The Hames Report

Convergence@Speed

A few years ago I started talking about the emergence of a plausible planetary technoculture resulting from the unpredictable conjunction of a few seminal streams of human invention, and the activities related to them. I was particularly fascinated by the effects of information-based technologies on what we currently do and how we do it – especially when divorced from more serious questions related to why we do it.

But now we also need to add the speed of change as an additional defining factor. Outside of its more everyday use as metaphor there is little current appreciation of the speed of change - still less concerning the conditions the speed of change could generate through technological innovation.

There are a number of significant convergences occurring that will transform human cognition and performance. The convergence of biotechnology, nantechnology and robotics, for example, is already radically transforming healthcare, war, security and manufacturing. Similarly the merging of in-memory computing, the Cloud and device mobility is shifting our capability to access knowledge, anywhere, in real-time – impacting how we interact with each other, undertake business transactions, and move to more participative forms of democracy.

Of course there are other more estoeric intersecting epistemologies that are potentially far more interesting than focusing on computer science and informatics (the convergence of quantum science, indigenous wisdom and spirituality, for example, that could well give rise to a new human cosmology) but these are outside the scope of this article.

How these conjunctions evolve, and how they will overturn everything we take for granted, make for a fascinating study for one overwhelming reason: the perceived rate of technological change is exponential. In other words we will arrive in the future much faster than anticipated. This is not a new phenomenon. One only has to review the time it took to decode the human genome or comprehend the illusion of time created by the exponential growth of a toxic weed in a pond, for example[1]. But it is still so often misconstrued and leads to patterns of human behaviour that lack foresight and wise judgement.

For the most part we cannot readily conceive of change at this magnitude because our intuition about the future tends to be commonly expressed as linear extrapolations of the past or the present. Consequently we tend to ignore, misinterpret (or drastically underplay) the impact of exponential change on our lives. This has huge implications for investors, ethicists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and government policy makers, as well as technologists themselves.

Let’s spend a few moments considering what exponential change implies vis-a-vis how we currently think about progress and habitually make decisions based upon assumptions derived from more conventional understandings.

The arithmetic of logarithmic (or exponential) functions is easy enough. Essentially it is a simple formula: when relative growth of any kind (e.g. population growth, compounded interest, resource extraction, inflation or consumption) is a constant measured as a percentage over time, the doubling rate of what we are measuring (in other words the time it takes for a quantity to double in size or value) will be 72 divided by the unit of growth. So for example, if the economy grows at an average 7 per cent per annum it will double over the span of ten years. If the growth rate is an average of 10 per cent per annum then the doubling factor will be just 7 years. And so on…

In this context consider what China has achieved since 1980. The Chinese economy has been growing at an annual rate of 10 per cent for the past 30 years. That means the economy has doubled a total of 4 times over that period. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty during that time. Many new cities have been built. A modern infrastructure of highways and railways has transformed the landscape, opening up the hinterland and making it far easier to travel to the major cities. In 2010, China had 18 million households with an annual income above USD 16,000. By 2020, this number will be 167 million households. That's almost 400 million people! What is more, Chinese brands are now competing with (and out-performing) the world’s best.

Astonishing economic acceleration of this nature is unprecedented on such a scale. But there are always unintended consequences. For example, if you were motoring on the highway between Zhangjiakou and Beijing in late 2010 it would have taken you many days to reach your final destination. Massive traffic jams regularly clog this highway – occasionally stretching to more than 60 miles. On this occasion thousands of commuters were stuck on the road for days, living off water and food sold to them by vendors wandering through the semi-parked cars. Apart from ongoing construction on this highway and the carriage of illicit coal and other materials from Mongolia, it is the explosive growth in car ownership (Beijing alone is adding cars at an astonishing rate of 1,900 every day) that's the most likely cause of this urban nightmare. It has created a paradoxical situation where the number of drivers on Chinese roads now negates any benefit from travelling in cars.

Back to our exponential function. We can apply the same mathematical logic to population growth. In 1986 there were 5 billion people on the planet. The growth rate was just 1.7 per cent per annum, meaning that by 2027 we would have reached 10 billion people. By 1999 the population had reached 6 billion but the growth rate had slowed to 1.3 per cent per annum, meaning that it will take until 2052 to reach 12 billion. That still means we are growing at a rate of 80 million people a year on a planet unable to provide adequately for 7 billion. Problematically most growth is occurring in undeveloped countries that can least afford large populations and where education hardly exists – nations like Burundi, Niger and Uganda.

But the population problem also exists in economically developed countries. In Australia, the city of Melbourne has experienced 1.88 per cent population growth over the past decade. One might regard that as modest growth, but that is not the case. Indeed if growth continues at that rate Melbourne will overtake Sydney in 2028, when each city will have about 5.6 million people. No other city in Australia has ever experienced growth of this size. It has taken city planners completely by surprise (because they presumably did not do the maths) and strained the city's infrastructure and services - adding to road congestion, overcrowding on public transport, increased waiting times in hospital emergency wards, the demand for energy and water, and a host of other undesirable outcomes. All of this in a relatively affluent country where annual immigration numbers are controlled by the Commonwealth government; the total fertility rate, of 1.78 per woman, is below that normally considered to be the replacement rate for a population; and where the potential impacts of exponential population growth on the city should have been apparent and handled differently in terms of systemic urban design.

Obviously we can also apply the same mathematical logic to the extraction of fossil fuels (like oil, gas and coal) the loss of biodiversity, the rate of global warming – and, of course, the increase in computer processing power.

All of which brings us back to the matter in hand: namely the speed at which technologies are converging and the subsequent role they will play in the future. For the astonishing truth is that it is not simply the rate of change in discrete fields or disciplines to which we should remain alert, but also the rate of change in that convergence. It is this speed of change that led US inventor Raymond Kurzweill to predict that the “singularity” (the year in which artificial intelligence exceeds that of humans) will occur at some stage within the next two decades.

The examples to which I have referred should show us that exponential change demands a far more sophisticated approach to systemic design, taking into account many potential features and points of view, while also pondering deeply the social, moral and ethical dimensions of the futures we are creating. All of which is easier said than done, especially when the subject is rampant, seemingly unstoppable, technological invention.

Kurzweill maintains that by 2030 we will be interacting with technologies that are billions of times more powerful than those available today. While this is correct in terms of logarithmic change I can’t help wondering if this is what we really want.

There are three paramount dilemmas we encounter when considering such possibilities as those anticipated by Kurzweill. The first has to do with distinctions between fate (the inescapable future) and desire (the preferred future). The second concerns the inability of human minds to imagine beyond what is known through experience and to translate these imaginings into a design capability. The third raises the issue of morality. In the end all three dilemmas relate to our intentions – the territory where the most difficult choices must be made.

1. The enigma of fate and desire

Depending upon the culture in which one is literate, the potential for shaping events is taken either to be severely limited (i.e. it is the role of a higher intelligence) or theoretically infinite (i.e. mankind is creator and capable of anything). Most of us occupy a space somewhere in between these two extremes.

For me, as a Buddhist and a practising futurist, the main problem I have with the kind of positivist determinism confidently proclaimed by many scientists and technologists is the irrefutable inevitability accorded most technological expressions of the future. Currently there seems to be a huge disconnect between what convergent technologies can potentially bring to humanity, and what we want those things to be. Nor are there many opportunities to discuss or debate such issues.

The notion of a reinvented species of humanoid with super intelligence in which humans can finally discard their earthbound carcases holds no joy for me. Nor do I believe there is anything inevitable about this evolution.

2. Imagining beyond the event horizon

Envisaging how our lives could be so utterly different from how they currently manifest is problematic for most of us. Other than artists and other visionaries we tend to construct our “probable” futures from linear extrapolations of present circumstances and past memories. This is the “here and now” of our daily experience and it undoubtedly limits our ability to step into a place of infinite possibilities – an “expanded” now compressing all past, present and possible options. One of the reasons Steve Jobs was not interested in asking customers what they wanted from Apple was because they had little idea of what was actually feasible. They did not know what they wanted until they could feel and see it in their hands and play with it. In other words they could not see beyond a particular event horizon.

Apart from those rare individuals who perceive the world from an altogether higher plane of awareness, there are several accepted ways of amplifying human creativity and imagination. Using hallucinatory drugs, for example, or accessing new tools such as virtual reality, allow us to perceive possibilities that would have been previously barred from us. Few people have access to simulation facilities and the immersive experiences these provide, however, as most are still privately-owned or used purely for entertainment purposes.

Perhaps we need to think more seriously about investing in the capability for the expansion of human imagination as a pre-requisit for more sophisticated social designs. Obviously an increased capacity for imaginative cognition may ultimately be provided by the technology itself. But by then it will be too late to influence the design of the technology and many ethical concerns will possibly have been overlooked.

3. The Moral Dimension

The moral issues, including many ethical questions that require resolution and will have a considerable bearing upon the various choices that may need to be made, have incredible consequences and are too important not to be considerd as part of the original impulse for design of any socio-technological ecosystem.

Meanwhile the inexorable tide of technological innovation that sweeps everyting before it gives us little time for any considered thought on these matters. For example, some clusters of transformative technologies could improve the human condition by prolonging life, enabling the human-machine interface, and eliminating disease. One might consider these critical to humanity’s future did they not exacerbate the population problem. It is ironic that most of what we regard as being good for humanity (medicine, peace, sanitation and law and order for example) actually worsen the population problem, while an alternative strategy for resolving the problem, (by promoting conflict and disease and encouraging murder for example) is morally obscene.

 

 

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[1] If a toxic weed doubles every day and covers the entire surface of the pond in 30 days, then it wil only cover half of the pond’s surface on day 29. This, of course, is part of the reason we see so little action to combat climate change. Looking at it today doesn't seem to be so bad. Unfortunately we do not see past the 29th day to tomorrow!

Ten Big Mistakes People Make in Thinking About the Future

Being a working futurist means that I think a lot about how people think about the future. It also means spending a lot of time with people who are also thinking about their own futures. Typically, this involves a dialogue between three distinct groups:

First, there's usually a small handful of very foresighted people, who are aware of their own blind spots and biases, and who are eager and open about the prospect of soaring into a wild blue sky to gather a lot of exciting new information.

Second, there's a larger group of people who don't usually think at 50,000 feet - but are willing to go there if they're with people they trust. Their wings aren't sturdy, and they are prone to some very common mistakes in thinking, but they're often the most gratifying group to work with. What they want is permission to let go, encouragement to go big, and a watchful eye to keep them out of the rocks and ditches.

And then there's a third small group that's very resistant to the idea that anything could or should change. I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about that last group, because I'm fascinated by the question of what drives change resisters. What they want from me is safety - the reassurance that if they overcome their natural reticence and try to embrace some constructive thinking about change, they won't end up all alone somewhere terrifyingly unfamiliar.

Of that second group, I've found that there's a fairly short list of common mistakes that they make over and over again - little assumptions that create big obstacles in their ability to see all the potential alternatives clearly. These are the same mistakes most people out on the street and in the media make, too; on any given day, one can open a newspaper to the op-ed page and find three or four of these mistakes, right there in black and white. When pundits and prognosticators are wrong, these assumptions are usually somewhere near the root of why they're wrong.

To the end of helping progressives think more productively about the future we're trying to create, here are ten of the most common mental hiccups that keep people from seeing the bigger picture and planning for it with a full measure of courage and intelligence.

1. The future won't be like the past. And the most likely future isn't. In any group, there's usually a tacit set of assumptions about where the world is headed, and what their future holds. Life has gone on for a certain way for a while - and the longer that trend continues, the more invested they get in the assumption that things will just keep on going that same direction. I always ask people early on to describe their Most Likely Future - the one they and their friends assume will happen if nothing else changes. And I've never met anybody who had to hesitate a minute to fill me in on what that future looks like.

But the gotcha is: research by academic futurists has found that this expected future really isn't the most likely outcome at all. In fact, it only actually comes to pass somewhat less than half the time. Which means that somewhat more than half the time, you're going to be facing something else entirely. And if you're too settled on that vision of what's most likely, odds are that you won't do nearly enough to prepare for those alterative futures in which you are even more likely to actually end up living.

It's good to know what your expected future is. Objectively understanding what that story is and how you arrived at it is half the work. The other half lies in being willing to let go of that cherished vision long enough to figure out and prepare for some of the other things that could (and probably will) happen instead.

2. Trends end. This is related to No: 1 in that the most typical reason the expected future doesn't come is that one or more of the trends supporting it fails. As noted above: the longer a trend has been going on, the more we tend to assume that it will never end. But all trends do end - and, in fact, the longer it's been going on, the more overdue you are for it to change. One of the things I do is map the trends that are creating the current conditions, and figure out which trends are overripe (there are tell-tale signs) and thus most at risk of disrupting the existing circumstances. Imagining how these trends could fail or reverse - what would happen if the opposite thing happened instead? - is a useful way of revealing viable and realistic alternative futures.

3. Avoid group-think. Another reason the Most Likely Future tends to obscure everything else is group-think. Every group has basic assumptions about how the world works - what's realistic, what's plausible, what's nonsense, what can't be discussed. The longer the existing set of operating rules has been in place, the more pressure people feel not to question that - and the crazier you look if you do suggest that other futures are possible.

In fact, it's arguable that when a group that's reached a point where no other futures are even discussable, it's a clear red flag that they are vulnerable to being flattened by some new situation that comes out of the blue - or any of the many other places they're no longer looking out for change. Which brings us to:

4. If it's taboo, it's probably important. The thing you are not discussing (the elephant in the room) has a very high probability of being the very thing that will put an end to the present era, and launch you into the next phase of your future. Worse: the longer you ignore or deny it, the more at its mercy you will ultimately be when the change does come down.

A big part of being a futurist is to gently get people to start thinking and talking about those taboo subjects, the ones that are too scary or painful to think about. The very act of bringing those hard issues out onto the table and beginning to grapple with them, all by itself, has tremendous power to make people more courageous and resilient. The elephant only has power as long as we refuse to talk about it. When we finally confront it, its power becomes ours.

5. Any useful idea about the future should sound ridiculous at first. This rule originated with Dr. Jim Dator, the founder of the graduate program in futures studies at the University of Hawaii. His point was: If you're not coming up with ideas that sound a little crazy on their surface, it's a sure sign that you're stuck in too many conventional assumptions - and are therefore not thinking big enough about just how different the future could be. If things don't look a little weird, you're not reaching far enough.

An example: Six years ago, I wrote about the right-wing's up-and-coming assault on contraception. It sounded completely off-the-wall at the time, and I took a lot of grief for it. But look where we are now.

6. Ask: What stays the same? The world is big, and governed by huge interlocking chaotic systems whose behavior can be impossible to anticipate. But, at the same time, there are also constants - the things that don't change from era to era, or that change so slowly that you can pretty much count on them staying the same even when everything else is going to hell.

Chief among these is human nature. Economies grow and shrink, nations rise and fall, the globe is getting hotter and world is getting smaller, but through it all, we are still Homo sapiens - which means we will always be hungry, greedy, horny, infuriatingly stubborn, astonishingly kind, quick to take up arms against each other, and equally quick to bind each others' wounds. It's just how we are.

Any serious survey of a future landscape includes questions like: What stays the same? What will we carry forward with us? What will follow us, whether we want it to or not? What can we count on? What will we still need to guard against?

7. The other side is not always wrong. Right now, America is assertively separating itself into two vivid, strongly held visions of the future. In these situations, groupthink necessarily runs especially high; we are committed not only to progressive values, but also to a specific set of solutions, policies and outcomes that we believe will best make those values manifest in a world shaped by our vision.

The other side, of course, is equally passionate about their values, vision, solutions, policies, and outcomes. In his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality, Chris Mooney points out that one of the defining traits of liberals is that we're far more open to evaluating conservative ideas on their merits, and adopting good ideas wherever we find them. Conservatives, on the other hand, will usually consider the source first. If an idea came from a liberal, it's immediately rejected as unacceptable, regardless of its merits.

This is gross generalization, though. It's plenty easy to find progressives rejecting potentially useful ideas out of hand because they came from sources we don't agree with. But when we're deep in the throes of transforming a country, an economy and a society - long on problems and short on good ideas for fixing them - that kind of narrowness of mind is a luxury we can't afford.

8. Be aware of different change theories. Everybody has their pet theories about how change happens. Almost all of these theories can be sorted into one of about 10 basic buckets, which are described here. Most of us have two or three of these buckets that we think explain just a whole lot about the world, and another one or two that make us very uneasy. And it's usually true that the people we disagree with most are working off of some fundamentally different assumptions about how change happens. Understanding which theories you're drawn to and which you tend to reject can go a long way toward helping you notice your own blind spots, and also form strategies to deal with places that your pet theories collide with those of other groups.

9. Don't think in five or 10 years. Think in 100 or 500 years. A lot of Wall Streeters didn't see the 2008 meltdown coming because economic forecasters typically work with historical data that's anywhere from two to five years old. In 2008, that means that their models didn't include so much as the possibility of a financial disaster on the scale of 1989, let alone 1929. They were thinking on a scale of five years, not 50. And certainly not 100.

While we know abstractly that bad things happened to the generations before us, we seldom believe that anything that bad could actually happen to us. America is safe and stable, and has been for a long time. We're comfortable thinking that there's no way we could face famine or drought, epidemic or genocide, or other catastrophes on that kind of culture-changing scale.

This is a common blind spot. Anything that's happened to humans before is quite likely to happen at some point again. And there's always the possibility that it could happen to us. Simply recognizing our true vulnerabilities, however unlikely those catastrophes may seem, and giving them their due in our future planning enables us to become stronger and more robust, even if the full catastrophe never arrives.

10. Don't assume it will be hard. Don't assume it will be easy. Better yet: don't assume anything, ever. Most of the above cautions are aimed at a final big one: Be acutely aware of every assumption you're making, and don't leave any of them unexamined.

Clear thinking about the future is all about carefully choosing which assumptions you're going to work off of. Often, futurists' main role is to point out and re-examine assumptions that everybody else just accepts as gospel. Someone will say, "Oh, we can't do that; it's too hard." And my job - made easier, because I'm an outsider - is to ask them why that's just assumed. As they explain the obstacles, we can unpack each piece of that assumption together - about how this person won't go along, or how that agency's rules work, or why the time frame just won't allow for it.

This exercise is worth doing because, frequently enough, the assessment that something's just not possible (or, conversely, will be trivially easy - one should question those, too) falls apart when you take a second, deeper look at things. Maybe that assessment was true when you last visited this question six months ago. But maybe things have changed since then - and now, your options are different. Or maybe it turns out that that old assessment is still true, after all. In that case, revisiting it increases your confidence that you can still trust it, though it doesn't exempt you from continually poking at your assumptions, every time you revisit them, to make sure they're still true.

Whether the assumption changes or not, the exercise is worth doing because basing your assumptions about the future on outdated information that already belongs to the past isn't useful. The future is ambiguous enough when you start working from the baseline of the present. You only increase that ambiguity when you put yourself several steps back of that line - especially when you don't have to.

In a time when the stakes are so high, and the margin of error so thin, it's more important than ever that we make the right decisions about the future the first time. Being mindful of these 10 mistakes can go a long way toward increasing the quality of our strategy and planning, and improve the choices we make about our future.

This piece was written by Sara Robinson and is reprinted here with the author's permission. Sara is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates. © 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154773/

The (Other) World Game

1. A Single Worldview

Over the past few years I have given considerable thought to the notion of the civilizational worldview as a shared construct. I believe this paradigm insinuates its way into our beliefs and attitudes towards each other and towards the Earth on which we rely for energy, sustenance and inspiration.

The grand visions and moral imperatives of this source model trace the most improbable story of the human project on planet Earth. An exultant story of astonishing adventures, passionate social movements and political revolutions. A romantic story of virtuosic creativity. A story that has fashioned great works of art, assembled complex urban environments, spawned incredible technologies, and produced massive wealth.

These accomplishments are all the more remarkable in that they have arisen via discoveries made within relatively bounded domains of knowledge and have been primarily driven by our curiosity and willingness to investigate discrete disciplines - initially theology, later philosophy and the humanities and, most recently, science. Such is human ingenuity and persistence.

If, or when, it occurs to us at all, we assume this civilizational worldview to be a constant element – the bedrock underlying everything we do and the means by which we can express our most fundamental nature. It is the life-condition we discern, experience each day of our life, and in which we are immersed from birth. It matters little whether we were raised in the parched deserts of Sudan, the chic urban landscape of Chicago, the dense rainforsts of Borneo, or the overcrowded slums of Mumbai. Regardless of where and how we live, what we earn, the particular skills we have acquired, or our social status, the civilizational worldview is as natural to us (and as mystifying) as the air we breathe.

This same civilizational worldview has fortified our world-system for at least the past 2,000 years. Along the way it has been nourished by a stream of varying sentiments about human purpose and capability, tested in a cauldron of competing ideologies, and shaped by common moral impulses. All these have progressively wrought our worldview into a deeply congruent and ingrained credo defining what we faithfully believe to be an indisputable truth describing humanity. Rising above any specific value set connating good or bad and right or wrong; transcending philosophy, history and geography; this credo implies eight tenets:

1. A ruling power “elite” serviced by a compliant underclass of “serfs”[1]
2. Wealth and power acquired by the elite at the serfs’ expense and protected via state political, military or policing mechanisms
3. An all-encompassing ethereal or superstitious dogma (where the elite may be depicted as representatives of a deity or divine beings) typically used to manufacture consent
4. An industrial war machine viewed as a crucial component of the economy and held up as validating the inherently combative nature of humans
5. Most aspects of production and consumption controlled by the elite - through ownership, language, access to services and skills, etc.
6. Games, entertainment and mass media used as a social distraction in ways that help maintain compliance within the social order
7. Economies (nomos or rules) accorded a higher status than ecologies (logos or purpose) - thus nature is logically exploited as a human right
8. An irresistible narrative within society based upon competition, labour, scarcity and difference.

This set of eight tenets does not imply a universally applicable monist integrity. On the contrary our worldview is something of a chameleon, changing its tone, color and intensity over time according to its changing surroundings and cultural maturity. But the critical thing to note is that the civilizational worldview was instituted, shaped and given legitimacy by us. As a social construction it can be rejected, remodeled or transcended - if that is what we want.

Until now it is explicitly what we have not wanted - nor even anticipated as being necessary. I cannot find evidence of any serious or persistent critique that comes close to challenging the veracity of this worldview. Indeed across the sweep of history, in every culture, architects of the bloodiest upheavals and entrepreneurs behind the most compassionate enterprises alike, have all assumed the validity of the civilizational credo. So it is fair to presume either that the civilizational worldview is the preferred epistemological framework for Homo sapiens, or that we have not yet been motivated to discover surrogates. Not to be searching for viable alternatives must surely mean either:

• that the current civilizational worldview has served our needs well - and
• those benefitting from this worldview (in other words those who have most to lose - the elite) want it to endure, or
• the thought of renewal or reinvention is simply too confronting, or
• an embodied sense of “worldview” as an implicit social construction is way beyond our collective consciousness to such an extent that reasons for alternatives are outside our capability to know.

Personally I deem a combination of the first and second of these possibilities to be most likely. There can be no doubting the civilisational worldview has brought great affluence, health and well-being to many millions. The reservation I have is whether it can do the same for the burgeoning billions of the world’s inhabitants who are starving, have no security, shelter, income or education, and are victims of injustice and discrimination.

The elite in all contemporary societies (i.e. essentially those who control the flow of money, resources and ideas - including elected and self-appointed leaders, the priesthood, public intellectuals, high wealth industrialists, bankers, politicians and their advisers, royalty, business corporations and industry lobbyists) put most of their efforts and resources into preserving and reinforcing the existing order because they have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. Nor is embracing the existing state of affairs and safeguarding venerable institutions necessarily a bad thing. Indeed it can be stabilising and comforting – something most of us yearn for at some stage. But occasionally, betrayed by hubris and distracted by the very means that have been constructed to maintain consent, the old-guard fail to heed the all-too-obvious signs of impending disaster.

Arrogant leadership, inadequate or flawed information, and decisions driven by vanity rather than wisdom have instigated almost every contemporary tragedy - from the sinking of the Titanic to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and even the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. Now it seems, with climate change, we may be heading into a situation that threatens humanity itself. Yet we continue to ignore warning signs, convinced of our invulnerability and oblivious to the damage already being wreaked by our “lock-in” to the civilizational worldview.

The elite are unlikely to change their ways until they feel pain, which is unlikely as wealth can quarantine us from the worst of adversities. In practical terms we know that if climate change turns out to be as disruptive to our way of life as scientists now predict, it is the poor, the disadvantaged and those who remain trapped by circumstances, who will suffer most. The elite can still sleep easily in their beds.  

2. A Cultural Cornucopia

A more profound facet of the worldview, and one that is more immediately recognisable, is the countless mindsets applied by people in differing cultures to help them interpret the worldview. Although the terms worldview and mindset are often used interchangeably, they are actually distinct. In my context a cultural mindset is a set of ingrained assumptions that reinforces social identity and purpose within a community. As powerful inducements for continuing to accept prior behaviours, choices and technologies, cultural mindsets invariably reflect and accentuate one or more features of the prevalent worldview.

But whereas the worldview is a single phenomenon, the shared backdrop to our collective experience, an abundance of cultural mindsets are extant. Continuously breathing life and relevance into the worldview, they are the social filters we acquire, transmit from one generation to the next, and overtly employ to sculpt the civilizational worldview to local conditions, such that it retains intrinsic meaning for us.

Each cultural mindset is exceptional in its semiotic palette. For example, each aspires to perceive knowledge accurately - yet translates truth and beauty and goodness in dissimilar ways. Each has its own sense of place, sophisticated ways of knowing, implicit biocultural associations, language, ethics and customs. And each affords unique answers to that most fundamental of questions: What does it mean to be human and to be living together on this planet?

In the distant past there seem to have been significant differences between one cultural mindset and another. But when the urge to discover and explore new lands accelerated during the 15^th century, and new colonial settlements started to blend with native mindsets, entirely novel hybrids formed. The fusion created through the collision of the Indic, Sinic and Occidental cultural mindsets, for example, shaped a fertile interface for trade and commerce along the Silk Road.

Unfortunately that is all changing. One of the repeatedly ignored downsides to globalization is the pall of homogeneity that erodes heritable knowledge and distinctive cultural attributes. Take the indigenous cultural mindset of native Australians, for example. At the time of white settlement there were at least 270 discrete Aboriginal languages and possibly 600 or more dialects. Half have been lost and only 18 are spoken today by around 500 individuals. This represents a huge loss of knowledge, much of it irreplaceable.

Sadly this trend is also reflected in our consumption patterns. Our addiction to luxury goods, for example, means global brands are to be seen in shopping malls in every large city and international airport with tedious inevitability. Meanwhile distinctive local trades, crafts, customs and markets are an endangered species – increasingly known only to a small and contracting clientele and a few scholarly anthropologists.

Even the purest and most precious of cultural mindsets are surrendering to this overwhelming assault as an incessant stream of corporate advertising infects our minds with the banal, the trivial and the frivolous. Large multinationals now dominate the food chain, the industrial war machine, global finance, the energy industry and the political agenda. They are happy with the status quo and see little reason to amend their ways.

The fact that we do not generally take these granular cultural predilections into account is one of the most glaring reasons for transcultural misinterpretation and international follies. It is also giving rise to a global monoculture in which western industrialised capitalism (the Occidental mindset in its most vibrant and compelling modern form) is given precedence over all other expressions of what it means to be alive and human. This particular cultural mindset overwhelmingly views reality as a logically explicable system of physical artifacts, calibrations and observable phenomena. It is a mindset dominated by scientific rationalism, in spite of the philosophical outcry cautioning us that such a viewpoint only illumines a path to perdition. Indeed the German writer Goethe claims in Urfaustus that putting one’s faith in Newtonian principles is tantamount to selling one’s soul to the devil.

In comparison, the Indic mindset sets far greater store on iterative cycles of internal reflection and spiritual transcendence, the prominence accorded to the relationship of the individual soul to the manifestation of external phenomena amounting almost to an ecological metaphysic. The Sinic mindset is different again, cherishing balance in all things – the feminine yin and the masculine yang preserving a delicate equilibrium between extremes.

As intimated there are other mindsets in existence that were once considerably more important in locally circumscribed situations than they are today in a global context. The ancient Amerindian, African Ubuntu and various Indigenous mindsets, for example, hold far less sway in today’s world, largely because they signify values, relationships and ideals that do not sit comfortably with our addiction to material wealth and scientific progress. These islands of humanity serve as critically disregarded laboratories where gender, social order, symbiosis and persistent narrative can inform many of our inquiries. For that very reason we should be paying more attention to them, specifically in terms of how we might develop a greater consciousness of evolving to a less exploitative worldview where communities can live in harmony with each other and nature. But that, I suspect will take a radical metanoia on the part of society at large.

Finally, to make things even more complicated, there are subtle inflections of multiple mindsets - as in the recent amalgam of contemporary mindsets across Asia, resulting in part from globalization as well as the intended and unintended remnants of imperialism.

Thus a multitude of different interpretations and understandings can materialize from societies operating from within differing cultural mindsets – to the extent that extreme behavioural divergence between them is often evident even though the civilizational worldview itself remains a shared and immutable phenomenon.

So, depending upon our cultural upbringing and mode of social initiation into the modern world-system, we will inevitably perceive, translate and respond to any crisis within the civilizational worldview through a distorting filter and with an intensity that differs from one society to the next, reflecting deeply implanted cultural attributes.

Because of this we also have a tendency to apply differently nuanced operating models and technologies (including the language used to express priorities and principles) to policy, governance, organizational and management issues that may give the impression of contradictory interests and needs. This impression is part illusion and part fact. A reality check can be undertaken by comparing such apparently conflicting interests with how our moral impulses play out in each case. These checks invariably surface basic needs and expectations that are universally applicable to the entire human family - irrespective of other incidental local factors.

The loss of each cultural mindset, as well as the congealing of the remainder under the intensity of Western orthodoxies, is leading to a monoculture and must be resisted at all costs. The ideal of a global monoculture, that is implicit in the cult of progress and technological positivism, impoverishes our humanity. As the great poet Octavio Paz said: Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life. That there are now far fewer extant cultural mindsets should concern us, particularly as biocultural diversity, considered by many scientists to be essential for the survival of our species, cannot be replaced.

3. Rebooting Civilization

So within the current world game we have two structurally-embedded elements that are discrete and yet intimately interwoven:

• A prevailing civilizational worldview, dominated by conventions that fly in the face of what 99 per cent of the population deems acceptable today and exemplified by an old industrialised capitalist paradigm that is failing us on a number of levels
• A diminishing number of richly diverse cultural mindsets that, while potentially containing genetic material for metamorphosis of the worldview, are simply discounted as being of less consequence to present endeavours and future outcomes.

Only comparatively recently has there been any rigorous critical appraisal of the civilizational worldview – something nigh impossible from within its defensive walls. But there are now plenty of examples of seemingly irresolvable problems caused or aggravated by this worldview that leads us to question how much longer its entropic nature can persist before totally unraveling. This is not whimsy, as some might wish, but a grave epistemological issue.

The human project is in a state of disruptive transition. Indeed I believe we are rapidly reaching a developmental crisis point that necessitates a total rethink of how we interpret and value progress. Given the major crises facing humanity, particularly the storm of intersecting environmental, economic, food, water and energy meltdowns, we must rapidly come to terms with the old proposition that there are indeed fixed limits to growth. Naturally much depends upon how much pain we are prepared to take before the adoption of a new paradigm becomes the preferred option. And whilst we cannot go back and reinvent the past, the future paradigm remain very much ours to configure.

Furthermore the socio-economic volatility and community awakening we are currently witnessing offers an exceptional opportunity for us to shift to a higher plane of consciousness in facilitating a different ethos underlying relationships we have with each other and our environment. We just need to be able to see the promise of an “appreciative” society with greater clarity and conviction.

Ironically, transformation of the civilizational worldview can help us by opening our minds to alternative possibilities. Enshrined within the rigid chrysalis of the present worldview is a source of hope – the imaginal cells of a worldview crafted to be intentionally viable, resilient, and based upon the fundamental premise of provisioning for humanity as a whole rather than continued pandering to a wealthy minority.

That is what we can achieve if, initially, we are able to envisage an appreciative worldview as a recasting of the eight tenets underpinning the old civilizational paradigm – a doppelganger with a decidedly different moral credo. Namely:

1. Open source governance – primarily as the interaction of the commons (at a global and many local levels) with elected regional representatives
2. Wealth (as in access to food, health, employment, learning, happiness, wellbeing and security) distributed without favour and protected by appropriate officials, effective monitoring councils and the justice system
3. An all-encompassing humanitarian mechanism for ensuring that cultural diversity is protected and fostered
4. The elimination of conflict through the dismantling of the industrial war machine and its relationship to "disaster" capitalism, (as famously articulated by the "shock doctrine" economist Milton Friedman) alongside the promotion of cooperative structures and multicultural enterprises
5. Most aspects of production and consumption controlled by the commons with open access to ownership, language, services and skills
6. Games, entertainment and the mass media used as a social distraction and openly acknowledged as just that
7. Economies (nomos) are lodged within ecologies (logos) - thus nature is protected for future generations and ecocide is a crime
8. A diversity of cultural mindsets and compelling narratives within a society unified through cooperation, empathy, intelligence and abundance.

But what of role should our cultural mindsets play? An understanding of context becomes particularly critical when so many of the ideas and institutions defining civilization seem to be in a state of collapse. This is the case today. It is the ideal time to be learning from other cultural traditions as an alternative to blind insistence on the superior nature of the Occidental mindset.

Possibly the most profound transition in history, one that has taken literally hundreds of years so far and is still far from completion, was the move away from pious notions of an infallible ‘maker’ or supreme being, to the concept of scientific materialism. Here it is the physical world that really matters. This shift required discarding deeply imprinted fears and fallacies. Unsurprisingly it led to the modern obsession with material goods and the acquisition of personal wealth. But evolution cannot just stop there…

We must now move beyond even our current phase of understanding. Among the most vital of contemporary principles is the rejection of the idea of the world as a machine and the adoption of the world as a living, interconnected, ecosystem. The transition towards a new society instilled with such a basic ontological shift appears most likely to lead to a new holistic consciousness that integrates both science and spirit. Yet the practical realities of governing a global population of seven billion or more people still lag far behind conceptions.

In the past, our inability or unwillingness to engage with really big issues (e.g. endemic poverty, environmental degradation or the alienation of young people) in any meaningful or constructive manner has been hampered by the fact that we have not allowed for diversity. We have been seeking a universal panacea. It is unlikely to appear and, if it does, will not be of much use.

Our inclination to delegate important decisions to others, for example (whether to dictators, monarchs, professional managers or elected representatives) was deemed pragmatic. Our unwillingness to understand our experience through an “others” perspective allowed us to live unconsidered lives. This epitomized a disquieting social apathy – a deeply ingrained passivity that has been extremely difficult to overcome. What is more it often allowed corruption, misconduct and oppression to thrive, to which we then turned a blind eye for fear of attracting still further repression. Many communities still suffer from that indifference today.

With the advent of today’s sophisticated communications systems and online social media, however, there can be no excuse. People are able to speak out and air their concerns, wielding power in ways that were previously out of the question. Governments and dictators fall at the hands of people power. Today, the voice of every citizen can be heard. Individuals can contribute to a global community of mind (a collective intelligence for change) should they wish to do so. Indeed some commentators argue the case that it is increasingly impossible to remain quarantined from such participation, given the potency and insidious nature of new social media. Furthermore, new social networks help create the collective consciousness we so urgently need to reboot civilization.

As far as I am concerned some of the more important questions we should be pondering are not even on the agenda. While the greatest threats to humanity and to our environment seem to be that nothing is done, that the wrong things are done too quickly, or that too little is done too late, I believe the greater threat to our social wellbeing is that we act without wisdom.

The most urgent issues for humanity no longer focus on discrete events and their immediate impact but on how we can adapt to evolving conditions in ways that lessen the damage wherever we can, exploit those opportunities that are bound to emerge, and delay more serious consequences to give us more time. There are three philosophical questions we must answer:

1. How can we tread more lightly on this planet?
2. How can we buy more time to do what must be done?
3. How can we preserve for future generations that which is uniquely rare, beautiful and inherently natural about our world?

Somewhere within the solution we will need to active steps to preserve the various cultural mindsets that still exist, while using their knowledge to fashion a new world game rich in diversity, strategically relevant to our collective purpose and shared aspirations, yet systemically viable in the face of nature’s wakeup call. Jeremy Rifkin call this the empathic civilization. Now there’s a thought….

This is a reframing and expanded version of a previous article in which I mentioned the dual concept of worldview and mindset. I hope the distinctions made between these concepts - which is really the focus of this piece - act as a convincing argument for the intentional metamorphosis of the civilizational worldview, together with the preservation, celebration and, wherever possible restoration, of unique cultural mindsets and their stores of invaluable heritable knowledge. 

 

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[1] In alleging differences between a ruling elite and a compliant underclass I am not inferring the existence of any organised collective conspiracy (by the elite) and certainly not any global cabal intent on world domination. Nor am I even suggesting that any directed cause-and-effect relationship exists. Rather I acknowledge the greater likelihood of spontaneous emergence of divisions arising within society that are then exploited by individuals and groups according to their circumstances (though always in concurrence with the other tenets) through the assertion of power in various forms - including ruthless domination over others, ownership of property and other assets, networks of relationships, etc. 

 

The Veiled Impediment

Consider if you will three situations in which different groups of people have been tasked with changing the status quo in various ways (each according to a specific context) in order to deliver “better outcomes”. The first is enacted at a local community level, the second at a corporate level (which may or may not have international ramifications) and the third at a global level. 

Case 1. The Government Taskforce

Somewhere on the planet this week a government will appoint a taskforce or establish a Royal Commission to enquire into a matter of grave concern to the local community. The issue might be one of police corruption, the decriminalisation of drugs, food security, or the welfare of indigenous youth - but investigations will generally follow a similar path:

• Terms of reference will be set by bureaucrats in such a way as to circumscribe the investigation, and thence relevant evidence to be collected, while validating present assumptions (about the nature of the problem and its resolution)
• Designated experts will be dutifully summoned to repeat opinions already on the public record
• A panel will be convened to hear “new” evidence
• The community will be consulted - in at least one of two favoured ways:
  • Town Hall meetings may be organised to allow locals to vent their collective feelings - though these gatherings usually serve only to inflame previously known attitudes
  • Individuals will be invited to respond to a survey containing a number of predictable, tick-the-box, questions in which pre-ordained expressions of the problem are implicit.
• More likely than not the findings will avoid advocating substantial change, recognising governments' reticence in this regard, and merely reinforce current notions regarding what should be done.

Sometimes considerable public funds (the item most likely to attract the ire of talk-back radio hosts and the tabloid press) will be spent on these enquiries. Meanwhile relevant Ministers will be hoping to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat by confirming novel, more effective, solutions for addressing the matter in question. The community's trust in government policy and decision-making is at stake. Reprisals for failure will be discernible via the ballot box at the next election.

Case 2. The Executive Leadership Team

As predictable as the annual migration of Pacific salmon, in at least one week every year, thousands of executive teams will seek prolonged sanctuary in their Boardrooms. Those from more profitable enterprises will probably zoom off to more exotic locations. The task ahead of them? To recast their strategy for the coming year.

Almost certainly they will be hoping to arrive at distinctive ways for increasing profits, strengthening their brands or driving alignment around a new operating model. Any strategic imperatives will have been decided in advance by the CEO - with appropriate input from the leadership team. Quite possibly they will be following advice from consultants who will have been asked to provide economic and industry forecasts for the next three years. These same advisers may also be facilitating the retreat using a generic process their associates developed for this purpose.

Over the course of two or three days participants will examine current results and productivity targets relative to their competitive position in the market, receive briefings on new products in the pipeline, and review any mergers or acquisitions in the offing. Other items, fitted in between social and sporting activities, may include, for example, talent management and customer satisfaction polls.

Following the retreat these business leaders will return to the more familiar routine of running their divisions - invigorated by their collegial commitment to the new plan and equally buoyed by the realisation that their strategic responsibilities are over for yet another year. At risk is the company's future performance, financial results and reputation, as well as shareholder value. Reprisals for failure (reflected in the marketplace and the stockmarket) could result in the sacking of the CEO and the replacement of key executives.

Case 3. The United Nations Summit

Towards the end of June, twenty years after the original Earth Summit, thousands of delegates from national governments, the private sector, NGOs and community groups will descend upon Rio de Janeiro once again for the UN’s Conference on Sustainable Development. Official discussions will focus on two main themes: How to build a green economy to achieve sustainable development (and lift people out of poverty) and how to improve international coordination for sustainable development.

Representatives at Rio+20 will be hoping to come away with renewed commitments as to how we can work together more effectively to reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an increasingly crowded planet.

On the Rio+20 website there is a noticeboard where messages of hope for successful outcomes from the summit have been put. These posts come from all over the world and from all sectors of society. They resonate as a collective cry of anguish - pleading as one for commonsense to prevail. Imploring far fewer words in favour of more urgent action, demanding a more courageous commitment to change, expressing unity as a species and concerns for future generations, these notes, many just brief epigrams, are a poignant reminder of how much faith we put in our elected leaders to know what to do in times of trouble and to put into action what needs doing.

In this instance risk is both extreme and existential - in that we are running out of time to make fundamental changes to ingrained patterns of industrial production and consumption. Failure in this context is too terrible to contemplate. It might mean we have forgone one of the best opportunities to tackle climate change and poverty. Reprisals for failure will be taken by nature. We might complain about the lack of political will. But ultimately the game will be out of our hands... 

The Veiled Impediment

In all three examples it is highly probable we will regard almost any achievement as limited and disappointing, or at least much less than most of us would have wanted and expected. There are good reasons for this. Most importantly there is an obstacle in the way that inhibits more effective and enduring change. It is hidden from view - which is why I call it the "veiled impediment".

But first I want to dismiss some of the more fallacious charges we are prone to use when reprimanding others. Especially an increasing tendency to blame people for less than satisfactory outcomes. I learned long ago from the great W. Edwards Deming that the majority of problems we encounter result from what statisticians refer to as common-causes rather than special-causes. Common-causes are the normal, historical, predictable and quantifiable variations in a system, whereas special-causes are unusual, not previously observed, non-quantifiable variations. In other words it is reasonable to suppose there is something inherently flawed about the processes we use, rather than any overt individual incompetence or negative interference.

For the most part the intentions of taskforce panels, executive teams and UN summit delegates are honourable - their aspirations similar to our own. They are upholding their values and fighting for what they believe to be true and fair. Appreciating this, and the significance of common-cause variation, compels a fundamental reframe as it shifts emphasis away from personalities to the issue of design.

So what is it about contemporary process design that is so defective? I believe the unchallenged culprit is habit. We generally comprehend a given situation using knowledge previously acquired and tested. It is actually quite rare for us to deliberately create new knowledge or fabricate new tools to deal with new problems. But that means we can only ever know what worked before and only ever use tools and techniques ordinarily available. We then rationalise these habits as "best practice". And who in their right mind would opt for second-best?

In the case of our protagonists almost all the information they acquire will point to them being on the right track. Even against the odds they probably anticipate success – otherwise why would they embark upon such ambitious endeavors in the first place?

But here’s the rub: in each of my three cases the level of deeper awareness (of integral consciousness) from which they are viewing their issues, the individual knowledge and collective understanding they bring to these matters, and the language and methods they are using to make sense of the information being thrown at them from all quarters, are utterly inadequate given the profound complexity of the matters with which they are dealing.

Worse still, they do not realise this. In fact it is highly probable they have convinced themselves the job they are doing is entirely acceptable, if not exceptional. This would be comic if it were not for the fact that literally billions of people’s lives depend on a new vision for humanity out of the UN summit; thousands of people will be impacted by any discrete strategic plan that lacks resilience in the face of change; and the community at large will suffer if a government taskforce or Royal Commission fails in its mission. 

Designing Better Outcomes

Much depends on what we mean by “better outcomes” of course and context is vitally important in this regard. Personally I interpret “better outcomes” to refer to three ostensibly discrete yet intimately related factors. Depending upon the depth of enquiry and the intensity of integral interrogation:

1. Better outcomes at level 1 means that enduring solutions (socially beneficial, culturally empathic, ethically apposite and economically feasible) can be found and applied to our most obdurate problems today

2. Better outcomes at level 2 means that upgraded means of sensing and making sense of the human condition are continuously incorporated into learning and enquiry processes - thereby leading to a situation where fewer problems of the type we are witnessing today are likely to re-occur in the future

3. Better outcomes at level 3 means that individual and collective epistemologies evolve onto higher planes of appreciation such that optimal expressions of what it means to be human (creativity, compassion and courage) find congruence in a new wisdom of panarchic communion that touches us all.

The implications are profound. Thinking-as-usual is a veiled impediment to progress. Like rats trapped on a treadmill it will get us nowhere and achieve little but for exhaustion and frustration.

Instead, we need to incorporate new ways of perceiving, clarifying, interpreting, conversing and responding to a myriad, continuously mutating, features within our many cogent constructions of the human story. And we need our design charrettes to evolve in alignment with this new consciousness.

In other words genuine progress (in government enquiries, corporate strategy development and international symposia alike) depends upon our ability to:

• discover more sophisticated ways of expressing what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling
• ensure tacit assumptions underpinning individual expressions of reality are transparent to others
• create more inventive and accurate methods for synthesising and liberating wisdom (including advanced pattern-finding techniques)
• imagine more inspiring futures that provide emotional continuity with our past yet liberate the human spirit and draw upon our innate desire for empathy, cooperation and unity in diversity
• expand and improve our use of real-time, granular, broadband intelligence from multiple sources
• compose a new vernacular for interweaving deeper reflection with collaborative action as well as the past with the present and the possible.

At a minimum there are ten principles we must incorporate and embed into our routine practices when planning and implementing change:

1. Design charrettes that include and connect all salient features - even when these are considered to be nominally beyond the scope of our enquiry as defined by others
2. Questions deliberately crafted to probe our innermost values, beliefs and assumptions in order to reveal and open up entirely fresh options and alternative pathways
3. Dialogical cycles that recursively and iteratively explore our individual and collective interiors (psychologies and cultures) as well as the more palpable exteriors (of the built environment, human behaviours, technologies and systems) we erroneously believe we can control
4. Immersive decision theatre facilities in which the most intricate scenarios can be visualised and played out in ways that surface a range of future strategic options
5. Analytical methods (quantitative and qualitative) that purposefully trawl across the “expanded now” of our total life experience (a compaction of past, present and possible future states of the natural or business ecosystems that concern us) in order to “include and transcend” potential pitfalls, flawed routines, outmoded stratagems, etc.
6. Mechanisms for accelerating our individual and collective learning metabolisms while institutionalising these to effect faster yet more considered trajectories for intentional evolution
7. Procedures to enable our attention density to remain constantly attuned to new or unanticipated developments in the broader world-system
8. Methodologies for using real-time intelligence to navigate changing conditions so that strategy becomes a continuous process of resilient design, review and recalibration
9. Shared narratives for portraying a range of possible futures and for guiding collective action within preferred futures
10. Tools and vocabulary that can be used to develop a mature capability for strategic leaning - rather than the contemporary bias for an immediate response when our senses warn us of an impending situation that needs our attention.

Unintended consequences

It seems to me that these ten design criteria must be critical attributes of any learning system intended to ensure that what we are doing and how we are doing it, today and into the future, is sustainable and relevant. Yet these design criteria are precisely what the protagonists in my three cases lack. It is also the reason I know not to expect “better outcomes” from their activities – irrespective of any extravagant promises made to the contrary - however much I hope that is not the case.

The sad truth is the final result from most strategy retreats, government taskforces and globally-sponsored summits, are predictable for their triteness, absence of imagination, the esteem accorded banal generalities, and a seemingly infinite recycling of clichéd aims and objectives dressed up in novel slogans.

Because of this inadequate systemic and self-awareness, the inability of current modes of enquiry to include and transcend such astonishing variety, the lack of an inclusive language for depicting complex patterns, and the impoverished methods we habitually use in place of thoughtfully designed, bespoke architectures, the pace of change towards an intentionally empathic future for humanity is incredibly and frustratingly slow.

The gradual awakening of citizens to various forms of oppression and injustice we are witnessing today in so many different forums and events around the world, especially in terms of how we deal more effectively with embedded corruption, political dictatorships, terrorists, peak oil, a rampaging banking sector, food security, climate change and the like are now mirrored in a similar prerequisite for transcending orthodoxies concerned with how we perceive, interpret, talk to each other and act upon such matters.

Without transformation of the principal means we use to comprehend the truth of our situation at any moment we may simply fall into the trap of assuming we know what is best and of reproducing what has already failed. If we do that for too much longer we should not be surprised if the collective voice of humanity rises up against those in authority to threaten a terrible retribution.

Feeding Frenzy: Clues to the Future of Food

Today's industrial agribusiness and animal husbandry practices, together with the extensive value chains and investment habits that maintain them, have created a paradigm that originated almost a century ago in the US and Europe. Facilitated by the convergence of petrol-based machinery, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, advanced refrigerated storage and conveyance methods, broadacre farming (and its oceanic equivalent of seabed trawling) this market system exploits the planet’s resources for the benefit of an affluent minority of the world’s citizens who mostly live in large cities in Europe, the US, Japan and parts of Asia such as Singapore.

It is also a system under extreme stress. The actual amount of food we produce is theoretically sufficient for possibly 12 billion people. But in spite of assertions to the contrary, the system as currently configured cannot feed a population of seven billion without causing a further decline in the planet’s productive capacity and putting the health of the community at risk - through e-coli outbreaks, for example, as well as swine and avian flu pandemics. Transfixed by the need to double food production over the next fifty years in order to sustain a population in excess of nine billion, (with less water, less land, depleted soils, fewer fertilisers and no fossil fuels) the industrial agricultural system has shifted way beyond its generative capability to function effectively. In spite of its apparent benefits it is becoming a lethal killer.

Originally each of the innovations mentioned above appeared to be ingenious responses to one of our most critical issues: how to safely grow and manufacture sufficient food for a burgeoning human population and deliver it to where it is most needed. The obvious answer was to increase production and to process large quantities of food in ways that preserved nutritional value, even whilst being transported over considerable distances.

Beginning with the Haber-Bosch process (a method of geo-engineering ammonia which can then be used in the oxidation of nitrates and nitrites for fertiliser) this is precisely what we did. And for a while it seemed to work. Crop yields increased remarkably as traditional landscapes comprising small fields, copses and forests were converted into vast plains better suited to the new agricultural machinery.

Unfortunately there were other costs that were either ignored or not seen at the time. We are only just beginning to come to terms with the overall effects of a process that precipitated the detonation of a population time bomb, the collapse of natural ecosystems, and soil and water degradation on a massive scale. 

Only belatedly have we come to grasp the negative impacts of discrete solutions on such intricate complexity. Misgivings had been around for decades but were mostly disregarded or disparaged. In 1962, for example, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring cast doubts on the indiscriminate release of large quantities of chemicals into the environment without full knowledge concerning the potential effects on human health and ecology. Carson’s logic effectively launched the environmental consciousness movement. The unintentional consequences of the industrial paradigm, however, were not seriously considered prior to 2004, the year in which the Stockholm Convention eventually outlawed several persistent organic pollutants and restricted the use of DDT.

And so we allow the industrial paradigm to persist even as it implodes. Grounded in widespread impulses and anecdotal beliefs, such as those arising from a belief that greater yields are generated by economies of scale rather than by economies of flow, for example, strategies calculated to maintain this system are ingrained in every part of the supply chain - from research, production and processing right through to packaging, distribution and consumption.

Inequities and process flaws are unavoidable of course. Farmers and fishermen toil to survive but are manipulated by large corporate intermediaries who profit from their struggle. Loss and waste is prevalent and getting far worse. Bio-diversity has been drastically diminished. Arable land is being degraded and developed for urban use, yet huge tracts are also given over to the production of biofuels. Grain harvests are failing leading to famine, malnutrition and starvation. Less healthy foods are directly marketed to children and to those on lower incomes.

In the meantime the rising cost of staples such as wheat, corn and rice nudges even greater numbers of people into poverty. This is a cruel paradox given that we actually produce sufficient food to feed and nourish the entire human family. The problem can be reduced to a few very simple elements:

• In the developed world:
  • we eat too much – most of which is processed
  • what we choose to eat causes obesity, aggravates illnesses like diabetes and leads to further environmental degradation
  • most of our food is produced at a distance from where it is eaten
  • much food is allowed to go to waste and is thrown away.

• In the developing world:
  • too few of us eat enough food that is wholesome and nutritious
  • what we do eat causes malnutrition and a range of other diseases
  • local farming practices cannot keep up with demand
  • the impacts of climate change are already making matters worse.

Given such unacceptable outcomes one might have expected the need for a substantial and urgent redesign of the food system to have been self-evident. But that is not the case. Protectionist policies combined with corporate interests still wield sufficient clout, both economically and politically, to stymie any attempt to invoke wide-ranging change. Indeed over the past decade alternative proposals, ranging from organic and biodynamic produce, food hubs and growers markets to large-scale hydroponics and permaculture, have been contemptuously and systematically scorned by agribusiness and its powerful industry lobbyists. At the same time, propositions in the same mould as the Haber-Bosch process (such as genetically modified plants and geoengineered manipulation of the climate) have been pushed by some scientists and large multinational corporations, causing outrage amongst most thinking people.

Meanwhile key assumptions underlying the viability and security of the food system go largely unchallenged and significant alternatives stall or occur only at the periphery, quarantined from the broader market system, which then continues on its suicidal path.

Which brings us to our current situation. Today it is evident that modern industrial agriculture is in crisis - unsustainable in its current form. There are three main reasons for this:

1. The industrial agricultural system is both chemical and petroleum intensive which exacerbates the risks from climate change
2. Industrial agriculture is a monoculture and the lack of diversity in crops contributes to the destruction of Earth’s natural cycles and ecosystems
3. We are facing a convergence of water, land, energy, technology and knowledge shortages - combined with an increased demand for food created by population and economic growth.

Recent estimates from several leading authorities on the subject indicate a need to double food production by 2065. In view of volatility in other parts of the ecosystem, particularly instability in the two critical variables of temperature and precipitation, that target cannot be achieved. Take temperature for example. An increase of just 2 degrees celsius has the potential to wreak all kinds of havoc on the food system. Rising temperatures and unpredictable levels of precipitation are already impacting food production in some arid parts of the world. As the problem worsens considerable damage is being done to agricultural yields and food security.

Most propaganda from agribusiness predictably claims that the industrial model remains the best way to feed the world. Advocates for the current paradigm are well entrenched. A recent report on food security from an independent group of eminent scientists from 13 countries, funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food, stops short of mentioning the need for transformation of the current system. Instead it puts forward a detailed set of recommendations to policy makers in which a number of outmoded assumptions are taken for granted.

Politically correct reports such as these avoid the real issue: namely that we must transform the paradigm of industrial production and its inherently toxic practices. Anything else is a recipe for species extinction. But is resorting to a bankrupt paradigm really the best or only way to arrive at a viable solution? Are there alternatives?

Yes of course there are. Better education would possibly encourage us to eat less. Efficiencies in flow lower costs and reduce waste. Permaculture deployed at scale can conjure arable land out of wasteland. Biomimicry methods could increase the growth rate and resilience of plants. Enlightened approaches to diet can eradicate obesity and help reduce heart disease and diabetes. Greater crop diversity could eventually restore the capacity of soils to produce more. Smart irrigation methods could drastically reduce the amount of water required to produce crops. Better use of local resources could see the majority of a community’s food grown within that community. And so on….

My conclusion, shared by many, is that any enduring, universally acceptable resolution of the various dilemmas, flaws and failures inherent within the current food system, will only come from a reimagining of the system’s high level intent, design criteria and foundation principles.

Paradigmatic renewal sounds very grand and philosophical but it is important to appreciate why a high level design is the starting point. It is a fact that systems only ever deliver what their architectures have been designed to deliver. Change the intent and the key design principles, in addition to any explicit factors causing the system’s state to behave as it does, and we change the outcome. So devising an entirely different conception could shift the entire food system into a resilient and viable future, transforming the relationship we have with each other and with nature in the process. If we do not start with high level design we run the risk of repeating many of our current mistakes and sticking with fallacies that no longer make sense.

This is an audacious and exciting proposition in which there will be no losers. A strategically relevant high level design would not merely metamorphose every critical assumption underpinning a range of deficient structures, mechanisms and relationships, enabling innovation at the same time as relieving current stress points, but would generate an entirely new paradigm for health and wellbeing. A paradigm more in keeping with our true circumstances. One linked to the broader problem of environmental sustainability. One in which waste is reconceptualised. An equitable and just system capable of ensuring abundant supplies of affordable, wholesome food for every inhabitant on the planet and offering an adequate and secure living for all and sundry - from primary producers to retailers.

So what might a fresh, strategically relevant, globally integrated and sustainable system of agriculture and acquaculture actually look like? How would it assure positive outcomes for all without the usual trade-offs and inequities to which we have become so uncritically accepting?

Futurists are fond of proclaiming the future is never the same as the present. That is mostly correct when we look at technology and how everyday practices are transformed by new applications – touching everything from travel to health care, education, finances, trade, marketing and manufacturing. This is because the speed of new knowledge creation and innovation have become astonishingly exponential. Deep-seated elements, however, like ingrained cultural mores and ethics, move slowly by comparison, although even these are accelerating with the development of real-time, interactive communcations technologies that can be used to interact with anyone, at any time, for any reason. Although such instant connectivity provides many social benefits (e.g. the time it takes for paramedics to get to a cardiac arrest patient for example) it is also one of the reasons some people feel their lives are spinning out of their control.

Of course there is always a slim chance that the future food system will continue to feature much of what exists today; the same players, the same production and consumption traits, value chains, policies, pressures and failures… But that is increasingly unlikely when (i) the necessity for massive change is accepted by influential agents within the food system and when (ii) this acceptance accords with a spontaneous community awakening to the damage being done by current practices. In fact when these two prime factors align the only other things in dispute concern (i) the speed at which we choose to shift to a new paradigm (including how different potential pathways available within that shift are expressed and communicated) and (ii) the economic imperatives of the transition. A third factor is the political will to lead, or the lack of it. But this is becoming less relevant in an age of democratic activism.

Personally I am confident that the future story of food will be one in which we recognise the importance of provisioning for the entire human family in ways that do not harm the capacity of the Earth to harvest sufficient, nutritious food for future generations. Of necessity this will require changes to some of our most basic patterns of production and consumption. Any number of positive alternative scenarios can be crafted, with critical pathways duly mapped, to illustrate and assist in either the improvement, transformation or transcendence of that which currently exists, as we are hoping the establishment of a Sustainable Food Lab in Australia will amply demonstrate.

But while future narratives are important, of far greater signficance initially are:

• The choice of design criteria that together proclaim a manifesto for a system that benefits the greatest numbers of people, regardless of circumstances or geographical location. It is essential that such criteria are made explicit in all stories related to the future of food for they embody the ethical foundation upon which a viable, secure and morally defensible food system will evolve and endure.
• The selection of systemic acupuncture points that, once agreed and enacted with wisdom and empathy, can trigger a radically new purposeful energy across the entire system.

Let me deal with both of these here in as concise manner as possible.

1. Design Criteria

As indicated previously, I believe the intent of a viable future food system, within the additional complexity of the intertwined environmental, economic and energy issues facing us over the coming dacdes, must be to make adequate provisions for the entire human family in ways that (a) ensure people everywhere have access to sufficient nourishing food, (b) increase the health and wellbeing of the human family, (c) does not harm the capacity of the Earth to provide for future generations, and (d) secures a fair living for everybody involved in the supply chain, especially primary producers. In-built resilience must be generative.

Given that different design principles reflect different priorities, a single story is sufficient to illustrate a number of sustainable design principles I find relevant to these ideals.

Most market economists trust that a resource without a private property regime is destined for misuse. Yet for centuries, on the Indonesian island of Bali, rice farmers have coordinated their use of scarce water through collaborative social networks. The system is centered around what anthropologists refer to as “water temples” which enfold the water sharing within a context of traditional religious beliefs. In effect the networks function through a form of bottom-up cooperation in which the temples provide a channel through which producers can coordinate their water use. Modern computer analysis has found that the resulting allocation is close to ideal in terms of the productivity of the local farms. It defeats pests naturally and uses the available water to maximum effect.

Bali’s water sharing is an example of commons management. In the late 1960s the government decided to push rice farmers into the modern age. New laws bypassed the water temples. Hydrologists were hired to install modern irrigation systems and government bureaucrats pushed Green Revolution techniques, complete with heavy pesticides, upon the farmers. The result was a disaster. Insects soon developed resistance to the chemical pesticides. Crop yields plummeted. In the end the government relented. Farming communities returned to the social productivity arrangements experts had deemed relics of a bygone and unlightened era.

Principle 1 – Stewardship for future generations

We acknowledge that economies are held within ecologies (not vice versa) and that it is our responsibility to hold the inheritable gifts of the Earth in trust and pass them on, undiminished, to future generations. Economically these gifts are irreplacable and invaluable capital. Protection of these common assets must trump individual and corporate gain. This principle must be enshrined into our economic operating system and enforced by the world’s courts.

Principle 2 – Putting human knowledge to better use

Valuable wisdom is contained within all heritable knowledge. A food system capable of feeding a population in the billions while preserving nature’s gifts for future generations must learn to adapt and utilise a variety of methods for food production based upon indigenous intelligence as well as Western science and modern ingenuity. Inventions like permaculture, for example, can be scaled up and used to return waste and degraded land to agriculture. Urban spaces can be developed into community gardens. Innovations that are out of patent protection can be used in situations where patented products are beyond the means of the community to access because of their cost. In all these situations a revitalised commons management can assure our most valued resources are impossible to privatise.

Principle 3 – Moving from scarcity to abundance

The global market is only one mode of economic production and value exchange. Others, including collaboration and reciprocity, continue to exist in many cultures. Our food system will become more resilient by encouraging these modes to function alongside each other. While the global market is still likely to be shaped by corporate competitive interests, other modes could lead to the expansion of local economies and barter systems, comprising food hubs and growers markets where fresh locally produced goods are exchanged and primary producers retain more of their products’ true value.

Principle 4 – Stimulating sustainable lifestyles

The global economy depends upon nature for raw materials, energy stocks and ecological services (such as clean water, air purification and soil fertility) that are indispensable to life. But materials flows in the global economy have become excessively large relative to their host, the natural environment. Further growth will merely make current problems, like global warming, far worse. Instead of growth we need to move to an economy of ecological sufficiency and wellbeing where food is produced, sold and consumed in closer proximity, healthy eating is encouraged, and waste is eliminated through process efficiencies.

Principle 5 – Insisting markets tell the truth

Many environmental costs often go unrecognised by markets, as when costs created by carbon emissions are not factored into the price of gasoline or electricity. These costs are invariably transferred to the poor which is a classic failure of markets. New policies must shift levies and taxes away from things valued by society (like employment, fresh food produced by renewable energy and the bolstering of community life) to undesirable things like pollution and urban traffic congestion.

Principle 6 – Accounting for nature’s contributions

Nature is a plentiful storehouse of the raw materials needed by our civilisation. The collective annual value of assets like plants, fibre, fuel, fish, water, soil and minerals can be valued in the trillions. But the global ecosystem also provides, other services (including purification, mitigation, seed dispersal, pest control, pollination, stabilisation, nutrient cycling, detoxification and biodiversity maintenance for example) that are an indispensible substrate of economies. These contributions must be factored into economic decision making by both administrative and economic means.

Some people may argue that these six design principles are either too idealistic or too far-removed from our current situation as to be unworkable. But that is the point surely? The future of food is about transformation of the current paradigm. Transformation entails boldly imagining what has been impossible until now, yet is most desirable, then finding ways to bring that new vision to life.

Take the 4^th principle, for example. Few people known to me personally would want to argue against the urgent need for a system based upon trust and cooperation where variety and diversity (of resources, products, channels and access points) is utilised for the common good. Variety can manifest anywhere and should be encouraged. Surprisingly a city like New York has around 650 or more permanent community gardens and there are now over 4,000 farmers markets across the country. So whereas sixty years ago the US national highway network heralded the collapse of local markets offering wholesome, affordable, locally grown, seasonal produce, these commercial commons are now being re-established with great enthusiasm.

Or take the 5^th principle, which also happens to double as an acupuncture point for whole-system change. When markets tell the truth it is pretty certain that long distance transport costs will rise. Manufacturers will react by shifting from global to local production. Clean and abundant energy from the sun and the wind will enable widespread organic farming, which will be competitive because the prices of fossil fuels and agricultural chemicals will have risen steeply as the sun sets on those industries. In that new world farmers will begin to cut out intermediaries and keep more of their products’ value. That cannot be a bad thing.

It matters little where our gaze falls, it is obvious that it would be silly to persist with the current system. Take farmers for example. There are around 1.8 billion of them worldwide, but more than a billion are likely to be thrown out of work if food supply channels continue to contract. What about international trade? Approximately 26 per cent of the world's food is traded internationally. At least half of that is controlled by a virtual monopoly of around two dozen companies - commodity traders such as Glencore-Viterra, seed industry firms like Dupont and Monsanto, food processors such as Nestle, and the massive supermarket chains of Carrefour, Walmart, Tesco and China’s Bailian Group. With power consolidated in such a small number of commercial entities, developing countries are being forced to f ollow agendas that best suit these multinational corporations rather than the needs of their own people or the local environment. Or perhaps we should hold labelling and standards up as an example of what is working reasonably? Well no actually. Strict bureaucratic specifications in developed countries like the US, EU and Australia, result in mountains of rejected product that would otherwise feed the victims of drought or those who are simply less fortunate because of where they live.

Clearly the current system is fatally flawed in almost every dimension demanding sustainability or equity. Furthermore its performance is becoming more untenable each year. In that situation a newly defined intent as well as strategically aligned, relevant, robust design criteria, are the path to a future system with a generative capacity to respond and adapt to changing conditions.

2. Acupuncture points

There is just one further set of ideas we need to articulate before launching into possible future narratives. Indispensible tools for transformation of any system they concern the array of constraints within the current system that can be targeted for change in ways flip the system into a more desirable condition - effectively, cheaply and relatively unobtrusively. I call these constraints acupuncture points for reasons that are probably obvious. They are the key causal factors regulating the actual performance of any system’s architecture.

In terms of the global food system I have identified four acupuncture points, although I am sure there are probably others. These are the loci where we need to focus our attention if we are serious about nudging the current system into one that is ecologically responsible, socially desirable, ethically valid and economically realistic. Aligned with the six design criteria each acupuncture point is a catalyst in its own right. Some may be more appropriately applied to specific regions or countries. But collectively they facilitate a new and purposeful energy that will enable us to transcend most of the flaws we have been studying in the current system.

  i.     Establishing eco-efficient production

Current production processes founded upon economies of scale are extremely wasteful and toxic, threatening every ecosystem on the planet. Instead we need to adopt economies of flow to ensure: finite resources including water, fertiliser and pesticides are used sparingly and with far greater precision; we mimic nature in the design of distributed processes and products that have negligible ecological impact; and we use the notion of industrial ecology to ensure that our plants, farms, factories and supermarkets are restorative of human and natural capital.

  ii.     Investing in sustainability

Surges of innovation, where new technologies and means of communication come together to revolutionise production processes, accelerate the rate at which natural capital can be turned into sustainable value. Investments and forays by ventures capitalists into green chemistry, clean-tech, biomimcry and industrial ecology promise startling breakthroughs in using natural wealth more efficiently, prudently and fairly. At the same time governments need to be persuaded to enact policies that democratise the economy, thus changing the way capitalism functions. They can best do this by encouraging energy and eco-efficiencies, removing subsidies from fossil fuels, and exploiting peer-to-peer networks in the creation of a distributed, post-carbon industrial infrastructure.

  iii.     Using social media

In the 1920s Edward Bernays used the new power of broadcast propaganda based upon crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to help the tobacco industry overcome one of the biggest social taboos of the time. He used these methods to persuade women that smoking in public was not just acceptable but the cool thing to do. Over time corporations elevated "public relations" based upon Bernays's techniques into a new artform, blatantly manipulating public opinion for commercial gain. Now is the time to fight back, using new social media to inject different, more ethical and beneficial, messages into public forums. Today the power and persuasion of new social media and crowd-sourced feedback mechanisms can be harnessed to advocate the purchasing of fresh wholefoods, to support local producers, and to promote healthier eating habits. 

  iv.     Liberating women

This may seem counterintuitive to many of us living in Western countries but is vitally important to global food production. A 1994 UN report noted that most poor people are women and most women are poor. Yet almost all low-income women are economically active. Even in many wealthy countries gender bias dampens economic activity. Women also lack access to land and credit. In developing countries they own only 15 per cent of the land. In spite of that women are responsible for between 60-80 per cent of the world’s food production. By empowering women on the land we stand to increase productive economic activity and also the amount of embedded productive knowledge in the economy.

Having recommended a renewed purpose for the food system, suggested a few simple principles that should inform the high level design of that system, and identified a number of strategic acupuncture points where we can focus resources to flip current conditions into a more desirable state, we can now look more deeply into what is already working at a local level, throw in some imagination and creative thinking, and begin to craft some compelling stories describing what our preferred futures within that new paradigm would actually look and feel like.

These stories might illustrate the growing number of networked ecovillages, transition towns, and other sustainable communities that are already flourishing around the world. We might choose to focus on farmers cooperatives as a way of keeping today’s agribusiness consolidation (that concentrates market power in an ever smaller number of multinational corporations, who then influence the food choices available to consumers) in check. We could point to new ways of preserving the biocultural diversity of crops (meeting the expectations of the land) by using a combination of smart breeding, soil preservation and growing perennial rather than annual plants. For the more technically minded, especially those who are willing to go out on a limb, we might resurrect the contentious issue of genetically modified crops or the chemical engineering of new products, suggest scaling fish farming into tight urban spaces, establishing native seed banks and niche markets for heritage breeds. And for good measure we can throw in “paddock-to-plate” informatics, grow-your own movements, single-course restaurants and memory-enhancing fruit and vegetables for senior citizens. We might even re-conceptualise food as preventative healthcare. 

Whatever the nature of our scenarios we must remember three important tenets: inclusion, collaboration and diversity. Transforming something as complex as the food system might be regarded as a fool’s errand. Fortunately it does not come down to the decision of one individual or company for this is a choice point that affects the entire human population. It demands the active engagement of those whose lives are bound up with the system. Collaboration in purposeful change is essential. Diversity of opinion is welcome. Everyone needs to be included in the conversation if everyone is ultimately to benefit.

Given this complexity it is also highly probable that a wide range of scenarios will unfold, driven by different needs in different communities. Allowing “many flowers to bloom” is one way we can overcome the dominance of the present (corporate and agricultural) monoculture. Large supermarket chains may well continue to offer selected brands at a discounted price but that does not stop a plethora of niche alternatives from also emerging and flourishing.

It is also vital not to demonise certain sectors if that can be avoided. Multinational corporations (like Tyson, Cargill and Nestle) and large supermarket chains (like Walmart, Carrefour and Sainsbury) are easy targets compared with television coverage of a fifth generation farming family evicted from their land - especially given the emotive and manipulative nature of the relationship between primary producers and large corporations within the current system. Setting pride, anger and personal circumstances aside we must reach out to all stakeholders in the system. In that way we stand a good chance of preserving the best of what we have while encouraging a more sustainable and just future to emerge that benefits us all. Of course it is a distinct possibility that large corporations will be the last to change as they are driven by legal requirements, particularly in terms of putting their shareholders first, over which they have no control. But that should not prevent us from inviting them into the conversation.

I recently attended and contributed to the 2nd National Sustainable Food Summit in Sydney, Australia promoted by NetBalance and organised by 3 Pillars Network. This extended philosophical statement tries to bring together some of the key themes presented during the summit in addition to creating a framework to provoke further dialogue and alternative narratives concerning a preferred global food system. I have not attempted to summarise all of the topics discussed during the two days, but rather to define a philosophical space that can be used to identify strategic imperatives and actionable pathways into the future. My views are entirely personal and do not represent an official point of view or endorsement of any kind.

The Third Industrial Revolution

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels all over the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are awash in debt and living standards are declining everywhere. A record one billion human beings - nearly one seventh of the human race - face hunger and starvation. Worse, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on the horizon, imperiling our own species’ very ability to survive.

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in the summer of 2008, governments, the business community, and civil society have been embroiled in a fierce debate over how to restart the global economy. While austerity measures and fiscal, labor, and market reforms will all be necessary, they are not sufficient to re-grow the economy. Let me explain by way of an anecdote. Just months after arriving in office, the new Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, asked me to come to Berlin to help her administration address the question of how to create new jobs and grow the German economy in the twenty-first century. I began my remarks by asking the chancellor, “How do you grow the German economy, the EU economy, or, for that matter, the global economy, in the last stages of a great energy era and an industrial revolution built on it?”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Second Industrial Revolution is dying and that industrial induced CO2 emissions are threatening the viability of life on Earth. What we need now is a bold new economic narrative that can take us into a sustainable post-carbon future. Finding that new vision requires an understanding of the technological forces that precipitate the profound transformations in society.

A New Economic Narrative

The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities made possible by the new energy flows. In the 19th century, cheap steam powered print technology and the introduction of public schools gave rise to a print-literate work force with the communication skills to manage the increased flow of commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power technology, ushering in the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, centralized electricity communication - the telephone, and later radio and television - became the communication medium to manage a more complex and dispersed oil, auto, and suburban era, and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century. In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own renewable energy in their homes, offices, and factories and share green electricity with each other in an “Energy Internet” just like we now generate and share information online.

The establishment of a Third Industrial Revolution [TIR] infrastructure will create thousands of new businesses and millions of jobs and lay the basis for a sustainable global economy in the 21st century. However, let me add a cautionary note. Like every other communication and energy infrastructure in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be laid down simultaneously or the foundation will not hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others.

The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy internet that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of renewable energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus green electricity back to the grid and share it with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via a green electricity Internet, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution. The entire system is interactive, integrated, and seamless. When these five pillars come together, they make up an indivisible technological platform—an emergent system whose properties and functions are qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the synergies between the pillars create a new economic paradigm that can transform the world.

The public/private financing of the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure build-out across the world will be at the very top of the agenda for the international banking and financial community in the first half of the 21st century.

The Shift To Lateral Power

The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age. Its completion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year commercial saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial markets, and mass labor workforces and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and professional and technical workforces. In the coming half century, the conventional, centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.

Lateral power is a new force in the world. Steve Jobs and the other innovators of his generation took us from expensive centralized main-frame computers, owned and controlled by a handful of global companies, to cheap desktop computers and cell phones, allowing billions of people to connect up with one another in peer-to-peer networks in the social spaces of the internet. The democratization of communications has enabled nearly one third of the human population on earth to share music, knowledge, news and social life on an open playing field, marking one of the great evolutionary advances in the history of our species.

But as impressive as this accomplishment is, it is only half of the story. The new, green energy industries are improving performance and reducing costs at an ever accelerating rate. And just as the generation and distribution of information is becoming nearly free, renewable energies will also. The sun, wind, biomass, geothermal heat and hydropower are available to everyone and, like information, are never used up.

When Internet communications manage green energy, every human being on earth becomes his or her own source of power, both literally and figuratively. Billions of human beings sharing their renewable energy laterally on a continental green electricity internet creates the foundation for the democratization of the global economy and a more just society.

Distributed Capitalism

Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations - how they are organized, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is exercised, and how social relations are conducted. To understand how the new Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is likely to dramatically change the distribution of economic power in the twenty-first century, it is helpful to step back and examine how the fossil fuel–based First and Second Industrial Revolutions reordered power relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - are elite energies for the simple reason that they are found only in select places. They require a significant military investment to secure their access and continual geopolitical management to assure their availability. They also require top down command and control systems and massive concentrations of capital to move them from underground to the end users. The ability to centralize production and distribution - the essence of modern capitalism - is critical to the effective performance of the system as a whole. The centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the conditions for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across every sector.

Virtually all of the other critical industries that emerged from the oil culture - modern finance, telecommunications, automotive, power and utilities, and commercial construction - and that feed off of the fossil fuel spigot were similarly predisposed to bigness in order to achieve their own economies of scale. And, like the oil industry, they require huge sums of capital to operate and are organized in a centralized fashion.

Three of the four largest companies in the world today are oil companies - Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath these giant energy companies are some five hundred global companies representing every sector and industry - with a combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is the equivalent of one-third of the world’s $62 trillion GDP - that are inseparably connected to and dependent on fossil fuels for their very survival.

The emerging Third Industrial Revolution, by contrast, is organized around distributed renewable energies that are found everywhere and are, for the most part, free - sun, wind, hydro, geothermal heat, biomass, and ocean waves and tides. These dispersed energies will be collected at millions of local sites and then bundled and shared with others over a continental green electricity internet to achieve optimum energy levels and maintain a high-performing, sustainable economy. The distributed nature of renewable energies necessitates collaborative rather than hierarchical command and control mechanisms.

This new lateral energy regime establishes the organizational model for the countless economic activities that multiply from it. A more distributed and collaborative industrial revolution, in turn, invariably leads to a more distributed sharing of the wealth generated.

The extraordinary capital costs of owning and operating giant centralized telephone, radio, and television communications technology and fossil fuel and nuclear power plants in markets is giving way to the new “distributed capitalism,” in which the low entry costs in lateral networks make it possible for virtually everyone to become a potential entrepreneur and collaborator, creating and sharing information and energy in open commons. Witness twenty something young men creating Google, Facebook, and other global information networks, literally in their college dorm rooms and thousands of small businesses converting their buildings to green micro power plants and connecting with one another in regional electricity networks.

What I am describing is a fundamental change in the way capitalism functions that is now unfolding across the economy and reshaping how companies conduct business. The shrinking of transaction costs in the music business and publishing field with the emergence of file sharing of music, eBooks, and news blogs, is wreaking havoc on these traditional industries. We can expect similar disruptive impacts as the diminishing transaction costs of green energy allow manufacturers, service industries, and retailers to produce and share goods and services in vast economic networks with very little outlay of financial capital.

Democratizing Manufacturing

For example, consider manufacturing. Nothing is more suggestive of the industrial way of life than highly capitalized, giant, centralized factories equipped with heavy machines and attended by blue-collar workforces, churning out mass-produced products on assembly lines. But what if millions of people could manufacture batches or even single manufactured items in their own homes or businesses, cheaper, quicker, and with the same quality control as the most advanced state-of the-art factories on earth?

While the TIR economy allows millions of people to produce their own virtual information and energy, a new digital manufacturing revolution now opens up the possibility of following suit in the production of durable goods. In the new era, everyone can potentially be their own manufacturer as well as their own internet site and power company. The process is called 3-D printing; and although it sounds like science fiction, it is already coming online, and promises to change the entire way we think of industrial production. Think about pushing the print button on your computer and sending a digital file to an inkjet printer, except, with 3-D printing, the machine runs off a three-dimensional product. Using computer aided design, software directs the 3-D printer to build successive layers of the product using powder, molten plastic, or metals to create the material scaffolding. The 3-D printer can produce multiple copies just like a photocopy machine. All sorts of goods, from jewelry to mobile phones, auto and aircraft parts, medical implants, and batteries are being “printed out” in what is being termed “additive manufacturing,” distinguishing it from the “subtractive manufacturing,” which involves cutting down and pairing off materials and then attaching them together.

3-D entrepreneurs are particularly bullish about additive manufacturing, because the process requires as little as 10 percent of the raw material expended in traditional manufacturing and uses less energy than conventional factory production, thus greatly reducing the cost.

In the same way that the Internet radically reduced entry costs in generating and disseminating information, giving rise to new businesses like Google and Facebook, additive manufacturing has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of producing hard goods, making entry costs sufficiently lower to encourage hundreds of thousands of mini manufacturers—small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) - to challenge and potentially outcompete the giant manufacturing companies that were at the center of the First and Second Industrial Revolution economies.

Already, a spate of new start-up companies are entering the 3-D printing market with names like Within Technologies, Digital Forming, Shape Ways, Rapid Quality Manufacturing, Stratasys, Bespoke Innovations, 3D Systems, MakerBot Industries, Freedom of Creation, LGM, and Contour Crafting and are determined to reinvent the very idea of manufacturing in the Third Industrial era.

The energy saved at every step of the digital manufacturing process, from reduction in materials used, to less energy expended in making the product, when applied across the global economy, adds up to a qualitative increase in energy efficiency beyond anything imaginable in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. When the energy used to power the production process is renewable and also generated on site, the full impact of a lateral Third Industrial Revolution becomes strikingly apparent. Since approximately 84 percent of the productivity gains in the manufacturing and service industries are attributable to increases in thermodynamic efficiencies - only 14 percent of productivity gains are the result of capital invested per worker - we begin to grasp the significance of the enormous surge in productivity that will accompany the Third Industrial Revolution and what it will mean for society.

Near Zero Cost Marketing and Logistics

The democratization of manufacturing is being accompanied by the tumbling costs of marketing. Because of the centralized nature of the communication technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions - newspapers, magazines, radio, and television - marketing costs were high and favored giant firms who could afford to devote substantial funds to market their products and services. The internet has transformed marketing from a significant expense to a negligible cost, allowing start ups and small and medium size enterprises to market their goods and services on internet sites that stretch over virtual space, enabling them to compete and even out compete many of the giant business enterprises of the 21st century.

Consider Etsy, a brash, web start-up company that has taken off in the past seven years. Etsy was founded by a young New York University graduate, Rob Kalin, who made furniture in his apartment. Frustrated that he had no way to connect with potential buyers interested in hand-crafted furniture, Kalin teamed up with a few friends and put up a website designed to bring individual craftsmen of all kinds, from around the world, together with prospective buyers. The site has become a global virtual showroom, where millions of buyers and thousands of sellers from more than fifty countries are connecting, breathing new life into craft production—an art that had largely disappeared with the advent of modern industrial capitalism.

Connecting multitudes of sellers and buyers in virtual space is almost free. By replacing all of the middlemen - from wholesalers to retailers - with a distributed virtual network of sellers and buyers and eliminating the transaction costs that are marked up at every stage in the marketing process, Etsy has created a new global craft bazaar that scales laterally rather than hierarchically, and markets goods collaboratively rather than top-down.

Etsy brings another dimension to the market - the personalization of relationships between seller and buyer. The website hosts chat rooms, coordinates online craft shows, and conducts seminars, allowing sellers and buyers to interact, exchange ideas, customize products, and create social bonds that can last a lifetime. Giant, global companies mass-producing standardized products on assembly lines operated by anonymous workforces can’t compete with the kind of intimate one-to-one relationship between artisan and patron.

Although still in its infancy, Etsy is a quickly growing enterprise. In 2011, Etsy’s sales topped nearly $500 million. In a recent conversation, Kalin told me that his mission is to help foster “empathic consciousness” in the global economic arena and lay the foundation for a more inclusive society. His vision of connecting up “millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again” is the essence of the Third Industrial Revolution model. Etsy is only one of hundreds of global Internet companies that are bringing together producers and consumers in virtual marketing spaces and, in the process, democratizing marketing costs across the global economy.

As the new 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings. The cost of transporting products will plummet in the coming decades because an increasing array of goods will be produced locally in thousands of micro-manufacturing plants and transported regionally by trucks powered by green electricity and hydrogen generated on site.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution allows small and medium size enterprises to flourish. Still, global companies will not disappear. Rather, they will increasingly metamorphose from primary producers and distributers to aggregators. In the new economic era, their role will be to coordinate and manage the multiple networks that move commerce and trade across the value chain.

New Business Models and Jobs in the 21st Century

Germany is leading the way into the new economic era. The Federal Government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an energy internet that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies on site, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart energy internet. Entire communities are transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants. To date, more than 1 million buildings in Germany have been converted into partial green micro power plants. Companies like Siemens, Bosch and Daimler are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, appliances and vehicles, that will merge distributed Internet communication with distributed energy, to create smart buildings, infrastructure, and green mobility for the cities of the future.

The transition to the Third Industrial Revolution will require a wholesale reconfiguration of the entire economic infrastructure of each country, creating millions of jobs and countless new goods and services. Nations will need to invest in renewable energy technology on a massive scale; convert millions of buildings into green micro power plants; embed hydrogen and other storage technology throughout the national infrastructure; lay down a green energy internet; and transform the automobile from the internal combustion engine to electric plug-in and fuel cell cars.

The remaking of each nation’s infrastructure and the retooling of industries is going to require a massive retraining of workers on a scale matching the professional and vocational training at the onset of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. The new high tech workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution will need to be skilled in renewable energy technologies, green construction, IT and embedded computing, nanotechnology, sustainable chemistry, fuel-cell development, digital power grid management, hybrid electric and hydrogen-powered transport and hundreds of other technical fields.

Entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of cutting edge business models, including distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, open source and networked commerce, performance contracting, shared savings agreements, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply chain management. The skill levels and managerial styles of the Third Industrial Revolution workforce will be qualitatively different from those of the workforce of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution shifts the fulcrum of power from centralized global companies to distributed small and medium size enterprise networks. The rapid decline in transaction costs brought on by The Third Industrial Revolution are leading to the democratization of information, energy, manufacturing, marketing, and logistics, and the ushering in of a new era of distributed capitalism that is likely to change the very way we think of commercial life. The Third Industrial Revolution offers the hope that we can arrive at a sustainable post-carbon era by mid-century. We have the science, the technology, and the game plan to make it happen. Now it is a question of whether we will recognize the economic possibilities that lie ahead and muster the will to get there in time.

This article was written by Jeremy Rifkin and is reprinted here with his permission. Jeremy is the author of The New York Times best selling book, The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. He is an adviser to the European Union and to heads of state around the world. He is a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.

A Tale of Death & Resurrection

As I grow older, more tolerant of a variety of cultural mindsets, more accepting of diverse views, faiths and belief systems, I detect an alternative wisdom reaching out to me with a persistence that has become irresistible. This wisdom is at once profoundly unsettling and intensely reassuring. Indeed such ambiguity makes it tough establishing which of these effects is the more authentic. An unresolved tension between them seems both palpable and necessary – a finely-poised attractor between contradictory forces that redefines human purpose and meaning.

I cannot lay claim to this being a new wisdom, though it manifests as such to me. I am deeply aware that human empathy and a benevolent ethos arise from a common impulse, innately grasped by many indigenous groups, for example, and which I will refer to as communion for simplicity’s sake, and that contemporary science as well as various social experiments have validated its critical importance to the future of the human species.

This wisdom is hard for me to fully digest and even more difficult to describe; partly because it emanates from emotionally charged convictions I find awkward expressing but also because of its relatively ineffable nature - a genesis arising not from Cartesian logic or rationalism but from a common bond illuminating and reflecting the sacredness of life.

Traumatic incidents during childhood (my father deserted me and my mother when I was eight years old and the suffering of losing the person I idolized most still intrudes upon my life in so many subtle ways) led to my avoiding any expression of intimacy with others lest these were misinterpreted, exposed my vulnerability, or were seen as a sign of weakness. But no longer. For some considerable time I have felt the compulsion to speak my mind. I have been branded a heretic, zealot, contrarian, amateur and an outlier. I suspect none of these were meant as compliments.

The world into which I was born, immediately following the second World War, was one of a strange and disquieting serenity – at least to a young boy growing up in rural England. After a century or more of unbridled nationalism and six years of bloody conflict across Europe and Asia a feeling of cautious optimism prevailed. Naturally life was still tough for many, including my family. We were very poor. In England at the time there was food rationing and recovery was slow at first. Gradually, however, a new normality emerged. I mostly recall unpretentious pleasures: train spotting at Uckfield railway station, harvest picnics in the fields at summer’s end, carpets of bluebells in the woodlands, gathering mushrooms in the misty dawn, cricket matches on the recreation ground, charcoal burners in the woods, itinerant gypsies in their brightly painted caravans, growing currants, raspberries and strawberries in our allotment and waving to the Breton garlic sellers as they cycled through the village...

In 1945 there were fewer than 2 billion people on planet Earth. Jubilation of having achieved victory in a war that shattered the ceremony of innocence dominated newspaper headlines. Confidence was at an all time high. There were scars to get over, their recovery assisted by the new movies celebrating heroics and creating myths that willingly distorted the truth. The futility and savagery of war received scant attention. A few people started to protest over the threat of a nuclear Armageddon but there was no mention of global warming, climate change, population growth, unsustainable consumer trends, endemic poverty or state terrorism. Early warning signals of an impending disaster went unnoticed. The future looked bright.

The distraction provided by wealth creation and the acquisition of goods grew exponentially. Affluent parish elders distracted ordinary men and women by organizing coach excursions to Brighton or Bognor Regis for those who had no other means of taking a holiday. Meanwhile big business, backed by a resurgent advertising industry, turned its attention to manipulating a gullible public and facilitating an explosion of productivity.

The stage was set although few people recognized this at the time. Distraction came in the form of peace. And possessions. From a situation where even sugar and meat were in short supply we rapidly moved into a situation where literally anything could be manufactured and bought. Televisions, automobiles, fashionable clothes, exotic fruit, vacations and experiences. Tools and gadgets to fulfill every possible desire began to saturate the market.

To be well-to-do back then meant owning a farm, small business, or having a car and being able to commute to the nearest town. School, too, seemed pleasurably humdrum. All the world’s problems had been solved. I sat in geography classes facing maps of the world where most countries, or so it seemed, were colored pink. The pink of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. A world in which anything now seemed possible and where certainty insinuated itself into every crack and crevice of community life.

Of course that world no longer exists – if it ever did. For the most part it was a comforting illusion. But one issue now dominates the future of human progress – an existential and potentially disastrous issue that few people saw coming. A global population fast approaching seven billion inhabitants, most with aspirations of increasing material wealth based on assumptions of continuing economic growth, had to be set against a progressively volatile context in which deteriorating environmental conditions, higher food costs, less available energy, escalating socio-economic and geopolitical failures and iniquitous gaps between the rich and the poor formed a potentially catastrophic fusion.

Today the situation is clear. The condition we created, deliberately and without conscience, is forcing us to face a new destiny. It now exposes the vulnerability of our thinking and points to the need to embrace an appreciative communion of interconnectedness and cooperation in stark contrast to more conventional mores and expectations (habitually driven by greed, envy, scarcity, competition and fear) resulting from the globalized system of industrial economism.

Seeing a new reality demands both foresight and conviction around a renewed purpose and intent. Accepting this as essential to human progress is tough enough. Redesigning society in order to practice a more appreciative collective wisdom is an entirely different proposition. Transformation and reinvention are pivotal as is the acceptance of physical constraints and finite natural resources. This, in turn, means relinquishing many of the assumptions we have long held regarding what is fundamental to human prosperity and what is not, what value we should place on economic factors in comparison with health, relationships, cultural well-being and contentment, and what is viable praxis rather than simply foolish habit.

So how does this wisdom of communion manifest? I can only speak for myself. I am more conscious of patterns, more able to map connections between scraps of information that were previously disparate, that seemed relatively unimportant at the time, or that somehow I simply convinced myself to discount. I recognize that sets me apart from many others, although I sense a growing affiliation around such wisdom.

Accordingly I and those of a similar outlook and persuasion are becoming more attuned to a reality (and its consequences) that many others seem unready to accept, unable to perceive or simply shy away from for fear of its more confronting implications. It is as though a veil is suspended between them and the improbable reality of a future existence in which it becomes both possible and desirable for all living beings to share equally in Earth’s available resources in a sufficient, altruistic and loving manner.

In truth my gradual awakening to an alternative wisdom, enabled by the thinking of new friends as much as personal reflection, has become a burden to me as well as a privilege I feel bound to honor. It is also a challenge I cannot avoid. As the birth of my new son, a gift in every sense of that word, draws closer I am conscious of an expanded sense of self and my purpose in life. This expanded consciousness goes far beyond anything I have previously experienced. It has transitioned me into a more empathetic and loving state uniting emotion with cognition.

The truth is never enough of course. Immunity to the reality of the human condition (through the spin and widespread deception of a vigorous public relations machine) is so inculcated in society it is easy to live an illusion and ignore contradictory evidence. But as each day reveals more of a truth that will determine our fate on this planet, I also feel more and more frustrated by the status quo and a greater compulsion to do something (anything) to disrupt thinking-as-usual.

In my view it ultimately comes down to fairness and morality. The critical domain requiring our unconditional attention comprises those established patterns of globalized production, distribution and consumption that have become utterly unsustainable - given the changing context. The mode of economic thought we take for granted, indeed blindly insist on pursuing, is enshrined within this exploitative system. At its extreme it is epitomized by the US model of capitalism. This model, so easily corrupted as we have recently observed, is an expression of rules based upon assumptions that are deeply flawed though seductive, nevertheless, in the overall scheme of things: namely that scarcity and competition drive human behaviour and that continued economic growth is necessary in order to maintain the social order.

Those last three words the social order are crucial to any proper comprehension of the situation we are facing. The rules as applied are crafted quite deliberately to benefit a small sector of society - namely the wealthiest individuals, corporations and nation states. It is a relentlessly iterative and untenable formula: by fostering competition for business and trade between countries, corporations pay lower taxes and produce more goods for consumption on world markets. Thus economic growth drives material wealth simultaneously mesmerizing entire communities and resulting in an unprecedented psychological lock-in to excess, greed and waste. Coincidentally it also destroys many of the social, cultural, environmental and spiritual conditions vital for human contentment, health and well-being while undermining the rights of workers and marginalizing the poor who remain slaves to this system.

We are only just awakening to the veracity of our predicament. Since the 1920’s a well-oiled public relations machinery, arising from an unholy alliance between governments, the media and corporations, and exploiting Freud’s research into our psychological motivations, has manipulated public opinion, keeping us compliant customers instead of alert citizens. In the words of Walter Lippmann it has “manufactured consent” and it has done this extremely efficiently by playing to our unconscious desires.

Sadly the mass production and consumption of goods we are taught to want but rarely need has instigated the crises we see all around us today – from the rising cost of food, to ethnic conflicts, the provision of energy from finite resources, the impact of a global monetocracy upon indebted states and individuals, the despoiling of the natural environment and the criminal practices of dictators, autocrats and unprincipled politicians and industrialists.

The need to speak out has become overwhelming. A new narrative is required; one of hope and happiness rather than hate and humiliation. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed differently. If, instead of competing on the basis of scarcity, we were to encourage collaboration to generate new knowledge, grow uncommon capabilities and share skills within a spirit of abundance and self-sufficiency. Of course competition would still exist, but in a transformed setting governments and corporations alike would compete in providing economic and socio-political security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, a decent education and a healthy and sustainable environment.

Most of today’s grassroots social activists and young entrepreneurs are desirous of such a shift. Furthermore they now possess infinitely more computing power on their laptops and iPhones than the entire US government had at the time of the moon landing. All we actually require is to generate trust, unity and a sophisticated appreciation of how best to liberate this new moral energy of communion in order to achieve success.

If collective power can be wielded with empathy and integrity, with coherence and conviction, corrupt and unsustainable practices will be dealt a death blow and elected officials will be kept honest. We will not need to jump through hoops in seeking common ground with those that currently ride roughshod over our humanity or despoil nature in pursuing their own selfish ends. We can change the world. I know it. You know it. So what is stopping us?

New Windows onto New Worlds

Hypothesis:

Set against the rich tapestry of mankind’s evolution on this planet our current era seems increasingly to be characterised (at least through Western eyes) by escalating disquiet on so many different fronts. The scent of suffering and uncertainty hangs eerily in the air - the hint of fragrance perceptible only to those who have become attuned to a gnostic sensitivity informed by cross-cultural meme assimilation.

A feeling that our world is spinning even further out of control is made all the more palpable by three overwhelming factors:

1. Asymmetric affluence in the post-industrial world compared to the crushing poverty, inequality and injustice experienced by citizens elsewhere.
2. Western petulance and hubris that allows empires in decline to believe it is their exclusive right to resolve all their autogenous problems - even if they had the capacity to do so, which they do not.
3. Our willingness to reject serious public discourse in lieu of distracting media commentaries that divert collective attention via a squalid mix of sanitized news, entertaining pap and a seemingly endless parade of celebrities behaving badly.

Linear progress itself has become a dangerous delusion. One has only to reflect on the news headlines that bombard us throughout our waking hours: an unremitting nightmare of horror, corruption, ecological catastrophe and the spiralling costs of even the most basic elements required to sustain life – cheap food, potable water and plentiful energy. In all of this turmoil human empathy has gone missing. Purer intentions have been lost. We are in thrall to materialism; obsessed by economic and political power in ways that could easily wreck our way of life - if the past collapse of previous civilizations is any judge.

The future is indeed grim if we remain adrift in circumstances that threaten to undo everything beneficial, abundant and beautiful we have struggled to establish.

Unknowingly perhaps, but frighteningly real nevertheless, our collective actions have spawned almost perfect conditions for the mass extinction of Homo sapiens. The truly terrifying spectre is that we have developed an awareness to know this is the case as well as the intelligence to do something about it. But is it too late for wisdom to prevail?

Over the coming decades we will need to redesign the material basis of our civilization. We have no collective cognition of how to do this. There are no narratives in the archives of antiquity to which we can refer. There is no process flow chart. No rule book. No training manual. No compass directing us towards more desirable futures.

Nor is there much leadership evident as yet. Indeed the very premise of hierarchical leadership may alienate the impulse required of us to transition. The few rare cases of politicians, bureaucrats and business tycoons who do care appear traumatised by the extent, scale and complexity of the problems facing us. Like rabbits caught in the headlights, their inclination is to wait and to wonder, or to make attempts to be seen to be doing something but with little aligned commitment and action. Astonished by global forces they happily unleashed, particularly their systemic nature and fickle twists and turns, most leaders seem paralysed within the here and now of “business as usual”. Except now there can be no such thing.

As a consequence their reactions are typically confined to an evasion of long-term issues, a denial of the limits imposed by physics and an assumption that we are all witness to the same truths and aspire to similar goals. Denying realities that resist conventional analysis they choose instead to quibble about today’s trivia in a concern to protect national interests, dithering and chattering about matters that are ultimately of little consequence.

But wait. Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong places for workable solutions. Despair, after all, does not loom large in humanity’s chronicles. The human spirit is far too resilient and adventurous for that. Optimism and hope can spread its wings given the chance.

Already an emerging consciousness is evident in certain quarters, particularly among the young who are not weighed down by the gravitational pull of the past and also in parts of the world relatively unsullied by the crushing dominance of the prevailing materialism of the civilizational worldview. This is especially apparent in parts of Asia and across the Global South.

In pockets around the world a cadre of enlightened, purposeful and interconnected individuals is emerging. Many of these people live in places where their voices have been hard to hear above the din of imperially mandated bluster. Their ideas, often transcending discrete cultures, ideologies and history, have been routinely excluded from mainstream debate because of poverty, geography, ostracism and oppression. Which is insane. Their unique experiences can help us comprehend what needs to be done and we need to listen loudly to propositions that offer genuine alternatives to the overbearing Western paradigm that locks us into a cycle of endless economic growth, escalating production and excessive consumption.

But in order for these new voices to be heard, their ideas incorporated into global dialogue and their advice acted upon, we all need to think differently. Innovation has to embed at the level of human purpose and needs to be reflected in society’s institutions. Only then might we create a context that allows us to see differently. And seeing differently is necessary if we are to behave differently.

Releasing us from the shackles of current dogma will not be easy. The way forward cannot be found in finely-tweaked approaches to political convention, competitive states or bullying nations - even less in continuing to dominate nature or ignoring the impact of seven billion people on the Earth’s biosphere. On the contrary it will mostly likely be embodied within yet-to-manifest knowledge – at the interface between past, present and possible, in what I refer to as epistemological foresight.

Epistemological foresight implies reaching back into past patterns as well as forward into future possibilities in more integral and substantive ways. Integral hindsight and integral foresight are warp and weft - part of the same dance: we need both in order to liberate the wisdom that lies within the expanded now of new consciousness.

Epistemological foresight has rarely been used as an enabler of intentional evolutionary design and it is no accident that the overwhelming narrative in today’s society is one of futile blandness. Foresight as most commonly practiced (with its emphasis on coherent trends and its appropriation by pop science, engineering and technology) oscillates between tedious logic at one extreme and seductive clairvoyance at the other. Too many futuring projects remain prisoners of convention. Why?

For one thing foresight has become just another instructional toolkit. It is no longer transformative, either in form or content. Furthermore it has become paralysed by a cognitive paradox: we seek to understand an indistinct future using patterns and metrics decipherable only from past performance. Our basic tenet, that we are able to discern future signals of consequence, even defining their characteristics, assumes a humility evidenced by few foresight practitioners. Therefore our ability to anticipate significant inflections and signals relies far too heavily on the recognition of past patterns – the antithesis of foresight!

The great French 20^th century philosopher Henri Bergson asserted that the tools of the mind become a burden on our imagination when the environment that made them so necessary no longer exists or has morphed into something quite different. I believe we have unwittingly allowed the practice of foresight to fall into that trap.

It follows that the future praxis of strategic foresight offers us a rare opportunity to create unique value through demolishing orthodoxies that are well past their shelf life while liberating new wisdom. Whatever form that might take, and whatever tools are used for that purpose, we must remain mindful that the ultimate goal is (a) to design engaging methods for imagining viable pathways that (b) shed light on how we can make provision for the future needs of humanity (c) in ways that lead to more intelligent, resilient choices and through the demonstration of more coherent, empathetic collaboration than has previously been possible.

Epistemological foresight[i] (a deeply resonant framework for comprehending and reacting to panarchic[ii] relationships at a paradigmatic level in which intuition and reason are interwoven across individual and collective levels of human experience) offers us one such pathway. But only as long as we remain open to the implicit systemic and existential challenges this framework introduces. The most difficult of these challenges is the need to transcend the civilizational worldview to which most of humanity unconsciously subscribes in one way or another.

Epistemological Pathologies

The civilizational worldview is as natural to us as the air we breathe. We are unconscious of any other framework. And while some of us may resist certain facets of this worldview at an instinctive level we still respond autonomically to its general principles - an implicit framework guiding meaning-making and which we assume to be just a normal part of being human. In effect it is the life-condition we discern, experience each day of our lives, and in which we are immersed from birth.

This worldview has endured at least since feudal times and possibly much longer. Along the way it has been reified by sundry beliefs related to human purpose and capability, tested by competing ideologies and sustained by five moral impulses.[iii]

These theories, ideologies and impulses have been progressively moulded into a set of deeply ingrained tenets defining what the majority of humanity believes to be real and consequently incontrovertible truths concerning the human condition:

1. A ruling power elite serviced by a cooperative yet subservient underclass of slaves or serfs

1. Wealth and power acquired by the elite at the serfs’ expense and protected via (state) political, military or policing mechanisms
2. An all-encompassing religious or mythical structure (in which the elite are commonly depicted as representatives of a deity or divine beings) typically used to manufacture consent
3. An industrial war machine viewed as a crucial, often principal, driver of the economy and in which all aspects of production are controlled by the elite (through such things as language, access and skills acquisition etc.)
4. Sport, entertainment, education and media are used as a social distraction in ways that help maintain compliance within the social order
5. Nature and the environment are exploited as a “god given” right
6. An irresistible narrative within society based upon competition, indifference and scarcity - rather than cooperation, empathy and abundance.

This set of seven attributes does not imply a universally applicable monist integrity. On the contrary our worldview is a chameleon, changing its tone, color and intensity according to its surroundings or, in a social context, its culture. But the critical thing to appreciate is that this worldview was invented by us. It is a social construction and, as such, can be remodeled - if that is what we want.

Consequently a more profound dimension of the worldview that we must take into account is the variances that occur within and between different cultural mindsets. The fact that we do not take these mindsets into account most of the time is one of the most glaring reasons for transcultural misinterpretation and international follies.

Of course taking cultural mindsets and their associated value systems into account can complicate matters considerably. Let me explain. There are three overriding lenses in our current world-system: these are the Occidental, the Sinic and the Indic mindsets. Each aspires to perceive knowledge accurately yet interprets truth, beauty and goodness in different ways.

The Occidental mindset, for example, overwhelmingly sees reality as a logically explicable system of physical artifacts, calibrations and observable phenomena. This mindset has been dominated by scientific rationalism, in spite of the philosophical outcry cautioning us that this viewpoint only illumines a path to perdition. Indeed the German writer Goethe claims in Urfaustus that putting one’s faith in Newtonian principles is tantamount to selling one’s soul to the devil.

In comparison, the Indic mindset sets far greater store on iterative cycles of internal reflection and spiritual transcendence, the prominence accorded to the relationship of the individual soul to the manifestation of external phenomena amounting almost to an ecological metaphysic. The Sinic mindset is different again, cherishing balance in all things – the feminine yin and the masculine yang preserving a delicate equilibrium between extremes.

There are other secondary mindsets that were once considerably more important in locally circumscribed situations than they are today in a global context. The ancient Amerindian, African Ubuntu and various Indigenous mindsets, for example, hold far less sway in today’s world, largely because they signify values, relationships and ideals that do not sit comfortably with our addiction to material wealth and scientific progress. These islands of humanity serve as critically disregarded laboratories where gender, social order, symbiosis and persistent narrative can still inform many of our inquiries. For that very reason we should be paying much more attention to them, specifically in terms of how we might develop a greater consciousness of evolving to a less exploitative worldview where communities can live in harmony with each other and nature. But that may take a radical metanoia on the part of society at large.

Finally, to make things even more complicated, there are subtle hybrids that blur the granular distinctions between mindsets - as in the recent amalgam of the dominant contemporary mindsets across much of Asia, resulting in part from globalization as well as the (intended and unintended) remnants of imperialism.

Thus a multitude of different interpretations and understandings can materialize from societies functioning within differing cultural mindsets – to the extent that extreme behavioural divergence between them is often evident even though the worldview itself, we must always remember, is a shared phenomenon.

So, depending upon our cultural upbringing and mode of induction into the modern world-system, as well as an individual’s developmental stage of consciousness, we will inevitably perceive, translate and respond to any crisis within the civilizational worldview through a distorting lens and with an intensity that differs from one society to the next, reflecting deeply implanted cultural attributes.[iv]

Because of this we also have a tendency to apply differently nuanced operating models (including the language used to express priorities and principles) to policy, governance, organizational and management issues that may give the impression of contradictory interests and needs. This impression is part illusion and part fact. A reality check can be undertaken by comparing such apparently conflicting interests with how the five moral impulses play out in each case. These checks invariably surface basic needs and habits that are universally applicable to the human family, irrespective of other incidental and local factors.

It is only comparatively recently that there has been any rigorous critical appraisal of the civilizational worldview – something almost unattainable from within. But there are now sufficient numbers of highly complex, interconnected, escalating, seemingly irresolvable problems created or nourished by this worldview, that are leading many thoughtful individuals to question how much longer its entropic nature can persist before unraveling into chaos. This is not whimsy but a grave epistemological issue and one best suited to exploration through epistemological foresight.

Given diverse crises facing humanity[v], particularly the perfect storm of intersecting economic, energy and environmental issues, we are reluctantly coming to terms with the proposition that there are indeed fixed limits to orthodox models of growth and development it would be wise not to ignore.

The human condition cries out for an alternative paradigm - an ecology of mind crafted to be intentionally viable and resilient and based upon design criteria that will make provision for the needs of humanity as a whole rather than pandering to a wealthy minority. The case for a new design, together with the process of letting go of stuff we still take for granted, becomes apparent when we look at just one of the many crises facing us. Consider this passage….

A Case in Polarization: The Environment

Eleven of the past fourteen years have been the hottest on record. The Nepalese leadership recently held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest in order to draw attention to rising temperatures that have dramatically reduced snowfall over the roof of the world. The government of the Maldives held a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the threat of global warming to the low-lying Indian Ocean nation. In Bolivia, glaciers that hold the nation’s water supplies are rapidly dwindling. The Arctic is melting so fast the ice cap is likely to have disappeared by the end of the century. Even East Antarctica, long stable, is now losing ice.

Elsewhere drought, floods, earthquakes and fires wreak havoc. Deforested peat lands in Indonesia are drying out and burning and the future of the Amazonian rainforest is similarly endangered. In parts of Australia drought and flood, once cyclical, are now considered a permanent condition. Rivers everywhere, including the mighty Ganges, an inextricable part of India’s physical and cultural landscape, are drying up, leaving only desiccated earth and dust bowls. The marshlands between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, fabled site of the Garden of Eden, a land so rich in soil and water that it would quench the needs of its dwellers throughout eternity, emits the unmistakably pungent stench of a dying ecosystem.

Meanwhile the massive floods that killed hundreds of people in the Philippines this past summer are becoming the norm. Nor are such extreme weather events confined to the tropics or the polar regions. Agriculture in the United States was ravaged in 2010 by droughts in Texas and California, heat waves in Louisiana and Nebraska, floods in Minnesota and torrential rains in Illinois.

In Venice, a major trade hub and maritime power in the Middle Ages and still one of the most idyllic cities in the world, the number of permanent residents is hovering at around 60,000, having halved during the past fifty years. Why? Because Venice is sinking into its own foundations. Bangkok too, once romantically referred to as the Venice of the East and my home for the past six years, is sinking into coastal mud at an alarming rate of up to three centimeters each year.

Marine life, too, is being killed indiscriminately. Only 10 per cent of all large fish (both open ocean species including tuna, swordfish, marlin and large ground fish such as cod, halibut, skate and flounder) remain in the sea. Toxins and pollutants combined with current rates of ocean acidification could potentially deprive future generations of all wild seafood. We are now causing species to become extinct faster than they are being replaced.

On every continent desperate nomads are migrating further and further from traditional homelands, many of them inhabiting the vast urban metropolises which are now home to over 50 per cent of the world’s population. As many as 200 million people are destined to become climate migrants by 2050, destabilizing the global economy in a process that will inevitably result in escalating poverty, inequality and conflict.

As far as we can tell, this précis of accelerating climate change is not hyperbole but, on the contrary, a fairly measured evaluation of the contemporary predicament. When filtered through the rational lens of Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolution we observe a cataclysmic canvas. What is not commonly understood, and even less frequently stated, is that all these visible symptoms of a society and a planet in a state of distress are the predictable consequences of how we have deliberately designed things. They are a result of the civilizational worldview working as it was intended.

But is this the only truth? And, if so, is it adequate to comprehensively explain what is happening to the human species and to Earth? Is this depiction of an environment in stress the only possible interpretation? Let us examine the evidence more deeply through the lenses of different cultural mindsets.

1. The Occidental Lens: Environment in Crisis

To any reasonable witness schooled in the scientific method and Cartesian logic, no other reading can be put on the evidence. Pure reason demands that we construe the testimony as a crisis out there – a crisis located within the environment. That is what we know. All else is of little consequence.

But what if this is an inadequate or even an inaccurate image of reality? Could we be overlooking something significant by focusing only on what can be observed? Might there be vital information hidden within the collective gestalt for example? Much depends on where we choose to look - and through which lens.

At face value we interpret the evidence as a disturbing account of an environment in an acute state of collapse. Moreover, the causes look suspiciously anthropocentric. However, the subcutaneous code reveals an even more alarming prospect; namely the advancement of a morbid pathology where nature is perceived to be the problem to which we must urgently respond. But what should the nature of that response be? What treatment could possibly be effective in the circumstances?

The rational Occidental mind reacts instinctively in the belief that if technological thinking caused this problem then technology can also solve it. As a consequence we get caught up in predictable attempts to achieve a universal consensus through international legislation: laws, rules and processes designed to mitigate perceived threats by cutting the consumption of natural resources, slowing pollution from fossil fuels and adapting infrastructure. Is that a sufficient or even a sane response given that these attempts, too, seem to be failing? Or is such an impulse to regain control over nature merely hastening our self-destruction?

If our most basic hypotheses about how the universe works are correct then the various courses of action we see all around us, especially from governments as well as organizations like the UN, are probably sensible. If, however, our assumptions are categorically wrong (and there is a growing body of opinion that this is the case) nothing less than a fundamental change of mind concerning how we perceive reality is required. For without such a deep-seated metanoia it is highly improbable that more epistemologically appropriate solutions will emerge.

Let me be clear. The data contained within the statement we are examining are not untruths, although sometimes the hypothesis as conveyed may seem propaganda-like, especially to climate change cynics. On the contrary, the passage actually uses visible events to express a crisis in precisely the terms one might expect from the Occidental mindset: a series of observations with associated metrics, calibrations, statistics and analysis, all trying to make sense of the most subtle of changes in the external environment. My anxiety is threefold:

1. Surveillance stops short at a critical juncture between sensing (what is going on) and making sense - in other words the opportunity to bring fresh insights from alternative epistemologies and different stages of consciousness into strategic prominence is ignored
2. We impatiently disregard information hidden below the surface of our perceptions even though the process of meaning-making can be far more profound at the levels of cognition and emotion
3. No attempt is made to integrate information from our individual and collective inner worlds – all attention is focused on the external world.

Also of concern is the content and tone of messages that play into the dominant media meme[vi] vis-à-vis climate change - one that is increasingly projected onto such subject matter through alarmist, at times almost hysterical articles, opinion pieces, websites, television news, cinematic fiction, summits and conferences. Containing a range of disconcerting details, statistics taken out of context and dumbed-down opinion, the green meme of impending human catastrophe has become the dominant global narrative within the context of our relationship to the environment and, not surprisingly, it is generating anxiety and paralysis within communities. Indeed it is a first-rate example of what happens when awareness of any situation is amplified but without any prior thought being given to the consequences of such raised awareness in the collective psyche.

Not surprisingly this meme underpins many of the scenarios saturating our waking hours - choking optimism and playing to our fears, doubts and superstitions in ways that abandon any sense of a better future. Scenarios depicting positive outcomes are scorned or considered irresponsible by the merchants of doom and gloom.

In this psychotic state almost everything about the past (including, of course, the socio-economic platform that gave rise to affluence and to modern lifestyles) takes on a romantic perspective, while almost everything about the future is couched in depressing terms. Regrettably our nostalgia for the past is a seductive lie. It merely engenders apathy. Instead of aspiring to fresh goals we do everything in our power not to lose that which we once had. Energy dissipates right there!

As a consequence zero-sum games remain the actuality. Entangled in a transition we never intended and hardly thought possible, one that threatens to depose some of our most fundamental tenets and over which we have seemingly less control by the day, we are traumatized by an ominous sense of foreboding and the ennui of uncertainty.

Instead of embracing an energizing potential for renewal, especially the possibility of attending to inequities generated by increasingly predatory forms of capitalism, we descend prematurely into melancholy, grieving for the sacrifice to come and striving to avoid the pain of disassociation. In most cases that just means carrying on with life, turning a blind eye to worsening forecasts and devastating events, doing what we can to protect our own parochial interests, and all the while putting our trust in promises of further economic expansion and growth when that is clearly the root cause of our current mess. How absurd!

In these circumstance is it really any wonder vast numbers of citizens just switch off, get angry, or try to deny the limits inherent in nature that stare us in the face? Why should it surprise us when individuals search for ways to evade discomfort and to conserve, or even improve, their present life-style? Why should we all not join those climate prosperity advocates who fearlessly seek to create even greater wealth from this crisis without so much as questioning the flawed foundations underpinning the notion of endless growth? Should we continue to belittle and censure those who simply hanker for the conspiracy theorists to be correct and the scientists wrong? Is it not human nature that we should turn our backs on a future seemingly devoid of any optimism or joy?

2. The Sinic Lens: Environment in Discord

Realizing that an existential ideal is harmonious existence, we observe that the course of industrial linearity (the extraction of resources, the industrial fabrication of consumables and the single-use throw-away mentality inherent in modern notions of consumption) is dissonant with phenomenology in the natural order.

For those systems long starved of methane and carbon dioxide, the thinning ice-sheets are breathing life back into organisms that humanity has misunderstood or ignored in terms of their role and consequence. Algae, viruses and bacteria bloom in a world filled with chemicals released by unconsidered acts. 

Our response can be dual. On the one hand, we can see the emergence of these reinvigorated terrestrial forms as symbians with whom interaction can be positive. It is conceivable that the structure and energy of these dynamic agents can align with ours in abundant cohabitation. On the other hand, we can view these energies as alien intruders and choose to oppose their emergence. While evolution cautions that the second path is unlikely to prevail in the long view, rallying around a common defense is a timeliness component of species-evident values and, as a result, may serve as an impulse to aggregate in community.

Beyond duality we can choose a more transformational pathway, embracing the role of imprudent acts which triggered this dissonance but seeking pathways to re-establish harmony. This may mean remediating our unconsidered acts, having acknowledged them as such, as well as our complicity in their invention. It may also mean uniting in acts of reconciliation that connect us more aptly in our eleventh-hour efforts to develop a considered response to our unconsidered, collective neglect. 

One can see this view in conflict in the past decade of economic and social activity in the People’s Republic of China. In the wake of the Kyoto Protocol discussions, China attempted to bridge its growing role as a world power with the post-imperialist concessions afforded in the aging paradigm under the moniker of developing nation.  In response to perceived need for power, industrial scale agriculture, and projected evidence of achievement, the Three Rivers Gorge scheme became a “coming of age” project. Sold simultaneously as ecological (non-polluting) energy as well as evidence of engineering mastery, China chose an iconic symbol of power explicitly from nature – in this case, a river.

However, discord challenged the project from the outset. Irreplaceable cultural heritage was flooded. Communities were displaced. Technology to harness power was largely supplied by foreign entities. Scant attention was paid towards the environmental cost of production (entailing vast concrete and steel consumption) or utilization (a toxification of vital waterways threatening the health of millions). 

Against the pollution of the waterways, however, has emerged a concerted effort by Chinese scientists to derive biofuel options from the various algaes that now blight the coastal waterways. Developments on algal agriculture, bacterial biodigesters and the like have emerged as centers of excellence in a country that seeks to balance Occidental metered growth with Sinic scaled engagement.

3. The Indic Lens: Environment in Dharmic Cycle

The world is as it is and we learn from our experiences. Humanity has come to the concluding stages of a process of awakening and passage through this dark stage is necessary if we are to reawaken with a new sense of being at a higher level of consciousness than before.

Prior to the industrial period we were not given the opportunity to acquire the value of reflective stewardship. Thus our understanding was compromised. Instead, our experiments with violence and with conflict (often amounting to trivial aggression over resources and territories and dominated by an imperial desire to kill, maim and impoverish for the selective opulence of a few) have come to mete lessons on those who saw themselves as beneficiaries of unconsidered systems.

These lessons must be embraced, instilled with the energy we previously released in callous and abusive behaviour, but in ways that express new models of engagement and relationship. Such is the path to enlightenment.

Those intoxicated by possessions and trapped within the current manifestation of reckless consumption will perish. But, in an awakened state, humanity will emerge more aware.

Perishing (should we embrace the process) will manifest as the eclipsing of those behaviors and memes that have dishonored matter, energy and spirit and the emergence of a refined engagement of the same in a new fashion. Perishing (should we enter into conflict with the process) will manifest as a violent retribution from matter, energy, and spirit abuse where the elements themselves will persist in destroying that which is triggering the immune response.

There is no path that does not involve destruction and there is no path that will not give rise to rebirth.

Many countries across Asia and the Global South are demonstrating collective responses that evidence the patterns emerging from the Indic mindset. In India itself, the retrofitting of compressed natural gas (CNG) in public transport vehicles in Delhi and throughout metropolitan centers has led to an immediate improvement in air quality the likes of which have occurred in few other places.

In the space of two years, pragmatism and public investment aligned to improve the air quality and living conditions of all as evidence of a notion of shared stewardship of the air. In post-Apartheid South Africa, resource management (including metals, gems, and energy) became the fulcrum for re-engagement of a national dialogue on resource stewardship and, through this context, social reconciliation was integrated into economic engagement. In Fiji rejection of colonial influences led to the provocative realignment of social order and systems.

Ironically, modern expressions of Indic philosophy include stark post-colonial reflexive social challenges in almost every incidence. However, as one examines these and other cases, what emerges is a clear prioritization on community and family accountability, in stark contrast to the abdication of such priorities for some apathetic caretaker state. This by no means suggests that bureaucracies are not flourishing and grossly ineffective in these states. But it is important to perceive the growing recognition of the role of the community unit rather than the collective apathy of displaced responsibility.

Intentional Evolution:

And so it seems there are far more inspiring alternatives to the enervating cynicism, uncertainties and increasingly shrill revelations of impending disaster that flood the Occidental mind daily. Stories that offer hope and intentions that chronicle a brighter future for all.

Human civilization is certainly in a state of transition. Indeed we may have reached a developmental crisis point, one that necessitates a redefinition of what we interpret to be progress. Yet while we can only analyze past transitions, the future paradigm still remains ours to invent. Along with technological revolutions, socio-economic crises offer exceptional opportunities to move to higher levels of evolution. We just need to be able to see the promise of societal renewal with greater clarity and conviction, which is why epistemology (the framework of understanding within which we make meaning) becomes so vital.

Contextual dynamics both establish and reflect dominant belief systems in the culture. An appreciation of context becomes particularly critical when so many of the ideas and institutions defining Western culture appear to be breaking down. This is the case today. It is the ideal time to be learning from diverse cultural traditions as an alternative to insisting upon the validity of a superior Occidental mindset, which is simply a delusion.

The Sinic and Indic traditions, as well as the various indigenous mindsets, enable an entirely different quality of reaction to the environmental crisis than that afforded through the Occidental lens.

Possibly the most profound transition in history, one that has taken hundreds of years so far and is still far from completion was the move away from pious notions of an infallible maker (or supreme being) to the concept of scientific materialism. Here it is the physical world that really counts. This shift required an across-the-board abandoning of deeply imprinted fears and fallacies. Predictably it led to the modern obsession with material goods and the acquisition of personal wealth. But evolution cannot stop there. We must move beyond even that phase of understanding.

Among the most vital of contemporary principles is the rejection of the idea of the world as a machine and the adoption of the world as a living system. The transition towards a new society instilled with such a fundamental ontological shift appears most likely to lead to a new holistic consciousness that integrates both science and spirit. Yet the practical realities of governing a global population of seven billion people still lag far behind conceptions.

In the past at least part of the problem was our inability or unwillingness to engage with really big issues (such as environmental degradation or property ownership) in any meaningful or constructive manner. Our inclination to delegate vital decisions to others (whether to dictators, monarchs, professional managers or councils of elected representatives) was deemed pragmatic. And our intransigent aversion to experience reality through an others perspective allowed us to live unconsidered lives. In reality this represented a disquieting social apathy – an ingrained passivity that is extremely difficult to overcome today. What is more it often allowed corruption, misconduct and oppression to thrive, to which we then turned a blind eye for fear of attracting still further repression. Many communities still suffer from that indifference today.

With the advent of today’s sophisticated communications systems and online social media, however, there can be no excuse. People are able to speak out and air their grievances, wielding power in ways that were previously out of the question. Dictators and governments fall at the hands of people power. Today, the voice of every citizen can be heard. Individuals can contribute to a global community of mind (a collective intelligence for change) should they wish to do so. Indeed some pundits argue the case that it is impossible to remain quarantined from such participation, given the potency and insidious nature of new social media. Furthermore, social networks help create the collective consciousness we so urgently need to reboot civilization.

In attempting to address the inevitable impacts of our hot over-crowded planet on individual lifestyles the application of such crowd-sourced intelligence, supported by all the innate wisdom and expertise we can muster, is vital. But whereas collective intelligence urges the immediate deployment of smart technologies, a shift to clean energy and the rapid phasing out of toxic products and practices, sagacity entreats us to pause, to shift the conversation, to pose uncommon questions that are missing from the current dialogue.

Some of the more important questions we should be pondering are not even on the agenda. While the greatest threats to humanity and to our environment seem to be that nothing is done, that the wrong things are done too quickly, or that too little is done too late, the greatest threat to our social well-being is that we act without wisdom.

The most urgent questions for humanity no longer focus on discrete issues and their impact but on how we can adapt and evolve to changing conditions, lessening the damage wherever we can and exploiting opportunities that are bound to emerge and delaying more serious consequences. There are two philosophical questions we need to answer: how can we tread more lightly on this planet and how can we preserve for future generations what is uniquely beautiful and inherently precious about our world?

A Critical Role:

So far our response to these questions has been depressingly inadequate. On deeper, more spiritual issues, such as how we can accelerate our capacity to adapt to the laws of physics in ways that enable more sustainable relationships, with each other and with the Earth, there has been a deafening silence. It is within this context that the role of foresight becomes critical. But the field itself will need to evolve in the following ways:  

1. Foresight practitioners must awaken to their role as curators of authentic integral experiences. Active self-reflection in the quest towards self-mastery has to be a pre-requisite for evolving foresight theory and praxis. It is only when mastery is fully understood that “higher altitude” questions around deep design can surface and be transparently explored. If an important part of our work is to facilitate the intentional evolution of society we need first to engage in that project at a deeply intimate and personal level. Viewing self as a mechanism for transition needs to be part of the process of bringing greater clarity, depth and rigor to the field and its efforts.

2. We must also ensure that foresight invites the possibility for identifying the true nature of individual and collective pathologies as well as putting forward solutions that are systemically viable and strategically resilient in a context that is morphing by the minute. The former demands integral intelligence, uncompromised by filtering and compartmentalized thinking. The latter requires a genuine blend of systemic consciousness and imagination coupled with commercial pragmatism and entrepreneurial flair.

3. Foresight must shift from its obsession with technology and uncomplicated issues to encompass a broader mix of higher altitude observations concerning the purpose of humanity, the provisioning of resources to accommodate the needs of an escalating global population, design criteria for social change, disparities between affluent and less privileged individuals and communities, and the rules and conventions that exacerbate division, competition and conflict within society.

4. Tools and methods must arise from philosophy, embracing both collective insights and expert opinion in an attempt to transcend obsolete knowledge in the co-design of new wisdom. This will take an expansive process of collaborative inquiry blended with curated transformational narratives that probe far more deeply into our inner belief systems and collective cultural traits than has hitherto been considered relevant.

5. The facilitation of foresight must move from conventional spaces into immersive environments. These decision theatres must be capable of (i) vividly visualizing dynamically complex patterns and data (ii) mapping the intended and unintended consequences of decisions (iii) simulating and modeling alternative solutions, and (iv) prototyping and stress-testing systemic designs.

6. Whole-system, collaborative inquiry and design conversations must take pre-eminence over other misused and increasingly hackneyed foresight methods. This is critical if we are to really engage a broader clientele in understanding that emergent patterns in our systems are simply the product of the way the system has been designed to function. Reframing symptoms (as frequently occurs during the crafting of scenarios) is a distraction, inadvertently shifting attention away from fundamental causes. Redesigning whole systems however (and, more importantly, the intentions informing that design) and we begin to solve the actual issues and dilemmas we are trying to grapple with on the surface – in addition, quite possibly, to resolving many other related concerns.

In a similar vein, scenarists must develop the capability for curating experiences in real time. They will need access to a range of relevant models and theories-in-play in order to guide, provoke and compose a seamless dialogue that includes and transcends prior knowledge.

It is also worth noting that when we are preoccupied with discrete technical issues and observable trends (as typically happens, for example, when scenario methods and technology roadmaps are adopted) our tendency is to converge around explicit goals we want to achieve or explicit futures we want to avoid.[vii] This is a mind-trap. Being overly attached to a particular outcome, especially one linked to a so-called focusing question, can deceive us into believing that the goal itself is of greater import than the desired end-state. As evidenced by the fact there is so much insipid and uninspired strategic thinking in corporate life today, this attachment can drag us further away from any deeper intentions we might long to embed in the system.

7. Foresight can no longer simply be about the future. It must pull information from past and future states into an expanded now of new consciousness. In this way the field of strategic foresight itself can be expanded, becoming genuinely transformative and therefore more strategically significant. This is the emerging field of epistemological foresight.

Future Pathways:

An elemental distinction between societies is whether they accentuate the spiritual or the physical realm. Within pre-literate communities these were (indeed are) identical. Throughout the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, emboldened by globalized trade and technological innovation, others eagerly embraced the Occidental mindset. Today we sense a less-fractured world, united by a common purpose, edging towards a more unified, all-encompassing mindset in which science and spirituality, as well as our internal and external worlds, strive to fuse once again.

What is evolving today, however, is not the individual but the composite organism of humanity. Even so, until we fully comprehend we are all part of a single living ecosystem, that we are all intimately connected to the Gaian biosphere that gives us life, and that cooperation and not competition is the key to our future existence, we will most likely continue to butcher each other and despoil the planet.

When a society accepts specific answers to recurrent questions from a particular body of knowledge, they commonly turn to that same source for other truths about reality. In the Middle Ages people asked the local priest or to the Church to help them resolve problems in their daily lives. Prior to that it was the village shaman or the witch doctor. When science eclipsed religion we turned to technologists for the answers. Now it is time to turn to the custodians of integral foresight and to more holistic, integrated and authentically human states of being. Epistemological foresight is the key to a deeper, more intentional design, of a unified society living in harmony with its environment.

We have been watching with increasing dismay the tragic events unfolding in Japan and Libya. As witness to these events who can doubt we are poised on the cusp of fundamental change? This moment in world history is unique. Exceptional times call for exceptional responses and not simply more of the same. Yet uniqueness of the type now warranted only emanates from higher levels of  intentionality - a collective consciousness intensely focused on integrating and transcending past paradigms and poles of thought.

Many argue that foresight methods have played a critical role in the development of modernist thinking - especially in encouraging us to imagine and rehearse what we would do should future realities turn out not to match our best-informed guesses. And they are correct. But we still remain trapped in prisons of our own invention, which is why these same foresight methods require radical philosophical and operational upgrades if they are to remain strategically relevant. The future of foresight is at stake.

Without valid foresight we put in jeopardy both the highly sophisticated nature of our society as well as its more pragmatic capacity to produce and distribute life’s necessities. One might perceive this threat as a potential collision between fate and desire. In that context, risks appear to have emerged as a direct result of the way we think - about our needs, our rights, our aspirations and our interactions, particularly relative to each other and to the planet.

Now we must think again. And differently this time. Not only through different lenses but also from a variety of altitudes. Epistemological foresight can help us move beyond the civilizational worldview by integrating and transcending current ways of thinking and doing as we re-imagine our collective state of being.

Over the past few centuries our world-system has advanced incredibly and in so many different ways. Today, those fortunate enough to be living in the developed world enjoy levels of material wellbeing that was unimaginable even a few years ago. At the same time much of what was once fresh and beautiful about humankind has ossified into a rigid shell - homogenous, pitiless, seemingly devoid of empathy, wonder or love. Bloated from excessive consumption, exhausted by pointless conflict, we await an emergency that will cause the blueprint of a new society to emerge from the imaginal cells of our deepest communion - like the metamorphosis of a chrysalis into a butterfly.

Perhaps global heating is that emergency - or will swiftly become so if government inaction persists. Yet all crises offer us a plethora of possible ways forward. Some paths lead to a better future for humanity as a whole. Others, and I fear these are the pathways we are intent on pursuing, chart a course that lock-in current divisions and convictions – especially the paradigmatic impulse linking progress to continuous economic growth and development.

We know that broadly defining a better future, one that is healthier, sustainable and more abundant than present actualities, is critical to human progress. But what do we imagine when we speak of better futures? What do we find inspiring? And how does a better future stack up with what we already have and what we believe we may be about to lose? These are critical questions to ponder as we take the first tentative steps within a new consciousness of possibilities.

In the past we have frequently quashed or undermined our capacity to substitute imprinted assumptions and beliefs for something far more viable and compelling. But we cannot wait any longer. It is time to open new windows onto new worlds.

There can be little doubt that the transcendence of the civilizational worldview, with its prejudicial constraints, exploitative traits and profound injustices, is the most vitally compelling yet audacious key towards unlocking such new windows. Impending societal collapse demands alternative options, visualizations, memes and strategies. And that is precisely the opportunity offered by epistemological foresight.

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[i] Epistemological foresight in this context is the all-encompassing domain of human consciousness, experience and knowledge. It includes the various ‘integral’ theories put forward by contemporary scholars like Ken Wilber, Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo and Ervin Laszlo as well as those in other, more ancient traditions but also goes beyond these by stepping into alternative ways of knowing that are not constrained by orthodox technological rationalism

[ii] Panarchy is the framework in which systems, including those of nature (such as forests and oceans) and of humans (such as capitalism and governance) as well as combined human-natural systems (such as institutions that govern the use of natural resources) are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.

[iii] These five foundational moral impulses are best depicted as (i) it is wrong to hurt people (ii) justice and fairness are good qualities (iii) allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues (iv) people should respect social hierarchy (v) purity and sanctity are good while contamination and pollution (and their associated character traits of greed and lust) are bad. Note that different cultures and groups bring different weightings to these shared five moral imperatives.

[iv] Extensive empirical research in the field of developmental psychology has shown that our ability to step into new epistemologies and to view reality through multiple lenses, perspectives and cultural mindsets, unfolds through nested stages. One of the reasons we struggle to see and appreciate alternative points of view is that we may be in an arrested state of awareness that literally prevents us from seeing and understanding more. The dance between our individual developmental stages and the evolution of a civilizational worldview with its various cultural mindsets further advances the need  for integral foresight, especially as it starts to draw attention to the interplay between intentional evolution at the level of both individual and collective levels of consciousness

[v] The four major crises facing humanity are crises of consciousness, behaviours, cultures and systems

[vi] An idea originally proposed by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, a meme acts as a vehicle for conveying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Memes can be regarded as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate mutate and respond to selective pressures.

[vii] I am using the term “outcome” as applying to a number of resulting changes we wish to experience within a system rather than that experience in its totality which I prefer to define as a “desired state”

 

Clueless: The Future of Stupidity

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe

                                                Albert Einstein

We humans, by our very nature, are easily misinformed, misled by gossip, taken in by grand lies, seduced by rumours and conspiracy theories, and often downright stupid.

A cursory glance at the average story headlining the daily newspapers reveals the degree to which stupidity and gullibility are routine. Indeed I suspect we constantly underestimate the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Its very difficult to avoid them. They are to be found everywhere – in academia, industry, government, politics and big business. 

Lets be clear. I am not talking about ignorance or a lack of education. On the contrary, many uneducated people are incredibly intelligent while countless stupid people have had a particularly decent education. I am using the term stupid quite explicitly to identify those among us who consistently display their capacity to ignore reason, who habitually disregard the obvious, who doggedly believe they are right and who remain convinced of their own infallibility, come what may.

Most of us believe we are smart. The problem is stupid people think they are smart but are not. They are deluded. In other words they are unaware they are stupid. However this is potentially hazardous for the rest of us, especially given the strong likelihood of stupid people being in positions of influence or power. Complicating the matter is the fact that even intelligent individuals can be stupid on occasions.

To deride stupid people, to single them out in order to laugh at their naivety would, in itself, be foolish. For stupidity seems to be a conditional norm. As a species we are clueless a lot of the time. If that were not so serious it would be amusing. But stupidity is a reality we need to face up to, particularly in an age characterised by the collapse of certainty and by the failure of systems we rarely challenge yet whose genesis arose from flawed assumptions and questionable intentions. Many of these are grand lies; misfortunate social memes that have ingrained themselves across generations and cultures to shape a shared civilizational weltenschaung.

In purely technological terms we are a remarkable species – or so we constantly flatter ourselves. In a more general cognitive context our capacity to solve complicated issues probably justifies the conclusion that we are a highly developed sentient intelligence but that is only a half-truth.

Over the past few centuries fundamental design issues and associated down-stream problems have recurred generation after generation and in every culture. Wisdom has been in short supply. Our undoubted technical and engineering capabilities have leapt ahead of any comparable expertise in social design. Furthermore our much-vaunted technological brilliance is set on destructive purposes rather than being used as a tool for good. All things considered we look pretty stupid.

I doubt very much that we can continue for too long in our conventional clumsy ways. But what should we do in a political and cultural landscape in which alarmist rumours, lies and superstitions are peddled as sacrosanct beliefs and where such fictions have more currency than fact-based truths?

Blaming individuals is not the point. Nor will condemning certain groups or communities for being ignorant, greedy or malevolent get us very far. Criticising an education system that still focuses on subject disciplines while failing to teach social interaction, altruism, learnable intelligence, critical thinking, eco-literacy and systems dynamics, is simply too easy. On the other hand we do need to tackle our collective stupidity. And if messaging has such a significant impact on how we interpret facts then there are few alternatives other than countering the more preposterous lies with a narrative that simply tells the truth.

Lets start with the biggest lie of all. The truth is there is no God. At least not in the sense of an omnipotent, omniscient man in the sky – compassionate or unforgiving depending upon one’s source of indoctrination. During the Enlightenment it became obvious that the God-myth was an elaborate hoax. It has endured, and flourished for a while, nurtured by those whose best interests were served by defending such infantile propaganda.

But it is now time to grow up and to acknowledge the myth for what it is. Like Zeus or Thor or Quetzalcoatl the God of monotheistic traditions is pure fiction; fabricated at a time of relative scientific ignorance to account for phenomena that could not be explained any other way.

On one level the God-myth reflects imagination, inventiveness and beauty. Reactions to the myth from the faithful can be pure and sincere. Nevertheless, pause for a moment to reflect on how bizarre our situation has become at the behest of this myth. As the potency of the lie became clear to rulers and those in authority it was used calculatingly and comprehensively to wield social control over the rest of us until, today, its impact has become insidious and irrational. For example, nobody in the US can seek public office unless they are prepared to pretend such a God exists. Much of what passes for good public policy in any number of cultures is forced to conform to religious taboos more suited to a medieval theocracy. Meanwhile crimes against humanity, whether it be the stoning to death of Iranian women or the atrocities committed by US-led forces in Iraq, are condoned on the basis of some kind of religious-inspired logic within a forlorn illusion that “God is on our side”.

In this day and age, when scientific and spiritual knowledge combined has reached a stage of sophistication that enables us to design, create and sustain life, but where much of the suffering we inflict upon each other can still be attributed to religious hatred, war and delusion, the God-myth has become indefensible. It is stupidity and self-deceit at its most scary. To refute this lie is a moral necessity.

Other lies, almost as grand, flow from this. Serfdom is a case in point. The ancient claim of monarchs and popes to be God’s representatives on Earth intrinsically entrenched their power in an era where the God-myth was intense and could not be defied without the risk of eternal damnation.

Yet it amazes me that millions of people around the world are still in thrall to rulers and autocrats who blatantly and in full view of the media accrue wealth at the expense of those who pay allegiance to them. The mystery, pomp and ceremony surrounding “majesty” is simply incomprehensible when set against the fact that each day over 4 billion people have insufficient access to clean drinking water. Inequities and injustices would diminish considerably if we were able to institute more egalitarian, less corrupt, regimes.

Another grand lie that distracts us from the invention of better futures is the assumed role of business in today’s society. It is often asserted that the role of business is simply to make profits for shareholders and that no other role should be countenanced. That is the kernel of stupidity. For profits depend upon continuous economic growth which, we have now discovered, is impossible. It flies in the face of physics. We have reached the limits imposed by nature – and nature is reacting in ways that are alarming.

In pre-industrial cultures production and consumption were mostly localised. Value was self-evident in that the quality of life was to be maintained. Meanwhile mastery of one’s craft was nurtured by a system of guilds. This system, based on trust and equity, was to generate value of one kind or another for the entire community.

The advent of the modern, limited liability company, changed these dynamics, creating a legal behemoth that enjoys freedoms and benefits denied us mere mortals. Initially the invention of the corporation spawned a level of growth and development previously considered impossible. It opened up new markets and expanded the range of goods and services that could be purchased. But over time the corporation’s obsession with money and profits eroded trust, amplified greed, and set humanity on a course from which we are now finding it is almost impossible to recover.

This lie needs to be overturned. Contemporary business can no longer merely serve the financial interests of a minority especially if, in order to do that, it has to ride roughshod over the environment or the rights or ordinary citizens. Business has to become an amplifier of value, but in ways that are more equitable than in the past, that recognise the inherent value of non-commoditised resources, and that accept responsibility for future generations.

I should point out that this is not some kind of utopian dream but a practical solution to some of the problems facing us today; problems that will not fade into memory without a conscious effort to destroy the lies underpinning them.

There are myriad interrelated myths to which we adhere in spite of all evidence pointing to their fantastical and deceitful nature. Contemporary stupidity covers the full range of policy issues - from the absurd to the irrational. Whether it is the bullying use of warfare that changes nothing in the long run, the denial from large corporations that small-scale local farming is the key to solving world hunger, the proliferation of guns in a country where deaths from the use of legal arms is on the increase, farcical arguments around whether or not global warming is caused by humans, or the unsustainable nature of a global monetary system based upon debt, it is the tissue of underlying lies and erroneous assumptions that are of most concern and that play into the hands of stupid people.

While dogma and inconsistencies abound, stupidity will flourish. But we can rise above it by accepting culpability for our stupidity, letting go of our ego-driven need to be right all the time, and coming to terms with the underlying flaws in our life-critical systems.

Human intentions, together with our knowledge base for leading, governing, making, contributing, managing, consuming, exchanging and relating (to each other and to the environment) all need a drastic overhaul and brought into a situation where the truth, rather than fiction, is the primary design tool for societal evolution.

Whether we opt to approach that from a scientific viewpoint or a spiritual ethos the issue is the same. We must find ways to transcend our collective stupidity, especially by rejecting obsolete fears and superstitions that may otherwise continue to trap us in a quicksand of escalating crises from which we will find no way out.

The alternative is to remain clueless – and perish.

 

Innovation By Design

‘The empires of the future will be empires of the mind’. So claimed Winston Churchill half a century ago. He was dead right. Ideas are changing everything we have taken for granted. Innovation is one of the key drivers of that change.

Inventors and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Dortmund to Sapporo have their eyes constantly on a radar screen that few of us have seen and most of us ignore - as if it were some entertaining, but mostly irrelevant, science fiction fantasy. This screen is called ‘integral futures’ and the seeds of all strategic innovation can be found there.

On that screen there is a ‘blip’. It has been there for some time signalling its intentions but it is now growing in intensity by the day. Those in the know have long recognised that the future of almost all manufacturing is closely linked to this ‘blip’. So too is the future of medicine, health care, agriculture, urban design, communications, media, transport, computing, textiles, construction, and a host of other industries. It will result in the rise and fall of nations and transform everything we do. It may even allow us to re-create extinct species, re-program species, and generate entirely new life forms.

This ‘blip’ is life code (specifically the convergence of digital and genetic code) and it is rapidly changing all the rules about what we thought was possible. Within a couple of decades innovators will need to be literate in life code just as they understand how to use computer software today. So what are we as a nation doing about that?

In the 1870s, Australia was ranked as the world’s most productive economy, trading off its capability to mine coal and iron ore, farm wool and patent extraordinary inventions like the combine harvester, the electric drill, differential gears, the refrigerator and the ubiquitous black box flight recorder found in all commercial aircraft. Today the smartest nation on the planet (per capita) is Luxembourg – a nation that has few natural resources but plenty of smart people moving bits of code around. Currently the world map of people who are literate in life code is limited to just a few suburbs in the the US, Europe and Japan that house the companies trading in genetic information. This new world is there for the taking. But it needs to be consciously designed.

So what should Australia do to be a part of that literate future? What should it stop doing that is merely distracting but ultimately sentimental noise? What will it take to migrate an old-style economy into a future literate one? What are the essential strategic design components of that future?

Many of our leaders, from captains of industry to government policy makers, believe we just need to start espousing innovation and everything will fall into place like clockwork. Not so. Knowledge of life code presages a future totally unlike that of the past. We cannot use past experience now. And current resources and practices can actually get in the way as it is actually changing the processes of innovation itself. A deliberate, totally new design is required. Conditions need to be amenable, the national culture needs to become one of enterprise and entrepreneurship, intentions need to be clear, talent and resources need to be available and, perhaps most importantly, global markets need to want what we produce.

There are three critical strategic lenses we must use to view this fast approaching reality: context (including infrastructure), culture, and composition (including capability). These three lenses give us a powerful framework within which to view the ideal system for nurturing innovation. Additionally there are three design criteria that, when fulfilled, can assist in accelerating and amplifying the most desirable conditions for innovation: they are connectivity, creativity and collaboration. With all these ‘C’s, let’s call this fast approaching future the ‘C’ society.

Context:
The future context is consciously shaped by a smart society. Individuals and companies in the ‘C’ society continuously scan the horizon for business intelligence. As a consequence they recognise opportunities (especially from scientific and technological change) as well as acknowledging emergent patterns and trends, such as climate change, for example. This allows the focusing of resources on ‘strategically appropriate’ and ‘systemically viable’ areas for advancement. In Australia these could be ecological and environmental services, water management, solar energy, molecular engineering, forestry, agricultural and dairy products, health care, education, etc.

There is also a pervasive recognition that peer-to-peer business models enable levels of connectivity, collaboration and creativity that surpass all previous forms in terms of ‘whole-of-system’ value. As a result, ‘C’ society governments are deeply committed to the generation and dissemination of new knowledge, consistently demonstrated through policies designed to attract direct foreign investment, liberate entrepreneurship (most noticeably through low tax rates (and even tax credits) for research, development and commercialization) and foster talent. This accommodating attitude extends to the networked infrastructure within the broader ecosystem, where (real and virtual) links between enterprise, education and research facilities are at once intimate, organic and agile.

Culture:
Two intrinsic aspects of culture are grasped by ‘C’ societies. First, is an acceptance that innovation burgeons when it is embedded within an ethos of imagination and creativity. In a broad sense this means appreciating culture in its totality and using that as a unique resource. For example, one of the reasons Ireland has become so much admired for its innovative capacity is because it has been the home of poets, musicians and artists for generations -  people who listen shrewdly, challenge courageously, speak imaginatively and communicate with vigour and clarity. This culture suffuses all those who live and work there. It is part of Ireland’s success. And the Irish are proud of it.

Second, the world has shrunk under the sheer force of digitally-enabled globalization. We populate a networked global market in which venerable boundaries are disappearing, where speed is of the essence, and where the natural ebb and flow of talent and ideas is gathering an unstoppable energy of its own. In this environment we may need to change our minds about what is important and what we should value - or not.

Composition:
Intellectual agility is common within ‘C’ societies. This gives rise to a flexible and adaptive workforce with the capacity to initiate and innovate in uncommon ways. What are the implications of such agility? While investment in learning is high, curricula are strongly informed by business needs. Learning networks connect individuals, corporate enterprises and research establishments in ways that guarantee novelty and systemic thinking. The organisation of business, too, is novel. Too many Australian organisations still organise for efficiency. There is no better way to limit and stifle innovation. So our enterprises need to be re-designed for speed and collaboration. In ‘C’ society businesses, organisational networks assure processes like speed to market, skills acquisition, cross-disciplinary joint ventures, outsourcing, and talent development are front of mind for the executives running the business.