thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
results. You end up either getting stuck or resorting to some form of violence. It becomes the war on... fill in the blank.A problem like climate change, Kahane says, is complex in three different ways. Itsdynamically complex: the causes and effects are far apart in space and time (carbon generated fifty years ago is affecting the climate today). Its socially complex: different groups have widely divergent aims and interests (the developed world implores the developing world to join in sustainability initiatives at the expense of their economic growth). And finally, it exhibits generative complexity: its new to us (there are no analogous situations and off-the-shelf solutions for massive climate change; we have never been here before).Kahane has spent most of his consultancy since Mont Fleur focusing on dialogue, what he calls opening, or even love. But he has come to see that power is just as important. Hes been inspired in this view by something Martin Luther King, Jr. said in a speech he delivered just six months before his assassination: ...power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.Kahane says an approach based on opening up and creating connection is half-right, but dangerously so. Power is integral to life, he says. We start with power-to, such as the power to have a house and a car and all the appurtenances of the modern lifestyle that enable us to get on with our lives, but insidiously this becomes power-over, because something (and often somebody) has to be exploited to make it possible. That leads us to a complex problem.The kind of power we need, says Kahane, is power-with. This kind of power, which King said is nothing more than the ability to achieve purpose, applies force and influence but with a vigilant awareness of its effect on others and how their power will manifest. We need to act with connection, Kahane says. We dont have a choice between power and love. We have to do both.Doing that is not straightforward, though; it involves feeling and listening as much as thinking and talking. Kahane feels that something the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said captures this spirit perfectly: We need to cross the stream by feeling for stones. He also likes to quote Trevor Manuel, the first black minister of finance in South Africa, who said about the countrys great transition, There was no paradigm, no precedent, nothing. We had to carve it, and so perhaps we were more willing to listen.Thomas Homer-Dixon is a political scientist who is not content to remain within the confines of his chosen discipline. His books, while intricately detailed, do not read like abstract recitations of pre-digested ideas. Theyre travelogues of inquiry. He visits people and places, listens and observes, and carves out a new way of seeing, one thats tentative but driven by a strong belief that we can do better.For several decades, hes made it his business to research humanitys capacity to deal with the complexity it has wrought. Long-time director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict
Studies at the University of Toronto, he was a frequent visitor to the Clinton White House and an adviser to Al Gore. In his 2002 book, The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?, he presented evidence that the demand for ingenuity arising from the ever-increasing complexity of our world is far outstripping our capacity to supply it.Heretofore weve been able to come up with technological fixesand in Homer-Dixons words, throw huge amounts of energy at our problemsto keep our ever-expanding Rube Goldberg contraption together. But now we will almost certainly find it necessary to accept some large breakdowns in human and natural systems and to develop radical new ways of running things as a result. Homer-Dixons appetite for innovation has led him to take a position as the CIGI chair of global systems at the newly formed Balsillie School of International Affairs in Ontario. (CIGI stands for The Centre for International Governance Innovation, a think tank recently formed by Jim Balsillie, whose company invented the wildly popular Blackberry.)There are a couple of areas where I sometimes despair about our capacity to deal with what lies ahead, Homer-Dixon told me. One is our cognitive characteristics and the other is the self-reinforcing nature of our economic system.When Homer-Dixon speaks of our cognitive characteristics, he refers to the fact that we adapt easily to small-scale, incremental change. Its what makes it possible to get up in the morning and not feel were in a strange new world. Its part of our survival apparatus. And yet, Homer-Dixon says, this very capacity is a real handicap when it comes to dealing with slow-creep problems. We just dont see the change, and the thing about slow-creep problems is they may be slow-creep for a while, but then all of a sudden theres a non-linear shift and we find ourselves in a crisis. Our economic habits link up with every other problem we face, since at bottom economics is about how we choose to use the resources of the planetin what ways, in what proportion, and at what rates. We simply dont have a vision of an alternative economic system that isnt oriented toward unending material growth, Homer-Dixon says. Until we have an alternative vision, or theory, we wont give up the one we have. Rather than a mere study of stock markets and gross national products, real economics is the interface between human beings and the world all around. And we are evermore out of touch with that world.Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, Homer-Dixon writes in The Ingenuity Gap, many of us come to believe that ... the reality outside our constructed world ... needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there. But we are numb to the messages from our surroundings. On a day-to-day basis, most of us in rich countries are increasingly sealed within the hermetic and sometimes illusory world of the human-made, the human-scaled, and the human-imagined, he says. This narcissism weakens our sense of awe and our receptivity to
critical signals ... that might awaken us to our deep ignorance of the potential consequences of our actions, and warn us against hubris.In The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, Homer-Dixon explores new ways of thinking about the world that might lead to new ways of acting. There is a temporal order in dealing with our big problems, he told me. First we have to change how we view the world, and that will cause us to change how we act.Like Adam Kahane, Thomas Homer-Dixon asks us to take the time to appreciate complexity. He points out that with each passing decade we build more complexity into the conduct of everyday life, which requires ever more energy and maintenance. While connectivity is generally thought of as a virtue, in complexity theory, systems with many close connections are said to be tightly coupled. Tightly coupled systems can act like the proverbial chain of dominoes: a breakdown in one location sends rapidly cascading effects throughout the world. For example, if the few large food-growing areas we rely on suddenly experience breakdown at the same time that transportation costs spiral upward, a food crisis can develop within days.Breakdown is one problem, Homer-Dixon says; debilitating collapse is another, and its much worse. Breakdown is someone close to us getting a bad disease; collapse is when we become so distraught about it that we wreck our car and kill five people. Drawing on something called panarchy theory, he talks about learning to build more resilience into our systems through decoupling (striking a better balance between self-sufficiency and interdependence, you might say). Another form of resilience is the collaboration of diverse interests, and Homer-Dixon sees promise in open-source activities, like Wikipedia, in which we suddenly have a worldwide-network technology, where we can basically all have a conversation together.Above all, we must accept breakdowns as inevitable parts of cycles large and small. After a breakdown, rebirth and renewal can occur, in a process he calls catagenesis: the adaptive, creative, reformative period that follows the breakdown of a system. Although this proves the resilience of the larger system, we havent done well in embracing a larger cyclical view. Since we cherish our systems and we want them to be permanent, he says, we havent really understood that our challenge isnt to preserve the status quo but rather to adapt to, thrive in, and shape for the better a world of constant change.The answer, Homer-Dixon writes, is to develop a prospective mind, a mind not fixed on the status quo, one that instead is comfortable with constant change, radical surprise, even breakdown ... and must constantly anticipate a wide variety of futures. With a prospective mind, were better able to turn surprise and breakdown, when they happen, to our advantage. We will, in short, be better able to achieve catagenesis, which he defines as the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of a breakdown.While Homer-Dixon is not certain about the exact nature of prospective mind and how precisely to cultivate it, both
individually and communally, he is clear that we need to know in our bones that we ride on the razors edge between order and chaos. To truly know that we inhabit such a world makes us more resilient. But, I point out to him, we really, really like things to be ordered and predictable.Well, you know what? he responds. Get over it.Paul Hawken is the patron saint of the participative. Almost forty percent of his new book, Blessed Unrest, is devoted to an appendix listing non-profit groups that work to address the environment, indigenous rights, and social justice. Hawken is the consummate social entrepreneur, someone who colors outside boundary markers of change like charity and protest, and applies the ingenuity of entrepreneurship to social development. He has written six books; founded a variety of companies, including Groxis, a portal and search engine interface software provider, and several natural food companies relying solely on sustainable agriculture; and is now heading the Natural Capital Institute, a research organization in Sausalito, California.In the spirit of open-source, wisdom-of-the-crowd collaboration, the institute has created a hub for global civil society on the web. The World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility (www.WiserEarth.org) provides a database of over 100,000 organizations in some 250 jurisdictions. Its collaboratively written, in wiki style, but organized using a very sophisticated classification scheme to map the social landscape. Its a well-ordered free-for-all, evincing the blessed unrest, the balancing on the cusp of chaos and order, that is the centerpiece of a new worldview.Hawken, like the others I spoke with for this story, is nothing if not reflective. He can speak in a quiet, ruminative voice about our body being a backstory of the Earth four billion years ago, the molecular chains, elemental compounds, simple bacteria, and salty fluids that wash our eyes and surround our cells, forming a compendium of life that preceded us. Hes a storyteller who recalls his boyhood days on his grandparents farm, a waste-free world from a time before recycling was a movement, where the barn was full of used washers, bolts, wire, and doodads, where paper lunch bags were brought back from school and neatly folded for use the next day, where a toy was a bald tire swinging from a sycamore. But Hawken also has a forthright, declamatory voice that exhorts people to change. He writes that were moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community, and that global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. Among these themes are radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. To Hawken, this is not a list of separate efforts; its an interconnected, self-organizing web, the response of humanitys immune system to an assault on its life force.Hawken is very busy meeting with as many members of this web as he can, so our interview had to take place by e-mail, some of his answers written from an airplane seat. I asked him about
the paralysis that many people feel when they consider all these very tough problems, and that on top of it all they must struggle to meet the daily needs of their family. He replied that paralysis is a sign of unexpressed grief, and he quoted the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who said we should all feel sick in some way, experience some sense of despair, because that is normal. When we experience this, it is a sign we are sensitized to the world around us. The sense of loss, Hawken wrote me, makes us human and brings us more deeply in touch with our heart. The enormity of what is passing away is almost unspeakable. Its not just species and ecosystems, but entire cultures, the seasons, civilization itself. Such a prospect can freeze us in our tracks.One of our central sticking points, in Hawkens view, is ideologyrallying around a fixed view of things, which sounds the death knell for diversity. In Blessed Unrest, he quotes historian Arnold Toynbee, who cautioned that civilization is a movement, not a condition, and the rise of uniformity consistently marks its decline. He also notes that theologian Karen Armstrong strongly emphasizes that the early expressions of religiosity that arose during the Axial Age were not theocratic systems requiring belief, but instructional practices requiring action. Just so, Hawken says, the movement that he sees emerging coheres into a values system but not a belief system.The most important step to take is to feel, Hawken told me. Our courage and reverence and will are locked up in paralysis, released when we feel what we see and allow it in.If we are able to get beyond centralizing so much on ourselves, we can find solutions in nature itself, Hawken says. We are turning to nature, not merely as balm but as designer, mentor, guide, and muse. Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers puts it aptly when he says, The solutions in nature surpass our conception of what is possible. Moreover, this is equally true about our human nature. What to do? Engage ones community, become more generous, cooperative, and enthusiastic. Creativity abounds, and our imaginations are limited only by what our mind believes.Margaret Wheatley began her professional life as a high school teacher and then administered educational programs for disadvantaged youth. The challenges she encountered there led her on an educational quest of her own, into systems thinking and organizational behavior and change. Having seen so many attempts by well-meaning people to effect change through organizationsschools, health care institutions, governmental bodies, and non-governmental organizationsWheatley felt there must be a simpler way to lead organizations, one that requires less effort and produces less stress than our current practices.A breakthrough for her came when she noticed that the view of the world emerging from the so-called new science did not square with how we actually run the world. New science embodied especially in quantum physics, chaos theory, and the theory of self-organizing systemsshowed her that even the idea of running the world, as if it were a machine, was ill-suited to the way the world
really works.Leadership and the New Science, her book that came out of this line of thought, was first published in 1992 and has been published in two revised editions since. She is also the co-founder of the Berkana Institute, which is dedicated to serving life-affirming leaders.Like Paul Hawken, Wheatley takes nature as her designer, mentor, guide, and muse. Weve acted like we want to be God, she tells me. We need to play by the rules of the planet, and you dont need any religion to tell you what they are. They are clear principles that you find in science, but also in spiritual traditions in the form of understandings such as interconnectedness and impermanence. Weve constructed unnatural mega-systems that dont work. They are crumbling and collapsing around us, and we are the casualtiesstressed-out, disconnected from each other, moving too fast without a moment for reflection or a really good conversation.When Wheatley looks to nature as her guide, she sees emergence as the salient property. In nature, she writes in a Berkana paper written with Deborah Frieze, change never happens as a result of top-down, preconceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. Thats how all larger-scale systems come about. If you could sit on a mountainside for many decades, you would see a tree here or there sprout up in the valley below, and then more and more, until you would see something you might call a forest. But youd be hard-pressed to find the blueprint.What can we learn from this? According to Wheatley, we learn that the world doesnt change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of whats possible. They realize all of sudden that they make up a forest, an ecosystema community.Community is the answer, says Wheatley. Community is the unit of change. The only way we get through difficult times is together. Yes, you work at the level of the individual, but particularly today, people are so caught up in small personal and interpersonal dynamics, a downward spiral of narcissism and egotism, that they just cant get over themselves. As a consequence, Wheatley thinks the small group, not the large group or the individual, is the most potent focus. The best place to begin is in having a good conversation and cultivating relationships. According to emergence theory, these are the bonds that lead to change, growth, and influence. For Wheatley, all of the truly marvelous changes wrought by humans can be traced back to some friends and I started talking and....I asked her whether there wasnt important work to do at the individual level. She said one of the most important things we need to do is find time for reflection. This kind of time has disappeared from our lives, and we need to reclaim it, she says. We must have time where we start to feel centered, peaceful, focused. Out of that space,
we can cultivate a real relationship and start a conversation.Like the others I spoke with, Wheatley sees all kinds of breakdown as inevitable, and there will be casualties. There already have been. But the cataclysms we face in the future, Wheatley says, may lead us to more local focus, to self-sufficiency, to coming out of our isolated shells. Adam Kahane likes to repeat a distinction Wheatley taught him. She sees a difference between giving up, throwing your hands up in exasperation and frustration, and surrender, embracing the power of that which has overtaken you. Wheatley is not certain how many people are ready to surrender. The kind of breakdowns were experiencing may force more collaboration and community on us, but I have to say, I havent seen it yet. As things break down, its either going to force us into community, or we will kill each other more.Its daunting to talk to knowledgeable, insightful people who are so sure things are going to fall apart, and also sure that a little better version of the same old thing wont be enough. Yet each of them sees promise. Not a dewy-eyed, mushy kind of promise, not love without power, or a grand ideology to rally round, but a realistic promise that in crisis we will find resilience, that we will be thrown back on ourselves and our communities and what counts. Thats the way of nature, including human nature.What I find striking is how close their view is to the core Buddhist principle of interdependence, the teaching that there are no self-sustaining, permanent, inherently existing entities; that everything emerges as part of a great web of interlocking relationships. Suzuki Roshi referred to it as the interplay of dependency and independency. Environmentalist Stephanie Kaza wrote in the March, 2007, issue of this magazine that the experience of a systems thinker, who brings awareness to all their relationships with specific human and non-human beings is equivalent to what a Buddhist might call the penetrating experience of interdependence.In Buddhism, however, the philosophical understanding of interdependence is coupled with the practical understanding that we need a mind discipline to break the habit of treating entities as permanent and independent. To get us out of our mess requires more than an intellectual understanding of whats wrong and whats right with civilization.Mindfulness-awareness meditation allows us to quell the anxious roiling of our mind and to see the world and ourselves in all of their slow-creep splendor. It is precisely the tool to cultivate Homer-Dixons prospective mind, to help us act emergently, and to attune ourselves to the rhythms of our surroundings and our fellow community members. Frankly, its hard to conceive of how we can genuinely change our view and way of acting without such a discipline. Without it, how, in the face of chaos, uncertainty, and fear, will we not fall back into fighting for dominion over what we imagine to be our world?Working with the mind through such practices reveals connectedness and unlocks caring and compassion, which these thinkers say is the very driving force of positive
change. When I asked Thomas Homer-Dixon where he finds hope, in spite of his despair about how deeply ingrained our self-defeating habits are, he talked about our childrens childrens children. We dont need complete agreement on a way forward, he told me, but human beings know what they want at bottom. It may sound trite, but across all the divisions of race and ethnicity, religion and civilization, class, caste, and rule, one thing we all agree on is that we care about our kids. We want the best possible future for them and we have a pretty clear conception of what that good future means. Its not a future full of material stuff, but a future in which our children are secure and safe and can develop their potential and flourish as human beings.
Discover how to capitalize on both your strengths and weaknesses.Who should attend this Training? Managers and leaders who want to activate their full potentials. Business owners and entrepreneurs who want to turn loose new possibilities. Coaches, trainers, consults, therapists and anyone who works to enrich people withenhances capabilities. Parents, lovers, friends who want to bring out the best in their loved ones. Visionary leaders who want to pioneer new directions for the human race. Every person who wants to be the best version of them