John Renesch: Exploring the Better Future

What If Stephen Stills Had It Right?

Folk-rock legend Stephen Stills wrote and recorded a 1970s single entitled “Love the one you’re with” which went on to be recorded by many artists over the years. The thought conveyed in this popular song was, to paraphrase, if you can’t be with the one you love then love the one you are with.

Stephen Stills, songwriter, folk-rock legend, member, Crosby, Stills & Nash

It seems this message could be applied to all of humanity today, not just for a lover. Following the same common sense logic Stills expresses in his song, if we are all living on this Earth and there is no place else to go, why not love the ones who share our Spaceship Earth with us rather than squabbling, persecuting or hating them?

This planet Earth which we call home is getting smaller and smaller as we grow in population, communications speeds up and travel time continues to shrink. We possess the ability to destroy people half way around the world in an instant as we sit on fuses that could bring about humankind’s extinction. What if we simply loved the ones we’re with?

What would it cost us? Our egos? Our pride? Our righteousness? Our airs of superiority?

And what would we gain? Security? Serenity? Fellowship? Community? Additional friends?

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me!

Standing for an Adult Society

In my latest book – The Great Growing Up - I attempt to make a case for the urgent need for our species to grow into full adulthood, to voluntarily evolve, and to cease our adolescent indulgences that are creating such havoc in the world. Ceasing this immature behavior involves recognizing it, pointing it out and saying enough! Let us stop legitimizing this behavior and insist on adult responses to our challenges as a species. Remaining silent is to condone it. Worse yet, remaining silent gives it legitimacy!

My recent interest in Vaclav Havel’s work and, specifically, his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” has revealed this pearl of wisdom (amongst many others):

    You have to begin with the imperative that you’re responsible for the whole world. And if young     people take that kind of position, there’s a lot of hope. In fact, it is the only hope there is.

This “position,” as Havel calls it, is the ultimate adult stand for humankind’s future – each of us needs to be responsible for “the whole world.”

The good news here is it won’t be necessary for everyone in the world to grow up. But it will take a critical mass to shift the culture so that adolescent behavior is frowned upon, where it is not only unfashionable but socially unacceptable. This requires taking a firm stand for something that is wanted, nay demanded, not a position against something that is unwanted.

Changes of this scale have occurred in our lifetimes so we know we can do it, if we have the collective will to do it.

Women’s right to vote, civil rights, and the environmental movement are all outcomes of mental models that have undergone large scale cultural shifts in the past century here in the U.S.  More recently we’ve seen this in the mass demonstrations against tyranny and oppression in the. Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement.

In closing, I quote Lynne Twist who writes about the distinction between a stand and a position:

    Taking a position does not create an environment of inclusiveness and tolerance; instead, it creates     even greater levels of entrenchment, often by insisting that for me to be right, you must be wrong.

    Taking a stand does not preclude you from taking a position. One needs to take a position from time     to time to get things done or to make a point. But when a stand is taken it inspires everyone. It     elevates the quality of the dialogue and engenders integrity, alignment, and deep trust.

When you find yourself in the midst of it, speak out against silly “acting outs” by politicians, the media you consume and any other places where you observe it. You may have to muster up some courage and risk some criticism but I guarantee you will feel better.


[To see my editorial on Havel – “The Myth of Powerlessness” - from my March newsletter click here]

Evolutionary Architects Wanted

The other day, I had a most unusual conversation with long time friend and colleague Bill Veltrop and a more recent colleague Max Shkud. Max has joined Bill in an extraordinary visionary endeavor – forming a guild of “evolutionary architects” that will bring about what they describe as a “societal metamorphosis, an irreversible transformation of our organizing forms, a shift in beliefs and culture unlike anything seen in our short history as a species.” This is how they show it in a diagram:

[Note: the hot links included in the text below will take you to the website where Bill and Max have embedded definitions of these terms. To return to this blog simply back up on your browser.]

Bill and Max assert that a metamorphosis of our social systems can become as natural for us as it is in nature. They further assert that the emergence of the Information Age within the last half century has set the stage for this “Age of Conscious Evolution.” They envision that we humans will design our social systems to serve the well-being of all life — for all time! This requires a rethinking of our social architecture or what they are calling “evolutionary architecture.”

I had been aware of the phrase “social architects” as people who design and redesign social systems but I had not heard the term evolutionary architect until Bill and Max invited me into the conversation. 

Here is their definition of an evolutionary architect:

        ….a social architect who:
        1.    Is committed to free humanity from the tyranny of unconscious social design — to make the         shift from “mechanistic” to “generative design principles.”
        2.    Sees humans and their social systems as having the potential to consciously evolve to         ever-higher levels of well-being — and is committed to that quest.
        3.    Strives to achieve the same level of design excellence for our social forms as is present         throughout the rest of nature.
        4.    Is concerned with the interplay of whole ecosystems — natural, social, economic, etc., in the         service of maximizing the contribution of these systems to the well-being of all life — for all time.
        5.    Is committed to master the emerging field of generative design as it applies to all systems at         all levels of system.

        While an individual evolutionary architect can have a powerful influence, we see the “evolutionary         architect” needing to take the form of a unique kind of community — generative action-learning         organism.

This community or “organism” they talk about is one they envision as a guild - a community of allies who help grow generative alliances with pioneering leaders, providers and organizational entities “who are ready and able to step up to this great evolutionary challenge and opportunity.” The name of this community is Global Guild of Evolutionary Architects (or “GlobalGEA” for short).

Who will be these allies, these leaders and providers, these organizations who will step up? They will be visionaries – able to see the real possibility of bringing this kind of future about. They will be entrepreneurs – able to launch this initiative, take it from vision to reality. They will be system thinkers who can see the relational dynamics amongst and between everything and everyone. They will be critical thinkers - very skilled at how they think. They will be talented – very skilled in what they do and how they do it. They will be transformational thinkers – familiar with taking huge leaps in worldviews, frame changing, and comfortable in the midst of paradigm shifts. And they will be collaborators – people who can be part of generative alliances, leaving their egos at the door. Instead of asking “what’s in it for me?” these people will ask “what’s in it for the world?”

Make no mistake here: while this is a huge undertaking it simply means we must work together. A societal metamorphosis on this scale, an irreversible transformation of our social systems, a paradigm shift in our collective beliefs and cultural norms unlike anything seen in human history is beyond the ability of one person or one organization. But, together we can do it.

If you or anyone you know could be a candidate, as an ally, leader, service provider or organizational partner in this global metamorphosis, check out www.GlobalGEA.net and immerse yourself in the content. Dive deep – don’t stay in the shadows. When you feel you have integrated the scope and vision there, you will be directed to the initiative’s Offer, Request and Promise, then to contact Bill or Max. 

They Have It Upside Down: We the People Get the Short Stick

 
Scene from “Network”

When we elect politicians, we expect them to serve their constituents – “we the people” - first and foremost. It is the basis for a modern democracy, that “we the people” are represented by those we elect, those who ask us to trust them.

Given the predominately two-party system we have in place in this democracy, we might expect our elected representatives to remain loyal to the platform on which they ran their campaign, regardless of their party. After all, they can assume their electors are likely members of the same party and that the platform or the promises made to the voters are important to them.

It is natural, we suppose, that once elected, these people who represent us may wish to get re-elected and remain in office. So their second priority might be to get re-elected next time an election rolls around. Thus their constituency becomes the people and corporations who pay for their campaigns to get re-elected.

But our present day politicians seem to have these priorities upside down!

Their first loyalty is to get themselves re-elected, raising money so they can buy votes. Their party loyalty comes next and, finally, last on the list, is serving the people who elected them in the first place.

There is no wonder why gridlock is so pervasive in our politics today given these upside down priorities. We are paying politicians to work for us and all they give us is gridlock and excuses, blaming the other party for their failures. Their first loyalty is to themselves and to the lobbyists and their clients who finance their campaigns. This assures their reelection. Their second loyalty is to their party, which shows up so conspicuously when they stand united in their explanations for their failures to govern. Finally, the last priority in the queue, is “we the people” – the ones whose interests they solemnly swear to represent  – but only after they have achieved their first two priorities.

The Occupy Movement is evidence that many people are “mad as hell and don’t want to take this anymore” as was so powerfully portrayed in the movie “Network” (see six minute video clip). Maybe our politicians will respond, get their priorities straight and start serving the people they claim to represent.

Paradise on Earth: Why Not?

   As regular readers of this blog know, I rarely feature the work of others here as I usually have something to say myself. But in late December, a colleague published a video on YouTube about a project he has been working on for 35 years. He calls it “Mission: Paradise”.  I think it is worth it to postpone one more stand on my soapbox. First a few words about the creator/architect of this vision.

His name is Jim Channon, a genius and a visionary in my view. Jim was an officer in the U.S. Army and founded the “First Earth Battalion.” I first met Jim when I was Managing Director and a Founding Trustee of the World Business Academy (WBA) in 1990. He lives in Hawaii where he facilitated a retreat for the WBA in 1991. He also contributed to my first anthology – New Traditions in Business: Spirit and Leadership in the 21st Century.

Jim’s powerful vision for the future reminds me of another colleague’s idea for a transformed humanity, Martin Rutte, who talks and writes about “Heaven on Earth”. Of course both these visions are aligned with the one I put forth in my new book – The Great Growing Up – which I call the “New Great Dream.“ But you can’t beat video for a compelling presentation!

I suggest you watch the first 15 minutes of Jim’s presentation. The last 10 minutes you can watch at your leisure but plan on the first 15 as a minimum.

Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GsUKSBqYhg4

Watch this with an open mind and notice any cynicism that may rear its head from time to time. Notice also that Jim has been having this conversation with thousands of pragmatic people in the world , including corporate leaders, political and military leaders, and knows his way around these communities. Of course these conversations are private as most high-profile people won’t want to acknowledge these exchanges publicly. 

As always, I’d appreciate any feedback you’d like to share here after you watch the video.

Occupy This! Taking On Oppression No Matter What It Is Called

Typically we think of dictators as power hungry people, usually men, like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi. Sometimes they were once popular rulers but became more and more corrupted by the power like perhaps Egypt’s Mubarak and many others past and present. 

But do dictatorships need to be flesh and bone human beings? Can an oppressive autocracy be created by a power-hungry system that dominates and operates similarly to a Kaddafi or a Hussein? I think so.

Let’s take three classes in one of these oppressive systems, as a simplified breakdown of the primary actors. Let’s call them the Elites, on top of the pyramid, the Enforcers in the middle row and the Exploited at the bottom, carrying the weight of the two levels above (see cheerleaders pyramid below).

The Elites are the privileged, the group who continues to gain wealth and power by making sure the system continues to function for their convenience, occasionally slanting the playing field even more to their advantage. They aren’t prone to giving up any of their advantage and often become insensitive to their excesses.

The Enforcers make sure the system is maintained and do the bidding of the Elite. They enjoy some power but just enough to remain loyal to the Elites.

The Exploited are the majority who have the least power, wealth and influence.

The Arab Spring movement has been fueled by growing injustices as seen by the Exploited (the masses) and even some of the Enforcers (military and police). The movement has been led by many educated professionals who are willing to risk physical harm to take their stand against oppression. In so doing, some of the Enforcers have been sympathetic, finding it difficult to harm fellow citizens with whom they empathize. 

Now let’s look at the United States and the Occupy Movement. Obviously masses of people are feeling exploited and oppressed, giving rise to Occupy. Let us look at the similarities.

Many Americans are feeling oppressed by the economic system and powerless in making any change happen to improve things. They feel exploited even though they may not have a personal dictator to point to as the identified oppressor. Fear, financially insecurity, and gridlocked political leaders acting like teenage brats incapable of doing anything to rectify the situation make matters worse.  The status quo is oppressive. By most definitions the common people are the Exploited.

The Enforcers in the U.S. are similar to the Enforcers in the Arab world. They consist of the courts, the prison system, local, state and national governments, the military and police. They keep the Exploited in line by maintaining order and squelching disorder. When the Elite see their hold on power threatened, they will subdue and suppress. In this regard, the Elite reactions to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement are somewhat similar.

The U.S. Elite are not despots living in sumptuous palaces with harems and surrounded by personal militias. But they live in extravagance, often have flamboyant personalities and flaunt their wealth and power and maintain their power base. They may not imprison or execute anyone whom they see as a threat to them, but there are similarities!

The ruling Elite in the U.S. is largely hiding behind very powerful and wealthy corporations. They purchase political favor much like people bribe officials in other countries. And now the courts have removed all restrictions on them to purchase even more political power, which has helped to paralyze  our legislators who sit in “special interest gridlock.”

To use an old expression, we have put the foxes in charge of the hen house. The changes that are desperately needed in our systems will not be made by the people who are currently benefiting from those systems.  Campaign finance reform, tax reform or election reform will never come about unless some force outside the existing system takes responsibility for making reforms happen. The foxes are very happy with the status quo! Why would they change something that benefits them so much? They may put on a good show at trying to change things but there is no incentive to actually lessen their perks as things stand. The status quo is good for them!

Perhaps it is time for a new constitutional convention where “we the people” take back our country much like the courageous Arab people are attempting to do. If we can oust our corporatocractic dictators we will face similar challenges as those in the Middle East and North Africa. Once you succeed in ousting the source of oppression, a system that has been in place for a couple of generations that has maintained stability, even though oppressive, things can get unstable pretty fast. Recreating a true democracy from the tenets of a constitution can be challenging and not for the faint of heart. It is a task for the stand-takers, the collaborators who put the well being of all ahead of any special interest or ideology they hold privately.  Our founders had the chutzpah and made it happen - so can we. However, we have to don the cloaks of our colonist founders and summon that historic degree of personal responsibility to make the new system work as our founders envisioned, not as it has devolved after centuries of special interest skewing.

Do we have the moxie, the chutzpah, the spiritual courage to pull it off? Do we possess the ability to recreate a system that serves the people instead of the privileged few? Do we have the will to stop energizing the existing system in all its dysfunction and work together to form “a more perfect union”? I think we do.

*******
[My editorial in this month’s issue of my free newsletter is titled “The Human Species Grows Up:
Transcending Our Adolescent Stuckness” (see link here)]

Occupy Movement in the U.S. Predicted Last April

The other day a reader reminded me that my April blog from earlier this year – what has now been named “the Arab Spring” - predicted the Occupy Movement here in the U.S. With that in mind, here it is again:

April 1, 2011

Growing Income Gap Could Spark Our Own Tahrir Square

Watching the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo several weeks back followed by the storming of the Wisconsin state capitol building by crowds upset over the prospects of being disenfranchised here in the U.S., I wondered when there might be pro-democracy  demonstrations popping up all over the United States. After all, one of the major factors of the leaderless demonstrations in the Arab world is the oppressive economic disparities between rich and poor. As can be seen from the graph below, the gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the rest of us continues to widen. Eventually this gap will reach a breaking point. No society can sustain this rising disparity before the other 99% figures out the system is rigged against them.

 
John Perkins, former “economic hit man” who has inside experience of the power of corporate appetites, calls this result “corporatocracy.” Wikipedia defines corporatocracy, in part, as a governing system where “corporations, to a significant extent ‘own’ or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies, etc).”

In many respects, corporatocracy causes this growing disparity. By its nature it continues to drive economic wealth to the rich while leaving the lower and middle classes pretty much stagnated. This becomes especially notable when you adjust for inflation. Some argue that 99% of us are actually worse off now, in terms of spendable income, than we were thirty years ago!

As I was drafting this article, the popular CBS News TV show “60 Minutes” featured a shocking story which included, in part:
    American families have been falling out of the middle class in record numbers….One of the     consequences of the recession that you don't hear a lot about is the record number of children     descending into poverty….it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25     percent. (see entire report here)

Here’s a TED talk by Wael Ghonim, which was recorded last month at TED 2011. Ghonim is the Google executive who helped jumpstart Egypt's democratic revolution. He tells the inside story of everyday Egyptians showing that "the power of the people is stronger than the people in power." When enough people get fed up enough being victims of unfairness they will stand up for themselves.

Remember the parable of the boiled frog? Like the slowly-boiled frog we can get sleepy, then become unconscious and eventually die if the process is slow and gradual enough. The temperature rises so gradually that we acclimatize to the heat without triggering our life-threatening -danger responses. The disappearing middle class and the lower classes have been lulled into near-oblivion over the past thirty years as the gap continues to widen between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert opined a few days ago, “There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.”

Where is that tipping point for organizing our own Tahrir Square vigil? Like the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain who have been willing to risk their lives for liberty, perhaps Americans can emulate what the protestors in Cairo bravely declared on television, “This isn’t fair!” and “We want our country back.”

Fortunately we are not frogs. We possess consciousness which, when awakened, allows us to make dramatic changes in our responses to situations. A dear friend recently reminded me of a pertinent quote to share here. It comes from Scottish psychiatrist, Ronald Laing: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

 

NOTE: My December 2011 newsletter features an editorial titled “Bad People or Bad Systems? A Crisis of Social Conscience.” To read it click here.

Having Larger Conversations: Beyond Meaningful to Transcendent

Have you ever wondered if the debate, discussion and general conversations that occupy our collective consciousness most of the time – climate change, population growth, terrorism, sustainability, etc. – are all essentially “small talk” when it comes to what’s really important? Have you had a nagging feeling that these issues – as serious as they are – are simply symptoms of some larger crisis?

To put it into popular colloquialism, are we all passengers on the Titanic arguing over the deck chairs? 

Each one of these crises is the result of human behavior driven by an immature consciousness  - a consciousness that once was sufficient for us but we have now outgrown. The consciousness that created all these problems has been either uncaring or lacking in awareness of the long -term impact we will have on future generations. This consciousness is adolescent and, like modern day teenagers, we often pretend to be mature.

And like most unchecked adolescent behavior there are consequences, often showing up as surprises to the unaware or uncaring. The crises we face today are the consequences we didn’t think about before. It is time to grow up, clean up our messes and start having “the larger conversations” about consciously evolving to a level of collective maturity that is capable of generating a sustainable, just and fulfilling human presence on this planet.

It isn’t just about solving problems, although many problems still need to be solved. It’s about generating a future we can bring into being consciously – a future we actually want for our descendants instead of a default future that will devolve from the wreckage of our past actions and inactions.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, once said that the best way to predict the future was to create it. So let’s create it!

But how? you may ask.

That’s a fair question but does it come from a place of hopelessness, powerlessness and victimhood? Does the future occur to you as unchangeable, set on a course of degeneration? Or does it seem to you as something to be created – on a course of generation and renewal?

Larger conversations require people who see real possibility for a better future – not incrementally improved but one generated from an entirely different worldview or paradigm. They see a possibility even if they don’t see exactly how to bring it about. They have a deep intuitive knowing that the reality in which we all find ourselves is not the ultimate destiny for human beings. They know something very different is within our grasp if we can shift our consciousness from one that generates scarcity, hyper-consumption and fear to a consciousness grounded in connection, sufficiency and caring for all.

Those of us who are engaging in the larger conversations - who see possibility where others may not, who feel hope rather than despair, interconnectedness instead of separation and isolation - are risking being seen as “the crazy ones.” Cynics may see us as a bunch Pollyannas, idealists just wasting everyone’s  time. They once tried idealism and really got burned. So they pulled the blanket of cynicism over their heads and swore never again to dream, to aspire for higher ideals. They are hardly going to be attracted to these larger conversations any time soon.

But those of us in the larger conversations can evoke possibility for a world we dream of, a reality based on what we want, not on the past. Future-based language will replace past-based thinking and the language which follows.

Would you like to be part of one of these larger conversations? The cost of entry is low – simply a willingness to see a world that works for everyone, a world that is environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling for al human beings. Conversations of this kind are going on all over the world, maybe not in the mainstream, but they do exist. They begin whenever two or more people are willing to engage in such unfettered explorations. They are going on in small coffee houses, retreat centers, people’s homes and certainly on the Internet.

Are you engaged in one of these larger conversations? If not, locate one and introduce yourself. You may be surprised by the welcome you receive! Once you are engaged in the exploration set aside all the reasons your “rational” mind might dismiss as pure folly. Tell your mind to leave you be, with strong emphasis if necessary. Disengage the egoic rationale that tells you such a conversation is a waste of time. Instead, allow yourself to dream without restraint about what is truly possible for an awakened human society having transcended the crises and circumstances we are facing today.

What better conversation is worth having at this time?

Too Many Causes; Too Little Bandwidth: The Challenge of the Progressives

  Last week I was reminded as to why some political ideologies gather more traction than others, when they seemingly have less support amongst the population. This has puzzled me for many years.

Allow me to admit that I am a fiscal conservative, more liberal when it comes to providing a safety net for the disadvantaged, an advocate for small but effective government, pro-government regulation on matters where the public well-being is at stake (such as the FAA, infrastructure and parks) and pro-entrepreneur having been one since I was 18. I have voted for numerous Republicans but probably more Democrats in my lifetime and backed Ross Perot out of frustration back in 1992.

At present, I don’t feel much loyalty to either of the two main political parties here in the U.S.  I was excited when Obama replaced Bush in 2008 but have since witnessed the greatest dysfunction in both parties, to the point of feeling significant embarrassment for my government.

This leaves me as somewhat of an objective observer of Washington without any strong loyalty. In this context I offer the following opinion.

It is safe to say that I have more Liberal friends than Conservative, quite largely due to living in San Francisco, which like many coastal cities is a largely-Liberal community.

One of the frustrations I hear from my Liberal friends is their inability to strategize and implement changes like Conservatives do. It appears that a few Conservatives can focus on issues they feel strongly about and make lots of progress politically in a short time, as has the recent Tea Party movement in the U.S. which was unheard of a couple of years ago.

My Liberal friends care passionately about a whole range of social ills and they want to see them all fixed. They are puzzled by their Democratic leaders’ inability to compete with Republicans who, in their opinion, have less to do with social good and more to do with ideology.

The Right seems to be able to rally massive support for a few issues and maintain consistent talking points amongst its spokespersons, even to the point of exposing themselves to ridicule by the satirists who compare them to robots or playback machines. They pick their issues, gather support for those issues amongst their leadership and orchestrate consistent narratives around those issues. They are laser focused on what they have chosen as their primary issues.

The Left, by contrast, seems to have no end of issues they care about. This leaves them with many leaders of various causes attempting to rally support for a wide-ranging myriad of issues – from climate change to rainforest protection, from human rights to poverty prevention, from campaign reform to closing tax loopholes. As a result, the Left’s agenda is scattered and diffused, sometimes confusing to those who observe the clear focus of the Right.

Is this a matter of strategy then? Or is it culture? Perhaps it is both.

From a strategy perspective, the Left and Right certainly employ very different means to bring about the change they are seeking. From an effectiveness point-of-view, the Right seems better at getting their issues on the table, presenting a more united front and bringing them to the fore of the public narrative. There is significantly more alignment amongst their politicians on these issues, as if there’s been “a meeting of the minds” about each issue. Even the same catch phrases are used by their advocates.

How long has this distinction been obvious? My earliest memory of U.S. politics was watching the Republican Convention in 1952 when Eisenhower was nominated. Reagan was the first President in my memory to focus on just a few major issues and champion them consistently, rallying his constituency around those same views and issues. “Reaganomics” still lives loudly despite the thirty years that have passed since he took office. Some might say it live louder now than it did in the 1980s when he introduced Art Laffer’s version of supply-side economics.

Not only was Reagan successful in implanting this economic philosophy into Americana, it has become embedded in the Right’s many arguments for lower taxes, smaller government and less regulation. This ideology manages to remain strong and compelling for many despite glaring evidence that tax cuts do not necessarily create jobs nor are they good for the economy at large. The Bush tax cuts, extended by the Obama Administration, and the present state of employment and the economy should be ample evidence that this cause–effect relationship is mythical. Nonetheless, the idea retains a fervent championing by the Right who have been successful in taking any increase in revenue or taxes off the table even in these times of historic budget crises.

So what does all this mean? For me, the lesson is that focus and unification on a few key issues gains public support more effectively than trying to promote many issues no matter how compelling they may be.  The latter engenders “cause fatigue” where people feel somewhat overwhelmed by so many issues they should care about. 

What does all this mean to you? Let me hear from any of you with thoughts to share, comments to make.  Whether Liberal or Conservative, I welcome your responses. Even you cynics who may feel like reengaging, your comments are most welcome.

New Book Finally Here! The Great Growing Up Debuts in October

 
Next month is the officially launch month for my new book – The Great Growing Up: Being Responsible for Humanity’s Future.  While my 14^th book, this one feels like my magnum opus – “my baby” – but then I suppose every new book is like a newborn child to an author. I have certainly heard this before from experienced authors.

The Great Growing Up is about an urgent collective choice: to opt for responsible adulthood over the largely adolescent ways we have been relating to one another and our planet Earth. I have tried to demonstrate that it is not too late to create the future we all say we want for our children and our children's children--a future that is environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just.  It is about a change of thinking that supports a paradigm shift-from adolescent self-centeredness to adult responsibility for all life forms.

I call for any readers who are willing to genuinely "grow up” to make this necessary choice. Ever-increasing numbers of individuals today are already seeking self-actualization, growing in consciousness, and willing to take on leadership roles in bringing about the first conscious evolution of our species. This represents a somewhat invisible global movement of historic proportions. The Great Growing Up invites anyone concerned with humanity's future to participate in this new thinking. The work of growing up is about a change of mind; we simply need to begin acting like mature adults.

The book has been blessed with much advance praise from many of my peers and mentors. In the near future I will have a website for the book, which will include these endorsements as well as a blog where I can exchange notes with readers. I shall look forward to connecting with many of you there.

You can advance purchase the book from Amazon.com as well as Barnes & Noble at substantial discounts.

Third Thursdays Call Series: New Choice for American Voters

The other day I got an email from a friend forwarding New York Times columnist Tom Freidman’s syndicated column in a local newspaper, the Press Democrat, published in Santa Rosa, just north of me in California. The title of the article was “Make way for America's radical center.”

This was the first time I had heard of Americans Elect which is “the first-ever open nominating process.” According to their website, “We're using the Internet to give every single voter—Democrat, Republican or independent—the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012. The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates. And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state.”

Apparently, two out of three Americans say they would like another choice in our elections.  According to Timothy Garton Ash in the UK’s The Guardian, “American politics have become so hopeless that I begin to be hopeful…. In a CNN poll, 77% of Americans say elected officials in Washington have behaved like ‘spoiled children’ in the crisis over the debt ceiling; 84% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.” In what seemed to be an appropriate follow-on from last month’s blog subject of my Third Thursday conference calls, here’s what I discovered.

Apparently motivated by the shameful game of “chicken” that was played out in Washington in the last days of July and early August, Freidman admits to signing a pledge, as I have done since reading his column. He writes about “a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket” that will be elected by an Internet convention and will emerge next year. He writes, “I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but an impressive group of frustrated Democrats, Republicans and Independents, called Americans Elect, is really serious, and they have thought out this process well.” As of this writing, over 1.7 million of us have signed this pledge.

In late July, Americans Elect reported they were “submitting a record 1.6 million signatures to gain access to the Californian ballot in 2012….this is the largest number of signatures ever collected in California for any one initiative. More importantly, the signatures were gathered in all 58 counties, making this a truly state-wide effort.”

As Freidman writes, this initiative may “take a presidential nominating process now monopolized by the Republican and Democratic parties, which are beholden to their special interests, and blow it wide open — guaranteeing that a credible third choice, nominated independently, will not only be on the ballot in every state but be able to take part in every presidential debate and challenge both parties from the middle…”

This initiative is not quite new governing system we have envisioned in the Third Thursday phone calls, but it does offer some hope that the old system might be salvageable. If so, our political leaders could be liberated from special interests and extreme ideas – radical left or right.

Third Thursday Explorations: Hospicing Our Decrepit, Dysfunctional and Obsolete Organizations

Last Summer, I started hosting a special conference call each month in conjunction with the Heartland Network, a social network hosted by the same people who host the Thought Leader Gatherings in Minnesota and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The intended purpose of this call was to explore with colleagues around the world how it would be to stop investing in the social institutions on which we depend for governance, regionally and internationally.  By “investing” we mean the emotional capital and the high hopes we embrace for changes we may make, such as bringing in new leaders, funding dysfunctional systems, spending time in debate or conversing about better candidates and planning reforms.

Our existing institutions may have served us well in the past but it seems that their time may be over given how dysfunctional, in some cases, even harmful, they have become. If their time is over and the time has arrived for them to retire, let us treat them as we do our dying – hospice with respect and compassion – honoring their service. Simultaneously, let us midwife what wants to be born, the yet-to-be-revealed  replacement organizations to serve our 21st Century globalized, diverse adult society.

Every third Thursday, unless I’m traveling, I host an open conference call to explore alternative systems and structures that might be more deserving of our energies - our hopes and our dreams for change which most of our existing institutions are squandering. The calls are open to anyone who wishes to engage in such an exploration. I ask people to email me at john@renesch.com to reserve a space. Once I know who will be on the call, I send prospective callers the call-in information. The calls take place for one hour, on the third Thursday of each month at 10 AM Pacific time.

Here’s an interview I did with a local cable show on this subject:

Link to TV show

The next call is August 18th. Let me know if you’d like to join it.

The New Responsibility Revolution

Those of us who are veterans of the human potential movement in the 1970s may well remember one of the popular mantras of the day urging us to “be willing to be totally responsible for creating our reality.” Remember that?

If I look around today and scan the horizon for who are amongst the most socially responsible people in the world, I’d be hard pressed to find anyone putting “more skin in the game” than the people who are risking their lives each day standing for democracy.  These people – most notably those in the Middle East and North Africa - not only include those who are demonstrating in the squares and circles, marching peacefully against totalitarianism, and showing their faces to the cameras publicly, they also include the many ex-patriots who could afford to flee their countries who are now returning to their homelands to be part of this pro-democracy revolution. They know they are at risk doing what they are doing and they are doing it anyway. They are standing on their values and willing to risk their lives in their stand.

Who would have thought we could find so many models for the courage of responsibility we are seeing in our media today? People from Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan are serving as models for leadership from the rank and file.

Map of Northern Africa and Middle East: Revolutions       Civil war       Sustained civil disorder and governmental changes       Protests and governmental changes       Major protests       Minor protests       Map source: Wikipedia

 

The paradigm of leadership is changing. We are shifting from a paradigm of a leader in an elevated position of authority with a following, a parental model you might say, to an emerging paradigm of universal responsibility – we are all responsible! Stated more poetically perhaps – It is time to stop looking for leaders “out there” and start looking leadership within ourselves. Said another way, it is time to stop looking outside and start looking inside.

This is the revolution we wrote and talked about years ago – no charismatic leaders, no Churchill’s or Roosevelt’s leading the charge. Just ordinary people willing to say, “No – that’s enough. We aren’t going to take this anymore.”

The Arab Spring is a collective stand by our fellow brothers and sisters putting their lives on the line, reminiscent of a collective stand taken over 230 years ago here in North America.

The founders of these United States of America were willing to pay a price to stand for freedom and liberty in the 1776 version of a pro–democracy movement. It might be worth a brief review of what it cost them to fully appreciate what risk really means. This summary is courtesy of Rush Limbaugh (you can read his entire essay – “The Americans Who Lost Everything” here):

    Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the     war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons     or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were, at one time or     another, the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes     completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his     pledged word. Their honor and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.

Now that’s putting your butt on the line. That’s putting your money where your mouth is. That’s putting skin in the game!

 

Who Are We and What Do We Want?

[Excerpted from Chapter One (“The New Great Dream”) of John’s forthcoming book, The Great Growing Up: Being Responsible for Humanity’s Future] 

  Some years back, before voicemail, a friend of mine recorded a memorable message on his answering machine. As I recall, it went something like this: “Hi, this is Gary. At the sound of the beep please tell me who you are and what you want. If you think these are trivial questions, be reminded most of us have been trying to figure this out all our lives.”

These kinds of questions have been the focus of philosophers, mystics, clergy and teachers of all varieties. Anyone who has embarked upon some level of self examination, personal development, vision quest, or other inner exploration has most likely ventured into this inquiry as well.
 
When Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Smith stepped onto the moon in 1971 and proclaimed, “…there’s a fundamental truth to our nature; man must explore,” he was affirming a deep-seated need of human beings. Once we have satisfied our basicl needs like food, sex, shelter, relationship and safety, we human beings are compelled to explore the unknown. We have wondered about everything, searched the Earth, are still exploring space (the macro) and the world of subatomic particles (the micro). Wherever there is a frontier, a horizon beyond which we cannot see, humans need to check it out. Indeed, we must explore!

We have made huge technological advances in recent years. We have gained vast wisdom from sages throughout the ages. Yet some of us wonder why we haven’t achieved the peaceful and secure existence here on Earth that we claim to want. Who are we and what do we really want?

In the past century we have seen breakthroughs of all kinds that allow us to create the kind of world we want for ourselves. So it isn’t a matter of the conditions being right. We have the wherewithal.

The cynic’s cry, “It will always be the way it has been.” This a disillusioned perspective, resigned to the present reality being as good as it gets. This is hardly the song of an adventurous human eager to explore the unknown, setting out on the quest for what lies over the horizon. The cynic has lost the spirit of adventure, spirit of exploration and, perhaps, the spirit of being human.

Let us re-engage that inner explorer in us and leave space to NASA and other outer space experts. Let us leave the oceans to the people already engaged in those explorations and leave the study of subatomic particles to the world’s scientists. With all these people and organizations fully engaged in their adventures into these uncharted territories, there are still at least five billion of us who could start exploring who we are and what we want.

We have everything we need to pull it off. The first step is to choose. We must decide that the promise of humanity is important enough to stand for it . . . and stand tall for it with all our might. Then we may get closer to answering the question of who we are and start acting more consistently with what we want.

 

Are We Nuts, Hypocrites or Just Plain Scared?

The title of this blog series is “Exploring the Better Future.” In this post I would like to explore why people fail to do what we know would be best for all of us.

Each of us is completely unique. Even twins are different. So why do we try so hard to be the same as everyone else and conform to some standard we made up?

We yearn for love and companionship yet hold ourselves back when it comes to expressing our affections and emotions with people we care about.

So many of us complain, publicly or inwardly, about the very same things we enable and empower through our silence or apathy.

We say we want relief from the hectic, stress-filled lifestyle yet we are quick to fill in each empty moment with something, maintaining the very busy-ness we claim to detest.

Many of us say we want community, yet we avoid contact with people as they walk by or avoid talking to anyone we don’t know. We choose to communicate through technology rather than in-person.

We claim to want people to be authentic and real yet do our part in protecting our sacred images of ourselves, withholding our vulnerabilities and private secrets.

Look at all the ways we say one thing yet do another, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unconsciously. This is co-opting ourselves, forcing ourselves into lives of wheel-spinning double-mindedness and energy-sapping inner-conflictedness.

Why do we do this? Are we so afraid of being who we are, so afraid of living the lives we say we want to live?

Could it be we trust more in our mind and all its manufactured opinions and beliefs than we do in our heartfelt values and deeper yearnings? Could it be we have allowed our minds, our egoistic “thought machines,” to become the slave masters of our lives while subjugating our hearts to the prisoner life of unrequited happiness?

How about breaking the chains we have placed on our own hearts and demoting our minds from master to servant?  How do we do that? It just might be a time to turn things over to a Higher Power, a power greater than ourselves - call it Nature, Providence (as the founders of the U.S. did), or God, however we might imagine that God to be.

And it always helps to get unreasonable. My favorite quote in this regard comes from George Bernard Shaw, adapted to modern language: “The reasonable person adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

Growing Income Gap Could Spark Our Own Tahrir Square

Watching the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo several weeks back followed by the storming of the Wisconsin state capitol building by crowds upset over the prospects of being disenfranchised here in the U.S., I wondered when there might be pro-democracy  demonstrations popping up all over the United States. After all, one of the major factors of the leaderless demonstrations in the Arab world is the oppressive economic disparities between rich and poor. As can be seen from the graph below, the gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the rest of us continues to widen. Eventually this gap will reach a breaking point. No society can sustain this rising disparity before the other 99% figures out the system is rigged against them.

John Perkins, former “economic hit man” who has inside experience of the power of corporate appetites, calls this result “corporatocracy.” Wikipedia defines corporatocracy, in part, as a governing system where “corporations, to a significant extent ‘own’ or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies, etc).”

In many respects, corporatocracy causes this growing disparity. By its nature it continues to drive economic wealth to the rich while leaving the lower and middle classes pretty much stagnated. This becomes especially notable when you adjust for inflation. Some argue that 99% of us are actually worse off now, in terms of spendable income, than we were thirty years ago!

As I was drafting this article, “60 Minutes” featured a shocking story which included, in part:
American families have been falling out of the middle class in record numbers….One of the consequences of the recession that you don't hear a lot about is the record number of children descending into poverty….it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. (see entire report here)

Here’s a TED talk by Wael Ghonim, which was recorded last month at TED 2011. Ghonim is the Google executive who helped jumpstart Egypt's democratic revolution. He tells the inside story of everyday Egyptians showing that "the power of the people is stronger than the people in power." When enough people get fed up enough being victims of unfairness they will stand up for themselves.
Remember the parable of the boiled frog? Like the slowly-boiled frog we can get sleepy, then become unconscious and eventually die if the process is slow and gradual enough. The temperature rises so gradually that we acclimatize to the heat without triggering our life-threatening -danger responses. The disappearing middle class and the lower classes have been lulled into near-oblivion over the past thirty years as the gap continues to widen between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert opined a few days ago, “There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.” [For the full column click here.]

Where is that tipping point for organizing our own Tahrir Square vigil? Like the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain who have been willing to risk their lives for liberty, perhaps Americans can emulate what the protestors in Cairo bravely declared on television, “This isn’t fair!” and “We want our country back.”

Fortunately we are not frogs. We possess consciousness which, when awakened, allows us to make dramatic changes in our responses to situations. A dear friend recently reminded me of a pertinent quote to share here. It comes from Scottish psychiatrist, Ronald Laing: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

Consciousness and Our Culture

  In her book The Watchman’s Rattle*, Rebecca Costa writes about what she calls “supermemes” that drive our culture. She identifies the third of these supermemes as “counterfeit correlation,” explaining that we have begun to substitute correlation for causation. We have started leaping to conclusions in the sea of complexity of our daily lives and giving false cause to matters we are unable to explain rationally. In addressing correlation she gives the following example:

    The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

    The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

    The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

    The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British     or Americans.

    The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than     the British or Americans.

    Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. It is obvious that speaking English is what kills you!

Costa uses this ridiculous example to masterfully demonstrate how complexity has caused us to lower our standards for proof. She writes, “Casually observing a relationship – any relationship - between two events is magnitudes easier than the grueling effort required to prove one thing actually causes another to occur.” She goes on to say that as the world grows more complex and it becomes more difficult to resolve the true causes of our problems, lowering our standards is a “natural response.”

I’m reminded of Einstein’s warning from a half century ago - that we cannot solve our problems with the same consciousness with which we created them. We need to be more aware that we can shift our consciousness, become more aware, and look at things from a different frame of reference.  Our simplistic thinking will continue to yield the kinds of adaptive behaviors we are seeing - tragic attempts to explain what we don’t know, to substitute beliefs for facts.

When you consider that the two telltale signs of a pending civilization collapse are gridlock and substituting beliefs for facts – Costa’s major point in the book – it appears we are well on our way toward that predictable end. What will change things? Heeding Einstein’s warning and shifting our consciousness will enable us to transcend the puzzling complexities that currently confound us. Not only will this avoid collapse but it could give birth to a world that works for everyone.


*The Watchman’s Rattle, Rebecca D. Costa, Vanguard Press, 2010

Consciousness and the Future: A Matter of Conscious Choosing

There’s a parable told in various versions that goes something like this: A Native American elder describes his own inner struggles to a young boy. He says, “There are two dogs inside me. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean and evil dog constantly fights the good dog.” The boy then asks him which dog usually wins. He answers, “The one I feed the most.”

Like the beautiful photograph below which I can hold either right side up or upside down, I can put my attention on the good thoughts or the bad, the positive or the negative. It is my choice.

        photo by Rosario Sapienza

I have found this simple parable incredibly valuable as I work to maintain a positive attitude for the future, not only my own but the future of humanity. While a bit of a maverick, I do call myself a futurist and have written and spoken about the future for many years. The future of humanity is probably not at the forefront of most people’s consciousness but, since it is the focus of my work, it almost always is mine.

While I occasionally get a bit down or despairing about the future of humankind - and the trends can be pretty discouraging - I consider this an occupational hazard. These times are when I must focus on the “good dog” inside me and look for the positive that is bringing us to a tipping point – not to a worse future but to a better one.

Another battle that goes on within me sometimes is whether to repair or transform existing systems and institutions or to move on and consider what new structures would better serve the conscious evolution of our species. We often make dysfunctional institutions stronger and more resistant by trying to change them. Putting our energies into those efforts may be counterproductive. In other words, there frequently comes a point when the more we try to improve them the worse they get! What a downer to contemplate!

One of my heroes is R. Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller who writes, “You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

By feeding the “good dog” inside me I am able to focus more on the positive vision I have for our future – what I stand FOR – rather than focusing on all the negativity confronting us and being AGAINST that.

Measuring Consciousness

"Our ordinary waking consciousness....is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness."  - William James

   It occurred to me the other day while I was in a discussion about consciousness that people mean different things when they use this word. In a spiritual discussion, people usually mean the degree someone is aware of their interconnection to the cosmos, God, and humanity. What about professional athletes who are totally in tune with their bodies, possessing extraordinary awareness of their physical presence? Or the person who possesses exceptional psychic abilities but is rather amoral when it comes to ethics?

How can we consider someone truly conscious when they may have exceptional awareness about one aspect of life – say in the spiritual domain – but are almost devoid of consciousness when it comes to some other part of their life, say their physical health? How do we rate someone’s consciousness when they possess uncanny awareness and presence in the domain of nature, for example, but are completely oblivious of any relationship beyond the material/physical plane?

Since we are all human and each of us possesses different strengths and weaknesses, or different degrees of awareness in different areas of our lives, how do we assess consciousness of the whole person?

I have been writing about conscious leadership for a decade or more now. My work has been focused on observing the consciousness of leaders – their skills and awareness, their mastery of their actions as well as their dominion of ethics, their commitment to responsibility for the whole and their continuous willingness to question their assumptions and choices. But is the conscious leader who has mastered one domain still regarded as conscious in the many other domains of his or her life?

We have all heard of highly-evolved spiritual teachers who have scandalized sex lives or other behaviors unbefitting a conscious icon in our society.

Is one’s consciousness a cumulative assessment of the various facets of one’s life?

I would enjoy hearing from anyone out there in the blogosphere on this subject.


NOTE: Be sure to catch my newsletter editorial this month.

From Survival to Service: The Maturing of Our Species

  Did you ever hear yourself say something you didn’t even know you knew much less ever thought about? If you have, you know the feeling of surprise and wonder…like who just said that? Was that me talking? This is why so much wisdom flows out of dialogue with one another. The exchanges are spontaneous and we often don’t have time to get ensnared in our minds. Our intuition just comes through uncensored.

Well, the other day, in such a dialogue with one of my spiritual communities, we were in conversation about service. Some read quotes about service. Others read poetry. I found myself saying that as we mature as people we are less and less motivated by survival  fears and more and more motivated by wanting to be of service to others….we morph from survival focus to service focus. Sometimes this journey is slow and gradual. Sometimes it is quite sudden. It depends upon the rate we are maturing.

Not only was I surprised but a silence filled the room for several seconds. Then one of our group asked me to say more. 

Now my mind got into the act and I’m sure I was less precise and concise as I tried to “explain” what I said. I liked the uncensored contribution to the dialogue better than my subsequent explanation.

We see this phenomenon is our aging society, whereby people are more apt to volunteer and do other service work when they are part of the growing older community. They have dropped the insecurities of youth and the façade that adolescent minds tend to take on. Pretense has gone out the window for many seniors who have become much more comfortable in their skin that when they were younger.

Another bit of wisdom that seems to come with age is the value of real meaning. The more people chase material possessions and stuff the more they realize the gratification is only skin deep and doesn’t sustain. They learn that true meaning comes by serving others without condition, getting out of themselves.

So if this happens for many people as they get older and some get more mature - and I’m clear these are two distinct qualities -  then why couldn’t a society do the same? Why couldn’t the species known as human make this transition and grow up into an adult society? What a concept?

Transformational Consultants: Today’s Canaries Trying to Save Lives

Many of my consultant friends have backgrounds in corporate life. Like the canaries of old, many of them found a different kind of toxicity and decided to leave the corporate world and focus on trying to influence corporate clients into becoming healthier places to work - less dysfunctional and more conscious. Many of these consultants left the corporate world to specialize in organizational design or development. Many focus on large scale change, often called transformational or breakthrough.

While coal miners might have been gasping for air as they emerged from the mines, forewarned by the canaries, these consultants emerged from the corporate innards gasping for something different – something less tangible than fresh air. Perhaps we could call it fresh air for the soul. In the absence of canaries these people were more sensitive than the majority and could detect toxicity of a different kind – perhaps a spiritual toxicity.

Nearly all the consultants I know have big hearts and want to make a positive difference in the world. Having had an experience that was less than optimal, they have chosen careers of service in making the work experience something more fulfilling, joyous and fun.  God bless them all!

Politics and Transformation

  Last month I was asked by a noted Australian futurist to preview his new book and write a pre-publication review of it. I agreed and started perusing his manuscript. Soon after I started reading I came across a reference to Australian author and public intellectual Clive Hamilton who “notes that political leaders ‘tend to be those who have internalised the goals of the system most faithfully.’ As a result they are among ‘the most immune to arguments and evidence that might challenge it.’”

This is one of the most concise descriptions of why it is so hard to create meaningful and lasting change in systems. And the more emotionally people are vested in the system, the more loyal they are, the more difficult it is to get anything to happen.

When one strongly identifies with their role in the system – when who they think they are is confused with their position in the system – they can be “immune to arguments and evidence that might challenge it.”

Political leaders are one example. Clergy are another. Educators are yet another example and the list could go on and on. But let’s stick with politics since this was the subject of Hamilton’s reference that caught my attention.

What are the “goals of the system” that politicians have internalized most faithfully? While we would all like their primary goal to be “to serve the public interest” we know that from the politician’s point-of-view the goals also include getting reelected (which includes campaign funding and serving the special interest of one’s constituency) and increasing influence (which includes committee seats, chairing committees, seniority, authoring bills, etc.). But, perhaps the most insidious of all the goals is the one that is implicit in any system in which one is invested - to maintain the status quo and resist all attempts to change it.

Gridlock in Washington and elsewhere is common. Never have so many spent so much to get so little done. In business, this would never do; enterprises displaying such abysmal performance would be declared insolvent and put out of their misery. The system is broken. And it appears unfixable. It may require a new system to be created instead of wasting more time or money, or investing more hopes and dreams in trying to fix the existing one.  

As visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller once wrote: “You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

***

On the third Thursday each month until further notice, I am hosting a conference call to explore how we might create alternative systems to the dysfunctional and outmoded ones we now endure. The one-hour call takes place at 10 AM Pacific time. If you would like to join one or more of these calls, RSVP to me at john@renesch.com and let me know you’d like to be on the call. I will then send you the call in information.

Wouldn’t It Be Great….?

How many times have you sat around talking with friends, family or co-workers and wondered about how great it would be if the world was different? We all do it to some degree or other. This wondering could be in the form of rhetorical questions like “Why do we have to have wars and kill one another?” or “How can we claim to be so civilized yet do such uncivilized things to each other?” or in the famous words of Rodney King, “Why can’t we all get along?”

Let me propose some other queries I hear in my travels:

•    Wouldn’t it be great if we would trust one another?
•    Wouldn’t it be great if everyone would have enough to eat so they don’t have to die of malnutrition?
•    Wouldn’t it be great if we stopped hating one another?
•    Wouldn’t it be great if we all told the truth to each other?
•    Wouldn’t it be great if we all felt free to say what we would like to say?\
•    Wouldn’t it be great if every human being was valued equally?

Why do these common “wonderings” remain merely ideological? Why are we satisfied having them as “thought candy’ rather than moving into action to make them happen in the world? Why are we content to talk these values but not walk them?

There’s a Christian hymn that concludes “Let it begin with me.” This is the only place we humans can begin to bring about the values we all claim to hold dear: ourselves. Starting with our daily actions, our words, our silences, our abstentions, our routine habits, our addictions, our consciousness, our consciences, our fears, our personas, our unexpressed emotions, our rhetoric and our own pompousness. “Our” means yours and mine.

Let’s stop wondering “wouldn’t it be great if” and start walking our talk before the world gets so insane it becomes the defacto asylum.

Taking a Cue for Organizational Structures from Nature

In the midst of widespread institutional ineptitude, I can’t help but wonder why we keep insisting on creating organizations that so easily and readily encourage dysfunction, that beget cultures that are riddled with all our social pathologies. These top-down, hierarchical structures, modeled after the military in most cases, grow so large they get “too big to fail” and require society – their primary customer – to bail them out.

There’s no such thing as too big to fail in nature – just ask the dinosaurs!

Why don’t we form organizations that resemble nature more than the military, where pockets of enterprise can grow separately like fractals, or branches on a tree.

When VISA was originally founded it was designed to be a different kind of organization, what the founder called a “chaordic organization.” It has since caved into convention and now is publicly-held/traded like most multinational corporations having forgone its original unique member network structure.

There is a movement to make corporations more democratic, conscious, transparent and agile, but the underlying structures are still rigid frameworks that more closely resemble high-rise buildings rather than forests.

In my wondering I looked for organizations that seemed to work more organically, like nature. Social movements have this nature-like quality, whereby people in different parts of society, even different parts of the world, develop a field of interest without hierarchy, patents, licensing or other market accessories. Often they are steeped in more of a gift economy than a market one with people freely giving of themselves to the cause. The civil rights movement in the 1960s, the women’s movement that followed, and the present day green movement are examples of social organisms that grows wherever they find passion to feed them.

Extremists with darker motives also organize themselves this way. The Mafiosi, drug cartels, Al Qaeda, para-military and skin-head groups all thrive without massive structures or conspicuous physical presence. They have strong social and organizational codes and often very negative consequences for going against those codes. They not only thrive in multiple cultures they defy the best attempts by the conventional organizations to curtail their antisocial activities. In other words, they grow more like fractals, cell by cell, without the hindrances of conventional structures.

Is it time for conventional structures from the past to give way to new forms for governance, leadership and other social commons matters? Is it time for us to bid farewell to the hierarchical boxes over boxes organizational structure we’ve grown so used to and start imagining something more befitting of the times we live in now, not the times of our ancestors?

As some of you know I am hosting telephone / Skype conference calls to explore alternative structures for the institutions we rely on for governance and leadership on the second Thursday each month, 10 AM California time. If you are interested in joining an upcoming call email me at john@renesch.com and I’ll send you the call in info.

The thoughts this post may have stimulated would be welcome there also.

Perspectives on Conscious Capitalism

Willis Harman and John 1990

One of the joys of growing older is perspective, or perhaps it has more to do with growing consciousness.  Regardless, I am moved to share a perspective on “conscious capitalism,” a phrase I coined in the early 1990s when I was Editor-in-Chief of New Leaders Press. This was to be the title of a book to be edited by Willis Harman and Joel Kurtzman. Harman, then President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, was my colleague and friend. Kurtzman was then Business Editor for The New York Times, soon to become editor of Harvard Business Review.

The nascent book was to be a collection of essays published as an anthology by various thinkers on the potential of our economic system if we made it more conscious, sustainable and less destructive. Kurtzman had recently published The Death of Money, a sobering reminder of how fragile and dysfunctional we have allowed our economic system to become. For several reasons the book was never fully developed nor published in any form by New Leaders Press, but I loved the title.

A few years later, 1998 as I recall, a colleague, financial advisor and would-have-been contributor to the New Leaders Press anthology, David Schwerin, published a book of the same name.  Amongst other things, the book provided David a huge opportunity to make several trips to China where his ideas were eagerly embraced.

Around 2006, my friend Patricia Aburdene published Megatrends 2010 in which she identified the birth of conscious capitalism as one of the trends. She even used the phrase in the book’s subtitle - The Rise of Conscious Capitalism.

My most recent encounter with the phrase was just a year or so ago. Whole Foods founder John Mackey started using the phrase in his writings which gave rise to the 2009 founding of the Conscious Capitalism Institute.

Now no doubt there are many other applications of the phrase but these all were close to me, or in some way touched me. since I’ve had a “crush” on the concept for almost twenty years now. Other writers may know what that means – to be enamored of a word or phrase –even to the point of thinking it’s your baby. There’s nothing quite as ego-busting as hearing your word or phrase used elsewhere and thinking “they can’t do that, that’s MY word!”

Because I was involved in book publishing I am aware that titles cannot be copyrighted but my experience is that most people don’t know this. It seems counter-cultural to them in this era of patents and trademarks and branding. For me, it is a lesson in attachment in the Buddhist sense and, once recognized, an opportunity to let go of any emotional, mental or imagined claim of ownership

The funny thing is that someone probably used it long before I did. That’s the beauty of words. They defy ownership, and are free to land in the hearts and minds of anyone anytime.