Robert Paterson's Weblog

Credit Part III - Mapping Your Credit Community

How do I know my "New Credit Rating"? What do I have to do to improve it?

Let's now look at how I might map my own "Credit Community" and see if there are some rules that emerge that will show you how you might map your own.

The first thing that I see is that I don't just have one of these networks. I have several. Some overlap but some don't. In this post I am going to talk about family and show how the family connects to work. I will focus on work in the next post.

A really important Network is my Blood Family. In the centre of my family map is my marriage.

I think many of us forgot the eternal truth that the key to getting through the bumps of life is a great partner. Here is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Sounds sooo old fashioned! But lets look back at the past. Imagine you are an immigrant to America in the 1880's. You are planning to take a wagon train to the west. What kind of spouse are you looking for? Good looking. Fun. Sexy. Well those would be nice. But wouldn't you look for more? Dependable. Hard working. Self sufficient. Skilled. Imagine you are farming or run a small business. Could you cope on your own?

So it's all different today - right? The one easy way to get poor today is to get divorced. Another easy way to stay poor is for a man to remain single. A bad way to enter old age as man is to be on your own.

I think that Jane Austen was right and remains right. The single most important investment we can all make in our Family Network is the choice we make for spouse and the value that we place on that bond.

For everything reverberates out from that. Do we have kids who are prepared for life or are they not going to be able to cope? Are the kids going to be able to help you as you get old or are they always going to be kids?

Does the rest of the extended family admire your spouse or are they indifferent or worse? For when things get bad will your family want to help?

When my grandparents lost all their money - their sisters got their husbands to help. When my Dad died aged 55, my sister and I looked after her - she has been an invalid for many years.

Shit happens to us all. We can't manage on our own or with a very limited family network. Family is the Real Insurance and the Real Pension Scheme. We have to pay into this Insurance and Pension Scheme just as we pay premiums into the transactional equivalent.

To get the support that we might need, we have to contribute. You have to freely help others in the family. But what is weird about this system is that the payments are not direct exchanges. The story of our aunts helping their brother reverberates through our family. They did not get back directly. Their grandchildren will repay them. Their act created a story and it is the story of what it means to be a sibling in our family that guides us all.

My sister and I have looked after our mother for more than 25 years. We do it because it is the right thing to do - but also because this too reverberates through our family. These stories will affect how others in this family will react when they are called. The "Insurance" in our family is that you will not be abandoned. You may never have to claim, but the "Insurance" is there.

So how does this network work?

At the centre is the marriage or partnership. The power of that centre is the health of that relationship and the ongoing contribution that each makes to each other and to the marriage. It's not about what you get - it is what you give that counts. The getting is a product of the giving not the other way around.

It seems that attached to the marriage are the stories. The myths of who we are. But to have power, these myths have to be known and told. All traditional families know their stories. Meals are when they are retold. They tend to be told by the older members, so there has to be opportunities to cross the generational lines in the network.

It is clear that the key Nodes of Trust that connect the system together all all dimensions tend to be the women in the family. Though I have a male cousin who is a massive affiliater. It tends to be the women who do the day to day work of keeping the connections tight. They call, they write, they invite. They remember birthdays and anniversaries. They organize the celebrations.

So if you are a man and have no woman that is loved and trusted by the group, you will find yourself moved to the periphery. The serious matriarchs gain power over time and move to the centre and take their man with them. This is even true in the most patriarchal families. The power lines move to the matriarch.

Piss of the matriarchs and you lose.

What other than the women act as connectors? In our family, we set up opportunities for the young cousins of each generation to spend a lot of time with each other. We spend a lot of our money to do this. We have found that connecting our children across the branches of the family is one of the best investments we make.

The ideal time is summer but sometimes it is Christmas. For many generations, the cousins have become all but siblings as a result. There are two network benefits. There is great love and trust across a wide part of the network and again the habit of repeating this process for the next generation. It means that not only are the kids connected across the same generation but that they also know their aunts and uncles almost as well as their parents. The bonds work up and across.

Now we come to where the work piece starts to affect the family piece. I got my first job because my uncle got me an interview. In the real world folks it is always who you know. He could spend his political capital because he knew I would die rather than let him down and so did Jack Cole at Wood Gundy.

I came back to Canada leaving my immediate family behind in the UK. I was embraced by my extended family. It was my great aunt, the one who lent my grandfather the money, who was my real estate agent. My granny furnished my place, I had her late husband, my maternal grandfathers bed.

I was introduced all around town. I had the full force of this huge family behind me.

Today my nephew has made the same journey to Canada. He is staying at my son's place. He too is being shown the ropes in Montreal. The story continues. The payback is not direct. It is enfolded in the story - so all in the family can call upon the story to support them. The bonds work up and across.

So what if you don't have such a family? Here Dickens comes to the rescue.

For all the experimentation, of course, Dickens's novels eventually wind their way back to some kind of nuclear family. And with this "rightful" restoring of the family unit comes another restoration, this one financial.

Dickens had the kind of family that took energy from you. In his life and in his novels, we see his answer. If you don't have the kind of Blood Family that can support you, create a "Heart Family" of your own. Look out for the people who can and will establish these same bonds with you without the ties of blood. Create your Tribe. For there is no secure life lived in isolation.

So how do so many of us live today? Has what I have been saying seem normal or weird?

I am saddened by how we have fallen for giving up on family - family as a tribe not mum and dad.

So in our pursuit of "freedom" we become slaves who rely on the state, our health plan, our investments, our line of credit, our pension. None of these things are in our control!

In reality, we have swapped the family for institutions! We have then become so busy in getting the money for the transactions that don't know how important relationships are. We have become incapable of knowing how to be in family so that it can support us.

Well my dear readers. In the next few years, we are going to relearn a lot of things we have forgotten. None of the institutions that we have given our allegiance too will be worth anything. You and I will find our way home or we will perish.

Next - Our Work Community and then how your organization can map its community

 

Credit Part II - How you will get credit and resources in the time ahead - The Natural Credit System

Thanks to Ross Mayfield for this model that looks like the work also of Valdis Krebs.

In this post I am going to do my best to show you what the observed reality of this "Credit" system is, make the case that social software will be a wonderful tool that will enable us to use this natural system and finally to make the point that we may have no choice but to try this because, the other source of "Credit" will not the available.

In my first post on Credit - I made the point that "Credit" is an ancient process where resources are leveraged not by a direct exchange of money (I lend directly to you and you owe me directly) but by a social process whereby my contribution to the community (which becomes my reputation and my character) allows me access to the wider resources of the group.

In the ancient system, the exchange is indirect. I contribute to an individual and this gives me an option of being helped by the larger group. If another doesn't not know me well, my close friends stand surety for me. Leverage in this system is the "Six degrees of Separation".

This system was the basis of all credit systems until quite recently. Even banking itself relied more on the lender's knowledge of the borrower. 40 years ago, your banker lived in your community. He (was always a man then) knew you and of you not by a credit rating agency but by his own use of the social model shown above. Your banker's work was to put himself at the centre of this social system. This was true even in the heady realms of Government Finance. The Fugger Bank had lifetime reps at the courts of all the rulers.

But post WWII, this idea of banking being based on relationships died away. It died because, we got to busy to have relationships. Many don't even manage to have them with their partners or worse their kids!

Something "Inhuman" happened. We replaced community and relationships which is our real wealth with money and things that are only symbols. The more we strove for money and things, the more we lost our connections and hence access to real wealth and real resources. We substituted transactions for relationships. Maybe later I will explore why this happened but not today.

The crisis of our time is going to take us back. There will be little transactional credit available. So if you need resources, you are going to have to put yourself back into the traditional resource model. You are going to have to find a community and you are going to have to do the work to establish yourself as a worthy person or group in that community.

The good news is that those of us that have been immigrants in the live web have paved the way.

This ancient system is being re-created in the Blogosphere and the Twittersphere. So here we see the old system at work. Need technical help as I did the other day when my Typepad site died - ask from my Twitter friends - within minutes I was connected to Mena Trott, the founder of Twitter. Need places to stay and guides for a trip, Jon asked his community in Europe and Ton his community in Canada.

Here is a simpler way of seeing this Resource Map. It is really a solar system or a galaxy. The natural system of organizing power. Hurricanes have the same structure.

This is how I see the elements.

I think at the centre in the human system is an idea and or a great binding inviting mission. Some thing that calls to the hearts on humans. In St Louis where we are working at KETC on the Mortgage Crisis it is the idea that if the city gets together we can help each other get through this. On PEI, it will be how we can help each other get through our energy crisis. Embedded into this Mission or Call, is a very small group who host. In Wikipedia it is 7 people. The research is telling us that tiny resources, the 1% Rule, are all that is required to initiate such a system.

Along the circular boundaries of the system, each mediated to enable the six degrees of separation and each having its own fractal system (for as in the universe itself - each one of us is at the centre of our own universe) energy flows aback and forth via the connectors.

Here is how Col David Kilcullen sees terror groups.

The work we all have to do now is to chart this out for ourselves. Each of us has such a world. Each organization has such a world. By charting it out, we will start to see what we have to do and who we have to know to bring back the power of this system to help us.

More later