Co-Creating A Living Breathing Movement of Businesses That Can Meet Our Societal Needs
Life has problems. Society has problems. More recently, the problems seem to have morphed from just mere problems to “wicked” problems. “Wicked” connotes a tangled network of inter-relationships where we are unable to identify for certain what is the first cause. Should we first tackle the gaps in our societal models or is it more important to fix the social codes through inner development? Perhaps our basic familial unit is broken and we need community? Perhaps it is the collective trauma that needs collective healing?
These are not in essence wrong and are great places to begin our sacred meaningful work. In truth, a society in perfect homeostasis encourages disintegration and chaos that catalyzes individual actors and agents to create higher-order in our inter-relationships i.e. Update Society. However, why do we sense that our human Society is not updating on its own?
Our Current Built-To-Last Society
The notion of building something that updates itself is born out of contemporary times. While Mother Nature has a built-in impermanence and self-renewal sensibilities, man has favored the romantic notion of immortality in a built-to-last universe of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon that is filled with clockwork images promising us prediction and reliability. In the words of Margaret Wheatley, we have deliberately built our Societies to be strong complicated structures that are resistant to change, fearful of the future.
“We built them that way to hold back the forces that seem to threaten their very existence. We are afraid of what would happen if we lose our grip. If we let the elements of our organizations recombine or reconfigure or even to speak truthfully to one another, we are afraid that things will fall apart. We do not trust that this is a world of growth, rejuvenation and process. We believe we must provide the energy to hold it together. By sheer force of will, we have resisted destruction. And if we let go, the world will disintegrate.”
A Living System That Listens
Having explored the identities and shadows of Metamodern Business as well as the new rules of the game that can harvest the Emerging space between order and chaos, our natural progression has led us to imagine how new forms of complex networks could emerge when we link Metamodern Businesses together. What if Collective-Businesses become a living dynamic system that brings forth state-like behavior in service of Society?
A living-breathing organization follows a behavioral pattern both on the inside how it is formed, as well as on the outside what it can be part of. This pattern can be simplified into the 3 stages of Compete, Collaborate, and Trade. Compete is what the smallest unit within an organization must be allowed to do. As the smallest unit starts to form groups of units that Collaborate, it is here we find the next stable state. Trade, at the third level, does not symbolize the direct exchange of goods but instead is the force that re-organizes and re-arranges groups to form entirely new entities.
The Metamodern business does this pattern inside itself and between each other. When doing both the business’s capability of true updating is brought to life - and this is what is needed today.
Co-Creating The Society In-Between
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well. It is the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out” - Vaclav Havel
The intention of our workshop is to both nurture the creative emergence and harvest the serviceable order that is available to us. Bringing forth the insights and wisdom from the previous day (The Emergence of Metamodern Business and Investment), we will provide a short introduction to the framework and philosophies that have led us here. At the mingle there will be plenty of time to learn, discover, create, play and witness each other’s stories as a new Society.
