Chapter 7
Collaboration, not competition, is the royal road to the wholeness that hallmarks healthy systems in the world. Collaboration calls for empathy and solidarity, and ultimately for love. I do not and cannot love myself if I do not love you and others around me: we are part of the same whole and so are part of each other.
Ervin László
A new paradigm is emerging in the opening decades of the 21st century. The values that accompany this new paradigm are pushing, prodding and nudging us to be willing, open and receptive to ways of approaching the emerging new situations. As our species is on the cusp of forming a planetary society – an entangled web of complex and multiple-level relations – we can no longer work with industrial-era perspectives. We can now see that the old hierarchical structures – where information travels in linear paths from the top down – are open to corruption, opacity and inefficiency. The ‘public commons’ of the past were closed down, which led people to behave with less integrity in their dealings with individuals and within their communities.
However, we have now entered the distributed era, of people collaboration, communication and networking. We are shifting from one set of C-Values: Com petition—Conflict—Control—Censorship – to a new set: Connection—Communication—Collaboration—Conscious ness.
To foster creative innovation the hierarchical model needs to shift toward ways of doing things that celebrate the collaborative community. The ‘old energy’ notion of secrecy must be replaced by one of sharing, which fosters integrity in human relations. Integrity in our human relations will inspire and motivate us to find solutions for our needs, and create innovative new ways and patterns of thinking. Such innovative and creative thinking is likely to be connected to the embrace of our diversity. After all, diversity recognizes the value of each indi vidual mind, and allows each mind to connect with others around the world, and to share in the collective brain storming. In this way, we can gradually shift from the ‘ME-ness’ of the industrial-era mindset toward the integrated-era value of ‘WE-ness’. That is why I feel that as these years unfold we will see more and more people embracing an open-source culture that facilitates community sharing and development. In fact, it is happening already the world over . . . and the results are paradigm-breaking.
Open-Source Values
Open source is a philosophy and/or practice that promotes free access to all levels of information, whether it be in design, management, human resources or anything else. Open-source culture also requires trust in how individuals and communities share and develop their resources and ideas. In an age of distributed networks the way people and information connect must now move from a closed model to a collective, open, trust-based model that celebrates the joy of collaboration. Embracing the open-source culture will help to nurture transparency, truth and trust in our human and social relations. We can say that Transparency will generate flows of truth. Truth will generate trust between people. Trust will provide the engine for successful human collaboration, creativity, and inspired innovation. The way that many of us do things (whether as individuals, or in groups and organizations) now requires an open-source culture in which individuals are able to harness the distributed intelligence of the collective. It has been said that in a room full of experts, the greatest intelligence is to be found in the room, not in the individual experts.
There is wisdom within the crowd, as this old example illustrates. In 1906, Francis Galton, known for his work on statistics and heredity, came across a weight-judging contest at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. An ox was on display and for sixpence fair-goers could attempt to guess the animal’s weight after slaughter; the best guess would win the prize. Eight hundred people tried their luck, many of them having no knowledge of livestock. Galton hoped to prove the incapacity of the average voter and thought that this would be a perfect analogy for democracy. After the ox was slaughtered it weighed 1,198 pounds. Not one person came close to the final weight. However, when Galton averaged the guesses he discovered, to his complete surprise, that the result came to 1,197 pounds!1 In another, more recent example, author Harrison Owen relates a story of how he was asked to organize a conference for a large engineering company that had spent more than two years, and millions of dollars, designing an aircraft whose door would not work as planned. This open-source/open-space conference brought together everyone who had worked on the door from top managers and designers, down to everyone on the groundcrew, including even those who had done no more than touch the door. All compartmentalization of information was abandoned. The result was that the conference fixed the problem at negligible cost to the company. Results were achieved in a way that was not possible in traditional top-down management structures.2
Robert David Steele (a spokesperson for open-source culture) also notes how normal people, when they share information and collaborate, often arrive at better decisions than those made by so-called ‘experts’ under secret conditions. Steele’s conclusion is that secrecy is a closed and ignorant energy, and he feels that the elimination of secrecy and top-down decision-making will be among the hallmarks of a new era. However, Steele also notes that the establishment of a transparent and ‘open society’ – one that is for ‘We the People’ – also requires the self-actualization of ‘We the People.’3 This is an important point; there can be no more than limited success if there is not a parallel development in the consciousness of the people involved. It is therefore timely now that we crack open the box on how we think, behave, work and relate to others. As we move into this new era of creative, connected minds we need to utilize the greatest asset we have – ourselves. The transitional bridge years, before the Phoenix Generation begins to rise, are about preparing the groundwork, and sowing the seeds in fertile soil. These emerging models are part of that groundwork and are being laid so that the future can be more transparent, trusting and truthful. This will be the energetic environment we need in order to respect, honour and empower people – irrespective of any artificial categories of class, status or anything else.
This innovative diversity has the potential to bring about a creative (r)evolution in our time by connecting people together to share with and catalyze one another – with an underlying design of unity. Our connected diversity has the ability to see problems and issues from new and often unexpected perspectives. Human innovation is set to have fewer constraints and less aversion to risk because not only are the old models failing us, but there is also greater necessity to try new things. We now have more incentive to be creative; and to try new, and often unknown, paths. As the poet Robert Frost so perceptively put it: ‘I took the one [road] less traveled by | And that has made all the difference.’4
As more and more people contribute their ideas and envision the unexpected, this will undoubtedly inspire others to envision the previously thought impossible. What is more, I fully expect to see more and more of the ground breaking new ideas and visions coming not from the experts but from the non-specialists: the DIY enthusiasts and the backroom tinkerers. Such breakthroughs from unexpected non-professional sources are what can be referred to as ‘disruptive innovation’.5 These are the people on the periphery – the non-traditionalists who go out on a limb to seek creative solutions from new perspectives. These ‘disruptive innovators’ will be made up of inspired young minds from all walks of life, from all social statuses, who will form a new era of young optimists who don’t know what can’t be done because they are plugged into the new era, not the old.
As we move through the transition years the structure of innovations will be dramatically altered. In the past many lone inventors and innovators were confined to their laboratories, or garages, feeling isolation from the greater community of like-minded pioneers. Often they were forced to seek funding from corporate sponsors or investors, who frequently restricted the distribution of their discoveries (or in some cases deliberately curtailed the development). What we are witnessing now is the formation of a network of ‘distributed assistance’, whereby projects and innovations are being open-sourced and finding eager helpers.
Distributed Assistance
It is my view that innovations will increasingly emerge through teams/groups of people working both locally and nonlocally on projects. They will pool their various skills, often connecting from diverse locations, and being less dependent upon centralized governmental or corporate funding. Such examples can already be found in such areas as community building/construction, finance, education and science.
i) Community Building
Marcin Jakubowski, a physicist turned farmer and inventor, founded the Open Source Ecology group in 2003 after he realized that the machines he needed to run his farm cost effectively did not exist. So he decided to design and build them himself, creating a ‘Global Village Construction Set’ (GVCS) with the aim of offering the means to construct vital machinery easily. Specifically, the Open Source Ecology group hopes to show how to fabricate fifty different industrial machines that are needed to build a small civilization with modern comforts. The blueprints for the construction set will be developed by people from various locations, before being built and tested on Jakubowski’s farm. They will then eventually be distributed free of charge on the Internet. The Open Source Ecology group has attracted contributors from all over Europe and North America in the true open-source fashion. And yet Jakubowski had no formal training in the area of machine design and manufacture. This is one pioneering example of how innovative tinkerers – people with perhaps no traditional background in such areas – are moving into research and design. Innovation is entering from the periphery with little or no funding. Some are even funding themselves through the collaborative networks known as crowd-funding.
ii) Finance
Collaborative funding has really taken off in the last few years, with a whole array of projects – including films, music and technology – successfully finding funding from random individuals keen to invest and/or donate. In crowd-funding the person seeking the money makes a short video to present their proposal, and, often offers incentives for individual funders. Such incentives may range from being given the role of an extra in a film, or being first in line to benefit from the project when finished. This distributed model of funding actually empowers those involved (both funder and fund-seeker) as it allows them to be in a more direct relationship with how their money is used and where it goes. Furthermore, such arrangements are also usually much more transparent as the recipient of funds feels obligated to show how the funds are being used throughout the process from beginning to end. Using this financing model many projects can be supported, encouraged and success fully achieved outside of traditional financial industry pressures. Whereas crowd-funding is using the ‘power of the many’ to help spread the utility of money, the micro-finance model has also achieved success in empowering people.
Micro-finance has been especially beneficial in supporting local projects and businesses in poorer regions where it would have proven difficult to secure funds otherwise. Micro-finance is a means of supplying small loans to low-income people who traditionally lack access to financial services. It is a way of allowing many poorer people, with inspiring ideas, to help alleviate their poverty by starting new businesses and schemes. Modern micro-financing was largely revitalized by Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It has now been joined by many other organizations – such as Kiva, Zidisha, Lend for Peace and the Microloan Foundation – that connect willing lenders to micro-entrepreneurs, many of whom live in some of the poorest regions of the world. Such micro-financing institutions have already given credit to more than 100 million borrowers. What this ultimately achieves is more people investing in their local region and communities, helping to alleviate the poverty of many under-represented people.
It seems to me that we are already beginning to under stand, and implement, the concept of ‘ecological economics’. These are schemes which support such practices as local currencies, bartering/exchange, and gift economies. One example of this ‘distributed assist ance’ model that has been used to empower poorer people was the ‘Equal Access’ project which gained funding to place 7,000 satellite radio receivers into the poorest and remotest villages in Afghanistan to train teachers by broadcasting teacher-training programmes. Their pilot scheme trained over 3,500 teachers and benefited 150,000 students. Similarly, the Open BTS (Base Transceiver Station) is an open-source software/hardware combination that can offer mobile phone services through an open spectrum offering very low-cost communications. The project was started by Harvind Samra and David A. Burgess with the aim of drastically reducing the cost of mobile phone use in rural areas, especially in the developing world. This once again illustrates the new-paradigm values of offering low-cost, often free, distributed assistance the world over in a bid to alleviate radical disparities and to connect peoples and communities together.
The distributed assistance model also encourages a shift away from financial capital toward networks and relations that promote social capital. It is a model that encourages and strengthens relationships and collaborations, rather than ownership and property. The era we are moving into will promote values of access and collaboration, where sharing becomes the new ‘ownership’. In other words, it will be a reverse of the older model of ‘to gain in order to share’, to ‘to share in order to gain’. It is also especially about sharing and investing in the community. The emphasis will be upon supporting and investing in local people who have innovative ideas that can benefit their locality as well as the greater whole. The old model of centralized competition only favours the few to the detriment of the majority, and often bypasses communities and local well-being.
iii) Education
Human societies and cultures today are so much more complex than previously that the majority of educational institutions are ill equipped to play a positive role. The old pedagogic model is not only increasingly out of touch with the current world but also, more importantly, out of synch with any vision for the future. What is taught across our school systems is in danger not only of becoming increasingly archaic but also limiting, or even harmful, to a younger generation of emerging creative minds. We need to embrace the world that is to come, rather than ‘training minds’ for a world on the way out. As previously stated, the human mind is one of the greatest resources we have on this planet. We therefore need to nurture its development, rather than arrest its growth. Did you know that the ultimate computer in quickness, compatibility and efficiency has a petaflop of computing power, powered only by ten watts, and is about a litre in size? Yes – and it’s called the human brain. Proper education, in line with the needs of its learners, is not only essential – it is a necessity. After all, who even teaches us how to think? Famed thinker Edward de Bono rightly asks why thinking isn’t taught in our schools: ‘Is it because thinking is not considered important? Is it because many people believe that thinking cannot be taught? Is this because we believe we are already teaching thinking?’6 How we think is likely to undergo a shift in the years ahead as we move away from the enclosed classroom, surrounded by four brick walls, and enter a global space of learning.
Youngsters of today do not react to industrial-era style education methods of repetition and rote learning – they require dynamic multimedia communications that connect them across the world with their peers. This model of distributed peer-to-peer learning shifts the focus from the lone individual to the wider interdependent group. In this way the learning process ceases to be an isolated experience between an authority figure (the teacher) and a passive learner (the student). Learning is set to become trans formed into a community experience. Education thus needs to shift into a collaborative model that utilizes both local and global networks to share knowledge and research. Technology and a globally connected world will converge to revolutionize education towards an online environ ment. This online revolution will broaden the reach of education and help to level the playing field for students from lower-income, less-privileged backgrounds.
We need to remind ourselves that when we talk about the younger generations we are also talking about the tens of millions of young minds being born into the poorer regions of the world. The 5 billion poorer people are likely to be among those who benefit most from open-source technology in education. For example, there are 10 million $35 tablet computers in India, and many educational establishments in India have already adopted open-source technology. India is not alone in working to educate its poorer citizens. Similarly, the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) aims to empower the world’s poorest children through education. They have developed a rugged laptop (often referred to as the ‘$100 Laptop’) that has been distributed to children in developing countries around the world. OLPC’s mission is to provide young, poor children with the means to access knowledge, and opportunities to ‘explore, experiment and express themselves’.7
Yet we should also be mindful that technology alone is not the answer. We also require our learners to develop a relationship with the natural environment. It is interesting that researcher Jeremy Rifkin notes how recent studies showed that children who during playtime were placed in artificial settings organized themselves into social hierarchies whereas when placed in natural surroundings they organized themselves in more egalitarian relationships.8 Rifkin foresees schools forging more relations with the environment, such as with park systems, wildlife organizations or environ mental groups. I would agree that our younger generations, in line with an evolving consciousness, will seek a natural balance between virtual and physical (technological and environmental) relations.
At each epoch what we should be teaching is the consciousness of the era. In present terms this means reflecting the new-paradigm models of communication, collaboration and connectivity. This would then reflect the new-paradigm values of empathy and integrated systems. Moreover, integral consciousness is developing alongside discoveries in the new sciences (quantum physics, neuroscience, biophysics and others), all of which reinforce the connected nature of the human self and its entanglement within the larger community of all living systems. How we connect and how we innovate is also influencing how we perform science.
iv) Science
Our connected diversity has the ability to see problems and issues from new and often unexpected perspectives. The way we think about tackling our global concerns is about to change. Science author Michael Nielsen describes how, for example, a mathematician in the Polymath Project decided to use his blog to tackle an unsolved mathematical problem. By collaborating with mathematicians from all over the world via the Internet the problem was solved in just 37 days. Nielson calls this ‘networked science’, and insists that this ongoing transformation of the way we collaborate in our projects and knowledge-base is rapidly speeding up the rate of scientific discovery.9 Similarly, Nielsen refers to what he terms ‘Citizen Science’, in which amateur volunteers are connecting with the scientists of academia in problem-solving. This new wave of collaboration is successful, first of all, because of the Internet’s ability to connect a wide range of distributed individuals and, secondly, because the diverse range of minds connecting across the planet increases the cognitive diversity active within the collaboration. As an example, Nielsen mentions how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to under stand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. Such collaborations in science and innovation, between professionals and out-of-the-box amateurs, are increasing our combined brainpower and creative vision.
These emerging participatory and integrated models are set to stimulate new discovery and invention. With billions of creative minds set to join the global think-tank of the future there will be new thinking and new revelations over the coming years. We have to shift away from complaining about problems to solving them; then we can become a constructive part of our planetary social, cultural, environmental and conscious evolution. And as we think and do things differently, so will our values evolve over the coming generations.
New-Paradigm Obligations
The under standing of the integral relationship between each of us and our environment brings with it a renewed, shared responsibility. It is a vision of life that respects and honours our fundamental interdependence within living systems. Quality of life must be central to how we live; and also how we relate not only to family and friends but also to those we don’t yet know. The imperative is on more fully developing our human communities and thus living more in balance with nature: human being means also human belonging. To do this we are required to make use of our technologies to live better, and live more sustainably.
Our shared fundamental values must embrace the inner world of the human, in harmony with focused and balanced social awareness. Many young people today are searching for a more satisfying and fulfilling social, intellectual, spiritual and emotional life. Those of us who have been born into change (rather than being born as change) are pulled between the need to contribute to our societies and the urge to seek for deeper insight into the meaning of life. The new-paradigm values ask from each of us that we are productive members of society, as we also strive to serve the greater humanity.
In a previous book that I co-authored with Ervin László,10 we explored how the physical sciences will reflect our rising spiritual growth. In particular, that the new field-theory paradigm (what we referred to as the Akasha Paradigm), which explains our quantum entangle ment, would help humanity in transcending its material differences to embrace our collective unity. We proposed that our new sciences would validate and corroborate a worldview that celebrated relationships, networks and connectivity, rather than supporting a conflicting paradigm of separation and competition. Further, that our new sciences are gradually portraying us as stewards of our environment rather than as conquistadors. This emerging worldview is the early birth of an integrating consciousness within humanity that reaches out to embrace our extended global family. Although this shift in perspective may be more difficult for older generations to adapt to, our younger and newer generations appear to under stand integral conscious ness almost immediately and without needing to intellectualize it.
As I have attempted to discuss in Part Two of this book, innovative changes in our social and technological systems are developing in parallel to a new era of social organization, communication and thinking patterns (or narratives). Humanity can be said to be empathically ‘hard-wired’ to evolve into a planetary civilization that celebrates diversity within unity. Our diversity is strengthened – not diluted – through our multiple connec tions and networks. Our unity is enhanced – not weakened – through our empathy, compassion and shared sense of responsibility and destiny. We are responding today to an unprecedented flow of energy, information and consciousness in our social, cultural and environmental surroundings. Such an intense range of impacts is inevitably catalyzing new patterns of thinking and ways of doing things. My feeling is that we are moving toward a restructuring of our inner psychological states as well as our external social structures. A new awareness in human consciousness is being birthed, and being driven through the heart of our social, economic and political systems. New organizational patterns are emerging, and with them new perceptions, understandings and worldviews. We are now being compelled to re-evaluate how we see ourselves not only within our local and global environments, but also in a grander, cosmological sense.
From this increased awareness and awakening will come a powerful urge to develop humanitarian, ecological and equitable systems. It often happens that an awakening in consciousness rouses the need to get involved in service for a common purpose. What we choose to do today will be inherited by the world to come. We each thus have an obligation to foster a more integrated, empathic and sustainable world. Our scope for sharing the new-paradigm values of Connection—Communication—Collaboration—Consciousness—Compassion has to be brought to bear on our future societies and our entire planetary civilization. We also require an individual human (r)evolution, a shift away from being absorbed in petty thoughts of a separate individuality and ego, to a recognition that as individuals we have an inherent connection with all life in the cosmos. The developmental awakening of each individual should be in balance with our daily life experiences – we do not need to retreat to a cave to seek self-development! Personal development becomes blocked if it does not embrace the individual as an aspect of the whole. We must therefore redefine – or refine – our own lives through this renewal of understanding.
This period of (r)evolutionary change requires nothing less than a qualitative transformation in human conscious ness. We do not need to wield physical or political power to be effective. Rather, we each can learn to expand and refine our ways of perception, thinking and action. The necessary transition toward a planetary society that is equitable and sustainable will only come through a (r)evolution in our consciousness. As Sri Aurobindo once wrote:
Therefore the coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity and attempt to effect it in themselves, to lead others to it and to make it the recognised goal of the race.11
Aspects of an evolving consciousness suggest an empathic mind that is aware of its connectivity both locally and globally, physically as well as non-physically. It is time to view our situation through the wide-angle lens of wisdom; we need to begin to see, under stand and act upon the bigger picture. We also have to accept a psycho-spiritual growth within the human race toward a shared, communal under standing. This human izing effect will encourage greater social/ community participation as well as pouring energy into a planetary civilization. After all, whatever we each do locally – with intention and energy – will be spread around the world in countless unknowable ways. Our sincere acts – our individual life of the spirit – must not be subordinated to over-intellectualization or drowned in the dogma of outward and empty forms of conduct and mimicry. Everything we do, especially from now on, must be real and genuine.
We have truly begun, for the first time in recorded history, to birth a transcendent era – a quantum renaissance – in which transcendence becomes more central to life. Not only is our well-being of paramount importance, as well as the well-being of all life on Earth, but also central to life is the question of our evolutionary imperative that drives us forward. We are about to see a profound change in the presence of human life on this planet.
There is a psycho-spiritual resonance emerging across the planet, energetically threading together each one of us. Now that we have the means to communicate and connect externally across time and space, our communal threads are responding to us and powerfully resonating our communality. However, these are signs of the beginning. The greater resonance is set to occur non-verbally as an inherent mindful awareness and an inner conscious knowing is birthed through our very cells/selves.
We are moving toward an era when change will not only be created externally, but will be born into humanity as part of our human biology. Our human biological nervous system – our quantum-state DNA – will be that change and give rise to a new form of intuitive human. We shall surely then see how incredible change can really be on our shared blue planet. This is set to be the era of our quantum renaissance – a time for the Phoenix Generation to usher in a burning new vision.