 and welcome to the Matrix of Peace show produced by Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Blyse, and CEO of Peace Through Commerce. I'm also here in my role as the recent past president of the American Creativity Association and current president of its Austin Global Chapter, as you shall see. Our guest today calling in from Vancouver, Canada is Haley Simons. She is the founder of Creative Alberta. She also has other roles. She's a concert pianist, but Haley and I have taken on a challenge offered to everyone by the US Congressional Commission on what happened from the terrorist attacks, on the Twin Towers in the United States, on the Pentagon, and even on the White House. On September 11, 2001. In other words, as this show title foreshadows, this episode is a reopening of a cold case, the case of the 911 terrorist attacks. And what we want you to know is the commission found that one of the greatest faults that day was the lack of imagination and creativity by those in the United States who might have prevented those attacks. Haley and I will begin to unpack that process of rising to providing imagination and creativity using the matrix of peace whole systems model of society. And that will help us begin this process of solving what we find are multiple crimes that stem from that attack. Aloha, Haley, glad to have you here. Aloha, fillers. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. You know, Haley, we've really been spending a lot of time about this attack and the call to creativity and imagination. And we really wanna do something on the ground. And we have a lot of ideas about that. But today you and I thought we would just introduce how to think about triggering and putting in place the right kind of imagination and creativity using this matrix model. And I'm really excited to do that with you today. You're the perfect person for this job. Before we do that, let's set the field. Let's set the stage that the Library of Congress for the United States has a short clip that our engineer, Michael, is going to show for us. And we'll go back to those moments. American 11, are you trying to call? The cops haven't not answered your phone. Our number one is in staff and our five is in staff. And we're gonna call from Washington. I am in a situation where the Americans learn the possible hijack. What's going on, Betty? The crap is erratic again. We're erratic. What are you talking to? Oh, God. Oh, my God. United 175, New York. We have some problems over here right now. We might have a hijack over here, too. Oh, my God. Jules, this is Ryan. Listen, I'm on an airplane that's on hijack. The thing is, I'm so well and I'm looking good. I just want you to know I absolutely fuck you. I want you to be good. So happy to sign. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you and I'll see you later, Mr. Bye, babe. I got an aircraft that's about east of the White House. Crystal City, just north of Crystal City. Just north of here, too. Yeah, stop all the parking. United 93, that traffic fee is 1 o'clock, 12 miles. Eastbound 370. Negative contact, we're looking at United 93. Hey, hey, hey! United 93, wait a minute. If you hear the sound right then. I got that piece of stuff. Keep it ready, Mr. D. You're having a war, boys. Hey, hey, hey! Whoa! I believe it is 57. Can you see him up there, sir? That's confirmed. Looks like he's rocking his wings. Roger. He's rocking back and forth. We're 568655 by as you stay away from that aircraft. Go north as fast as you can. United 93, have you got information on that yet? Yeah, he's down. He's down? Yes. When did he land? He did not land. Oh, he's down? Yeah, somewhere up north east of Camp David. No, can you just go on and get it now? I don't want people waiting. I've come to superimpose this flight. Maybe there's two of us in the building. We're not here to decide what's going to happen, ma'am. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Say you're going to die. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, say your prayers. We're going to think positive because you've got to help each other get off the floor without dying. That's a lot. We all go back to that day, I think. You were having a baby that morning. You know, Phyllis, my daughter's due date was 9-11. 2001. But she was upside down. She was a breach, baby. So her C-section was scheduled the week prior, September 4. Because on September 11, my obstetrician and her pediatrician were both in New York. They were scheduled to be in New York on a medical convention that day. So both medical providers were there. And they ended up operating in a rescue position, actually. It was fortunate they were there. But it was a long, long time. It was actually quite a few years before I saw any footage from that event at all. Because it was just too closely associated. It was still hard. Still, for a Canadian on the West Coast now of Canada, it's that impactful. It had global impact. It was not a local event. It was not just a national event. This had global, universal human impact. Well, yes. And that's why we want to start today and offer to the audience a process that can help us intelligently design a problem-solving process that can rework what kind of response the US could have had that day and what kind of proactive action could have already been on the ground in the works between al-Qaeda and the official leaders of Islam and the leaders of the United States to have preempted, even having had the attack. So you and I are going to talk about that. We're going to talk about phase one of the matrix methodology and facilitation tool. I want to do that. And we're going to show how that works. There are five phases to the matrix of peace methodology. We'll introduce phase one today. But before we do that, let's set some more of the scene. I want to read for the audience what a key finding was, perhaps the key finding by the United States Congressional Joint Inquiry into the terrorist attacks. And we'll bring up that slide three. I'll let everyone read it. I'm so glad to see this kind of visionary and honest report by this is the House and the Senate committee, Joint Committee report. They say that prior to 9-1-1, the intelligent communities, analytic components, that's the FBI, the CII, and the other departments. So this is a public sector sort of review. Those entities, those groups, failed to understand the collective significance of the information that was in their possession. Why? This failure, as they found, is attributable to a basic lack of creativity and imagination in evaluating the intelligence that was at hand. OK. I feel like that is a challenge, a call to action to everyone on the planet. This kind of invasion is happening not just in 9-1-1. We know it happened in Pearl Harbor. That is still seen as one of the largest failures of an imaginative, creative response to act on intelligence that was in hand that brought the United States into World War II. That's a massive response and result. And then we have 9-1-1. We have other significant being caught unprepared. So here we have, you started Creative Alberta. And at the time this all happened, I was just in law school. I wasn't involved with the American Creativity Association. Let's just take a moment because I know that you and Creative Alberta tried to answer this call. And you know, I think Lincoln Center, and you were invited to go to Washington, DC, right? Or was it New York? It was New York. You went to New York to Lincoln Center. So share with us before we talk about this deliberate process using the matrix of peace to answer the call. Tell us what you did as a leader in Creative Alberta at that time. Well, I was so taken by actually an initiative that was already underway. And through some wonderful colleagues and connections, you know well as well. Susan McKellant, the leader of Creative Oklahoma, through that group and through the National Creativity Network, I had the great privilege of being introduced to Scott Marshall Brandon, who took this initiative called Imagination Conversations. And his idea was to gather people in the room to address this as one of the most damning citations ever to arise from your country. And I was really honored to be actually, we were the only Canadians invited to this very small summit event in New York in 2010. And I was so taken by the event itself. It had enormous potential. It had lofty goals. And I wanted to take it back to Canada. We were the only Canadians. And I asked permission of Scott, may we input something like this in Canada? And he very generously said, by all means, take it. It's yours. And we did. And I know there's something not very creative about that. But we wanted to have this conversation in Alberta, which was where I was living at the time. And we gathered as many stakeholders for a three-day event to not so much have a conversation. We had some opportunities. And we can talk about that actually as one of the downfalls of the event. But it was an opportunity to showcase imagination and creativity through the various sectors. And one of the most represented sectors actually was education. Education is so on board with getting creativity instilled as a systematic process within the pedagogy and throughout the educational system, especially in Alberta at that time. We had, of course, the arts community was there full force. And we had some amazing shows. But we also had some very poignant presentations from law. We had representatives from, we actually had an astronaut from the US. It was John Harrington, Sergeant John Harrington at the time. He was, so we had a scientific representative. We had a brain scientist. We had a lot of science, a lot of art, a lot of education, but the event halted there. So it was a three-day, beautiful summit event and it was installed. So we had this potential that was just never fulfilled. And it's like the Charles Schultz cartoon, the Peanuts cartoon where he said sometimes the heaviest burden to bear is a great potential. So it felt like that for our imagination conversation. OK, so let me just kind of pick your brain a little. We know that this is a new kind of war is what they said. And it was. Certainly the United States had never been attacked outside of Pearl Harbor, outside of the Hawaiian Islands. The mainland United States had not been attacked by this, apart from the Civil War, not the Civil War. I mean, the Revolutionary War with England and then the War of 1812 and then 9-1-1 is a long span. So it's a new kind of war. This wasn't even country to country. These were terrorists and yet they got through. So in that three days, I don't want to talk so much particularly yet about who was convening. I want to know what you did based on what you did, what it wanted to do. Did you brainstorm how to have, did you have this finding in hand that the lack of creativity and imagination and evaluating the intelligence? Did you have that up on the board? Did people say what could have been done differently, either there or at the Lincoln Center with Scott's group? Did you say what was missing? Did you itemize what the intelligence was? And what did it mean? How did you define creativity and imagination? Why would anybody say that was what was lacking? Why didn't they just say that information was lacking? Did you connect those dots? They didn't have the imagination to connect the dots of the education. So what happened in those three days, just a 10,000 foot view, did it shed light? I mean, would things have happened differently based on those three days, the solutions that you generated or that you know of from Lincoln Center? Yeah, that's a great question. And the short answer to that is no. The this missive, this failure of a lack of creativity and imagination stood on its own. We literally extricated that with the fact that it had that validation from, I mean, as a Canadian. I knew so little about the American political system at the time. And to have this joint committee come up with this missive was astounding, I think still. Maybe it would be even more astounding today. I'm not sure. But we extricated that and used that as the the raison d'etre for the entire conversation. So we didn't have to address, in particular, sending off a terrorist attack. We wanted to implant and say, if we start to change now, how can we change the future? And we used that to future build and future project. And that instead of looking back, we wanted to look forward. And maybe that was also part of it. We had a failure to look to really exude what had happened and say, what was it about this event that we could have addressed better, that we could have actually implemented to make a more meaningful event? Because unless you have that deep analytical analysis and a look at it, then you might not have the proper structure going in to have something effective come out of an event like that. So did you come up with the top 10 things you would do differently? And maybe the answer is no, not at that time. But did you come up with three things that would have been game changing? Or did you just talk about you need to look forward? Or did you say we need to do popcorn brainstorming and narrow it down to three things? Or do we need to bring computers into the room? And maybe I'm just sort of doing a survey now of what the kind of things that could have been said. Before we get into a facilitated discussion that the matrix might have made a change. But just checking in with you, did you get a report? Did you have a single outcome that would trigger imagination or creativity differently in using the data that came in? And another great question. And also looking back, something that I would have done differently today, I dearly wish there was some system in place like that. And I'm glad we're gonna talk about that later because I can see that potential actually becoming fulfilled with a better system. What our event essentially landed on was the importance of education and having this primary creative imaginative curriculum and curricular outcomes as the number one key to planting that seed for events. But it was a very broad, not detailed finding at the end. There was no official report. There were board meetings and minutes and there was feedback from the participants. And we had several hundred participants as well. I think our event was actually larger than the event in New York. So we did have more people in the room but not necessarily all of the right people who maybe should have been there. Okay, so let's bring up the matrix of peace. And we have a very little time. We needed an hour show today. So let me give a very 10,000 foot 101 class on how the matrix might have informed those precious time of the people in the room. So here we have a matrix of peace, whole systems model of society. So if you imagine that this was an x-ray of the body of society, it would have four structural components like its circulatory system, its bones and its organs. The society has three basic sectors, the public, the private and civil society sectors and they're represented there by the outside circles. The fourth critical component of this model of society is the yellow globe around it. And we call that the consciousness sphere. It's one, the three circles represent best or worst practices going on on the ground. But then influencing everything is how you feel about what's going on on the ground. And we say values unite, but beliefs divide and what are the beliefs, the values, the virtues and the worldviews of the people. And this model engages all four components of society. So we'll go to the next slide and talk about the intersectionality of the three outside sectors. We say that in order to get to justice, prosperity, sustainability and peace, they must work together and it's the consciousness sphere that forces them together. The next slide shows how when you have dividing beliefs and anger and intolerance, you have, let's say this was on a global scale, let's say this was the United States and Islamic countries that are in war with or disagreement with, maybe not just the United States but the West, our combined societies, our public, private and civil society sectors are not talking at all. So that's how the model works. And until they come together in the intersections, they can't co-create justice, prosperity, sustainability or the superordinate intersection of societal peace. So go to the next slide. How do we use this model, have a conversation around the 911 attacks? We have a forming stage which draws upon representatives from all three sectors of society. In our case, that would be leaders of al-Qaeda, leaders of the Christian and other religions in the United States. Other maybe religious leaders is in the Islamic States, the minority leaders, and then representatives from the government and representatives from the private sector who you didn't talk about. So we didn't have Google, we didn't have Blue Origin, we didn't have SpaceX, we didn't have Facebook, we didn't have these large corporations that are countries within themselves. Had we had them all in the room, that conversation about where did imagination and creativity, where's the gaps? Why did they fall between all of those sectors communicating? And how do we make that happen the next time around? And so in that sense, I would say just today, answering the question of why you didn't have any answers and we haven't heard them today, is that we didn't have the right people in the room asking those questions together. And that's what phase one of the matrix of peace methodology would have facilitated. And on that, right there as we can see, that we just the forming of the group using the matrix model metrics would have changed the questions which would have then changed the answers that came out. You don't even need all five phases to have had a game-changing conversation with the convening methodology coming out of this matrix view of society. And with that, I have to wrap up the show and say goodbye, let the audience know that you've been watching The Matrix of Peace Show brought to you by Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lease, CEO of Peace Through Commerce. We've been discussing this episode on reopening the 911 attack cold case and how to answer that call for action using the matrix systems. Our guest is Haley Simons, the founder of Creative Alberta. And thank you, Mahalo Haley for joining us. Mahalo. Yeah, Mahalo to our viewers for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Lease, Aloha.