Future Here Now: the Future Ready Mind's Ground Conditions
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In the first version of my book The Local Economy Has Arrived: What’s Changed and How You Can Help, I gave a Cliff Notes version of my assessment of the basic requirements of the future we and our communities and organizations are moving into. I call those the Ground Conditions of the Future, because they’re like the ground conditions that engineers evaluate before they design a structure. It’s literally the condiion of the ground — spongy, rocky, clay, stable, unstable, etc.
When I wrote those, I was thinking primarily about external conditions, like public policy and economic revitalization. But as I described yesterday, I’ve come over the years to understand that real change isn’t possible, even if we really want it, unless it starts in our own brains. And as I wrote about last week, our own brains need a lot of external help to adopt new habits of thinking.
With that in mind, some of the Ground Conditions tell us much more about what our brains need to be able to do than I realized back in 2013. Here are a few of them. You can find the whole set in this Short Shot, or in The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived
Entrepreneurial Mindset is the unmet need. For everyone.
When we ask people to self-manage multiple career changes, play an active role in improving their communities, do the hard work of continuous education, advocate for their children in school, we are basically asking them to live entrepreneurially. And evidence indicates a multi-decade decline in entrepreneurial mindset in the United States.
In a situation where the old systems no longer work, to not be entrepreneurial is to be helpless - whether you are starting a business or not. You have to be able to see and capitalize on new opportunities. That goes for everyone, no matter your education level or profession or position or wealth.
If our work is about people, and if we are so dependent on our Talent, then it falls out that an entrepreneurial mindset is our biggest asset, our human ecosystem’s new superpower. If we have lots of people who can think and act entrepreneurially, then we will have lots of good problem-solving and creation.
But to have that, we can’t treat entrepreneurialism as this special playground for the wealthy or educated. Entrepreneurial work is everyone’s work, because non-entrepreneurialness is a recipe for deterioration. And that means that our budgets, our programs, our systems have to increase entrepreneurialism, especially for those who have been cut out of the game in the past.
Most important issues exist on a continuum, not a binary choice.
We drop easily, far too easily, into Us vs. Them.
Into Right and Left.
Socialist and Reactionary.
But let’s be practical: in a human ecosystem, where the best solutions might fall completely outside of our own limited experience, approaching issues this way is like trying to build a house with no more tools than a hammer and a screwdriver.
It’s tying a hand behind our back and then wondering why we can’t unravel a giant snarled knot.
Regardless of your belief system, a two-sided point of view is probably hiding more from you than it’s showing. And we can’t afford that loss of information anymore.
We who intend to help our communities thrive better be ready to be brave.
We have to reconnect to the reasons why we got into this, before the rules and bureaucracy and politics took over our field of view.
Whether we want to or not, we are going to be on the front line of the fight for new solutions, and we are going to be useless if we are just punching the clock or wandering from election to election, or cool idea to new cool idea.
We have to critically re-assess our professions and organizations and roles, and find the fortitude to break through the walls that are keeping our communities from being successful.
We cannot be foolhardy, and we must admit that we don’t have all the answers.
But we have to be brave enough to help lead the expedition.
Hi Della! It is so good to see your newsletter after returning to Ohio. I love this fresh take on embracing an entrepreneurial mindset to empower ourselves and our communities in light of where we are. This is a time for mutual aid; coming to our own rescue and leveling up. That said, it is important to name what I believe we need to level up to: for me, it is a new economic model aimed at removing extreme concentration of wealth/reducing wealth disparity, moving away from extraction and toward circular, and altering the consumption model. There is a lot of work, a lot of work to be done to reimagine how our economy can function better, and being engaged in that will help me weather the stress and anxiety that will result from national policy in the coming months and years -- scapegoating vulnerable people (and worse) while extreme wealth continues to concentrate. Even if I'm wrong, and I hope I am -- there is much to do.