What can I do when the issues are so BIG?
What can I do?
What can I do when the issues are so BIG?
Who am I to act? Who am I to lead? Who am I to stand up?
Many years ago I was sitting on my couch one weekend, thinking about the world. I have always been interested in geopolitics. My natural inclination is towards understanding large-scale systems. My decades of training in the school of Bucky Fuller has me consider everything from the level of Universe first – the largest most comprehensive view available to me – knowing even then that the view is partial and biased.
“What can I do?’ I asked myself many years ago. What can one small person with limited resources do that will make a difference? I did not want to be the person sitting on the couch complaining.
This question was one that my mentor of 35 years, Buckminster Fuller, asked himself.
His answer was to do what was spontaneously arousable from within for the highest good for the highest number of people, without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone. He set out, at the age of 32 years, to commit to humanity’s future, to lead what he called a design science revolution. “Don’t try and change the existing system. Build new models that make the existing obsolete.”
My answer to this question didn’t come immediately. Indeed, I sat on it for several years. It wasn’t that I didn’t do things during this time. But the call to do something that seized me around the answer to my question had not yet arrived. Kairos time was at play – heavenly time.
When the idea arrived, it landed in one hit. The result was an event in 2015 and 2016 in my local community, Big Blue Sky, engaging three levels of government, and multiple stakeholders. The purpose of Big Blue Sky was to work together as a community to co-create the future of our city, considering our geography, climate and technology changes, employment, health and child care, education, civics and justice.
The precessional effect of Big Blue Sky – the side effect – what Bucky said was often the main effect – is Syntropic World.
With Big Blue Sky back in 2015 I did not set out to create Syntropic World. But accidentally and inadvertently, I laid the foundations.
The purpose of Syntropic World is to create new models and systems, not to try and fix the broken. Our economic systems. Our legal codes. Our accounting systems. How do we coordinate humans? How do we create enterprises and businesses? How do we design currency and flows of value? How do we consider the long term consequences? How we convene. How we feed, house, transport. How we lead.
Everything.
In Syntropic World we aspire to have every system we design and implement be coherent and aligned with the laws of nature. In other words, for humans, given we are nature, to partner with nature, rather than to think we can impose our own constructs on nature and expect a response that is good for our precious home planet and all living things.
In the application of new models designed by nature to everything we do, to build both an education platform and community of practice working to build enterprises, businesses, technologies and communities deploying these new models. As Seth Godin says – when people like us do things like this – this is what happens. Syntropic World as a business is the model and all the businesses born through the work of Syntropic World – all the Syntropic Enterprises – demonstrate what is possible when we do this.
What can I do?
It is such a big question. There is no right or wrong answer.
At the level of the ground we need to supply food to the hungry, sanctuary to the homeless, climate and war displaced, respite to those suffering. Dignity to those without access to money, health care, rights or education. We need to work to address the immediate threats facing so many people. We need to enable Social Justice for everyone regardless of colour, race, gender, ability.
At the level of the ground we need to stop digging holes and taking from our energy savings account.
We need to deploy humanity’s amazing ingenuity to access the abundant energy we are gifted for free every single day, removing ourselves from dependence on our Earth’s savings account – fossil fuels – and all the concomitant costs that come with that dependency, including the massive geopolitical power differentials.
We need to free medicines that support human health and survival from property enclosure.
We need to stop the profiteering from drugs, guns and violence, child care, age care and education.
At the level of the future – the large scale systems level – we do need to change almost every current system and structure created by man.
We need to design and implement new systems and models that make the existing obsolete. Ones that partner with nature’s laws, reflecting the intrinsic design principles of Universe, and in doing so, honour the future of Earth and all her creatures.
I was asked recently how people might decide what to do, given the size, depth and breadth of our current global and local issues?
How do we reconcile that we are doing enough?
How do we make peace with the choice we have taken to act in this particular way?
The following is my belief and practice. In part it comes from my decades of studying Bucky Fuller’s work. It is also embedded in the Pattern Integrity of Syntropic World.
- Every human has a unique Pattern Integrity – present from birth. Indeed, every living thing has a unique Pattern Integrity.
- Often times our culture, parenting, education, community and systems and structures work to snuff out our Pattern Integrity, to confuse and weaken the vital force we each are.
- Yet each of us has a sense of our own direction, even if buried or obscured. For some, it might be local work on the ground, with communities, with gardens, with children, with animals. For others, it is towards education, the caring services, health care. Others are inclined towards justice. Some want to build things.
- Over the course of our life our circumstances present us with both good and bad and easy and hard roads to develop our skills and experiences. Every single one counts toward the whole of us and what we can do.
- If we are still unsure about what we can do, then pick a card. Any card. And get to work. Commit your whole self to this direction for a period. No matter if it is the right or wrong path for you, it will be the right path for your future. Trust that no skill, no experience, no knowledge gained, no lesson learned, is lost.
- If you are seized by a Source Idea – an idea that just will not remain with you as an idea only, that insists against all self objections for you to act – then act. Do not question how you will manifest it into form, or if you have the ability. Get started. In the process of bringing the idea to life, you will be shaped to become the person who can manifest it into form, or not. No right or wrong. (See #5) I am of the belief that those gifted with a Source Idea that animates them to act and keeps them acting when the going gets tough have the ability to bring it to life.
- Take the first step. Boldly. Clearly. Resolutely. Do not question the second step until the first one is taken. Repeat. Step #2 will be revealed when Step #1 is in progress or complete.
- If you are seized by another’s Source Idea and want to step into their arena to bring that idea to life, do so. Do apply the Rules of Nature’s Game below to your consideration to commit before you commit.
- Know that the direction you choose, the cause you are animating, is enough. No one can do everything. If everyone is moved to act around the thing they care about deeply, everything that needs action now will be covered. Someone else will pick up a cause that is dear to your heart but is a distraction to the main cause and idea you are focused on.
- Know that no act is too small. Someone who gifts genuine open-hearted smiles to strangers and friends is making a difference.
Some Rules of Nature’s Game
Before we act, consider deeply and thoughtfully, the precession of the action – the short and long term consequences.
The principle of precession applied to building Beautiful Business
Preferably consider the precession with the input of others unafraid to speak their truth to you. To consider deeply, apply the law of Synergy – where the behaviour of the whole cannot be determined by an examination of the parts separately – therefore start with the biggest perspective you are capable of.
Ask others for different perspectives. Run scenarios. Know that the impulse to be seized by glamour – to use the glittering tool of the day, for example, like blockchain and AI – might not be coherent with the path that supports the Source Idea to come to life.
Check the difference between service to others, the future, and your own desire to serve yourself. Do this with rigorous honesty with every single decision. From this place refuse to impose your own agenda or desire for the idea to look a certain way or exist under a timeline you want it to perform to, rather than allowing its own natural gestation and form to emerge.
Commit to Clean Communication as a non-negotiable engagement condition so that you and the team work coherently together, remaining focused on bringing the idea to life rather than spending time dealing with messy human disintegration.
Clean Communication- the foundation of all great and enduring relationships
Practice Steward Leadership – act as the parent/steward to the Source Idea. The idea is not you and you are not it. You are there to support the idea coming to life as an expression of its own Pattern Integrity. Therefore, like a gardener with precious seeds, your job is to create the ecology that enables the Source Idea to come fully to life.
In creating this ecology, deploy a tool such as the Syntropic Trust Manifesto – an enterprise architecture and threshold crossing that both stabilises the enterprise in integrity and allows people to choose to dedicate their life force energy to this purpose and way of being in support of the purpose.
Be the model. Do this at the individual, collective and systems levels. In other words, we cannot simply bring an idea to life. The birth of an idea will shape us into someone able to do this. Do we do this with integrity? Do we hold the shape of our own Pattern Integrity? Do we enable cultures of integrity, where each participant gets to be better for their work on the purpose they care about? Do we use models and structures with the very features that we are seeking to change, designed into their DNA, hoping for a better result? Or do we create new models that enable the world we intend to see to come to life, making the old models and tools obsolete?
When asked the question – what can I do? – towards the end of his life – Bucky’s simple response was to commit to integrity.
This answer is harder than it sounds.
It means integrity in everything we do or say to ourselves and others. Being integrity. Holding the shape of our own Pattern Integrity – the unique and gorgeous intrinsic expression that each living being is.
It means understanding the design features of our foundational models, tools, systems and structure that we are using every single day, often without question and subconsciously.
Are they in integrity to what we are stewarding to life? Or is their application dissonant with the Pattern Integrity of our Source Idea?
To act in integrity is both a personal moment-by-moment practice and the courage to speak up for integrity, against violations of integrity in others, against violations in the very systems and structures that we humans have built.
What can I do, you might ask? Very much more than you think possible.
If you have not begun, now is a good day to start.
