the provider of fixes, it instead becomes a convener of stakeholders, thereby allowing ‘we the people’ to generate our own solutions, which is how a real democracy should be. This shifts our systemfrom a STATIC governMENT institution into a DYNAMIC ‘governANCE’ system. We go from rigid structure to flowing process. The governing body becomes a manager (or governor) of the ecology of interactions that happen by the people. Collaboration then, becomes the vehicle that acts as the governor, as it enables the flow of action and change.In this way, collaboration and governance become synonymous.
Watch this youtube on collaboration as government …
We no longer have to wait for government to get on board to see a change we want. Instead the governing body builds an infrastructure that allows connection and decision-making to happen. Decisions are no longer made by government. Instead they are made by us (we the people) and government merely create the tools and processes (many now will be via the internet) that allow everyone to have more access to both the learning and decision-making process. This becomes a healthier form of control.
The relationship between Principle, Practice, and Policy
Click for relationship to sustainability
Rather than government directing and making the decisions, it instead becomes an enabler or ‘governor’, as it was meant to be, by acting as policy makers, but with a different understanding of the meaning of ‘policy’. Government monitors rather than polices collaboration outcomes that publicly occur through induced design. Government evolves along with the society by being inter-twined within the overall feedback system. They become watchers of the difference between consciously derived guiding principles and the actually applied experiences and practices that occur within a community of practice.
The diagram shows a model of how the interaction between PRINCIPLES, PRACTICES, and POLICIES can help to build a healthy collaboration system. It suggests that an over-focus on any one of these three can not sustain the system, as it must have flow and movement in balance or the system gets clogged or breaks down. Each of the 3 P’s must act interdependently with the other two.
The policy box represents a more evolved government, or in other words, the convener of a dialog between principle, which is generated out of desire, need, vision, and design possibility. Policy is the way to keep healthy FEEDBACK going between the Principle and Practice boxes, in the same way a governing valve acts on a physical pipe – too much or too little puts the system into instability. There has to be balanced flow of energy, materials, ideas, etc. Note that the people inside government (policy) do not make decisions, which is incorrectly being done today. Rather they merely adjust the flow of information and choices that are being made. They do not alter the information or choice-making themselves. Rather, they create and maintain the channels to be ‘flow’ happens in a balanced way. This is a truer term for the term ‘policing’, which comes from policy, and allows for collaboration processes to INFORM the system as a collective. This is a self-generating behavior and occurs via the interactions between the engagement of the people involved within each of the principle, practice, and policy domains.
See THIS LINK for more on Principle Practice Policy configuration.
So, YES … Collaboration “IS” the New Government.
My considerations here are meant to be a starting point for an expanded dialog for considering how to evolve our present republic system into a truer form of democracy, or something beyond that can hold life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness FOR ALL, not just for a few.