The Mission is heart-breakingly hard. Not only will we face powerful enemies but also huge inertia. While confronting all this opposition, the way forward is also not known in detail.
Maybe most challenging of all will be to forge a Fellowship that contains enough Mindset diversity but enough commonality to provide the courage and the capability to get to the end.
When I say "Diversity" I don't mean the shallow idea that prevails in society today about the color of our skin or whether we are male or female but the deeper diversity that is found inside us all - our mindsets and culture.
In LOTR, the main characters are not really Elves, Dwarves, Men or Hobitts but archetypes of personality or mindset types that are common in the real world of people. To do this work all have to be able to work together but still keep our unique perspective. The "Harmony" that Chet shows us in the slide above. The Wisdom of Crowds is not found in Group Think. James Surowiecki lists what he feels are the key criteria for wisdom where a smart group has to be subject to:
- Diversity of opinion
- Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence
- People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization
- People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation
- Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
So knowing that we have to find a way of doing this - how can we actually pull this challenge off?
Stuart Baker showed us how.
I can only give you a surface impression of his talk - that seems very simple but has the power to deepen indefinitely. I urge you to see the video when it is available - this too only gives you a snapshot. Better still speak directly to him.
Here is an overview of the "Map" of the traditional main types of Mindset that most humans fit into
The largest group are "Nurturers" - seen on the bottom left. You will find these people in Non Profits, in Health Care Delivery (Not surgery!) Teaching etc. On the bottom right you see the "Providers" - these are people who have to make and do things that provide wealth. Business, especially entrepreneurs lives here. Both groups have also a "Dark" side. Both can be seen as the traditional roles of the two sexes. But neither are in reality gender based. Men can be Nurturers. Women can be fierce Providers.
At the apex of the diagram, are Pioneers. These are people who are on the Quest all the time. ideas and the new are what interest them. They can be unworldly - I live here and become more like a nutty professor all the time. There are few of these - but they are essential.
It is clear that these archetypes have little to say to each other. It is also clear that an ideal society would find ways to link them and to balance them. It may be clear to you, it is to me, that we are currently very unbalanced - that our society has shifted decisively to the Dark Side of the Provider - where all is merely a transaction and all is about money.
So let's go a bit deeper and see how the system can be balanced. Let's start to explore the connective process that has the power to offer up Fellowship.
Here we can start to see the complexity in Stuart's map. Of course it is Fractal! Any natural design has to be.
Each Archetype embodies an interior copy of the whole.
To make the Fellowship work, you have to have connectors in each area that are similar. So Providers have Pioneers who can link up to the lower level of Pioneer in the Pioneer realm. They can Translate. Rory Francis is a Pioneer Provider and he can easily connect to me up in the Pioneer Nurturer realm. Without him - I can never get anything done. My wife Robin is a Nurturer/Provider - we connect in the Nurturer realm. I fail to connect on my own to Provider/Providers and to Nurturer/Nurturers. I need bridges to do that.
In the video, Stuart will offer you more detail on the characteristics/Values of each realm and you will see the top layer of the Social/Mindset world we actually live in.
But how do we make this into an organizational reality? How can we use these ideas and make them world at Scale?
I am going to go into a lot of detail in the next commentary when I talk to you about Rory Francis' work with the PEI Bio Alliance.
But in summary note two further elements in this view. At the centre is the "Governance System". Like all "systems" this has both a nucleus and a boundary.
Both are critical to make this into a viable living system - like a cell.
The boundary has to be porous but must also shield the system from attack. Think of it like your skin. It contains "Trusted Space". Trusted Space is the ideal environment that will support a being to develop to its design potential.
This Trusted Space is defended, as is your body, by an immune or defense system. In societal terms, this would be the "Military". In the small social world this would be the ideal parental unit.
In the case of the Bio Alliance, this is the Bio Alliance Inc. A 3 person unit run by Rory that defends, promotes, encourages, links etc. It is by design a small unit because unlike a head office of a typical machine organization, it does not take power to its own self. It minimizes the ego. No Jack Welch here!
Like the best parents, the leaders in the Trusted Space, are selfless. The more they can suppress their own ego the better. Like the hero in armed conflict, who is prepared to give their all for their society.
So the paradox of the Facilitator of Trusted Space is this. The role is Nurturer. They Nurture their society. But in this role, like the Lioness, they are also warriors.
At the heart of this natural system is of course the nucleus - the governance system. Like Visa International, this has to be truly representative of the members. All the varied interests have to be reprtesented. Dee Hock calls this a Chaord. A "the corporation whose product is coordination"!
I will say more shortly when we talk directly to Rory's work and later to Amy Shaw's at KETC.
But the big idea in summary is this.
If our world is indeed interconnected and tightly coupled - like a network - then our core organizational framework has to reflect that reality.
Currently the heart of our problems is this. That for the last 200 years, we have strengthened a Newtonian Machine like idea of reality and have expressed this in its ultimate form - the modern corporation. This organizational framework - like Mordor or the Matrix - has taken most of us over without us even knowing that we have been subsumed. Even those who lead such organizations do not notice. After all it is our perceived reality.
It was Henry Ford's genius in 1905 to express this idea of the machine upon social organization that has lead to the vast gains in productivity that we have enjoyed. But this model has a price...
Victory and the restoration of a more human and humane and more connected social world - depends on taking the organizational ideas of Hock and Stuart and making them the new normal.
The terrible shocks to the Newtonian Economy that we are currently living through give us the chance of pulling this off - for in this new model lies enormous new productivity.
The power of this emergent model is that it offers the full value of the "WHOLE". In the Ford model, the "way" is directed by a small group or even an individual at the top. In the Chaord, the organization is "Facilitated" to grow to its potential.
Stuart has added a significant insight that has allowed the Early Adopters to pull this off. In the next two commentaries, I will show you not only how this can be done but also - maybe more imprtantly - that the results are showing.
