Click Here To Join The Changing Normal Meetup Group.
WHAT IS CHANGING NORMAL?
Rappoport addresses the idea of what NORMAL is in his articles. He speaks to each individual having the ability to create realities, and how our essential creative nature for doing this is being suppressed. [Caution: His writings are not for minds whose belief systems are easily threatened!]
WHAT IS A CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY?
The work of “Changing Normal” is founded on the dream of a new mythology arising. One that is globally aware, and speaks to the magnificence of our individual and collective manifesting potential.
Each person’s true Identity can get suppressed by an unconsciously arising shared belief system. This is when myth takes on negative connotations. However, once an individual awakens to the myth-making method, each holds the power to become creators of grand new worlds. This can not be done until one’s ego is transformed to align with both personal and shared realities.
A cultural mythology arises when individual messages inform group thought (mind), expressed through metaphorical (emotion), and transferred through a collectively connected medium (body). This is how our shared reality is created, controlled, and sustained.
WHOLE SYSTEM COMMUNITIES THROUGH MYTHIC DESIGN
Culture change happens as a conscious co-creative emergent process. Below I describe my vision for an online community that I am creating called ‘Changing Normal’. A collaborative process for designing and developing a more livable and sustainable future using an open flexible framework called ‘community domains’ (see slides below), providing a comprehensive approach for building real-life communities designed with the whole system in mind. Participants will be invited to use the changing normal environment to share their talents, unique creativity, and passion with others. The long term goal is to transfer each person’s creativity into real-life formations and healthier more sustainable communities worldwide.
Linking Cultural Misfits with Changing Normal
Additional considerations under way to discuss how the (so-called) crazed “Cultural Misfit” plays a role in transforming an insane world that is requesting healing and transformation.
TOOLS & FRAMEWORKS FOR CHANGING NORMAL
Click once on the moving pages below to stop pages from changing. Click links on pages to access more details.
Click once on the moving pages above to stop pages from changing. Click links on pages to access more details.
YOUTUBE VIDEOS Uploaded on Apr 10, 2009
CN 040909 Part One
CN 040909 Part Two
CN 040909 Part Three
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social innovation, collaborative design, design ecology
The three ‘V’s – victor, victim, villain. If you are human being, you can’t escape it. We all wear their cloaks at times in our lives. You are more dependent on these three V’s than you probably know.
Our ways of thinking shape our world. Whether we know it or not, the way we formulate our ideas do control how we see the world and how we make choices.
Consider for a moment how our inter-actions and choices emerge through them. How might these 3V’s show up as part of ongoing issues within your workplace and home-life? Most, if not all, of our decisions and actions emerge through the interactions underlying this ‘3V’ culture-making archetype.
Consider This …
Applying quantum physics to human behavior
Villain (Evil Bad Guy)
All models have rotation or spin. Thus each subject within a model becomes one of the others. The victor-victim-villain archetypal interaction has (like all models) a dynamic movement that moves each subject into becoming one of the others. In this case, the victor becomes the victim, the victim becomes the villain, and the villain becomes the victor. Have you ever noticed how this happens in your favorite movies? How the good-guy and bad-guy overlay each other’s light and dark sides? Batman and IronMan are two good examples that present this interplay. Have you also noticed, at least in our Western society, that there is often more attention placed on – not the hero, but on the villain? Because of this, the villain ends up being the real hero. This is the archetypal rotation in action. The policeman-assailant-assaulted scenario is another example how each person in the triad play an unconscious role in keeping this cultural engine running.
Awareness Shifts
Now then, in a (w)holistic view, do we need to allow the time it takes for each one of us to become the other? If so, this is a conscious act, is it not? Otherwise each of us (too often) get unconsciously caught migrating from one identity to another, and then fall back again, creating a polarized oscillation. Bouncing back and forth to and from the identity we had for ourselves previously. Instead of moving through one and into the next identity within this triad configuration, we stuck in one of them, and movement stops.
An Open Conclusion
Psychology, archetypes, and the dynamics of change
Victim (Suppressed Person)
What might be another model that could work better than the one we are unconsciously using today?
If we could become aware myth-makers, maybe we could design something different for a relational dynamic model? We have become the result of it designing us, rather than consciously using the model to create a collective intelligence that supersedes the interplay within the subjects of victor, victim, and villain.
What if we had an archetype for this dynamic? An archetype of archetypes? Would this allow humanity’s failing displays of destructive expression to be able to move downstream into other realms of possible life, form, awareness, and consciousness?
I’m writing a book on ‘cultural misfits’, and it’s just coming to my mind that this may be its charter – to transmute “objective isolated acts” (static) into “subjective interdependent actions” (dynamic). How we think about models – their influence on our beliefs, choices, and actions – may give us a way to begin consciously creating our way of life, rather than be unconsciously run by them.
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A new insight …
The Hidden Healer is ‘Vulnerability’
After watching this TED presentation I realized that the center of this complex, codependent triad, is the hidden healer to the turmoil created by the 3V interactions. It is VULNERABILITY. Watch the below well done presentation, which based on research, and you will see what I mean.
And what does this all have to do with COLLABORATION, INNOVATION, and CHANGE?
To become vulnerable, it means by default that you are connected to others. This simple yet profound point is unlike what most organizations teach. Instead they remove the irritating grit quickly to get to the strategic gems. Known as being ‘efficient’, it is a false premise and ends up not being effective at all, and certainly is not sustainable. In fact, when the grit is removed, it is a rare case where the innovation is not removed along with it. Turbulence, conflict, disagreement are healthy, but have to be placed within the context of our humanity, not our productivity.
More on this later, but it is very clear to me now that the gooey, yucky, sticky, muddy stuff that is created when each member of the organization or team consciously chooses to become vulnerable with each other, the whole game changes. Thus, this 4th V (vulnerability) is a baseline for healthy and effective collaboration and design.
Here’s the part that stops the show for most and they run away: At the core of our shells is vulnerability, which consists of those uncomfortable feelings we have when feeling exposed. And what binds the core together is the festering seed of SHAME.
Brené Brown: Listening to shame; Being vulnerable
As an experiment … I will be continuing my work on this post, so stay tuned.
Here is a framework that can help you to hold powerful conversations.
A way of revealing individual value from community values. Inside this crystal is a movement of energy that defines the health of a community and the individuals that make it. It’s “V” formation shapes the alchemical vessel of community, allowing for the transformation of personal meaning and collective identity.
There so many efforts, articles, and statistics that address both sides of the recycling equation, such as this article on recycling and the water bottle industry.
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To my point however, the nonlinear increase in production of things like plastic bottles, far excedes the ability to recycle them, due to lack of creating economic constraints to buy the recycled stuff back.
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Additionally, most recycled plastics do not get returned to the front end of the industries for its re-use, such as water bottles as they describe in the article.
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My mission is to get people and cities and nations thinking beyond end-of-use recycling to FULL CYCLE, or cradle to cradle, integrated design solutions relating to the making and use of a product. This is the ONLY way we are going to get ourselves out of the mess we’ve made.
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This effort means designing ‘whole-system’ solutions that include efforts which enforce companies who make a product to bring it back into their product-making processes. Be it a bottle or a cell phone, etc, all products are to be returned to the factory where they were made for incorporation back into new product production streams.
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Until then, I stand that recycling can never catch up to production, and is a false promise in our attempt to ‘save the environment’, let alone ourselves. Especially within a world where the population growth, and thereby ever increasing product demand, have gone non-linear.
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* See my metabolic closed-loop system diagram to stimulate your ideas on how to create a (w)holistic recycling system. This is the model that needs to become the standard for sustainable corporate product design and development.
No matter what we do – from guiding our child’s evening prayer, to the way we prepare our food, to how we hire and fire people at work, to how we say hello on our iphone, to celebrating our nations leaders, to ringing the bell on wall street, to starting an act of war. It’s all loaded with ritual.
Ritual is what defines our lives. The blending of these rituals becomes the tight weave that make up a society’s mythology. Myth, a cloth made of ritual threads, drives all of our actions and decisions, done mostly without knowing it. So for me, it’s less about bringing ritual into our technical lives, as much as becoming more conscious of them.
We have forgotten rituals’ place, their vital power in manifesting our world, thus making their practices irreverent. Bringing back the Sacred into our daily walk and talk, becoming observers of how we ritualize, and transforming the ones that no longer serve us. This I believe, is the most important thing we humans can do to transform our world.
Collaborative design with no boxes holding us in!? … Awesome!
Facilitation Across Time and Space: How to Create Change Through Virtual Environments.
Unconferences provide a newer form of creative freedom that empowers participants into defining their own creative paths. Satisfying individual needs by allowing ‘them’ to be the authors, presenters, and facilitators.
By sharing knowledge across previously impassable boundaries, unconferencing holds the potential to be the primary way that SOCIAL INNOVATION will be formulated. I’ll be writing more about unconferences; even holding a few myself. Come join in!
