We Need New Mastermindsetters To Help Change Humanity’s Mindset

Yesterday I retweeted  this tweet from @transarchitect: “The task of the teacher is to show us that we can change our minds, and that it is safe to do so”. This inspired me to come up with a new word MasterMindSetters. This blog explains the concept.

You could say there’s some common ground mindset in our society up until now. Many institutions, corporations or governments have become used to “manage” resources around the basic paradigm of scarcity. And then this scarcity easily leads to red ocean strategies whereby a minority uses up a majority of the “scarce” resources. I like to call the “Masterminds” that invented this scarcity thinking  the MasterMindSetters 1.0. They are the ones who keep the 1.0 system going. Their Masterminds advocate a scarcity mindset which makes them the mindsetters of the previous era.

But a new era is on the verge now. And with this new era, a new mindset is gaining acceptance. It’s advocated by new thinkers that see a need to disrupt the old systems. I call them the MasterMindSetters 2.0. These are the Masterminds that advocate a mindset that starts with reasoning from abundance instead of starting to reason from scarcity. And they are the ones that are the setters of this new mindset. Give them an applause because they might just be the ones that come to help to liberate our world from all the crises it’s gotten into. And help them transforming society into a new beautiful world where there is plenty of everything for everyone. And where forgiveness for imperfection and continuous learning is the new normal.

A World With Unique Human Beings Needs Human-Centric Service Designs

We human beings are individuals. We are, literally, in-dividable. Unable to divide. Like atoms. Unique. And despite each of us being a unique, in-dividable being, we have a lot of things in common. But it’s in the commonality domain where we often take decisions more in favor on the common than on the individual aspects.

I have observed many times that the majority of commonality or services oriented decisions we make lead to one-size-fits-all concepts such as generalization, categorization, standardisation or centralisation. I believe these decisions are mostly driven by fear, lazyness or just plain incompetence. Fear for not achieving maximum efficiency. Fear for not achieving the maximum synergy. Fear for having to cope with more complexity. Lazyness because it makes systems operations easier. Lazyness because it makes design easier. Lazyness because it makes change management or project management easier.  Incompetence just because we haven’t yet invented how to design complex systems for complex worlds.

But how would our world look if we stopped generalizing and started designing our world just as it is? A world that is complicated and full of unique living beings with unique service requirements? Instead of falling back on the easy-way out abstracted, generalized “types” that favor a minority above the majority. Time for change!

Time Flies When You’re Having Serendipity

As time goes by, we sometimes run into situations we never forget. These are the situations where serendipity (the act of unexpectedly finding something of value) can play a major role. Wikipedia states: Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. So it seems, serendipity is all a matter of coincidence. But do coincidences really exist? Or is there a higher (hidden) plan that guides us humans into believing we accidently run into coincidences? Either way, what really matters is if you can spot serendipities and act upon them. Social media might increasingly be helpful here. By connecting in social networks, you sometimes discover hidden value in a connection you couldn’t have dreamed of before. So the serendipity is all around, waiting to be discovered. Good hunting!

Seven Basic Principals of Huna and Other Empowering Thoughts

Huna picture source here. The Seven Basic Principles of Huna stem from Hawaiian philosophy. They appealed to me and inspired me to combine them with some other empowering thoughts. The Huna principles are:

• The World Is What You Think It Is
• There are no limits
• Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
• Now Is The Moment Of Power
• To Love Is To Be Happy With (someone or something)
• All Power Comes From Within
• Effectiveness Is The Measure Of Truth

If you live by these principles or resonate with them, chances are the following paradigm shifts might also appeal to you. They were written down by @venessamiemis.Venessa wrote them in this blog Bootstrapping Humanity’s Next OS that was resonating with me very much. The shifts or transformations or “axies” as Venessa call them are:

• from scarcity to abundance
• from finite to infinite value
• from ownership to stewardship
• from transactional to relational
• information hoarding to knowledge creation
• from isolation to cocreation
• from passive consumer to active producer

Especially the first “axie” appeals a lot to me. I even made a graphic for it. Because I believe there is abundance in allmost anything if we want it. So it’s all about sharing. Sharing worlds resources. Sharing values. Sharing thoughts. Sharing knowledge. Sharing wisdom. Sharing consciousness. Sharing leadership. Sharing work. Sharing opportunities. Sharing Energy. Sharing prosperity. Sharing … you name it.

And then I thought, why not add another set of these yin/yang type transformational values or paradigm shifts or “axies” that can help us thinking about what we would really want the world to transform into. I was inspired by the 12 BetaCodex design principles on sheet 34 in this paper from Niels Pflaeging. This paper was posted in respons to the Stoos Network LinkedIn discussion Organizations as “learning networks of people creating value”. It goes as follows:

The Beauty of Emerging Global Consciousness

Fantasy picture source here. Inspired by reading several blogs and articles, I am convinced global consciousness is further emerging. It’s as if humanity is preparing herself to go through a gate into a new era where we are more interconnected. And increasingly, I am beginning to see the beauty of it all. Because people all over the world are increasingly sharing their personal beliefs, thoughts, visions, values etc. we can now more easily make a conscious connection with eachother, facilitated by the Internet. Especially if we are on the same “consciousness wavelength” connections are easily made. Just to get a tiny little overview of this huge global consciousness topic, I recently created a mindmap called “Better Managed World“. It shows some very basic viewpoints of some of the communities that are occupied in rethinking some of the world’s systems. Communities that share meaning, vision, insight etc. It might inspire people to seek new connections. To me it feels as if Angels are guiding humanity to become more and more connected, that’s way I added this Angel picture here (source here).

How Strange Attractors, Panarchy and Rhizome Can Be Used To Support Organizational Change

Picture source here. The blog title is about three not so commonly used topics.  Allthough i’m certainly not an expert in these topics, I envision some practical use to combine these topics into some kind of generic, organizational change process. Let me try to explain. Many people have a natural habit to form communities around a certain shared topic or idea or concept. You could compare a community with a rhizome, where in the figure to the left, the new idea starts as a new, fresh node on the rhizome.

Before a community starts, it allways starts with the initiative of only a single person, the thought leader if you like. And then comes the next step: as a community initiator, you need to attract other people towards your idea. And using social networks/internet, you  could attract ‘strange attractors’, suddenly coming out of nowhere, helping you catalyzing your change or your idea. The next step is perhaps the most difficult: how do you sustain the energy into the bare bones community you just have initiated? In this step, good ideas often vanish again. It seems the energy gets lost. And exactly like Esko writes in his blog: “communities seldom grow beyond the group that initiated the conversation, because they fail to attract enough participants. Many business communities also fall apart soon after their launch because they don’t have energy to sustain themselves.”  you will often experience that lacking energy is one of the inhibitors to really sustain change. So what could be done about that? I wonder if the panarchy model (picture below) could assist us here a little. If you take a look at the never ending, lemniscate model which the panarchy represents, you could try to approach it from a ‘strang attractors’ point of view. For each phase in the model, one might need phase-specific attractors that help moving to the next phase.

This makes a nice bridge to the introduction of an excellent interactive panarchy visualization made by Gavin Keech et al. You might consider it as an organizational change framework. By combining the panarchy as a generic (organizational) change framework, using it as a kind of meta change process, you could try to assign the proper change agent archetypes to each phase in the panarchy lifecycle. It might turn out just so that the change agents ARE able to sustain the change, because there specific role is phase dependent. And you could say, they give the right type of energy depending on the phase. What I have written down here is all ofcourse just based on assumptions, no scientific approach, just a bare idea. Anyone care to validate it or work it out a bit further?