how to save the world

• Reintermediation: Why hollowed-out organizations are impoverished and fragile, and how to fill them out again, in a brave new way.
• Rail: A solution to the transportation portion of global warming, or an impossibly expensive attempt to put the auto genie back in the bottle?
• Experience-Based Decision Making: It seems an obvious choice, until you understand why the alternatives hold sway.
• Making Blog Comments and Forums and Wikis Work: Do we need groundrules to enable real conversations, and would anyone follow the groundrules if we did?
• The Long Tail: Why the tail will never wag the dog (while it’s attached to the dog).
• Best Business Books of the Year: A null set!

What I’m thinking about:

Despite social networking and the Internet and various face-to-face meetup opportunities, those of us who recognize the need to build a new culture are still terribly isolated, and a long way from consensus ourselves on what we should do. There’s a lot of us on the Edge, but we’re still disconnected, economically, physically and philosophically, and we’re starved of the resources we need to make anything happen. We will need to do a lot of learning from a lot of experiments, but how are we going to find the time and resources to do them, and to agree on what experiments to do first, and with whom, and coordinate our learnings from them?

Things happen the way they do for a reason. I keep making excuses for writing about the need for change — creating intentional communities and natural enterprises and radically simple living programs and information-sharing and organization networks — but not doing anything about it. Why? Because while there’s no better way to Let-Self-Change than just beginning, it is far from clear how to just begin. Where and how should we just begin? What is the first step, and can anyone know what it is for anyone else? And when we should know better that it’s hopeless, what is it that keeps us going, believing we’re somehow going to save the world?

Part of the answer has to be breaking free from the gravity that keeps sucking us away from the Edge back to the mainstream centre of our culture. Money, debt, social pressure, laws, the media, political pressure groups, advertising and many more ‘forces of gravity’ make it very hard to break free until and unless we have no other choice (until these forces no longer have any hold on us, which is probably never for most of us). And they make it very easy to make excuses, to do nothing. But I think it’s unfair to blame our action on procrastination and lackof courage. I’m more inclined to believe the time is not yet right.

The only problem is, by the time the time is right, it may be far too late.

So what’s keeping you awake at night these days?

Several years ago when I was doing some strategy work for my multinational employer I read Peter Schwartzí book The Art of the Long View , This remains the definitive text, I think, on the process and value of scenario planning. It is not, as many believe, about predicting the future. It is, rather, the field of doing what I have often felt is my gift: imagining possibilities:

You can tell you have good scenarios when they are both plausible and surprising; when they have the power to break old stereotypes; and when the makers assume ownership of them and put them to work. Scenario making is intensely participatory, or it fails.

So the purpose of scenario planning is not to predict and preempt the future, but rather to consider how the future might be different from the present, and what the implications of those differences might be for your organization or your community. A scenario is essentially a script or story about the future, and scenario planning is “ordering oneís perceptions about alternative future environments”. The scenario-building process entails these eight steps:

1. Identify the Focal Issue or Decision : What do you really want to know? Define a specific decision or issue where having scenarios will be helpful.
2. Identify Key Factors in the Local Environment: What factors influence the focal issue or decision? What will decision makers want to know when making their choices? This entails doing some ‘cultural anthropologyí, “hunting and gathering intelligence” outside your immediate areas of knowledge, ensuring the scenario-building team is diverse, imaginative and informed, and challenging established “mental maps” about the issue or decision.
3. Identify Driving Forces: What major trends and driving forces influence the key factors? The work of Porter, Drucker and Christensen can help identify these.
4. Rank by Importance and Uncertainty: Rank the key factors and driving forces on their degree of importance and the degree of uncertainty. Make an x:y plot with importance vs uncertainty. Those key factors or driving forces that fall in the quadrant high importance and high uncertainty merit further study and inclusion in alternative scenarios.
5. Select Scenario Logics: Define the key variables for building scenarios and their relationships. Steps 5-7 involves having “strategic conversations” with people throughout the organization or community to get other perspectives on how the scenarios would ‘play out’.
6. Flesh out the Scenarios: Each key factor and driving force should be given some role in the scenario. 
7. Implications: What could happen if the different possibilities occurred? Build these into your scenarios. Schwartz talks about a process of “rehearsing the future” to do this.
8. Selection of the Leading Indicators and Signposts: What trends or events, if they occurred, would add credibility to each scenario?

The objective is to come up with a few alternative scenarios that differ in important, substantive ways, not just in degree, which will increase your group’s knowledge and allow more confident personal and collective decision-making. Itís a disciplined attempt to reduce the ëcost of not knowingí. And, unlike the visioning and predictive processes, itís not about what youíd like the future to be, or think it will be, but rather how it might be, in challengingly different and surprising ways, from how it is today.

Well, thatís the theory anyway. Those who have used the technique will of course tell you that this has provoked novel thinking and insights that have led to much better decisions and savings of millions of dollars and avoided untold grief. Iím not so sure. Iím all for imagining possibilities and developing stories that get us thinking outside of our normal mental models and considering new ideas, approaches and methods. And Iím all in favour of strategic conversations around plausible future trends or events or insights about how the world really works or what could be. But despite scenario plannersí denial that theyíre in the business of predicting, there seems to be a lot of assigning of probabilities to the assessment of scenarios and the making of decisions stemming from them.

As youíre probably tired of hearing me say, most organizations, societies and environments are complex, which means prediction is impossible and the variables that determine what will happen cannot even be identified. The best we can do in complex situations is look for patterns that might suggest the need or opportunity for an intervention ñ creating an attractor or barrier that will tend to encourage or discourage certain behaviours and lead to a preferable outcome. Christensen makes the same point a different way, saying that “disruptive innovations” ñ the ones that can topple the incumbents and transform an industry completely ñ are essentially unpredictable because they come from outside the conceivable attention horizon of the players in that industry. They are not only unexpected, they are ëunexpectableí.

Back in 1989, when The Art of the Long View was written, Schwartz (with Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and others) produced three scenarios for the year 2005 that they called Global Incoherence, New Empires, and Market World. These make fascinating reading, coming as they did before the dot-com boom and bust, before social networking, and before 9/11. The scenarios greatly overestimated our willingness and ability to do anything about global warming and the environment in general. They also overestimated the impact of new technology on society, the amount of change that the ëinformation economyí would bring about, the impact of then-teenage Gen Yíers (and the trend to cultural homogeneity in general) and the degree of innovation in business and the media. It underestimated the degree of political upheaval, cultural clashes, genocide and war that turned out to be the hallmarks of 2005. It incorrectly foresaw the “replacement of political ideology with pragmatism” as a result of “a world weary of war”. The End of Oil is contemplated but discounted as highly improbable. And while interactive TV is contemplated, there is no mention of anything like what we now call the Internet.

The fault of these scenarios, and of most attempts at imagining alternative futures, is the human tendency to assume the future will be like the present, only more so. Those of us who say this will be the final century of human civilization produce raised eyebrows because the majority cannot conceive of a significant discontinuity between what has happened in the past, what is happening right now, and what is to come. When sudden discontinuous reversals occur (the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot com bust etc.), our tendency is to discount them entirely as unsustainable anomalies and do our political and economic prognosticating as if neither the rise nor the fall had ever happened. When other unexpected discontinuous events occur (9/11, Katrina), our tendency is to exaggerate their significance, to ignore our learnings from everything that happened before them, and to start predicting more of the same, mentally creating new continuities to replace the ones we have lost. Thatís just the way we are.

So rather than create scenarios that help us imagine the future as it seems likely to be, Iíd prefer to create scenarios that can help us imagine the future as it could be. In organizations, thatís what ‘visions’ (a kind of best-case future-state story) are about. And in larger society, thatís a function of utopian (and dystopian) novels, and of some sci-fi. Their value is not in their predictive ability (and that is not their purpose) but rather their ability to stimulate the imagination to think discontinuously, and to provoke the intentionality that comes from thinking about what is possible, and consciously or subconsciously taking the first steps to make that imagined possibility real.

The problem with most visionary imaginings is that they are the product of just one person, or a few people in an organization with similar knowledge and perspectives. They lack The Wisdom of Crowds. For example, my novel-in-progress, The Only Life We Know is about a post-civilization society of diverse and loosely-connected, sustainable, self-selected communities, as an illustration of how intentional communities and natural enterprises could obviate the need for hierarchical states and markets. I had hoped it would be a ëvisioní or model of whatís possible that other ëdeep greensí, anarchists, and progressives could modify and then introduce into their own new ex-civilization or post-civilization communities.

But suppose instead of writing a utopian book solo I wanted to make the visioning a collective effort. Iíve had some preliminary discussions with some fellow idealists about how we could go about collaboratively creating a post-civilization vision and an intentionality program (not a plan, precisely, but more like the set of announced collaborative and individual intentions that come from an Open Space event) to get us there. Using a real Open Space event would be ideal, of course, but getting a couple of hundred people with the imagination to ëcreateí a future vision of a better world, one that envisages better ways to live and make a living, together in one place, would be a challenge unless we were to find a major, progressive, idealistic funder for the event. So perhaps instead we could use a wiki or some other collaborative tool where we would apply the methodology of Open Space virtually to (1) create the future state vision collectively, and then (2) develop an intentionality program to make it real.

This may be too much to expect of an asynchronous tool, and in the worst case it could turn into an anarchic ëherding catsí exercise. But I think with a manageable-sized group and some appropriate ground-rules it could work. The end-product would be not scenarios but an imaginative vision of whatís possible, a model of a virtual ëplaceí for living and making a living sustainably and joyfully in community, and a map, drawn by each of us from where we are now, of how to get there.

Itís worth a try.

This false economy leads us to buy what we donít need, which requires us to work harder to pay for those unnecessary goods and services, leaving us even less time to look after ourselves and our own needs and forcing us, in a vicious cycle (cycle 1 in red on the chart above) to ëoutsourceí even more of the things we might be doing for ourselves. All this phony economic activity is added to the GDP and employment data. Do-it-yourself and other ëunpaidí work, and things we make for ourselves, are not considered ëeconomicí activities and hence not included in the statistics that drive our societyís political and economic decisions. No surprise then that the government encourages us to buy what we donít need and what we could provide for ourselves.

By contrast, the Gift Economy does not value monetized activity more highly than un-monetized activity. It suggests, on the contrary, that our time is invaluable and that therefore we should ëspendí it, as much as possible, doing things we love and things that are our personal responsibility, and only buy goods and services we cannot possibly provide for ourselves. In doing these things ourselves, we learn to do them better, more efficiently, more effectively and more economically, saving the cost of outsourcing them to a third party.

Thanks to this cost saving, we then need to work less, which gives us more time to do the things we love, creating a virtuous cycle (cycle 2 in green on the chart above) instead of a vicious one.

The economists donít like us doing this, since this DIY work doesnít involve the exchange of money or the employment of others to do our own work, and so is not included in GDP or employment data. This is why published trends in GDP and unemployment are meaningless, and why these data provide no useful measure of a societyís well-being.

The outcome of this virtuous cycle ñ more time ñ has another benefit as well: Some of that ëextraí time can be invested in Gift Economy activities that yield even greater, self-reinforcing and sustainable ëgoodsí:

• Mentoring, parenting and coaching: enabling others to cope with major life challenges and problems
• Showing and teaching: enabling others to develop new capacities and skills
• Gifting, sharing and peer production: exchanging, and collaboratively designing and making stuff for mutual benefit

So under the Gift Economy, the joyful investment of this additional ëleisureí time spawns three more virtuous cycles (shown in blue on the chart above):

1. Mentoring, parenting and coaching others (cycle 3 on the chart) produces healthier, happier, more competent and more responsible citizens with fewer social problems and needs. This reduces the costs of health care, crime, wars etc. and also makes us better at doing things for ourselves, saving both our society and us as individuals money, so we need to work less to pay taxes and personal expenses.
2. Showing and teaching (cycle 4 on the chart) produces a more self-sufficient citizenry with more capacities and skills, who therefore need to work even less since they need buy fewer goods and services from others.
3. Gifting, sharing and peer production (cycle 5 on the chart) produces goods and services tailored for our individual needs and wants at no cost beyond that for materials that must be purchased from the ëmarketí economy. Open source, free libraries and file sharing, scientific exchange, cooperatives, social exchanges such as work bees and vacation home swaps, the Internet (and particularly blogs) and philanthropy are all examples of gifting, sharing and peer production Gift Economy activities. Umair Haque has outlined a peer production model that could take us even further, to the point ëproducersí and ëcustomersí become indistinguishable, where they collectively invest time, ideas and energy in a trust relationship with others to co-produce goods and services precisely tailored to their mutual needs, which can then be gifted to others.

These cycles are, of course, subversive. They threaten to undermine and starve the ‘market’ economy by freeing us, the end-customers of that economy, from the need to pay money into it. They also threaten to undermine and render irrelevant political structures and institutions that exist to defend economic rights and powers, to wage wars and to mete out scarce economic resources ñ the Gift Economy voluntarily gives us these rights and powers, has no need of wars to defend them, and operates under a principle of generosity and abundance, not competitiveness and scarcity.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the brokers, agents, controllers of resources, marketers, politicians and other parasites who rely on the ëmarketí economy and its corporatist supporting political structures have already demonstrated a willingness to go to great lengths ñ alternately suing and bribing customers, ridiculing and slandering Gift Economy initiatives, and bribing and coercing lawmakers to disrupt the decentralization of power that the Gift Economy brings about and to protect ëtheirí property from being shared or given away generously.

The Gift Economy in fact represents a ëre-naturalizationí of the economy. The ëmarketí economy is unsustainable and has shown itself to be morally bankrupt, unable to innovate, fragile and lacking in capacity to cope with rapid change. The shift to the Gift Economy has already begun, and is entirely consistent with the critical political and economic demands and needs of our time, and with way nature and ëuncivilizedí creatures thrive in a world of abundance and a spirit of generosity (in the true ëgiving and sharing freely and trustfullyí sense of the word, not the narrow sense of charity).

All we need to do, starting within our own physical and virtual communities, is acknowledge that our time is precious and that making time to re-learn to do things for ourselves and become more self-sufficient just makes sense. Once we realize that, it will become clear to these communities that the Gift Economy offers us a better, easier, more equitable, resilient and joyful way to live, and to make a living. And, best of all, it justkeeps on giving.

• The best representation of our world, of what ‘is’, is not matter, but the connections between matter.
• These connections define ‘power-relationships’ — the ability of one entity to influence the action
  of another.
• The ‘law’ of evolution can therefore be restated as: if new patterns of forces can survive
  their impacts with one another, if they tend to hold together rather than tear apart, they then represent a stable collection of power-relationships which survive, self-replicate, and mutate into further new patterns which are in turn subject to the same law.
• This law applies to physical (matter), biological (gene) and cultural (meme) patterns; all matter and life and consciousness, and their evolution, are ‘creatures’ of their/our material, genetic and cultural constituents, created for the perpetuation of these patterns and sustained through their stable power-relationships.
• Because of the evolutionary success of memes (due to their ability to adapt and change much more quickly and successfully than genes), culture has come to play an increasingly dominant role in our planet’s power-relationships.
• Most significantly, the advent of agriculture, which was provoked by climate change (the ice ages) brought about a necessary power shift from the individual to the group in the interest of memes’ survival, to the point the individual became largely enslaved to the culture, and the survival of the civilization culture now outweighs in importance the survival of any of its members or communities.
• A consequence of that has been the advent of the codependent cultural constructs of market and state, and, as agriculture has enabled exponential growth in population and created new scarcities, egalitarian societies of abundance have given way to hierarchical societies of managed scarcity.
• This hierarchy has been further entrenched with the cultural evolution of technologies that enable even greater self-perpetuation of the memes that gave rise to it, and have led to the ‘efficient’ subjugation of the human individual to technology — that’s the power-relationship that most supports the survival and stasis of the culture, and under it even those at the top of the hierarchy become slave-hosts to the memes and culture.
• These memes and culture can now self-perpetuate and thrive more effectively with technology and the artificial constructs of market and globalizations than they could with inefficient and unreliable human hosts, so technology growth is now even outstripping human growth, to the point that humans are becoming commodities and could even become redundant.
• So: if we are now becoming slaves to the machine-powered perpetuation of memes that are outgrowing their need for us (to the point that although catastrophic global warming and human extinction now seem inevitable, this is not something our meme-culture ‘cares’ about) can we, the human slaves, thanks to the genetic and memetic evolution of self-awareness, ‘liberate’ ourselves and defeat the meme-culture before it destroys us? In other words, can we consciously, collectively take control for the first time over power-relationships, and establish new power-relationships that put the genetic survival of the human race (and, hopefully, the survival of all other life on Earth on which that genetic survival depends) ahead of the reckless survival of the Frankenstein ‘civilization’ culture we have created?

Vail’s answer to this final question is a qualified ‘yes’. He argues that the way to establish power-relationships that put our genes’ interest ahead of memes’ is to “confront hierarchy with its opposite — rhizome — a web-like structure of connected but independent nodes”, borrowing from successful models in nature of such structures. The working units (nodes) of this ‘revolutionary’ structure are self-sufficient, egalitarian communities, and the concept of ‘ownership’ in such communities is eliminated to prevent the reemergence of hierarchy.

Rhizome-based structures need to be developed and then institutionalized from the bottom up to replace hierarchical ones, Vail argues, in all areas of our society — social, political, economic, educational etc. to entrench the power and sustainability of self-sufficient communities and render them invulnerable to re-expropriation of that power by hierarchies. In practical terms, he says:

Self-sufficient energy coops, and local permaculture-based food movements are examples of rhizome structures. Such networks are also the most effective means for the dissemination of information on how to make rhizome activities even more effective — they have much less signal loss than hierarchical methods that require information to flow up and then down controlled and constricted paths. Rhizomes are also, while less ‘efficient’, more effective and more resilient than hierarchies.

Next, Vail argues that, once established, to defend against attacks from vestiges of hierarchical systems, rhizome networks need to adopt asymmetrical methods — by reducing the desire of hierarchy to re-achieve power (e.g. by making it difficult or unrewarding to do so on its own terms) and by becoming ‘invisible’ to the hierarchy (e.g. dropping out quietly and not taking part in the hierarchy’s social, political and economic activities). Vail concludes:

This is entirely consistent with the approach I have been arguing for — the bottom-up creation of a combination of working models of (a) self-sufficient, sustainable (probably polyamory) egalitarian intentional communities operating under Gift Economy principles, (b) natural enterprises and (c) peer-to-peer information and organization networks.

The concern many have expressed about models like Vail’s and mine is how to scale them up — how to get them to the ‘tipping point’ at which, like viruses, they start spreading quickly and supplant the old hierarchical ones. One approach Vail mentions is Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs, or ‘pirate utopias’). Bey’s zones are based on the principles of (a) 30-50 person ‘bands’ replacing families (Bey quotes Gide: “Families, how I hate them! The misers of love!”), (b) a continuous ‘festival’ culture of conviviality, abundance, sharing, celebration, and joy and (c) no private ownership.

I really like the idea of a festival culture. Bey sees the zones as temporary (nomadic, to prevent their being attacked by the prevailing hierarchical culture). Vail says they will only be needed “until the size of the rhizome network provides enough power” to sustain them.

But that’s not how viral models work in nature. They get a foothold and then replicate. Assuming we can create some successful working models without having them destroyed by fearful or envious corporatists (and though I’m perhaps naive, I don’t think the establishment would be bothered to try to destroy them when they’re below the radar screen, and after that it’s too late), how might they replicate virally?

Suppose we were to invite people to just begin. We could use Open Space invitations to find the people who are ready to create some working models of TAZs. We could facilitate Open Space sessions to let invitees form TAZ ‘tribes’, each tribe consisting of about fifteen contiguous intentional community ‘clans’ of about 100 people, with each clan having 2-3 natural enterprise ‘bands’ operating within them. Then, any clan that was so popular that it attracted new members to grow beyond the magic number of 150 people would ‘split’ into two new intentional communities (members would self-select which of the two clans to belong to), and any tribe that exceeded about 2000 people would ‘split’ into two new tribes the same way. This is the way viruses replicate, and the way that some groups of animals instinctively hive off when their membership exceeds a certain threshold. As our rhizome-culture working models became more and more popular, and the hierarchical civilization culture collapses, we would simply and organically take over. Bottom-up, a model that has evolved to work replacing one that has ceased to function. That’s life.

These sustainable, natural bands, clans and tribes would support each other through network connections, physical and technological. Each would be autonomous and self-sufficient, and evolve in its own self-determined, wonderfully diverse way.

The great challenge, of course, is finding arable land that can sustain these extraordinary experiments. One solution would be simply to wait until climate change, pandemic, economic collapse or other disasters depopulate an area to the point its land becomes free or nearly so. Another approach I’ve mentioned before is to find philanthropists willing to donate the land on a successful-efforts basis. Or, we they could start in Russia and other countries where serious depopulation has already begun.

Are you ready for this? Is the world?