Future Here Now: Systempreneurship
Future Here Now is shifting to a daily format - same content, but spread out over the week so that one email doesn’t look like you will need a year and a half to read it.
If you’re a free subscriber, Today is one of your periodic free emails! Enjoy! Full subscribers get an email like this one once a week, plus a Try it On exploration activity, a roundup of Signals, a plan of action called To Do Next Week, and a Selection from something I think you will want to see or hear. You don’t want to miss out on All That, do you? You can get it all for only $5 per month. Deal!
If you’re a paid subscriber, check your email from last week for the new game plan. And thanks for coming along.
Signals
Signals are indicators of a possible future. They’re not guarantees, but they often give us a peek at a new idea or approach or technology that’s beginning to take root.
Rethinking “In Charge”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90822301/lessons-from-a-project-with-no-managers-no-boss-and-everyone-is-a-leader
I shared this article a few weeks ago, but I think it’s worth a second look (or a first, if you didn’t catch it back then). We are getting used to working in a physicsally distributed manner - decisions over Slack, meetings on Zoom - but we’re also, in many places, working with more distributed systems for making decisions, such as teams that may not have a traditional leader. But decision-making in that kind of context presents a lot of us with big challenges, because no one every taught us to do that. If no one is in charge, how do we decide which information is important and which isn’t? How do we resolve differences? Who gets to say when we’re done?
This project is an extreme example of how to re-engineer the process for building something complex, involving hundreds of different people. And that’s what makes it a good Signal - they’re doing something that seems almost, but not quite, so far ahead of where most of us are that it almost (but not quite) seems impossible.
I do want you to notice something: the people in the story aren’t just doing whatever they feel like. They’re working within a system — there’s very specific objectives, outputs, norms of behavior, etc. that shape and guide everything that they do. That’s the system. It just doesn’t look like the ones we’re used to. But it’s because of that system, and what it allowed, that this group of people were able to achieve a pretty impressive result.
Creating New Systems, Local Scale
https://theconversation.com/3-reasons-local-climate-activism-is-more-powerful-than-people-realize-196637?
I have to admit to having the gut reaction to climate change issues that this author identifies: I don’t know enough, it’s too big, it’s important but I don’t really know what I can do about it. I don’t know if the author would use these words, but what he’s proposing here is a systempreneurship approach to breaking those logjams. He does this through something overlooked but, IMO, profound - proposing a “Theory of Change” (if you write grants, just know I heard you wince :-) that sets local action not only within the global scope, but as an important means of addressing the global objectives. We are definitely not used to thinking that way, on the whole. Even in my own brain, I know that I compartmentalize “global” from “local” — and perhaps the reason why I focus so much on local is because I can understand it, but I haven’t learned to hold both global and local in my head at the same time (Ouch.)
Zooming out, this articles gives us a new perspective on a piece that we too often overlook when we’re trying to foster change. A lot of us are anxious to get into action — we don’t want to sit around thinking and visioning and planning, we want to get out there and do stuff. Doing something makes us feel better, but sometimes we’re feeling better at the same time as we’re doing the thing that doesn’t make as much impact. This is one of the critiques of consumer recycling programs, for instance. If I don’t recycle my milk carton, but a factory a mile from here is churning our pallets full of shrink wrap bound for the landfill, which one should be getting the environmentalists’ attention? Too often, it’s easier to attack my milk carton, because it’whis easier to envision and take on.
That’s why, even though the term gives me a twitch, that “theory of change” becomes so important to systempreneurship. If we don’t get very, very clear on what we understand, what we intend and how it fits into the larger systems, chances are we will revert back to the things we were doing before. And at that point we’re not creating new systems, we are at best repackaging or twiddling at the edges.
Systempreneuring the Uber-System?
https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.htm
Ready to really blow your own mind? How about learning to see the problems with the structure that underlies darn near all of our other structures?
The premise of White Supremacy Culture is that all of us — Black and white, poor and rich, US and most of the rest of the world — live in systems that have build up on the basis of a set of largely unexamined assumptions that make the white Euro - American experience the default — the norm, the “right” way to do just about anything.
When I first read this list and got into the information in this site and others that explain different parts of this, I really struggled. I still do. It’s easy for many of us to see some of the things on the bottle diagram as “bad” - certainly as non-helpful or counterproductive - but there’s others that are a lot harder to grapple with. I kind of like the written word, after all.
A big part of creating or improving our systems has to do with two issues that come through strong as we grapple with these concepts. One is the impact of our assumptions, our unseen and unrecognized assumptions, like many of the labels on these bottles. They form the foundations of our systems, old and new, and if we don’t get the right foundations in place, we’re going to end up building new systems that are twisted and distorted by the old stuff underneath.
The second is the necessity of learning from others, especially others whose life experiences are very different from ourselves. I would never have thought to question the primacy of the written word if I had not encountered people for whom the written word does not work well. I would have never been able to envision that progress =/= bigger or more, until I spent time with people who did not come from cultures with that assumption, or who had already worked through the faults in that assumption.
I’d encourage you to chew on this one for a while, and pay particular attention to where you find yourself feeling defensive or attacked. And think, at least abstractly, a little bit about what these kinds of changes in basic assumptions would mean for many of our accustomed systems, like … oh, how about written blogs? (Ouch.)
Tomorrow we’ll look at some ways that you can take some of the things we’ve examined this week and put them to work in your own business, community and life. If you aren’t a full subscriber, you won’t get that email. But you can change that for just a handful of spare change per month. I don’t think you’ll regret it.