Collective Intelligence
Simon says: Start with Why!
16 months ago
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” - Simon Sinek
Yesterday I shared a cup of coffee with my friend Tim Soerens as we discussed how there are too few people who have found their Calling, and how we might change that.
Tim turned me on to this guy Simon Sinek who wrote a book called “Start with Why.” He created a visualization called the Golden Circle.
The Golden Circle
His idea is very simple: great leaders are able to inspire successful teams and movements because they emphasize the purpose behind their vision. Exceptional leaders don’t tell us WHAT to do or even HOW to do it, they provide the motivating reason WHY.
Lead Yourself.
I would add that this is true for individuals as well; for each of us to lead ourselves into excellence, we must have a clear and loud sense of purpose: our CALLING. As more and more individuals get clearer and clearer on their Calling, they can Find The Others and create organizations that surpass the mediocre status quo because they are founded on human passion.
“The Why” Will Save Us.
Sinek insists that, “The very survival of the human race depends on our ability to surround ourselves with people who believe what we believe.” I think he is saying that to build the wildly innovative and effective teams, organizations and communities required to tackle the epic challenges of our day, we need to be driven by an emotionally potent sense of why.
Why should we create a better world?
Is the sustainability/social justice/whathaveyou movement just motivated by the result, -the what- of a sustainable future filled with wind turbines and organic farms? Do we need a deeper sense of why that future should be built?
Company as Monastery: The Strategic Advantage of Employee Actualization
17 months ago
What if Employee Personal Development was the primary objective of a team, organization or community?
This inquiry is still a fresh, raw topic for me. This will be my overarching question for the next year, so look out for weekly blog posts for the next three months as I do more research and noodling on the topic. You can follow this series with the tag co.purpose
Image credit: www.zenspotmbs.com
The Gist
Nurture the Soil and the Plants will Take Care of Themselves
All too often, companies are life-sucking rather than life-giving to their employees. Our economy is based on wealth-extraction rather than wealth-generation and a history of treating people as an expendable resource rather than a core asset through which to grow new value.
The Thesis
By supporting the personal growth, artistic mastery and self-actualization of its employees as the primary mission, a company can achieve strategic advantages and increased performance in all areas of a quadruple-bottom-line. The mechanism would be that employee actualization would lead to higher motivation, more creativity, better communication and more elegant self-organization.
A New Vector for Infinity
Infinity is an important design pattern for any system, so as we build the next economy, we must ask, “Toward what infinity are we heading?” What variable will we maximize?
My opinion: let’s change the direction from money to love.
Our economy is running up against the limits to growth, and unfortunately the structure of the economy is dependent on infinite financial growth. Since money, as currently designed, is debt – I don’t really want to grow that infinitely. It makes more sense to grow something that is capable of infinite expansion: love and consciousness.
Really dude? A love-based economy? Are we going to be chanting on boardroom tables now?
Bare with me here. By love, I mean re-connection. An awareness of interconnectedness. The capacity of a system to understand itself and be auto-transformative, self-changing. A good business needs to be keenly aware of its own nature, its own strengths and weaknesses, and the context in which it operates. A good business needs to be able to change itself. This is innovation at the level of the GOAL of the system, in the language of systems thinking.
Employee Personal Development Yields Better Self-Organization
People who know what their strengths and weaknesses are can self-select into the most appropriate roles and tasks for a given situation. With passions clarified and unlocked, people will have personal incentive to find the most appropriate way to contribute: work will be fun for them!
What does personal development mean for you? How might work deepen our sense of purpose, and help us grow as people?
Flow Currencies
311 months ago
“Flow” is a state of immersive, effortless concentration.
How might we create currencies that help us live our lives in flow?
If you you have Spotify open, feel free to play this hand-selected track while you enjoy this post.
A few posts back, I posed the idea of lifestyle design currencies.
I’d like to zoom in on that a bit, and expand on one variable: flow.
The Jedi Resides in Permanent Flow.
This notion was first researched by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who was curious about expansive states reported by artists and scientists. While in flow we are more productive and creative, enjoying the moment as we give our full selves to the activity at hand.
I want more flow in my life!
How might we create currencies that help us live our lives in such a way that we are tapped into the flow throughout the day? Currencies are perfect tools, because they help us shape and enable flows of all sorts- flows of value, energy, material and information. Currencies are all about dynamic, coherent movement.
Before we start brainstorming Flow Currencies, let’s learn a bit more about the nature of the flow state.
I’ve designed this nifty poster for the basics:
You get the picture. You’ve probably experienced flow while dancing, playing music or doing yoga, but it is also possible to tap into a flow when you’re writing, brainstorming, coding, doing math, or cleaning the bathroom.
How Currencies Can Help.
1. Game Design
Currencies can act like code to program the rules for a game– setting up boundaries, routing feedback loops and regulating control. Games are inherently fun to play, and we can use the principles of game design to organize our grown-up work and transform it into a playful experience. Imagine if, instead of writing a boring to-do list each morning, you crafted a little game through which you could achieve your goals.
2. Rich Feedback
When we lack immediate feedback, we are prone to begin speculating or worrying which can lead to inaction because we don’t know whether our last action was successful and if we should continue down that route.
Imagine if every hour a little chime went off, reminding you to take a stretch break and asking you how clear you are about what you’re trying to do. As the day progressed you could see a chart of your performance, noticing when you got off-kilter and when you were dialed in.
3. Exterminate Borebom
Flow is the opposite of boredom. When we match high challenge with high skill, we fall into flow. The trick is to understand where your mastery lies, and what challenges you.
I’m not sure what it would look like, but imagine a currency that mapped you onto this chart in real time, helping you see if you need to turn up the challenge or do something at which you’re more skillful.
4. Keep it Simple
Clear goals, boundaries and contexts help us let go of a feeling of overwhelm and plug in to the task at hand. Perhaps as part of a game design, I could imagine Flow Currencies that require us to state the variables up front, state clear boundaries and time limits, and focus on incremental small successes.
5. Effortless Collaboration
This is where things could get really interesting. One of the challenges of collaboration is that we all work in different ways. So if we had currencies that made these human factors visible, we could gel into winning teams faster. What if a whole organization was structured to maximize the time spent in flow by its employees? What if projects were managed with the knowledge of how individuals on the team best concentrate and communicate, and was designed as a collaborative game? Imagine how productive this business would be if its employees were highly engaged and focused all day, working at a high level of skill on super challenging tasks?
Flow currencies will help companies outperform their peers
by having more fun.
They will help communities create more art in the streets.
They will help you be a rockstar.
The Shape of the Universe
01 year ago
Last night I watched a program called “How the Universe Works” that tells the story of astronomy and astrophysics, and what we know about the universe at large. Galaxies form into clusters and superclusters, and these superclusters form into tendril-like networks reminiscent of a neural network or mycelium. Is the universe gods brain?
Worth noting, it is actually dark matter that provides the extra gravity needed to hold galaxies, clusters and the network of clusters together. And it is dark matter that gives it shape. Is dark matter the programming language of the universe?
The arrangement of galactic superclusters
Fungal mycelium
Brain neurons
Sovereignty in the age of Social Media
01 year ago
Great little video from Gabriel Shalom. My favorite quote, “Its not about what Europe and Northa America getting together to figure out what to do about China. Its about the people under 40 getting together to figure out what to do about the people over 55.”
