The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog .

In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity’s primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient ‘sociotechnological primitives’.

First I’d like to qualify pre-architectural. It’s not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin or beginning. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we’re not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If pre-architectural doesn’t do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.

A means to our purpose is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.

Nuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own … maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations

Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the advisory council for the Future of Work community, and part of the steering group for The Responsive Organization community, I know I’m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.

Mike Grafham and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.

[embed width=“960”]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]

Sociocracy on Philip Sheldrake

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations