 Anthony, awesome. Julie, lovely to see you. I'm Gint. Morning, Jerry. I'll be doing a minute. Excellent, Ken. Thank you. Good morning. Are you petting the bumblebees for now? Sorry, what? Are you petting the bumblebees to calm them down? Exactly. They need their morning care. Exactly. Otherwise, your time in the shrubbery could be pretty exciting. Cool. Lovely to see everybody. Why don't we start in our usual manner and do a check-in? And I will just go by the grid on my screen and start in then Klaus the Nancy. Jean Bellinger, do you want to start? I'm currently on vacation, one mile from my house. Look at that one. Now we rented a beach house and the family's here for the week, so it's actually a vacation. That sounds great. You are living the future of vacations, I think. I think we're all going to be vacationing within, like, spitting distance or throwing distance of our actual dwellers for a little while here. One of the conversations we're having is what happens to travel and tourism. So it looks pretty grim for a while. Klaus, then Nancy, then Julie. Yeah, good morning. I'm extremely busy in the food business. So I shared some observations there, but it's actually very encouraging to see there are literally a dozen webinars a week focused on the link between personal health and coronavirus and the immunity system and the nutrition you take in. And then the recognition that the system is really one pathway we have opened to get some handle on the environmental damage around us. So that's very encouraging to see. At the same time, it's also amazingly frustrating to see how many people are in kind of any kind of change. But anyway, it has been a busy week. I'm consistently surprised about resistance to things like regenerative agriculture because doing agriculture right fixes about 10 problems downstream. And we're just not focusing on it. I don't mean it's very it's not strange because there's industrial agriculture basically has everybody by the neck. But it's such a big win. Well, think about billions of dollars of advertising starting at early age children's channels to promote fast food and to promote sugary beverages and things like that. That's the information is simply not kicking through to the public. And then on the other hand, you have an industry that just can't change because when you think about restaurant chains with 30,000,000 outlets who have all the same menu and a supply chain that is completely specialized to process different inputs. And they can only come from an industrial system that's so into shelf-stable products that come frozen to the unit. Restaurants that don't have a single cook in there. They don't have a cutting board or a knife in there. Basically, assembly lines. So the system has boxed itself into a corner, this fast food thing. And I designed restaurants like this because I worked for Disney. And I was building restaurants that can serve 1,700 meals per hour. I didn't realize that. Wow. So yeah, there is a huge reckoning where some companies in order to shift into this regenerative organic would have to basically reformat their business model costing them billions of dollars in market share and all that. So a couple things. One is I'm sharing here in my brain a node that I created a while ago. But it was a recent node. I created it, well, I guess in 2015, not so recent. And I created this because I realized I had a whole series of different areas in my brain. I had natural farming. I had soil fertility. I had a series of different things that were kind of separate. And bringing them together turned on a light bulb in my head about how these things all work together. But I'm realizing right now in just this conversation that I don't have here the thing I just said, which is the knock-on effects of regenerative agriculture and how it can be beneficial. So that's one thing. And I'm interested in how we express this and how we tell these stories as an OGM-y thing. And the second thing is my first job in the world was at Disney in the park in Anaheim. I was a jungle cruise captain, which was interesting. No way. Yeah, I was being paid $2.90 an hour, which unfortunately dates me. And I was paying $13 and a half dollars a month in union dues, even though I was part-time and therefore didn't qualify for any union benefits. So that's the only union job I've ever held. But it was really fun. And I have just I never, you know, phone. Nobody had a cell phone then, et cetera. So I have no pictures of me doing that, none. I thought I recognized you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But also part of the job, I was carrying a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson 38, with which we were supposed to shoot the hippos that came and attacked the boat, which I'm positive is no longer on the ride, but I haven't been to the park in a couple lifetimes. So anyway, Klaus, thank you for triggering all those good memories and so forth. Nancy, then Julie, then Neil. Nancy, you're muted. Nancy, get in and check in. I'm going for a text check in, because I think the people who are on first get more airtime than the people who joined last seem to get less. So there you go, Mines and Chat. Because we are checking in long. Well, and if you're online first, you're calling us first. That's true, too, which is maybe a bit of a subtle reward for people who log in right early or something. I don't know. Or a punishment. Or punishment. That's true. I was feeling the same, so I'll go last. So interesting. Thank you. And guys go last. And would people prefer really quick check-ins so that we can dig into some topic? Or Judy is a yes. OK, so let's then, I will not riff on what everybody says. I will take a couple notes and let's do more rapid check-ins. So we make it through. And why don't I go from the bottom of my screen up instead of from the top down? Is that better? All right, good. So Simone, Scott, Rob. Simone, yeah, if you'll check in. Hi, I'm Simone. I'm new to the list. I had a lovely conversation with Jerry. And based on that, I'm very excited to be part of the group here. And I am a psychiatrist. I'm actually going to leave it a little soon, because I do have to go to work. The good news is, is that in terms of the COVID issue, I'm in Philadelphia area. And we have seen a significant drop, certainly in our hospital. There's been very few cases over the last few weeks. My interest is in complex thinking about solving social problems. Currently, I'm trying to develop what I call the citizen commission to understand COVID-19. So it actually looks at the various institutional and other processes that led us here. I go beyond just trying to blame people, but rather come up with ideas of how to move forward in a more effective way. And the first one that I'm dealing with is how the media handled COVID-19. So thank you. Thank you very, very much. And feel free to post links in the chat to your work and essays. I've got almost all of you in my brain, so you can search for yourselves there, et cetera. And as I learn more about you, I'm curating that. Scott and Robin, Matt. Good morning. Well, at least good morning for me. My video is not working again, but I'm smiling at all of you. So as usual, I had a couple of quick notes. The first thing is an observation of this group. In contrast to everything else, I'm noticing that it's not people yelling and not listening. It's not one expert talking to an audience. It's a respectful, engaging conversation between a bunch of really smart, passionate, experienced, thoughtful, generous people, which I think is what makes this so rare and engaging for me. And I also, I think of you all as a bunch of icebergs, in a sense, because you just have so much to you. And that's just so interesting to me is the depth that all of you bring. And I just think that it's such a rare thing, in contrast to many of the other things that I've experienced. On the food side of things, have you guys seen anything from Jamie Oliver teaching kids how to cook? I think you should take a look at some of these. They're really interesting. In this particular one I'm sending, he's making chicken nuggets. But he's saying, this is how you make them. And you can make them without having to buy it. It's a fascinating way to go. Another thing about the local food is that I wrote a short story or started to a while ago about what would happen if the bicycle had evolved, if only human powered vehicles had evolved instead of machines like gas powered or other powered machines. What would happen? And one of the results was that your travel would change. You would be restricted to certain areas. Food distribution would change, because it would have to be you couldn't bring it from around the world. You couldn't bring it from across the country, not in any realistic way. So it was just an interesting thought exercise. And then the last thing to toss out was thinking about how we ripple outwards. One thing that came to mind that I had forgotten about is in the book Ender's Game. So Ender's the Hero. But his brother and sister are on earth using, I'm quoting Wikipedia here, they use a global communication system to post political essays under pseudonyms. So the older brother starts doing this, establishes himself as a respected orator and then a powerful politician without actually holding office. And then the sister, who doesn't quite trust the older brother agrees to publish under another pseudonym. And they fight back, fight back and forth except they're talking behind the scenes. And it's just an interesting way of, they're changing things by arguing publicly and yet knowing what the outcome of the argument is going to be in order to influence the people who are following them. So, good morning everybody, that's it from me. Scott, thank you for reminding us of Ender's Game because it is, it's like they have a pantomime that pretends to be democracy or governance or something like that, but they gain incredible power. Love that. Thank you and in the interest of going through our check-ins quickly, Rob, Matt, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. My name is Rob O'Keefe, this is my first OGM call. I came to the group via the brain first as a tool that I've used on and off for many, many years, then found Jerry's brain, then found Jerry's inside Jerry's brain calls and that have been lightly supporting Jerry on Patreon. So I am very interested in complex systems and the systems thinking that several of you bring to the table. I think that I have a deeper interest in Bitcoin and financial systems and how the dollar, the US dollar, impacts a lot of the social, political, economic systems. So I haven't heard that talked about too much yet, but I may start some of those conversations. In my day job, I'm a strategy and technology consultant in Washington, D.C., mostly working with federal government clients and this summer I've been spending a lot of time in Bluffton, South Carolina, which is in between Hilton Head and Savannah, Georgia. So the southern part of South Carolina and it's been a good place to get away from crowds and kind of try to be healthy. So I think that's it for this morning. Awesome, thank you, Rob. Matt, Kevin, Doug. Good morning, everyone. My quick check-in here is thinking a lot about these check-ins themselves and how to move things forward and get organized. I've been having one-on-one conversations with a lot of people on these calls and I know that there's a growing energy toward starting some movement and feeling that momentum. And so I'm kind of starting to break things down and I'm noticing with this group that there are some of us that sit into the really wanting to think together about the concerns, the problems that we're working on. And so it's just a way of sharing what we're working on and getting the input from other people and thinking out loud in a public fashion about whether they're issues like the food chain or we've talked about education, we've talked about social injustice and things like that, that there's energy there that probably needs to be supported and continued, that there's some energy around actually creating some service guilds or some work product and some things that provide services to the world. Jay and I are starting to collaborate on a potential project around storytelling and I know story-threading is one of those guilds, but that there's also a need for some people to maybe think about the container itself. And it's hard to think about the doing and the thinking together at the same time that you're thinking about the medic container and really trying to put some energy into that medic container, both in terms of kind of the philosophies, the operating norms and the kind of the governing principles as well as actually the technology and had a good conversation with Abby around this idea that there needs to be some building of some meta capabilities that allow that thinking together or allow that change. And so looking to just kind of push the organization and get us moving. Love that, Matt, thank you. That's top of mind for me as well. Everybody's moving around a little bit on me, so let's go Kevin, Doug, then Ken. All right, thanks. I reported on our credit union project and it's getting progress on both the investor side and the detail MOU side, but we discovered something this week that I think is kind of interesting and significant. We've been trying to do a local business preservation fund that uses equity rather than all these debt funds because nobody needs any more debt if you don't know when your customers are coming back. So we found this vehicle called a pooled income fund that's used for plan giving, but you can put money in and we can do patient equity to local small businesses. And it seemed really cool and you could do it at a grassroots level. We discovered that you also get capital gains forgiveness coming in. So if you sold a business or financial asset, the money you put in doesn't pay capital gains. So we've got a partnership that we're cinching up today with an opportunity zone fund that also does capital gains forgiveness. That's the thing that makes them work. And so we are, and it's a fund looking at black and brown business ownership through real estate because that's what opportunity zones do. So suddenly our fund could add to their return and reduce their risk and increase their impact and we can be sold by these big folks at just a little aftermarket product. We can be cool things on your bumper or whatever for these folks raising lots of money. So that's kind of a cool thing. We thought it was a little bitty thing but it turns out it could be add a lot to a really big thing. So that could be kind of cool. That's it. Kevin, thank you. And this group operates at many different sort of nexus zones. There's certainly the food nexus and Kevin and others of you operate kind of in the finance and money nexus. And Kevin has been where money meets meaning has been his tagline for a really long time, which I love. So I think part of what we can do is form up around these themes and see what we can do about it. And I'll say this here and I'll come back to it when we're done checking in. But OGM has kind of a meta role to play in that we're about improving the arguments, improving the discourse, not necessarily solving all the world's problems but connecting to those who are solving all the world's problems like your activities in the world and just adding turbo rockets to those. And maybe turbo rockets is the wrong analogy here. Doug Ken Hari. Yeah. My main interest has been thinking about how to put together the way we handle food and the way we handle shelter because putting them together begins to generate an image of how we could actually live in the future. And I'm struck by how many agricultural projects for example in their websites have photographs that have plants but no people in them, which I think is a mistake. I think mixing those two things together is really helpful. And my thought for the week is that the romantic movement which was a reaction against industrialization failed because industrialization was so attractive in the 1880s let's say that basically it provided jobs and interesting things and people went there and the romantic movement and it's later formed the arts and crafts movement were buried by the tsunami of industrialization. But the industrial model has kind of run out. And I think that going back to the romantic movement and the arts and crafts movement as ways of integrating our living and our eating in the same space as a vision of where we can go post crisis is what's been on my mind. That's super interesting. And if people didn't have to worry about food and shelter everything kind of changes. And a place to get there is from maybe we had a hyper abundant energies energy to cheap to meter, not because nuclear but because solar because other sorts of things that starts to move us in that direction but if our mindsets about economics and needing to have money for everything don't change then we don't get to the future you're describing. It's a huge juicy topic. Thank you Doug. Ken Hari than Julie. Hello everybody, Ken Homer here in center of California broadcasting live from my patio. I've been working for the census. This was my 14th straight day of work between eight and 11 hours every day. If I didn't know better, I would think someone is actually trying to undermine the efforts of the census. It's almost like someone wants it to fail. I'm dealing with incredible layers and levels of disorganization and chaos, trying to shield my team from all that and give them coherent information which is really hard. And for some reason, as I was listening to people talk this morning about their check-ins, the phrase popped into my head from the lesser known of Orwell's books but the equal to 1984, which is Animal Farm and I keep thinking about four legs good, two legs bad, no four legs good, two legs better because that seems to be going on a lot right now. So that's my observation and if you comment for the day. Awesome, thank you Ken. Hari, Julie, Judy. Okay, good to be on this call again. Greetings from India. And my check-in is, okay, so first of all, I'm actually surrounded by people who are so good at systems and systems thinking and all those these things. I'm actually just have come to this through sustainability, which is what I'm interested in. So one of the things which I'm doing is I'm helping to build a nonprofit on climate action and it's like we're using systems mapping to create context for us to think about mobility, for example. And I've been lifting a lot of the language from these calls and telling them about sense making and things like this. And we're thinking about how we can deploy as a horizontal layer so that we can enable people working with different communities to bring that climate action layer to them. So my first mapping workshop is this weekend and also thinking a lot of self-organizing structures and how we can use that. And interestingly, writing proposals where the keyword resilience is used a lot and we demonstrate multi-scalar approaches. For example, to build a resilience with regard to water in Afghanistan. So that's one of the proposals which is getting out. And I'm just really happy to be on these calls. And like I said a lot, I'm learning from here and trying to apply, for example, genes and approach to building a systems map is something which we can use without scaring everybody away when they say like what systems thinking and so on and so forth. So glad to be here. That is awesome, Harry, thank you. Julie, Judy, Pete. Hi everyone, happy to be here as well. It was my ambition to be here earlier but I followed quite some of the calls via YouTube. So thanks for that as well. Where to start? I'm in Belgium. I'm female, I'm 32. That was thinking that I had to do there. I guess that starts after Charlie. I'm quite passionate about- Sorry, that's not Charlie. Sorry. It's hot in Belgium. We have a heat wave like crazy. We never experienced that here. So it's like, whoa, we don't have AC or something. So just took a shower. Yeah, enthusiastic about people. I did the quite classic track, I guess. I went to university. I studied economics with a major in marketing, went to Coca-Cola, a big corporate company, learned a lot but was frustrated after a couple of years by the lack of decision-making, lack of ambition, lack of innovation. I'm not experienced in technology at all but it went so slow that I was like, okay, I'm gonna be outdated if I keep working here in five years. So that led me to search something else. So I quit and ended up at Nextworks, which is a company that believes in innovation, technology and people and just advocates to do something about that and do more with it. I think that's also why I ended up talking to Jerry and April in what we do. And we continue to bring people together. I think we're not really far ahead in using technology to do that better, actually. So I think in that sense, what Jerry's brain is was really fascinating to me because we also see a lot of connections, a lot of content, a lot of stories. And then I wonder after a couple of years, like, okay, how can we bring them better together and give better access to more people to do something with it, et cetera. So I kind of recognize the exercise that we are doing as well. Curious human being and addicted to easy interfaces due to my generation, I guess. So I struggle finding things in your brain, Jerry. So you have to explain me again where the search button is. So I'll reach out for that. Yeah, and I mean, ask me anything. I'm an open book. So happy to be here and excited what's to come. Lovely to have you here, Julie. Thank you for joining. So happy. And Julie's also a new mom. Judy, Pete, and then I'll go to the bottom of the screen, Romer and Hamilton. Sorry, I had to unmute. I'll keep it short. I'm a bumblebee too, because I hop from topic to topic and dive deep in between. Right now I'm really focused on how to take discourse and thought into action at a community level, which is where I think I can probably have the most influence, although I've got connections to a lot of different large professional and international organizations that might be partners or distribution networks that we could think about for engaging others in discourse. My passion areas are around education, arts, science, which is my professional background, and change. Awesome. Thank you, Judy. Pete, Romer, Hamilton. Good morning from Pete Cominsky from San Diego, California. One of the things that's interesting, we're starting our second year living in San Diego, and in the summer there's a weather cycle, which is, we're changing a little bit. So for the rest of the world, this is not very dramatic, but in the summer, San Diego, we're close to the coast, so it's a very pleasant weather. The temperature goes from 65 at night to 72 or 75 in the day. Beautiful weather, and then it gets a little bit hot. It'll cycle up to being hot for a couple of weeks. So we're just starting that cycle. We're just, today's gonna be the cross zone, I think, where it's 70 at night and 90, 90 or so during the day. So because we have an older house, our house was built 40 years ago or something. We don't have air conditioning, so I have this whole routine of five different thermometers around the house and open the windows at night and close them during the day until it's afternoon and then open them. And then I'm noticing on my thermometer charts, the house lags about two or three hours after. So we hit the same high as outside, but two or three hours later and it's really frustrating that I can't make that smaller. So that's big on my mind today. Other things, we had a great call. Lauren's call on Monday was awesome about education and I'm hoping to see more. We had a lot of energy on the call and Lauren's probably processing stuff and going to get out recordings and transcripts. So I'm super excited about that. The other thing that's freaking me out right now is we're kind of like the country, US country is kind of starting to see how the election is gonna go, but we don't have the presidential election in November. We don't really have any idea collectively how bad the chaos is going to get, I think. The current administration is going to do a head to do win head tails, I win strategy where I think probably likely they'll trash the election. They'll lose the election on purpose, not only the presidential election, but the Senate election. And then that will give them enough oomph to say, but we got screwed by our themselves. But so then we're gonna have a big, long nasty fight for a couple months. And so I'm wondering how we could prepare now to make that, to make people more aware and make that easier to navigate. It's kind of an in the moment interest of mine or I don't know, that's what I'm anxious about today. So normally I work on collaboration systems, helping people work together to solve the problems they want to solve. And also as part of the organization, the meta structure of OGM, we have a fairly new forum system. Please feel free to get online and we've got lots of places to discuss all the different nexuses that are part of OGM. And let me, if you have any problems with the forum, if you wanna get onto it, or especially if you kind of got started and then you couldn't figure out how it works, I would love to help you get through that. Yeah, I'll also drop an invite link as soon as I stop talking. Thanks. Thank you. Romer Hamilton, April and Hank. Hi, good morning everyone. Romer Benitez here from Grand Rapids, Michigan. This is my first time here in OGM. Thank you, Jerry, for bringing this group together. This is really triggers my curiosity here. And thank you for posting the videos. I had a glimpse of it and I'm starting to learn about this group and what a wonderful people you have here. So I'm grateful for that. And of course, to Jean, I've been following Jean Bellinger. I was part of the rural community group with Jean and Klaus. I saw Klaus here. So I've been following this channel man here. So that brings my curiosity to OGM as well. Let me tell you all about myself. Well, I've been in healthcare before and currently on sabbatical, but I was in healthcare, mostly in the administration side of it. And I care about healthcare, although I would consider myself a bumblebee as well. Thanks for putting the word in my mouth, Jerry and Judith. I have a vast interest in different topics and I would somehow dig into the rabbit hole when I find something interesting. And I guess what really interests me most is the understanding of connecting the dots between all these different topics and understanding the complexity that exists between that maybe finding the fundamental levels where levers could be pulled and where we can find the most efficient approach for the problems that are on the table. So and that leads me here. I'm very curious and I have this yearning to learn, to listen and to take part on the conversation here. So thank you. Thank you and really welcome to the call and everybody else is here for the first time. Welcome to the call. Hamilton, April Hink. Hey guys, happy Thursday. Really hot here in Boston as well. So we're all miserable together. Hope you know that. I'm Hamilton, I'm from Collective Next. This is not my first time on the call. Happy to be here. The thing I would share, I'll share a book recommendation that Jerry sent to me, but I have been immersed in lately. It's called low tech designed by radical indigenism. I think I've talked to him before. I'm working with Anne and some others around and just water is a big theme that I'm studying. Water as a metaphor for the world that we're living in, white water. And I'm really getting into some of the rituals of, this is the purpose of this book, and Jerry can say it better, is to say to design movement to rebuild an understanding of indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture. I mean, I can't hear anything. That generates sustainable climate resilient infrastructures. So Klaus, that goes back to what we were saying about this stuff. So that's what's up for me. I'm really into this book. I highly, highly, highly recommend it. I'll put the name of it in the chat if somebody didn't already. Oh, Pete did. Thanks, Pete. And happy to see you. April's having audio trouble, so we're gonna skip her for a second. She can't hear anything that's happening in the group through her earphones. Sorry, Hank, and then we'll go back to the top of a conversation. Oh, good morning, everybody. Hank here also not, definitely not a first time attendee to these OGM calls. So I've been working with Matt, meeting with all the people one-on-ones as well to kind of try to build up some energy around some of the organization. I think my mind has kind of gravitated towards that kind of place in the middle of the projects, like the do space and then the principal space to like think about the frameworks that are actually going to help information kind of flow between those two, right? And like tie those pieces together. That is proving to be a much more complicated task than I thought. And I mean that in a very positive way. But you know how like you think about things and it's so simple and you're like, oh, I can do this thing in like two hours and then 10 hours later, you're like two paragraphs in and there's more questions and answers, but I'm enjoying that. I think personally I have recently just thought about really just kind of how people, how important it is to set goals and then keep them in mind and then also the challenge of reframing them so in ways that make them achievable. I kind of call it like recertifying as a savage kind of thing every day. How do you do that? What's the process of doing that? How do people do it differently? Which has been, which has been cool. It's been really hot here as well. I went on a run the other day and I'm pretty sure I saw the devil in a swimming pool on the run. So that's kind of where we're at. So that's where, that's my check-in. Thanks Hank. Let's go Jean Neil Julian. Sorry, did I say Jean or I meant Jay? But yeah, Jay Neil Julian and then we'll go back up. Okay, hi everybody. I'm honored to be in these calls and often intimidated by the genius that appears. I continue in five different directions to explore the relationship between individual gathered insights from one person's life and how those are applied in storytelling and how that builds up to collective storytelling and greater mythology. And I just continue to explore this in leadership and organizations, culture building. And as Matt said, we're exploring some ideas. There's a thread of that which is where does the, where's for me, the story layer on top of the brain and what would that look like? So I just flagging that Jerry. But in general, orienting towards a world that works not just for everybody, but for all beings that inhabit this planet and how, what does it look like to cast out into a future or an alternate reality that we can begin to build soon and collaborate as quickly as possible into seeing that acting on it in very, very tangible ways. I think a lot of us share those impulses. So it's great. We're hearing, I think, ourselves through each other a bit as we check in because it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's me too. And those are good words. Ooh, I like that. And then, you know, on from there, Neil Julian. And then back to Gene. Thanks everybody. Neil Davidson here in Lervon in Belgium. If I can share this, if you can see this thunderstorm coming up, you might be able to see Lervon is in the center, Brussels, so that's in Belgium. It's gone dark in the house. We're hoping to get some rain. I spent an hour this afternoon watering plants that I put under shade covers last night to try and protect them from the heat. This is an unprecedented heat wave in Belgium. It's three or three to five years into water deficits. I left Australia when it was burning under bushfires for six months. And their fire season's about to start again. My brother has just been appointed in groundwater, managing the groundwater program for New South Wales in Australia, 70 towns there. We're about to be evacuated last year for lack of water. This is climate chaos, writ large. It's already here. We're all feeling it in terms of how that then relates to OGM and how we might do things at a better level. Part of my concern is that there's a lot of great work that needs to happen. There's a lot of great information that exists, that we need some sort of vertical integration, not just horizontal coordination. And so the conversation that I tried to start on Discord was to do with what are we here for? It wasn't meant to challenge OGM. It was meant to say, what's the highest level whole systems, ethical intention, principles that we can bring as an architecture that then allow all the other projects to align with and help to prioritize those projects. Now, as a newbie, I'm not directing it. I'm just trying to ask that question. How do we coordinate around multiple levels of thinking and consciousness and engagement from the conceptual and the ethical right through to the actual physical on the ground? And linking back to the conversation earlier about regenerative agriculture, one of the projects I tried to get up and running, unpaid for eight months, full-time in an architectural firm based in Brisbane, was to try and develop an anti-fragile food security strategy for the British Virgin Islands after they had two category five hurricanes in six weeks in 2017. Unfortunately, we couldn't get that up and to show the interconnectedness of things. Part of the reason was the politics coming out of Britain and Brexit and the fear of the loss of tax havens impacting on the financial sector which provides most of the income which has alienated the standing of every farmer in the British Virgin Islands because you can earn more creating a tax haven and creaming the benefits from rich people than you can actually looking after your own people in terms of feeding them. So that's one example of the systemic elements that I think we can start to say, how do we bring high-level system ethics and design plus all these tools to say, how do we inform that plus the mechanisms for systems mapping, conversations, dialogues to build collaborations across difference, not just with people of like-mined but unlike-mined in transdisciplinary systems design laboratories. And that's the sort of thinking that I'm trying to now bring to Belgium but of course most of my work is done face-to-face and very hard to have face-to-face in the middle of COVID. So in reframing what that looks like for the last six months and hoping that I can bring some of those gifts to bear, I hope to get back to the discourse conversation when I get a chance to integrate other bits. And I don't intend to offend. So if I say things which look out of turn, please let me know. If the stuff that's already in place, please let me know. And if I'm going somewhere that people don't want me to go, please let me know. But if I'm going somewhere that you like, encourage it and I'll try and bring some of the things that I've learned over the years in a way that might help others to see alternative pathways forward. So thanks so much for having me here again. Love that Neil, thank you. And we're trying to sort these things out right now on discourse. I'm not a great forum participant. I'm having trouble sort of getting around and being there. I love this context, like seeing you live and interacting in this way is my favorite thing. Actually, second to like being in person which I miss desperately. So I'm trying to be in these conversations and do some guiding there as we go. We could do a one-on-one if you want, then Jerry. Oh, you're talking to the others as well. Sorry, please. That sounds great. Love that. Julian and then April can actually check in. So we'll go Julian, April and then Dr. Jean, if you want to say more and Nancy, if you want to de-virtualize your check in. Go ahead, Julian. Hi, Julian here from Palo Alto. I'm interested in the mechanics of knowledge management. And this starts with concepts like graph databases and semantic webs and then moves into IT structures, conventional IT structures, but move forward into the 21st century. In particular, I'm interested in using immersive visualization to do this management, but not based on technology silos based on cognitive science. Let's see. So I'm seriously interested in any topic that affects the ability to describe and manage knowledge. I've been sidelined for the last two weeks by an unplanned hospital trip, but just getting back to speed today, hopefully. Thank you very much, Julian. April, you want to go ahead? Sure. Hi, everybody. Just chiming in very briefly. And my apologies for the earlier gaffe. I was able to hear everyone just fine. And then at a certain point, my earphones just forked out. And anyway, enough of that. Just wanted to say a quick hello. Super excited to be back. I will probably be dropping in and out of OGM meetings from time to time. I think some of you know that I'm working on my first book. Manuscript is due in November. So kind of all hands on deck for that. All about how do we navigate constant change and not so much from the perspective of neuroscience, but really just quite practical and adaptable. And I've recently launched this thing called a Flux Mindset Explorers Club, which a few of you are members of actually. And it's a collaborative quest to work through some of the themes I'm writing about, some of the themes we're all grappling with. When I think about a world in Flux or if I were to ask all of you right now, what parts of your world or life are most in Flux? I think we'd get some universal responses. And I think we'd also get some very individual, unique variations of that. So just really excited to see all of you to observe, learn, witness, chime in when I can. For those of you who do not know me, I guess I get, I think most of you know this, but if not, I am also Jerry's wife. So I am the one of us who get to see Jerry as we're on these calls. And when you posted that photo of the Boulevardier earlier, I was here when you took that photo. So anyway, always just awesome to see. Many of you and this momentum and I think this whole thing around Flux, it's been echoed by several of you without using that word today. And actually one thing I'll mention is that one of the most consistent pieces of feedback that I'm getting as I write and probe and explore and kind of throw ideas out there around this notion of Flux and how do we develop a Flux mindset and re-groove or groove for the first time some of the disciplines required to think very, very differently about what we expect about the future, about where our assumptions and values come from and so forth. One of the things that's been most interesting is that people continue to say to me, you are describing something that I now realize I have actually been feeling for a very long time but didn't have language to express. And just putting some language, it's not as though once the moment you define something you somehow solve it, not at all. But if we don't have a common language to talk about this stuff we're never gonna have those conversations. So I offer that up as sort of a Fluxy lexicon is part of my quest at the moment. And anyone who wants to chat about it more, I'm happy to do so, that's it. Awesome, thank you. And Jean, do you feel checked in? Are you? Well, I wanna introduce the group to leverage Weaver if this is the time to do that. This is an excellent moment. And I think we've got most everybody else. Nancy said she's fine with her text check in. So go ahead. So the Kumu people have been building this application called Weaver that they have been trying to get somebody to beat the hell out of to tell them how to make it better. And so last week I jumped in with both feet and said, I'll do that because I finally understood that I think it's an environment that we need. It's a place where you go and you define your profile. Let me move this up a bit. You put together your profile of an overview of yourself along with, how do I get rid of this there? Along with information about your interests, what you're working on offers and needs that you have. And then if you are wrestling, well, there's also a place where you can do messages on varying topics, but it's not meant to be a discussion group or anything like discourse. It's to talk about certain things regarding the environment mostly. But if you end up dealing with a problem that you're wrestling with and you need somebody to provide additional perspectives, if you're looking for somebody that's doing storytelling, all right, you can come in here and you can look at Deanna and say, oh, okay. Maybe she can provide some perspectives on what I'm wrestling with and you can send her a message. It's a place to look for a resource to provide additional perspectives on something that you're wrestling with. How many people it takes to get to a critical mass? I don't know. I just started building this last week. I figure it takes somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand. So currently the people that I've invited are beating up on the environment, leaving notes for the developer who is monitoring the threads and making changes on a daily basis. And for any of you who are willing to jump in at this point rather than later, then help us continue to figure out how to improve the environment. If Jerry will post my email address in the discussion thread, send me an email and say, sign me up and I'll send you an invitation. Any questions about this at this point? Yeah, I've got a quick question, which is, I've been on multiple, I was just gonna type in, I've been on a variety of online systems that help bring out people's skills and superpowers and whatever. And I was an advisor to a startup called connect.me years ago that did a really nice job of this. And when everybody showed up and started going back and forth and you could sort of tag people for skills and then the company went under. LinkedIn did this early and early on when people started doing skills there, it worked pretty well and then it just got polluted. So that now I think hardly anyone pays attention to the LinkedIn skills list, which is too bad. Cause doing this well is really interesting. So I'm wondering, Jean, is weper particularly good at that or what about it do you especially like? I'm especially like because I don't know another facility to support this at the moment that works the way this does. And this is actually being built by the Kumu people. So I figure it's gonna be around for a while. Okay. And I don't, is there a way to see this network as a Kumu map? No, no, it doesn't export to Kumu. It's something that someone could say that they wanted to happen. You can look at the map and that invite. You can see the network as a network and it does some density analysis on that network. Though it's pretty thin at the moment because there's only a few people that have joined. Though your comment about being able to export it to Kumu, someone might want a cross section of the content for that reason. So any other questions? Yeah, I mean, this seems like a side dish for Kumu that isn't using Kumu, which is interesting in itself. Other questions for the people? Well, I found a copy of Jeff actually built the prototype for this in Kumu to test out the thoughts about how they wanted to structure it. So as a mind map of what they would do in it? No, in terms of the data fields and the way that people connected and the way that they wanted it to operate. And until I found his, I was going to see if I could build a version of it in Kumu, but I lose something in terms of the messaging. Great, great. Thank you, Jean. Anybody else with questions? I put Jean's email in the chat. So if you want to go into Weaver, please. I think Jean, I think we're sort of looking around for a place to put profiles and more about us. So this is a candidate for doing that. And we have an intro thread in discourse, which has been actually pretty nice. People are doing a very lovely job of introducing themselves there. Yeah, the other thing that I... Go ahead. I've been part of things like this and this kind of depth requires a lot of curation and time, which if you want to do it, it's great. I love them. I've been built on them, they're great. You need an obsessive curator, you know? That's me. When mine grew to 4,000, it didn't work new as well as when it was 600. So the other thing, Jerry, is I was going to show you that last week's Open Global Mind, OGM. All right. This is... Where is it? Was it 10 o'clock? This is your note taking of it in the Zoom, in Rome? Yeah, so after the call, I just dropped in the chat. Okay, so this is the chat. Here is every instance where Jerry posted in the chat. Here's every instance of Jerry everywhere in my second brain. And if I do... If I simply open Jerry here, there are five specific references that I've made to Jerry in different places, in addition to all of those unlinked references to you. I have just become amazingly fascinated with Rome in terms of the way that it allows me to chronicle my day in terms of everything that happens and it files everything in the right places. I don't have to go worry about whether or not I put the notes under you or whether I put it under some topic or some subject. I just type everything in on today and it takes the tags and puts it all in the right place. So for those of you who haven't found Rome, go take a look at romeresearch.com. I think it's amazingly fascinating. Thanks, Gene. And I think we need to have another hoedown pretty soon and throw in tools that are not visual in the sense of multi-dimensional but also power tools of the kind you're talking about. And I know that Yuri, who's not on this call but is a member of OGM, has a similar tool to Rome he's been working on. And there's a couple other variants of it. Also Jacob Cole with Idea Flow. So this is kind of a category of those. And just on the topic of profiles in things, I was just looking up, this is my list of profiles online from all the years I've been using the brain. So here's my LinkedIn profile. Here's, remember Google Plus, everybody? branded.me, Brave New Talent. Here's connect.me, Facebook profile. Visify, Karma Circle, Branch Out, Quora, Reinventors, ORCID, I don't have any memory of what that was. Anyway, I love profiles like this, but I've been doing a whole bunch of these. And I would love to figure out a persistent one. One that actually becomes one that we all love and use. And somehow LinkedIn ate the resume but didn't eat the profile. Like, I'm curious about how that works in particular because a really good profile should be a way to visualize ourselves in our networks, should be a way to find people who have skills as you were just demonstrating with Weaver Gene, should be a whole bunch of things. But somehow that hasn't clicked in place. Anybody with thoughts on profiles or some that you've really loved? Pete, go ahead. Real quick, I'm gonna drop a link to Memorations which we talked about in another call recently. It looks like an open protocol to publish information about yourself or about anything. It reminds me of Microfarmats and IndieWeb and Wayback XHTML Friends Network. So I like the centralized ones and I also am looking forward to seeing decentralized ones. Agreed. I think decentralized Web is something we need to sort of focus on a bit as maybe a sub-call or something like that because it ought to inform everything we're trying to build and all the tools we're trying to choose. There's, that's kind of where I think things are heading and Memorations I think is a good call there. Any other thoughts on profiles and such? If not, I'll turn our attention briefly to this idea of story threading. Jerry, we haven't heard from Lauren. Lauren joined us. Lauren joined us. Okay. Lauren, would you like to, you mean as a check-in? Lauren, do you want, you're outside, I think you're now outside the mall. Do you want to check in briefly? Yeah, I just got out. Yeah, I just wanted to say, I kind of condensed that. So we had a little education on Monday where we had a bunch of people from various fields of collective intelligence, kind of ideated around the future of education or learning. And it was actually, when I put it together, I was so overwhelmed. And I'm going to post a link in the chat but if you're onto something, I think you'll see what I see. So I'm just going to post a link and check it out. She wants us, but I actually, I honestly cried. You're breaking up on us a bit, Lauren. Now we can't hear you. If you get to a place with better signal, let us know. For a second, Kevin has a question or a comment. Go ahead, Kevin. Kevin, do you want to jump in? Don't know. Okay, Lauren is chosen. Kevin, I don't know what's up. Why don't I take a moment? I sent a link to a Google doc around story threading to everybody just now. And we had a call about story threading where we introduced the idea and this document starts there and says, if you want to watch the recent OGM call, let me just share my screen so we can all look at it together without all being in the document. There we go. So basically I'm starting with a pointer to the OGM call where we introduced the concept of story threading. Whoever has a small child in the background, could you mute for a second? That might be Lauren coming back on the call. And then a description of what story threading is and also I copied the paragraph that I wrote when I originally thought of this idea of story threading in here and every one of these links is basically an inspiration. This paragraph is meant to be, story threaders might create a prezi or a documentary or a super game or a graphic novel or a manifesto or a card deck. Whatever they feel like or are inspired to do or wherever their skill set is. But this document is meant to figure out, okay, why don't we instantiate this? So let's turn story threading into a role, the way that graphic facilitation is a role already. Let's turn story threading into a role and the business. So going through how to recruit and prep pioneer story threader. So I'm, I think the worst story threader because I'm totally happy to be a story threader and participate in meetings in this way who else would like to do so? I had, I have a thought in my brain where as I was thinking about this, I thought of people who would make good story threaders. This was a pretty ambitious list because I included, for example, Jane McGonigal who is a super game designer. I included Nicky Case who's gotten a lot of attention for doing simulations online and I don't know Nicky, but back on Patreon. So would have to introduce myself, but part of this is there's sort of a high bar for being a story threader because your role is to find interesting threads and weave them, to find nuggets of goodness in the meeting that aren't necessarily being represented in what's being said, and to add to that your own context and experience. And then I think that we'll clearly need to do a test drive basically figure this out ourselves by trying it out on at least one event, maybe several, and then probably do a couple more on discounts. And then what I did was I created a pitch, basically started a short pitch deck in Google presentations. So we need to build out a pitch and then figure out who would like to actually do this. And then story threading at some point needs to actually be a standing business if it picks up. And then in OGM, I think the idea is can story threading be a guild? And can story threading be a practice? And what does it mean to be a business and a guild in OGM? This would be just pioneering that whole idea. And finally a couple of things at the bottom. So how do we market this? Where do we go? I own the domain storythreaders.com. So there's a website you can go visit that we're clearly I stopped in mid sentence at the end of the page. So we need to build that out. And then how do we tell when we're getting somewhere? So today graphic facilitation is a known thing. Only you know about story threaders. So if we create a demand for story threaders, that's one sign of success. Another one is that story threaders are making a living doing that as currently graphic facilitators do. And then a third is that some of these creations go viral. So some of the inspirations that are in that paragraph above are things like the story of stuff or the ice bucket challenge. I mean, I'm sure that every other nonprofit besides the ALS foundation, which did the ice bucket challenge, I'm sure every other nonprofit was slapping their forehead going why wasn't that us, right? Because the ice bucket challenge has nothing to do with ALS. It has everything to do with here's a crazy ass thing to challenge your friends to do and contribute some money. And it generated, I'm forgetting what the number was. I thought it was something like $20 million for ALS. That was a huge sum. And then how do we bake into this process of story threading some double and triple loop learning? How do we actually improve the process as we go? Because so far, story threading is just a vision for how to do this. We need to actually run it a few times. So sorry to sort of bump through it in that way. You all have a link to this document. Let me just go quiet and stop sharing screen and see what anybody thinks. Neil, please. Wonderful. I haven't had a chance to read the document, so forgive me if I'm cutting across that. The work that I was doing in Australia was becoming more and more keynote listener. And the keynote listener's role is to hold space for all the perspectives in the room, not just one perspective. It's to hold a higher level intention of how do we get the best out of this group of unlike minds currently collected here in a transdisciplinary sense. It has to be multi- or trans-despinar in its thinking and potentially trans-consciousness, trans-religion, trans-race, trans... It has this capacity to hold a level of thinking higher than what is currently in the room. And yet it has to remain true to what comes up in the room. The differences in the room is what creates the opportunity because it's the difference that makes the difference. And so if you can show people how to show up more fully whole in themselves and show others who showed up more fully, you can change the narrative. And I've had a bit of experience of playing with this in the verbal sense. I've been looking at how to bring that to market if that's the right term for about five or six years. I think there's an element here of flow, not just of capture. And it needs, I think, at least two players, one to capture what the other is saying. And that's why these recordings are so powerful. Because when this stuff comes to me, it comes through me. And I play the macro violin like this group here by responding to the body language and seeing who's ready for the next piece. And you said that and that fits with this. It's not just a linear connecting. It's some sort of intuitive flow process, a bit like poetry. And when that happens, you end up with a beautiful aha moment when people realize, I just saw myself in systems context, in a system seeing itself evolving. And so my sense is that the resources you've got here and the people you've got here have amazing capabilities in this. There'll be different ways and different groups that will have disciplines that we understand intuitively enough to be able to step into particular roles. There'll be threads that you've already captured in your brain, Jerry, that will be able to allow us to do the research and dig down and then to weave it back together again. But my sense is it's more than one role. It's actually part of it is the, how do you play the group? And part of it is, how do you then bring that back as the recording of what the group just played? So that's my little contribution to what's being said here. So Neil, that's huge for me. Thank you for clicking together a bunch of things in my head. Because the original idea was at an event or at a conference to bring several story threaders into the event, four to six is what I was thinking. Mix them into the crowd, et cetera, et cetera. And I was thinking of it as kind of an event, performative thing to create divergent expressions of what's happening in the meeting and to not lose the brilliant little sparks that are in the meeting. But you just connected that back to my great frustration in the world, which is we're sitting here in little rectangles and Zoom with a chat. I've got this brain thing on the side, which I occasionally take over the screen to share. And I was going, I've learned how to use it as my background. So I can now have my brain live in the background. There's a tool called, which is brand new, which lets you do it. And there's also many cams, which I haven't actually, I've installed, but haven't got to work yet, which Matt and his team are using. But basically these create a virtual camera so that you can make this your virtual background. But, sorry, back to the actual important point. My larger interest here is in how do we annotate, comment, share, visualize, represent the things that we know and put them in the mix actively during a conversation, not an official event, not a whatever, just like daily as we go forward in life. And you're also calling out, how do we do this in a way that lets us honor and in fact celebrate and in fact relish the diversity of ways of seeing or ways of representing the things that are going on? Because in that diversity is like the big win, right? And so it's not can we harmonize or homogenize our ways of seeing this event, which is sort of what Wikipedia does. Wikipedia forces everybody into one page and agreeing on what's gonna show up on that one page facing the world. Here, how do we preserve the richness of our different perspectives on the topic and mix them together in ways that might be like Rome where it's sort of outlines with transclusion with backward links, where it's like the brain, where it's like Kuma, whatever. What is that mix of tools? Sorry, and thank you for this riff. Go ahead, Neil. Neil, you just muted yourself. Accidentally. Transmutation. If it's okay with everybody, just a quick follow-up. I've worked with Matt and Gail Taylor on one occasion where I was invited in as the wild card. And the wild card's role was to cross-pollinate a bit like I think Judy was saying about being a bee, dipping in and out, listening to different conversations, feeling rather than hearing what's actually occurring and weaving, throwing in pebbles, deliberately disrupting, a bit like the Jester, the court Jester, speaking truths that others are too afraid to say, bringing the child mind in a way that allows people to see the naivety but also the double entendre. And there's a skill in doing that. And you do that pretty well too, Jerry. And so it's not just the linear connection, it's the transformative leap, but you've got to recognize that multiple individuals at different levels of understanding, depth, whatever. Each of them, a transformational leap is different. So that's a leap for one. So you have to show they've been honored and this is the vertical coherence that I'm talking about. I think it also relates to education. I think it also relates to what level are you pitching? Is it to business, is it to whoever? How do we weave that? And the way that I've done that in the past is with somebody to hold the structure as a good facilitator, because it's almost impossible for me to hold structure and go into the intuitive flow space. So you need somebody who can hold structure, mutual respect between the person holding structure of the intention we're here for and the person that's actually bringing something new and communication between them to say, is it appropriate for me to raise something I've just noticed? And if you can do that well, you can bring it then back in poetry and pictures and conversation and story and humor. All of those tools come into play and especially if we can then dig and say, this is what came out of it and now we've dug back into the brain and those bits of information we didn't have on our fingertips at that moment, we've now woven into the story and here's your rich picture of your system evolving in systems context and based on the real-time recording which allowed you to see yourselves and to recognize yourselves and how you came together and I've had that a hard moment. Wow, where did that come from? And it's just this most amazing feeling because the whole field is lifted to another level and the same people in the room but they're now thinking now what? How do we coordinate about painting the fence? It's why don't we change the town? And so this is I think the transformational shift that's so needed and unfortunately the current and I think this is part of the frustration I'm sensing in this group. The frustration is that we've got the information, we've got the tools, we have all these pieces, we don't get the gigs because we're not just doing the business as usual, tick, you know, I'm one of the top five so I get the gig every time and yet when we're in the room and I have to inject myself into the room sometimes as a gatecrasher, we create a difference but you have to be ready for discomfort because you're actually challenging some people's worldviews, affirming others and stretching others that are ready to move and you have to hold that dynamic in the individual that is actually doing the weaving in real-time. That may not apply to somebody who's doing the weaving away from the scene after listening to videos or watching what was said but in the real-time space it's a really intriguing combination of systemic understanding but also systemic sensing and holding those loosely with humility as I've seen you do Jerry, holding those with humility rather than imposing your view, holding the possibility that that could go another step and having that next step in your head to play as a card if they're ready to go there and somebody has to throw the pebble in and be able to say, oh, sorry, that was the wrong ripple. I meant to go this way. So you've got to have nimbleness and all those things. So I love this area and this rich field we're playing with here and I'm looking for how can I bring some of those skills connected to this body of knowledge recognizing that I've only got a narrow band of things which I know enough about to be truly transformational but I can hold space for multiple perspectives in whatever field I throw myself at but having an expert in the room like Klaus on food structures or whatever would be fantastic to say, here's what I'm sensing Klaus, what do you reckon? And by the way, how does that fit with the crowd? And so that's happening in real time. It's systems facilitation rather than facilitation to an outcome. Neil, that's awesome. Before I pass to Ken, then Jay, real quick two things. One is there's, I love the idea of the trickster, the coyote, the jester, the person who has leeway or permission or license to do things in the meeting that change the meeting that is brilliant and is nowhere contained in the story threading idea at this moment, although it's lurking in the background. So you just yank that forward. And second, I think what you're also helping illustrate is if we do this right, we're inventing the next medium. We're inventing the next way that people normally communicate. And what we're describing right now sounds like, Jesus really complicated, like, oh my God, I'm gonna see like all the, and so if it sounds overwhelming right now, we need to also figure out how this becomes as simple as tumbler or Pinterest. And yet much more vital and representative of what's going on, so that we're actually sort of doing what you just described so poetically, Neil. Ken, then Jay. Thanks Neil, you talk about a fox being foxy. There's so much in what you said, I could go in many different directions, but I wanna start with the keynote listening role. During my decade with the World Cafe, we had a regular practice where we would periodically gather and set aside an afternoon and we would sit in silence for like 20 minutes with the question, if the World Cafe itself was speaking to us, what is it saying right now? And then each person would share that and we had a graphic recorder recording that, we'd start to map out and over the course of time, doing that on a regular basis, we kept hearing different things about the cafe that really informed how we shaped it and put it out in the world. And I think that might be a reasonably good practice for us with OGM as we get more deeply into it to periodically sit and say, if OGM was speaking to us, what would it be saying right now? The next piece of this is a very similar thing, Mark Gurzon, who's the president of the American Mediators Association was hosting a three-day World Cafe in Israel around the Israel-Palestine conflict. And periodically at the end of each day, he'd say, okay, what voices have we heard in the room here? And over three days, they identified seven separate voices from the room. They weren't coming from any individuals, but they were coming from the way that people sat at the tables and kept moving. These seven separate voices kept showing up. So that to me was kind of a keynote listening of there are these really deep unconscious perspectives that we can bring up if we are consciously engaging with them. That requires a structure and asking the question. And I think that also fits into your keynote listening role that we can engage the people who are actually in the process in that level of listening because it's something not used to doing. And when they do it, they go, oh, it's a little weird, but the results show up really quickly and powerfully and they're blown away. Wow, that's really interesting. There are these seven perspectives that are kind of arguing. And now that we've identified those voices, we can listen to what's legitimate about each one of them and what needs to be honored. And that changes the entire conversation from one of strife into one of coherence. And just to build on what you said, all the things you said, you just described don't need to be visualized, put into Kumu or the brain or whatnot. They show up differently. They show up when we make room for them when we're actually present with each other. And then there's this fun edge of, oh my God, we just learned that there's seven voices. Maybe we can represent those and like absorb them into the forms of representation and the ways that we're shaping what we know and how we express it because the insight that those voices were there is a big deal for that group and for what was going on. And I think, I agree, let's build that into what we're doing. Jay, the floor is yours and then class. Yeah, so I just wanted to ask the question, what is the role of story in story threading? And kind of speak to that for a second because a lot of my work has been just trying to draw a smaller circle around what a story is. So the idea of a retellable story is quite simply when you're gonna take in 100,000 words today, you're gonna remember only a bit of them tomorrow and most likely as culture defines for us, it's gonna be in the form of a story. It's going to be some distinct surprise or change that took you from one state of knowledge or being into another state of knowledge or being some shift, some transformation. And so the retellable story is like that thing that's carried over till tomorrow that you could then remember and retell. And that's just one circle and there are many circles of how to define story. But I think that what is interesting, one part that I'm intrigued about is if we can get to those moments of change and have one way of depicting those moments of change in these expressions, you can also start to layer those moments of change from different perspectives that informs a kind of greater hologram of story. And so I feel like what you're saying is you're talking about multiple inputs and methods, but I wanna just keep coming back to this idea of story, of exploring these dovetailing key moments of change and informing and drawing from what people will actually remember from this and kind of telling a meta story from that. Totally agree. And we also need to be a little a lot deeper about what we mean by story as you're calling out here. Love that and needed you on the rest of what you just said. So Klaus and then Judy. Yeah, so I actually posted a story example on the forum and I also have that same sentiment that while we need to show maybe graphically or in flow form connections within the system, we then have to translate that into a story to an audience that has like no idea what they are looking at when you show them despite the web of relationships. So this is, I'm working with a group of NGOs. It's hosted by the Sierra Club, but there's like a dozen, there's the Sunrise Movement, Greenwood Deal, there's a dozen NGOs involved in this. So I posted this here yesterday, got a very surprise response from a group of vegans who were protesting that I'm once again hostile for two vegans where obviously the story has completely different purpose. But the challenge really is to take this systems understanding and move it into a story format that's short, compelling and relevant to the context within the group that you're talking with lives in. Right, so I'm all in favor of, I mean, I admire all these systems structures because they help build an understanding and you see connections that you may have missed otherwise, but so my thinking is strictly abstract in my head. I don't do any modeling. I just think about it and meditate on it. But so we have to find a way of starting maybe with story, moving that into a model and coming up with an advanced story. But it's, I think it's all rooted within story. Thank you class, Judy than Neil. Sorry, I had to unmute. Yep. Wow, really rich conversation today with a lot of depth to it. And I'm trying to think about how we take the shared inspiration that occurs in this form of discourse into operability within our group and outside our group because there are nuggets of insight about every 15 seconds in these calls. And I can't possibly keep up with looking at the person taking the chat, taking my own high point notes, et cetera. And I know I'm a pretty good integrator. So I don't know how to take this collective wisdom into the transformative mode that allows other people to engage in a new insight that they can then take into action. Because my sense is we want this to not be an intellectual exercise or a philosophical one, but a connection of people that are gonna do important work together in local and global contexts because each of us is one point in a huge personal network for at least all of us all over the world, but also in our communities and every person we influence is another nexus point. So I'm struggling with how to say this, but the taking it from the ideological knowledge content that we all bring so richly with our own experiences to something that is transformative or offers a possible transformation to a larger community is where I'm really wanting to try to work. And I think you expressed that really, really beautifully. Partly the people who are in this call have a high tolerance or capacity for the juggling and the mind mapping and the whatever else that we're doing. And I think all of us are pegging the needle during these calls. I know that I am. I'm looking at the chat, I'm listening, I'm trying to process and then occasionally the technology is breaking and then whatever. And so how to translate that into something your average civilian or your average citizen is really happy to use and participate in daily right this minute there's this gigantic gap. And I think Judy you're pointing and saying how do we operationalize it so that everybody gets the benefit from this kind of thing, which I love, which is like a total goal. So yes, and then Neil and Pete. Beautiful thanks, thanks, Jerry. And thanks, Judy. You did express that very, very well. And this is part of the dynamic. And I think it comes back to Klaus's point that if you're trying to tell a story, it's different than if you are capturing a story or recognizing that there are multiple stories in the room. In my work in real communities in Australia, my job was to point out that there was more than one story. And how can you live together in this place if there's more than one story and you can't even share your own stories? All right. And so in one example, and I've discussed this at some length with, lost his name, another conversation. The fathers and the fathers-in-law had the irrigation rights. They had the water rights. They could choose to put in a crop or not. For them, the economy was working. For the daughters and daughters-in-law, the town was failing. It was too far to go to get healthcare, shopping, and so on. They were in the same room with us. We pointed to the fact that there were two stories, but we didn't say you're wrong and you're right or you're right and you're wrong. We said, how come there's two stories? And at the point they realized there's two stories, you then have allowed both stories to be seen side by side for the first time. So in that way, you're saying, what is your common story? What could your common story become? That's working with and turning the herd to some extent, right? And so you have to hold a higher systems ethical intention that I will do the best I can with however far they're prepared to go, at whatever speed they're prepared to go, but you have to be loose to the absolute outcome, right? It's non-attachment to outcome in the Buddhist sense of the word, right? Then the other side is, and I think this is Klaus's dilemma, the other side is if we know all of this stuff about how the global food system is collapsing, about how we've got food deserts, about how we've got drought, about how climate change is gonna change everything, about how monospecific culture is raping the planet, right? How do we bring that information to attention? And I think to me there's a spectrum of opportunities here. Each one of them is a pebble in the pond, it's a strange attractor, right? The strange attractor is to say who gets this story, right? Who gets this story? And I think there's a need for multiple levels of story. And I think I mentioned this on a previous thread. Indigenous Australians have oral histories, which they tell around campfires in systems context based on what they saw today, changing season, but 60,000 years of co-living, co-evolving with the land, i.e. in systems context. You can't get deeper than that, right? So when they tell a story, unlike the preacher on Sunday, they're telling a story from your ancestors created that rock and this is the dreaming story. And that's where the water goes and don't kill the possums because this is their breeding season, right? This is contextual information that's real information for people in real places to survive, right? So that's the first level. Secondly, when you tell the story orally, it doesn't matter who tells the story because they're being held to account by the elders who know more about it in our white culture from a theological perspective about what Jesus said or whatever, right? So the stories are held in trust by the elders. The youngers are allowed to say it and the kindergarten kids get it because it's told in parable form, but it all makes sense, multiple levels of meaning, different levels of telling, and when you ask the right question, not when you know the right answer, when you ask the right question, you are referred to the next level of knowledge custodian. So we can go deeper, we can go broader, but I think this is Klaus's frustration. When you throw a pebble into the pond of an undifferentiated audience that you can't see, you can't read the body language, you don't know what their worldview is, you don't know whether they're all vegans, right? What is the response you're gonna get? Well, you're gonna get a cacophony of noise. And the reason that I'm here in Belgium and the reason that I've had the last gigs, none of them paying, by the way, for the last 10 years, is because people saw me holding space for multiple perspectives in real time, even though most of the people there didn't get it, right? And so it's the people that go, wow, that guy is trying to hold space for this in the same way we honored Jerry last week with the beautiful video. He's holding space for this diversity and this complexity, right, and he's not trying to direct it, he's just holding it so that it can find itself and then say, how do we move forward? And individuals will be attracted. And the place that I'm aiming now is where are the transformative thinking individuals in organizations and institutions that are trapped inside organizations they know will fail, in systems they know will fail, right? Unless they can change them and if they can't change them, they will leave. And when they leave, they will join us because we're the ones that pointed out to them and gave them an island of sanity and a sea of destruction. And they will look to us and say, how do I help you to do what you're doing? Because what I was doing there is a waste of time. And I'll bet you there's people on this call right now that are in that space or have been in that space and have left it. Thank you. Wow, I'm gonna have to listen to this call again afterward. That's so rich. So Pete and then Doug. I'm gonna have to listen to this call again because I don't know where it comes from. That's awesome, you're channeling something. I'll have what he's having. Pete, then Doug and then we're gonna wrap the call today because we're already well over time. I wanna respect the story threading and thanks Neil, that was great. And I'll have to listen to the call again. Something that occurred to me in this call is, so I feel like I'm not prepared to talk about it. I think I'm not gonna do a very good job at it, but I think a lot of us are story setters, knowledge mavens, whatever. Some subsets of us are also builders or doers or at least helpers, coaches for builders. So one of the energies I'd like to see more of here is either us or any one of us or me, I will help people do this, is to pick something and start working on it rather than continuing to help people tell stories about it. So I wanted to share that in the course of my life, I feel like I've kinda got it down to a science now, how you build things. And you can start with a very small prototype with a few people, you can start building a really dorky prototype of something and then take that prototype and tell other people about it and keep going from there, right? So there's a fair amount of writing and thinking about this in the world. One of them is, I'm gonna post two links, Eric Nyberg's blog post about Agile, creating things in Agile is really good. And then Eric Reese's startup, lean startup book was a revelation to us a few years ago. Oddly enough, his website is now kind of not lean anymore. It's hard to see the trees for the forest. But both of those, there's a principle of just get started. Pick something you're really passionate about and do a little thing with somebody else and then take that little thing and show it to somebody and make it bigger and bigger and bigger, right? So if anybody's interested in either themselves starting to build something or finding one of the people you're helping tell stories of and helping them build something, I would love to help you build from something small to something bigger and bigger and bigger. I love that beat. I think there's a lot of that energy in the room. You're totally right. Doug, last word. Well, as I'm listening, I think there's a desire to be able to tell the story based on what's actually happening in the meeting. But if you take a meeting like this one, it might be that the real story is never actually spoken, which means the story integrator has a big problem. So for example, in this meeting, the key story might be, I'm just picking one, hidden assumptions about sticking in the present and not talking about history. So I'm just fascinated by it. That makes the storyteller's role really hard to pin down and hard to teach. And, well, you see the point. And are you saying that specifically about story threading as a concept in a practice? Or are you just saying that generally, which I think applies also? Yeah, the conversation in the meeting unfolds in a linear procession. But the story might not be linear at all. It might be the very few points in the meeting when somebody raised a question about assumptions. And I'm totally on with that. And partly what I'm hoping to suggest with story threading is that by giving people a lot of leeway freedom license to interpret and narrate and express the stories they're hearing, that what you just said will show up better than it would normally. Because somebody will say, hey, actually, there's an archetype we've all been walking around and not talking about. And here's the archetype, and here's how all the nuggets that I heard in the meeting attached to that archetype are making this up. But that would hopefully surface some of what you're talking about. So I think I didn't know it, but what you just said really resonated for me. I'm trying to bring skilled people. And I don't know if this is a teachable skill or if this is just a talent people have, which is why I'm saying that the bar for story threading might be a little high. But I think that I want the kinds of people that Neil described earlier to be in the room doing this so that we can bring up those kinds of notions, like you just said. That's a terrible place to end this column because I just want to go with that. We also need people like Doug in the room, right? And this is really important that it's, I think that's really important what you're doing, Doug, because this is the disrupting coherence compassionately, right? It's challenging where we got to in real time, right? And then it's the question of, and now what, right? And so if you can create the space to do the next piece of creation away from the group, then you've created space. And that's what you've just done. You've given us a nugget there to say what wasn't spoken about. How do we bring that up? But if you don't create that space, it's very hard to record it in the minutes or have it in the report. And the reports that I've tried to write, academics looked at them and went, you can't write this. It's got integration of real world people and stories. It's got bits of academic research. Most of it's subjective. None of it's real. None of it can be verified. I'm going, go and talk to the community. They just changed. And so we don't necessarily know how to measure this stuff, but we can sense it. And so when we sense it, we need to speak it. And when we speak it, we need to hear it. And when we hear it, we need to say, and now what? Jay, did you want to add a code out to this? You had your head up a little earlier. It's great that we're talking in many layers of story and what we mean and how this works. I would say I would add that it's very, for me, it's very important to just inquire how is the world before? The world before was a lot of people looked up and said the current story capturing systems that we have or insight capturing systems that we have are not quite doing what we need. A multidisciplinary group came together and looked at story from multiple angles and said, I have questions here. I have questions here. Are we talking about the same thing? And then we kind of got to the innermost cave, which is what is this? What can this be? What might it look like looking out into the future to say at one point we will get to what this immersive version looks like? And that's where I think we are. We're in the cave. That feels like a better punctuation mark for this call. In the cave? Yeah, exactly. So in the inner cave, good, like, and I think there's a shadow that I'm a little afraid of over there around the corner, but- Beware the dock whip. Exactly. And beware the frumius bander snatch that draws that bite the claws that catch. I have a philosophy joke to end on. Oh, that's perfect. Play-Doh and a platypus walk into a bar. The bartender says, what's up with that? The platypus goes, what can I say? He looked a lot better in the cave. That's really good. Thank you, everybody. I'm gonna have to re-watch this call. This is awesome. See you on the tubes. Let's plan a couple of separate calls. Thank you so much. This is a gift. I really appreciate it. Thanks to all go well. The storm, I had to dash out during the middle to take things off the roof, which we've been shading the skylights with. The neighbor's tent was blowing away over the fence and we had to grab that and pull it back. That's where their kids have been camping out in vacation in their own household. Wow. The garden's got about an inch of rain, I think, in the meantime. So it's been a productive meeting. Thank you very much. Take care. See you. Bye, everybody. Thank you for surviving the storm. Thank you.