 This is the OGM weekly call on Thursday, July 7th, 2022. Boris Johnson has said he'll step down. COVID is still rumbling in the background. Rights are under threat all over the place. And we were just talking about what does it mean when somebody asks you, how are you? How are you in a world like that? Yeah, yeah, in a world gone mad. How are you? So how is everybody intentional irony? Today is a check-in format. So I'm just going to wander around and invite people to share OGM. I read Pete's Plex Dispatch this morning having struggled to maybe send him a paragraph and he wrote like all kinds of cool stuff. So I'm hoping Pete shows up here so I can thank him. He's been with everyone, but like, holy beans, wow. That's quite remarkable. Still in a great service. Yeah, yeah. Help us see ourselves. Yeah, he's awesome. So let me go, Hank, Klaus, Scott, for starters. Unmute. Okay. Yeah, great. So yesterday's met a call, which I think most of you were not on. I mentioned two things which are on my mind and I'll mention them again briefly now. One of them is I've just completed a set of six and a half hour online vision sessions for the nation of Wales. And that is the nation that's part of what used to be Boris Johnson's country and possibly Boris's successor will be more congenial with it. We had four different sessions of approximately 20 to 30 people each using a positive cartography method to co-create building blocks for a vision of how they would like to see the country in 15 years was for Wales. I think very enlightening and successful project. And for myself as designer of the methodology and leader of a team that carried it out. I think it's going to be interesting and I'm going to be spending it just just finished two days ago, and I'm going to be spending the next couple of weeks trying to understand what I learned about orchestrating and facilitating the six and a half hour online session that gives people more energy than they had when they brought came into it. That's point one. Second point is a little more negative. And I think it's going to be interesting to see that there are increasing news reports online and offline media about the growing despair in society and especially amongst the youth, climate anxiety, and I'm already dialoguing with a number of people in the chat room. And I'm going to be talking to some of the organizations about what can be done to counteract that or to address it. And I had really interesting responses from five different people in the, or six different people in the session of met project yesterday who said they'd like to talk about it. So I mentioned it here as well since most of you weren't in the audience for the future, if young people are totally in despair about doing something about the climate, and it's up to people like us to step up and help them and help society. I mean, we are the ancestors of our own future. So that's another thing that's really interesting. And as one third thing, it's specifically for Jerry, but to some extent it's for all of us. Leif Edmondson, who has a really enlightened friend of ours from Sweden, who has taken part in a couple of these calls, once he sent his regards to Jerry and to this group, and would like in the future to see if it's possible to organize something internationally about societal innovation in on a topic that interests us all involving future centers in the Netherlands and in Sweden and perhaps other institutions around the world. So I just mentioned that our presence of more of that to come in the future. Thanks Jerry for letting me off. Hank, that was awesome. And I love that idea. I would love to know more and I think we'd be very happy and a bunch of us would love to jump in on the future's centers discussion. I just had a question on the first item you had on positive cartography from all the sessions and all that. Did anything stick in your mind from the people, what participants did that we were like, whoa, okay, how did they get there or something that was memorable just so that we could have a flavor of where positive cartography. And then what it's like. Yeah, okay, that's a that's a that's a great question. Most of the online sessions since the COVID lockdown have been talk, talk, talk, listen, be bored for the sleep. It's all words and it's all cognitive in positive cartography we asked people to choose images, either images that they've sent in advance and we've uploaded on a mural board or images we've seeded the mural board with and say, hey, when I'm thinking of the future of health care in the isolated valleys of Wales. This image is what I see. Look at it. Tell me, do you see the same thing? Have you seen something different? And that gave people lots of energy because suddenly they weren't listening to policy to policy positions and technical babble, but they were listening to people talking about the things that they see in the future. And that's one part of the answer I want to give and the other part of the answer I wanted to give is in framing the sessions for the people. I asked them to participate both as a person who has a specific function in society, whether it's elected government, the civil servant, a leader of an NGO or what else, but also as a citizen and a resident of Wales in the future. And we had a number of people who said, well, I think something about health is important and I'm in transportation, so I didn't know any of the details, but I've got four children and I'm a farmer's daughter and looking at it from the point of view of a mother and someone living on a farm, this is what I can say. And that also was something that rarely goes on in those types of discussions and I think both of them fed the group with so much energy. That sounds really valuable. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm going to give you a summary of an exercise that John Kayo and his colleagues at the Idea Factory invented back in Silicon Alley days called the Maastricht cubes. Did you hear about this? Sounds very familiar, but I can't place it. So they call the Maastricht cubes because they invented this for a workshop held in Maastricht, so that's the connection. So they invented a lot of different types of cubes. They invented 100 photos that relate to different sort of emotions, archetypes, whatever. They cut them all into let's say four by four, they printed them onto four by four squares with Velcro, and then they gave everybody a cube that had Velcro, the other side of Velcro basically on all six sides of the cube, and they asked people a question and everybody went up to the wall which had repeats of all the images. So you had to tell your life story from the Jungian archive and you go boop, boop, boop, boop, and then everybody stands up and rotates the cube around and says then this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. And it was pretty good and pretty powerful and relatively simple. Sounds really interesting. I'll have a look for it online. Sounds like it's everything to do when you actually are face-to-face with people. And possibly there's a good virtual translation. It could easily show up as a virtual palette of images that fit for you or something like that. That would be pretty simple to do. Okay. Terrific. Thanks very much. Thanks Hank. Anyone else with thoughts or hanks? Hank, if you're going to do something like this again, let's talk. I did a program in Portugal a few years ago for the society for organizational learning and we had about 50 people in Braga. And so one of the exercises that we cooked up was what we called the tree of generations. And so we asked people in small groups to share with their fellows things that they had learned from their grandparents that were really important to them. Life lessons from grandparents or grandparents generation if you didn't have grandparents. And to write them down short posts, separate posts. And then we asked them to think about things that they want for their grandchildren. You know, the kind of world that they are looking to instill and create for their grandchildren. Again, write them on post-its. And then the last exercise was to write down things that you are doing that carry forward the lessons from your grandparents to make that world for your grandchildren. And so the tree that we had drawn on the wall on some mural paper and we said come up here and put the grandparents in the roots and put the grandchildren in the branches and put the stuff you are doing as the trunk. So you are the connection between the two. And it was fantastic people just like they were bonkers over this. Oh my god, look at what we have gotten here. This is such an amazing example of collective intelligence. And I think this would easily adapt to a mural board. You could totally do this online. It would complete work. So that is the kind of stuff I like to cook up. Yeah, great. Fantastic. I will be in touch because I am hoping to do this type of thing once again after the summer. Fantastic. Thank you. Anyone else? That was great. Thank you. Let's go to Klaus, Scott, Doug and Carmichael. Yeah, thank you. Pete rescued me in some ways because I had a moment of panic come over me last week. You know, I developed this webinar with the Sarah Club and it is the national team, the National Grassroots Network and I have been working with this group for like three, four years. It took me a really long time to come in as a corporate guy and get their trust and confidence and so on. So now we have a team together that is really on fire but they are all brand new to this and so we don't have resources lined up. We don't have the right support staff. So we got this webinar lined up and the interesting part of it is looking for a lever that you can pull, a big lever you can pull because the food system is so complex. It has so many moving parts and even within the Sarah Club you have the pollinator team the sewage sludge team the anti-K4 team. You have like a dozen teams that are working on components. It's like the proverbial elephant implying to people walking around it so the the intention was to bring in systems thinking and I've done this with Gene Ballinger for six months we worked on developing this thing and Gene was saying this thing is useless because it's way beyond explainable. It's too complex. So you have to find a way you have to find one message that's the best or everything and I finally found it and it's called water because everybody understands water it's either too much of it or not enough of it or it's polluted or it's poisoned but the research shows that over 90% of the American public has a relationship with water and is concerned about water and having listened in on the congressional hearings from the agriculture department the Republican party has already lined up solid opposition against anything climate change related I mean the co-leader the leading member in the House and the Senate both made comments saying there will be no regulation no initiative that is focused on climate change we're not going to deal and change our climate change so water and this is getting pretty technical here but in order to fix water tables and to clean up water and to protect air perverse and so on you have to do the exact same things to regenerate your soil back to health as you do when you talk about climate change because you have to move carbon into the soil because carbon is the feedstock for the soil microbiome and the soil microbiome is the root of life because the bacteria and microorganism in the soil form the basics of life from which life then evolves into higher forms so out of there come worms then birds eat worms so you have that whole chain of life building up from within the soil microbiome and water is when you look around the country think about the damage around the Gulf of Mexico along the coastlines of Florida where you have dead zones and thousands of dead fish on the beach you have the same in Lake Erie where the entire city had to shut down their water filtration systems because they got all this sludge coming in from algae pollution and so on and you have your own link that the stuff coming down the Mississippi River Delta which is the runoff from farms is causing this and in virtually every community in America there is some issue related to water either you have pollution in your lake and you have all this algae going there or like in California the farmers are sucking the up rivers try and pulling them so low the city loses its water supply so there are issues related to water so I found the Sierra Club is this huge, I mean it's a 4.5 million member organization you know very big bureaucracy I mean they have a significant multi-million dollar budget and so on but it's quite rigid in what they do so I found a state chapter Illinois in this case where they are saying let's go for it let's do this and they connected me locally to a farmer who is a Sierra Club member and to the leader of the local soil and water conservation district and that lady got so excited about the idea of being able to communicate out the importance of focusing on water and repairing water sheds that she recruited the director of the Illinois Soil and Water Conservation District the association plus two senior level members from USDA who focused on the conservation component and so now we have an amazing panel we have two farmers, two activists farmers, commodity growers and let me just the latest creative that we have developed is still in the format but I finally access the designer and I'm just paying for it but we now have an opportunity to get into the farm bill the farm bill spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year to influence the way that we farm so the subsidies that are going into the farm sector are distorting the entire industry the money goes into the support of commodity crops and commodity crops are raised as mono crops and when you put the same crop into the ground over and over the soil dies because each crop takes different nutrients out of the soil and if you put the same crop over and over then the soil by microbiome dies then you have to put chemical fertilizers and like synthetic nitrogen phosphates and so on made with fossil fuels and then you have to protect these crops because now the natural defenses in the soil have gone so now you need glyphosate and ever more toxic chemicals to defend against predation from insects and weeds and this is an arms race which we're losing obviously because nature is building up defenses against these poisons and so now we're dealing with the industry refuses to budge for example right now synthetic nitrogen is getting to be really expensive it's made from natural gas so they're using sewage lodge which is the sewage from cities all that stuff is full of toxins and some of them are what they're called forever chemicals that are going into that they're now using for fertilizer which then transfers into the crops which then transfers into our system and which we absorb and so the idea here is that when you look at the farm bill it's like explaining the defense bill it's crazy but there are basically three sections in the farm bill one is the crop subsidies where they're paying to farmers to pick crops and guarantee the price and subsidize it then you have nutritional assistance programs 76% of the farm bill is nutritional assistance programs so they spend about $200 billion a year on SNAP benefits and school meals and that sort of thing and then there is one component that's called the conservation programs and those conservation programs are now stealing specifically with issues like pollinated protection, biodiversity soil health and so on but individually these programs are not effective you need to accumulate you need to aggregate these programs so that the farmer can shift and repair his soil and structure his soil which then at the same time disrupts the entire industry because when you are prioritizing soil health that means you have to change the types of crops you are calling because each crop you can't call the same crop in Florida as you do in California or in Oregon if you want to repair your soil and you don't treat soil as a base sand line and so the industry would have enormous costs to change their supply chain strategies and accommodate farmers when they need to shift the European Union for example mandates three crops in rotation so that the soil has time to recover between crop cycles and so on so anyway in this webinar we want to have farmers explain here's what I need to do to repair a watershed if I was taking a dead piece of land where the soil is dead and I want to revive it that's what I need to do and then we have the government official saying okay for this purpose you can use this program and you add that program and pull those things together and develop a three to five year plan and so that's what we want to put on the table because all of our volunteers we are talking about farmers but we don't have the specificity that you need to know these five or six programs because then we can go and lobby Congress and ask for funding because these things are notoriously underfunded and you know when the Trump administration came in the first thing they did was defund to come out of the conservation programs so anyway that's sort of where I'm at and I haven't had time typically I give myself three months to set up a webinar like this and I've had only two months for whatever reason and so I don't have enough time to really focus on the communications aspect of this webinar the last month I did with business climate leaders we had over 1,500 registrations so we released the first batch here and ended up with 24 reservations so that's my panic you know to get my god what am I going to do there but the message needs to translate into different audiences differently so there has to be because everybody I mean the housewife or school kids in the cities have no idea what you're talking about when you talk about soil health and for a farmer it's a different conversation and so on and so on so we are trying to create a core message similar to what I just posted here and then we need help to communicate that with an explanation attached so if you look at your audience the people that you are talking with most of the time how would they get this how can this become understandable to a broader audience so anyway I think we're on a really good track I've been on the advisory board for the very consistent business network and for and Citizen Climate Lobby and all the Sierra Club so it's getting around the strategy is taking hold and Farm Bill has become a centre focus for a host of NGOs who are going to exert an impact there thank you that was a wrong story that was a brain fall thanks Klaus and so many interesting things I'm happy I mean the way you started finding the lever of just focusing on water is really interesting because so many of the levers or so many of the useful things that have to happen are poisoned or stalled or don't really don't get enough traction or whatever else it's kind of crazy anyone else with with thoughts suggestions yeah go ahead Stacy I did want to add not so much towards the webinar but to the bigger picture I wanted to say that whoever is working on communications regarding the bill in my opinion there's a whole other message strictly geared towards the people that are for regulations like the for getting rid of regulations there's a message I think for Libertarians and if you know who's working on that message I would love to help because I do think I have some insight so I just wanted to say that so there isn't enough time to really dig into this first Stacy if you take this core message here and then expand to this audience right with an introduction let me be clear I don't have a Libertarian audience I'm saying that I think I have an insight into how to take not about your webinar but how to take the message to a Libertarian audience which I could find because that's what I use Facebook for you know I'm able to track people and find the groups I'm saying I could help in shaping that message to put the pressure on you know the people in Congress that are saying you know we're fighting for you because we're not going to let them regulate us and how I think I could help to switch that for them to see it a little bit differently because they're already locked into feeling they're being manipulated so it's kind of easy to show them they're being manipulated a different way I saw an article a couple days ago that was about a Democratic representative who was doing well running on sort of deregulation strategic deregulation in his district which was a relatively conservative district but it was a message that is not expected from a Democrat and I don't remember any of the dynamics but sort of along these lines I kill you're muted sometimes more eloquent when I'm muted the libertarian angle I think is really important because I imagine that a lot of farmers identifies libertarians in some way and so crafting that message be really key I'm always I'm really glad that you're doing what you're doing and I appreciate your depth of knowledge and your systems perspective on the ag world I have a background in sustainable ag in one of my past lives so I'm very oriented to this I love what you got and I'm concerned you said I don't have time to focus on the communications aspect I think the communications aspect is really key you are a wealth of information and facts and data and perspective but for me even as somebody who knows this field I find it kind of overwhelming to listen to you and I wonder how it is for people who are being introduced to the topic for the first time so I would really encourage you to focus a lot more on the communications aspect on who you're trying to reach what they care about how they're listening and what are the ways to distill and parse and kind of drip out the information in a way that they can receive because in my experience facts don't change people and piles of facts don't change people and I think what you're about is how to get people engaged in effective action around these issues farm bill is like you say monstrous complex nobody's going to take on the farm bill they're going to take on the piece that matters to them and then maybe move further and further into the game so I don't have more specific in that now there are people who are brilliant at this kind of work who could work with you on it I just really want I want to see what you're doing have traction and have impact I'm just concerned that I know this is an inside group this is not necessarily how you would do webinar or presentation but for me the key was when you said I don't have time to focus on the communications aspect that's exactly where there's work needed I meant to say I didn't have time because I was so focused on doing the technical aspect business climate leaders I had a dedicated first of all I had Joel with me who was the retired CEO from a billion dollar biofuel company and it's just a powerhouse and then I had a dedicated communications specialist with me and in a $10,000 budget that BCL gave us to pay for this now so I didn't have to focus on communications as much so when I got ready to launch this thing I realized holy smokes no one here on the team knows how to do this and so I have to get into it but this is not my skill set now this is not my sandbox so this is where last week I said to know the cherry and be done everything and so that was my moment of panic but I totally agree with what you're saying and as I'm developing this team I think it could be your sandbox I think there's some you know there's maybe like a workout routine for you to do around that to really strengthen that aspect of your toolbox that is so rich and so valuable but kind of overwhelming yeah and the message around water resonates you know across many sections but it needs to be again customized because when you talk to somebody in Florida they have a different relationship with water than somebody in California responding try so the message needs to be customer and then in other sections of the country the water is so polluted you can't drink it because it has all these agricultural chemicals in it so there is a a meta message you know that cuts through the entire farm bill really but then you need to explain it to people in ways that it works within their context you know within their understanding yeah sorry I'm sorry very quickly Jerry one other thing class on water have you I forget if we've talked about this before but are you following the work of Walter Yenny out of Australia on the relationship of water and soil and climate yeah okay sorry about that sorry about that I just on Gill's point sort of elevated in principle it's not on you to figure out the media communications that's not your jam like the way the way that hit the truth of the matter is that what we're living in is about media communications the whole swing to the right the whole devaluation the whole confusion distortion field that's happened has been a 100% a function of a PR media very intentional very deliberate or lent less campaign targeted at and what came up for me as you were talking was has anybody sort of galvanized and called out the folks that are in that media space you know that are at the top of that pyramid about you know where are you and what are you doing and why are you doing what are you doing from the standpoint of galvanizing aligned people in the belly of that beast to step up and step in and and not just in connection with Klaus with your world but you know they're what a half a dozen scale our 3000 pound gorillas you're one of all of which have the facts and the grounds and the basis for what the what the cure and what the what the answers are but don't have the messaging capacity resources campaigns coordination to impact on the end users that are being poisoned the end users that are running dry the end users that are you know dealing with all this and and the media pieces almost a stand alone from it has nothing to do with all the cause and effect that you're working on it has everything to do with that John or that chain Q public goes to turn on the tap and gets nothing or gets something they can't use and the sad part here is that if I was working on the industry would be making a big six figure income and we are competing against the six figure folks who work in teams to do up the works and to stem against that is without resources and then there's an all volunteer team that's a pretty heavy lift Hank Yeah, I just want to add whether it's relevant or not remains to be seen for the last 25 years I've been working directly or indirectly with the Ministry of transportation and water management which is runs one of the future centers I referred to earlier on in this call and they know a lot about what people think about water issues how to get people's attention from other aspects of calamity calamity is coming our way on to what which don't seem personal enough to water which seems personal to everyone so in the future if it turns out to be relevant perhaps I can make connections with people there who might be able to shed light on European aspects of how to deal with this Yeah, thank you and Hank from conversations with you and showing here the connections into the ministries and things like that Okay, yeah, great Yeah, thank you, cool and the history of the low countries and water is absolutely riveting completely fascinating and will become more and more necessary for human survival So let's go Scott, Doug Carmichael, Stacy Hey everybody Mr. Moring, good to see you Good to be seen I noticed at the bottom of the graphic that Ken had provided that this is from data from 29 years ago from a book and I think that kind of is a thread that relates to everyone talking about how to communicate this that's 29 years ago and the name of the book is Water in Crisis a guide to the world's freshwater resources from Oxford University So I'm not sure that we don't know about this I just wonder if you know, again the graphic shows the entire globe and that's really really big it's a really big like what do I do this afternoon that's going to help make this better and you know I don't have any idea so anyway my thought on that and that's just kind of a tail end off of Klaus's enormous challenge is he has the information and it's been you know he's the next in the line to continue to say hey here's what's going on and you know who knows how long something like that takes all right so a simple update from me you may know I've been talking about this for a while that I've been working on a little framework of my own it's just a personal framework that helped me tie together things I've been interested in for no reason other than I've been interested in them for the last 25 years thinking perception memory creativity games stories how to kind of have a life and I've been working on this for the last couple years and I was able to actually surprisingly thread it all together in a stack level level seven level framework and it's been really helpful for me but the the message that I have for you today is pretty straightforward keep the same thing but change the presentation format and whatever the thing is is whatever you have to be working on so this is what it looked like this was my first wow hey it all fits it's a bunch of scribbles right makes sense to me I have a couple of those yeah so then that became spreadsheet a little more organized little clearer for me okay great it's a gridded format then I sat down one afternoon and made a card deck and just for everybody for everybody watching if you pin Scott's window you can see him big on the screen or if you go to speak with him it's the main point is that you can see just generally what I'm doing so the little card deck is literally just little cards that I cut out with scissors sitting at a picnic table and each one was a thing and obviously you know everything on that little hand written thing was a thing and then everything on the spreadsheet was the same thing maybe updated a little bit then everything on the card deck was the same things updated a little bit and it kind of felt like it was great it was interesting for me and then I made it into an outline so your classic you know outline you know it just like it's not even two levels deep it's just one level deep and I looked at it and I said oh this is the table of contents for the book and it wasn't until I put it in the exact same information that I put it in this format that all of a sudden it became serious because it's a card deck and that makes it fun and light and interesting and it's a spreadsheet well that's helping me kind of sort it all out and then it turns into this outline and I looked at it and I thought oh this is a book that's what this is and this is how I can communicate this or whatever happens but I think that the main point of it is it changed every time I took the information and made it into a different thing instead of looking for new information I just reorganized it reformatted it you know it has a serious type base in this case on the card deck it's hand written cut out with scissors on a picnic table and so what I guess I would offer up is don't discard the tried and true classic formats that we've had for as long as we've had formats it's an outline I mean if you're in elementary school you probably learned outlines and we seem to want to find the latest newest way of presenting something and this one I handed to my wife and she said oh okay so when are you going to publish this all the rest of it was you know okay here's Scott doing his thing again it's not for me it's not interesting I don't really understand what it is okay boom this is a thing I understand and so I guess that's my that's my hope for today is to contribute that little bit Scott thank you thank you for walking us through your journey and having the different stages of it that's super cool and then you have made a comment in the chat that I wanted to ask you about that I think comes back to what you just did and said which was when you watch kiss the ground and so I want to connect that with something I'm calling I'm finding trying to find a better name for this I'm calling it instrumentation or instrumenting good ideas and the example I use is the one two four all pattern from the liberating structures pattern language about group facilitation and my quest my claim and I'm hoping to be able to fund a little bit of software to do this is that some wisdom buried on a book page or a website or a wiki someplace that it doesn't get found it doesn't get used could be turned into some code that is in a marketplace for zoom applets that people could plug in that could then not only inform people about this pattern which is really cool one two four all but in fact do the choreography for for you so for example if there was a zoom bot that was a group process facilitation expert bot it could notice something and then and then recommend hey there's two or three group processes that could come in handy right now and then one of the choices would be one two four all and if you press that button it would then break define breakout rooms assign people to breakout rooms name the breakout rooms do timing put prompts on the screen etc etc to run you through one two four all which is not hard technically to do at all but the knowledge of its existence is scant and you actually make it happen is non trivial if you're busy hosting a zoom session and anybody who's tried to you know manage breakouts well and do all of that knows that that's a bunch of work so sorry long story but but I'm trying to come back to there's a lot of great information that's buried in documentary films like kiss the ground and other sorts of things that isn't actually usable or useful never mind known that there's one state that's not usable there's another state which is how do we instrument it again I don't know what the right word is here actualize it potentiate it I want a clean simple word like water how do we water it how do we sprout it I don't know so that it then becomes a completely usable thing and then your thought in the chat may not have been going in that direction at all but you're like I thought we'd solve this so why isn't it sort of in motion to make things so that they're movable so that they're actually easy to easy to tip into motion well I can I can clarify a little bit I think because that that is interesting so as you were talking what I realized is that I can't solve all the problems none of us can and so we can either sit and be anxious about all the problems that we aren't solving personally or we can pick and choose and reduce anxiety realistically by saying someone else is working on this and I'm okay because someone else is working on this because we have problems that we all think I don't have any idea what we're going to do about this this is crazy and seeing something like kiss the ground and think oh getting the carbon back into the soil oh it's brilliant okay I get it and then for me at my engagement level I'm good with that okay that seems like a plan that's going to take a while that's going to take people other than me to solve because soil is not even though I live on this planet and you know water is critical to my life and soil is critical to my life that's I'm one of eight billion and that's not my problem to solve I have my problem that I'm working on and I think that there's multiple levels of engagement perhaps that okay well maybe there's one thing that I can do that will help with that maybe I want to devote my life to this well those are levels and I don't think that it's reasonable to expect everyone to say I want to devote my life to this health depends on it but for me a lot of that anxiety that I believe I can't remember who mentioned that at the beginning of the young people well maybe we can help just in one way by saying hey you know what we figured out this really good idea we haven't done it yet but we have we have a plan we have a direction it's not simply what to do that's kind of where that thinking was coming from I'm willingly saying that's not my thing to solve that's not my thing I can help promote in whatever way I feel better knowing that things like that exist before I didn't I thought what are we going to do so thank you I'd like how you've put that all together and it strikes me that yeah you're not going to take that on I'm not going to go start a farm but when I go to the store I can look at a label and buy this carton milk rather than that carton milk easy I can mention to my friend that I did that or when I have somebody over for dinner I can say something about it a buddy of mine used to when he would go into a restaurant back in the days when he went into restaurants he'd want to order a steak and he'd ask the waiter where's this from and the waiter would say I got no idea and he'd say could I talk to the chef and the chef would come out and he'd ask and kind of discuss the provenance of the meat and the waiter would listen and the diners at the next couple of tables around them would listen and it'd be a very low key conversation that started to expose people to thinking about where's your meat come from where your vegetables come from so you know I like what you say and I think that's one of the things people are really hungry for the system story is big and overwhelming and most people don't hear it the way we do you know like half of Americans read at eighth grade level or below you know all the stuff that we all here talk about and look at and read 2% of the population either reads or even can read and so you know making stuff accessible to people both in terms of what they understand is really key and I like what you say you know the comfort of knowing somebody's working on the big side of this that I can't take on here's a piece I can do something about it's great Scott and Julian really really small addition to what Gil had said I found out last year two years ago I think it was that there's five levels of literacy in this generalized test and the test was based on going to a website finding a book that you searched for on the second page of the search results that did not have a name a word in the title that was directly related to the topic so the title was soil and you were searching for ground or something like that that was the highest level was to be able to go search for something get to read all those get to the second page and find the one that actually was relevant and what I noticed that just blew me away was that they combined last time levels four and five because there weren't enough people in fifth and so it made me realize once again that being in a group like this is a bubble of well it's an invisible bubble that we often don't think about of course everyone understands this and this is not elitist in any stretch it's just some people are tall some people are short this is just reality it's distributed and there's this little group that can understand a lot of this and the sad part is that we think that we because that's what we talk about is you know that translates but anyway um yeah so I will find that study and I'll post that later in this call Thanks Scott Julian I really like what you were saying a few seconds ago because and especially bring up the point about and I would encourage just thinking outside of this box of text and sound being the only ways to perceive and communicate because people pick up on stuff using all of their senses not just those and a lot of times text isn't a great way to communicate something anyway that's why we have pictures um and I wanted to bring up again that old quote attributed to Confucius about if I hear I forget if I see I remember if I do I understand and if we're going after understanding I find ways of better ways of communicating to people than just saying here go read this book with this web page Thanks Julian uh let's go Doug Carmichael Stacy Ken Well I'm not sure whether what I'm about to say is controversial or not I just don't know this group well enough for maybe my own mind but what I want to say is I think we have made a fetish object out of democracy we treat democracy as the solution to all our problems uh the Greek historian Polybius helps us out by saying look if you have an internal issue democracy is a great way to resolve it but if the threat is from outside the state uh democracy is not good because you still get factions that compete with each other and prevent a co-Europe strategy so the choice between an autocratic and a democratic approach is tactical and based on circumstances I think it's important because I think that the world we're moving into uh let's see now one of my notes here oh those are Jerry's notes not mine Sorry sorry this is me just sharing Polybius what little I know about him So uh I think we are moving into an era of global problems without global management and global management is not likely to be democratic it's going to be somewhat authoritarian autocratic whatever you want to call it and their times Polybius makes clear when that's a good way to go uh and actually Roman history picked up on Polybius and ran with that method for about 200 years trying to have a principle between tyranny and democracy and uh I think we need to expand our own sense of how to manage the problems and not make democracy the solution to every problem um and I will add to what you just said that we're not even agreed about what democracy means is it representative democracy does one person vote actually does it work is it direct and nobody seems to think direct democracy actually works which is the simplest form you would think people were talking about when they say democracy so it's complicated class yeah I mean I question that that um there is there is such a thing as central leadership when you look around the world anywhere any society that is led by a dissolves into a mess because the decision making process is uninformed so the the power of democracy is to have information rise to the top the information gets disseminated challenged you know which is and which is a process that's uh frustrating time-consuming inefficient but on the other hand the alternative is for an authoritarian leader to make a decision based on incomplete information and to balance this right to back to balance to have um a an authoritarian bent leadership you know that that is able to to put away with nonsense and really focus on solutions but at the same time do it in in in a fashion that is organized and and structured and brings best available information to the top I think that's the challenge we have and solved it. Thanks Klaus. Yeah um Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety argues against authoritarian for the reasons that Klaus just said Doug the question I have for you I mean I was really one of the things that really struck me in the dawn of everything was the assertion that there were cultures authoritarian and what we would now call democratic or participatory cultures based on season of the year and the and the external requirements what it took to deal with it. It's kind of an echo of Polybius's argument that with external threat needed more concentrated and you know and faster reflex kind of leadership but if you you know if if you're envisioning that global authoritarian leadership with one of the necessary solutions to the climate crisis which it may well be I don't I'm not disputing that who's that leader how are they chosen by whom for the sake of what and that I think is a big impossible mess it's much more likely that that authoritarian leadership is very to the things that we're concerned about here and then for them I wonder I don't know how much you've thought about that but I wonder where you go with that question well I take some some weak examples but they're some weak examples like Churchill Roosevelt leaders that emerge that whose authority expands is more extensive than given to them by the democratic process but those two were elected democratically weren't they they emerged in that process but I think that the policies were not democratically chosen the U.S. president is not chosen thank you semi-democratically sometimes in the past anyone else with thoughts about our democratic fetish comments well one of the one of the dimensions is with time and stuff so authoritarians it's much easier for them propaganda about how great the good old days were the challenge progressives have is convincing people that tomorrow can be better than today and stuff so I don't know how that ties in but it's Gil if you want to put your hand down our cue now is Stacy Ken Gill Scott go he's off camera Scott wow that's all I'll say to that so I've been trying to think of a phrase that's equivalent to the do your research and for me that's look at the patterns and there's more than one reason for that like I think what typically would come to mind like in this group is obvious look at the patterns we learn you know through history but there's another reason which ties into you know this theme that you know I've been spending a lot of time with people and we talk about bringing the unseen into the scene and sort of where Wendy put in the comments when you can see the patterns it also helps you to see where you can jump in where there's a place where those patterns match your passions and you can jump in and meet to try and shift them so I just wanted to put that out there because I wasn't sharing anymore so if you have time later I will read that poem that I shared with Jerry Wendy it's the poem that we had yesterday actually I will share I will take that time to share the poem. Why don't you do that please and did you find a text version of it? No but I found a way to work around it. Okay good. It feels so good to realize that the energy that creates worlds is supporting you to wake up every morning in clarity knowing exactly who you are to know that source is thinking through you to experience meaningful rendezvous to dovetail with the right people who give you the right piece of information just at the right time to never feel dependent upon anyone to feel the energy that creates worlds moving through your fingertips and through your mind to see evidence all around you of the thoughts you have been thinking and to feel the power of who you are that's what you came for and I think that I can't find you now we're here I can't see you well I can't see you but I'll figure that out but that's what being able to see the patterns helps to do and I can't find you just a alt tab until you find the zoom good good good thanks Stacy really appreciate that let's go Ken Gill good morning afternoon evening where you might be I think everybody's in the US here so probably morning or afternoon let's see there's a thread running through this that is related to what I'm currently doing I have my work is very slow at the moment I have a couple projects in the pipeline that haven't come through yet so I have a little slack period and I'm reading Damon Centola's book Change How to Make Big Things Happen which I can't recommend highly enough just really amazing book I'm reading it on Kindle so I highlight a lot of stuff and then after I do three or four chapters I stop I go back and I type up my highlights so that I really remember the high points of the book and I run about one page of notes for every 10 to 12 pages of the book so I'm getting a nice you know distilled version and I'm really intrigued with for those who don't aren't familiar with him he talks about social change the civil rights movement to follow the Berlin Wall Arab Spring the rise of Twitter they all were really complex for them and it wasn't excuse me wasn't until Arab Spring that we and the rise of Twitter that you really had the tools to analyze things scientifically and really attract this so he makes a distinction between simple contagions which spread virally just like disease which has been our model for how things grow and change for about a century now but complex contagions are changes in behavior they entail a risk to reputation or psychological risk or financial risk and those don't spread virally they spread through the power of weak ties across networks and I'm only in chapter 4 so I don't have the full picture here but it's a really intriguing story of difference between simple and complex contagions and how they spread through networks and the real power of to change networks does not why with the social superstars not the opres of the world it's the network periphery where if you can get things frothing at the periphery where people start to connect on a personal level then there's a huge potential for change and I think this has some really interesting implications for what we're about here at OGM I'll report back at a later date when I've absorbed more of the book and have more practical and pragmatic ways to apply what I'm learning. Thanks Ken I love that and Centella keeps coming up and I started the book but didn't get very far into it it's one of those that I should power through somehow It picks up after like chapter 3 starts telling some really great stories about Google Glass and why it failed and made some really huge missteps between Glass and Google Plus they've really not done their homework on things or they didn't understand how things were working so once I found once he started telling the stories it became harder to put the book down for the first introduction at first chapter like ehhh you know but once you get into once he gets into the tales of how it applies it gets really interesting Thanks Ken Wendy Yeah so just a clarifying question if I followed you right Ken because I was also reading stuff in chat so I apologize could I sum it up by saying you're getting from the book that to create change requires connection or is it over simplification maybe but that's the basic The best way I can sum it up is you know many of us look for the special people and then it works to create change like if we can just get an Oprah or a big name then people will you know take this on actually want to look for the special places in the network that there are certain areas in the network where change gets really interesting and it goes against our traditional view of you know we think things spread through a viral method but they don't social change that require the complex contagions requires building stuff up so let me give you a brief example in Korea in the 50s they realized that they were going to have a huge problem with overpopulation and so they had to come up with a national plan for contraception but the Korean culture was one where they value children and contraception was just an alphabet people like you can't take my ability to procreate away from me that's part and parcel we are and they found out that the towns were successful it proved to be successful over time and there was no one method of contraception because they offered birth control pills, IUDs, condoms you know and what would happen is there would be a group of people especially the women in the villages who would say we're going to talk about this and okay here's what we're going to choose and then they might have a connection with another village somewhere else and they go oh if you're doing that then we should talk about this here weak ties between the villages not that there was one really well known group that said here's what we're going to do and it took that and so while Korea was successful in adopting a mass plan for contraception there was no one method lots of people chose IUDs, birth control pills lots of people chose condoms and it had to do with what did your connection to the other villages what did they choose and it was just simply legitimizing not the content not the method but rather it's an important thing we need to talk about this and it is necessary for us going forward we're going to be in really big trouble does that make sense? Yeah and if I could just respond to me what I hear in that is it's about the connections between people it's about the relationship I have with people so I'm going to go back to that and another good example of that is when the vaccines were being rolled out I heard about in other countries where there was resistance the vaccines and then in entire groups and so they sat down with the leaders of those groups not to be like this big leader who would make change but understanding that that leader then had connection with an entire group of people to help the leader understand and then still providing the choice for those people but just giving them the information letting them ask all the questions they wanted to ask so that they felt like they were in a trusted supported environment answering their specific concerns and again it's not about the information or the passing of information it was about the people sitting down together and listening to each other listening to their concerns and them having access to the experts to get answers to me that speaks so much more about the connection between people same thing repeats in classrooms kids don't learn if they're nearly as well not even close to as well if they don't feel a connection to the teacher or to the material I would put that a little bit on the side too sometimes the connection to the material can be enough to surpass the connection to the teacher so they've done so many research studies it's the connection that enables the transfer of information so I don't know if I can phrase this properly or not because I have not absorbed the whole book but in making this change we have networks of strong ties which is our most of us here have a strong tie to each other we talk regularly and strong ties strong ties social networks have redundancy and so if Klaus's idea about the farm bill is going to ricochet around here because we're all totally there we're not reaching new people so your network connection is a little bit wasted when you start talking to somebody Klaus's farm book is like oh yeah you're preaching the choir it's when you Wendy have a connection to another network and you take Klaus's idea and say I'm going to share this with my other network that you form a bridge to the network periphery and you get things moving in a different network so it is very much about people connecting strongly to an idea or a concept but it's also being able to take move from the strong tie network to a weak tie network of I'm going to take this over here to this other network I'm part of and start talking and then they're going to pick this up because they trust me so it's actually the weak ties that create the spread weak ties give you reach strong ties give you redundancy redundancy creates resistance so that's it's a lot of technical stuff and I apologize for not being clear do you want to jump back in? Cool, Hank then Stuart then Dunn Thanks, thanks really a lot Ken for me crystal clear weak ties and strong ties are often confused and thrown into the same box and that there is actually research and intelligent writing about it that's an accessible writing about it I think that's really important for us all to understand so I think this is one of the themes that really needs to be explored more in this group and other OGM groups and other groups in our own networks because there are I mistyped something earlier that I think it was Doug said he said every society is led by a powerful individual and I was writing it out and I wrote every society is led by eight powerful individuals sort of oligarchy or whatever the technical name for that is and that's probably very close to the way I see the world but which eight people is it and how do you reach them and how do you get people to understand that and one bridge comment to something that I also put in the chat while thanking Stacey I think poetry in the poetic imagination has a lot more power over people than we tend to think because poetry seems to a lot of people to be very elitist and you know it's for them and not for us but in my experience working with just normal people I'll go back to my example and it's about to start and the water management people the workers who stand with the knee-high boots out of the ditches along the highway poetry is also really important for people like that and they've demonstrated it to me enough times so thanks again Stacey and anyone bringing poetry I know Jerry's done it in the past as well anyone bringing poetry into these conversations Speaking of poetry Yeah, what's really interesting is that I have a poem out for a presentation that I did this morning at 8 o'clock to another group which is just absolutely perfect so I smile and when you mention poetic so I'm happy to do that at the end of the session but I wanted to punctuate something that Ken said and a coral it is and I'm and I'm the coral it is that a lot of people working in a narrow area think that they have the answer okay and we're living in a world of many many complex challenges and to have that awareness that they have a piece of the answer okay they have the answer to a specific challenge but there are many other areas that need addressing and that's why the collaboration or a network of networks become such an important phenomenon that people can see where others have pieces to the to the larger solution and then you can start networking those folks because there's always a to use bone's work, the perturbation if you poke a system there's an unintended consequence of some kind and how do we resolve all of those different vectors that go into creating a larger solution Thanks Stuart and happy to hear the poem at the end Doug then class so when people talk about improving and making more effective systems often we forget that it's in the context of other people making other systems and connections Manuel Castells at Berkeley sociologist who's written a lot about networks wrote a book called Rapture where he says that the multiple connections among everybody with everybody is tearing apart institutions making society ungovernable we got to take that seriously Thanks Doug class Yeah, pretty much in the same vein what Doug was just saying has been mentioned here a network of networks requires a translation or adaptation of the information to a different context and to get back to my previous example I mean the Seracarp has chapters in every single state and then some more chapters within states New York has several and so on so if we can get water as a dominant theme then the person living in Florida will translate this differently than the person living in California right so you go to your California networks and you translate this conversation in different ways than you would in other states dealing with drought versus pollution or excessive water and so on so that is the power of networks now if we can and this is the hierarchy of information that is required and Sherry you were putting something out a new idea of something you want to work on which I interpreted as a hierarchy of information along the Donnerler Meadows leverage points of a system where if you have a narrative that is a meta-level narrative that then needs to roll through the system in ways that it can be operationalized you know and this operationalization looks different depending on local circumstances so the adaptation required on a meta-level narrative down throughout the system is where typically things fail there are great ideas at meta-level but the operationalization doesn't have structure isn't organized and fails because one idea doesn't cut it it needs to be interpreted thank you we're not going to make it through our queue today because we're getting close to the end of our call but let's go Gil, Doug Breitbart and Carl so much here let's see Ken, I love the notion of frothing the periphery I've got my froth there I'm ready to go so we'll have to hear more about how we do that I wonder how the weak ties business goes when the corpus colossum has been severed as it has in this country that's just a thing to use about as you dive in deeper also to Ken you mentioned Google's failures maybe those aren't not having thought things through well enough maybe those are experiments that fail in a company that's willing to experiment has resources to throw at big experiments I don't know if that's such a bad thing picking up on some stuff earlier in the conversation about the despair of the young it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately I have some younger relatives and I'm just really struck by you know when I was their age, when I was in my teens and 20s the world, it felt like the world was wide open, it felt like opportunities were vast it was a mood of reinvention and creation and change and they're in a mood of constraint and closing doors and lockdown and I'm just trying to imagine how that feels inside their beings and so I think the conversation we'd be having about pattern and perspective are really important because how to say this if all folks today are seeing as what's in front of them it's pretty scary shit and if they see the historical sweep of the rises and falls of the human experience maybe the perspective opens a little bit what was the mood of Blacks in the south in the early 1950s before the civil rights movement started cranking what was the sense of impossibility and resignation and stuckness and something opened up over the course of 10 or 15 years of organizing and finding ways maybe to elders to share that experience with younger people about what that felt like and what kind of action was involved in shifting that sense of possibility that sense of mood may be a place for us to think about to think about so I think a lot I woke up the morning of I guess this was last week when the Supremes offered up their EPA decision capping a week of from my perspective horrific retrograde decisions basically trying to wipe out the last 50 years of social progress that we ain't done yet kids I was really surprised that my mood was not despair my mood was serenity and resoluteness I'll try to post in the chat a piece from Chris Hedges about how to face the challenges of this moment so I think a lot about how we look at events and how we absorb them and how that affects our mood and how we stand and move in the face of all this stuff and that's part of the story I think of the everything we've been talking about today from weak networks to authoritarian pathways and poetry and the rest just as part of the as part of the personal check in here I've been focusing as you guys know on standing up a holding company to to work with small and medium size businesses to become ecologically grounded and employee owned and community rooted companies momentum is building on that we've made some really powerful I think interesting connections this week and my request to you all is if you know anybody who has been in the private equity business and who knows that game and wants to do something better with their skills and experience and passion and just make another pile of money I want to talk to them so I'm looking for introductions to people who are private equity players with chops and heart and so that's when where my main focus is my secondary focus is around coaching working with leaders and emerging leaders young or old whatever one of my clients told me last week that the work together has been the best business investment he's ever made and it's an interesting thing coming from a serial so if I can be of assistance to anybody you know I request an introduction there and zooming back out to the background I find myself putting a lot of attention on how I listen and how we listen and how our interpretations shape how we're able to listen and what's the what's where's the fluidity of the dynamics and possibility in that and I'll leave it at that for now because but I also just want to say I enormously value these conversations I keep on thinking about how to streamline my commitments every week to be able to focus more on what I need to do and I look at this and there's no way that I can cut this out I love being with you all it's just a real rich feeding of my spirit thank you thanks y'all we appreciate that one of your comments in the middle it saddens me that people don't know more history or care about history and every now and then when I want to get really depressed I'll go watch Jay Leno's interviews of people on the street where he asked them really simple stupid questions and nobody knows the answer but then you ask them what the names of Kim Kardashian's kids are and it's like got that so people aren't stupid we've somehow managed to dumb ourselves down as a culture as a civilization as a society or something like that but it's just very disheartening we've stopped teaching history right well we turned into social studies which turned into mush which got political yeah well also and when we've taught history we teach like facts and dates but that's not what it is it's stories yeah and they're all interpretations and they all reveal something about how we look at the world and see how I mean the United States is a very strange place compared to other countries very strange very true yeah I just wanted to comment Gill I so appreciate you bringing up the civil rights movement of the 50s and and the perseverance that black people have had in this country you know diversity is good but it's also essential I mean you know in terms of our mood here imagine if we had some older black people who were there in that period of time and understand to persevere I think there's a lot of wisdom and a lot of learning and a lot of cross-pollinization that could go on from that context so thank you Gill yeah and this is one of the challenges and weaknesses of this group frankly is that we don't have that diversity with us there was a piece in the Washington Post this morning I posted it into the into the listserv observing that this weekend in Chicago there was more people killed in the island park this weekend but there was no massive police presence and there was no media coverage and there was no flying in of crisis counselors to help people deal with the trauma there were kids who had a guy murdered like right outside their schoolyard nobody there to help them and talking to the parents and say well yeah this is you know we're in a different world different universe we don't here it's taken for granted we don't want to come and what happens in the white community all of a sudden it's oh my god and maybe there's some value in the oh my god but there's you know there's a window into the different worlds that we live in and the different experiences that need that we you know we're not exposed to that world except in little bits of news occasional that maybe comes across our desks and how do we bridge that how do we what what are the weak ties Kent that move across those kind of gulfs I don't know if Centella talks about that it'd be really interesting to hear more I'll stop Stuart we're kind of at the end of our time I think we're not going to make it through the rest of our queue and I was thinking of inviting you to read the poem you mentioned that you had read earlier in the day and that would take us out of the call today my pleasure so it's called gratitude gratitude and the reflective question is can you be more deliberate generating the joy healing and discovery connections bring can you increase the presence of sacred relating gratitude thankful I don't ask for more people presence opening doors exciting relations relationship brings provides learning so many things privilege pleasure engaging deep connections make a faint heart leap communion of gathering beings enables flight they are wings grateful for all who hear listening to a voice sincere we can give more than we know in openness we serve and grow grateful boundaries disappear as you listen and truly hear what passes between more than gold alchemy of presence slows getting old thanks to source for dear friends without connections at loose ends joy pervades when souls touch for this treasure thank you so much thanks Stuart that's a very way Wendy this you could pin this on the wall maybe so much so much hear about connections and resonance and all thank you thanks all for a great call and see you on the inner tubes Joe thank you you well folks bye bye