Our steady attention to what is moving us
in the luminous moments of co-inspiration
transforms the fleeting experience into continuous celebration
of the awakening of the collective learner
to its potential for higher intelligence and wisdom,
capable to hold more compassion and complexity.

More conversation with Darina. She wrote:

 > The need for massive engagement & urgent collective involvement on as many levels as possible is higher than ever, as are the stakes of not responding to it.

Indeed! As Tracy Huston put it, in Inside Out – Stories and Methods for Generating Collective Will to Create the Future We Want :

“A mighty movement of a kind never before enacted would be required to make real change... The magnitude of the response must be equal to the magnitude of the challenge... How can we intentionally create such a movement that allows us to shed the old stuck self and ways of being and thus emerge into a new state of co-existence?”

Effortless intentional creation is dancing with the discovery of  how we are such a movement.

> there is still substantial gap and lag between the technological advancements and our capabilities to apply them consciously with more joy, creativity and meaning for the good of the whole and for the evolution of our collective consciousness.

Learning to significantly and rapidly reduce that lag requires community action research. (Co-)designing such a research is both dear to my heart and central to the market offers of CommunityIntelligence.
 

> I do resonate with your clear vision and very eloquent expression of it totally: "I imagine it as a learning and action community (both in the sense of a "community of learners" and a "community that learns") dedicated to liberate the human spirit from every internal and external condition enslaving it. Sharing our learning edges, our passionate inquiries, and deeply listening to each other's driving questions, may lead to the discovery of unimagined  synchronicities and synergies..." Absolutely!
 
> What I see as one of the challenges is actually what WE need to do both individually  AND collectively, inner and outer work and play, to match the complexity of these needs, calls and coming shifts. That growing and living ecosystem of shared ideas, connections and actions needs both visions and actions, theory and practice, ancient and post-modern, personal and transpersonal, local and global, micro and macro, male and female, minds and hearts, bodies and spirits, human and divine in order to evolve fast enough with the timeless shift of the ages we live in.

I could not have said any better! The ecosystem of shared ideas, connections and actions can thrive and support us, only if we give it all what you speak of.

D a r i n a wrote in an email about her current experience:

> meeting new ideas, places and people very intensely and synchronistically

I replied:

It is happening with more and more of us.  It feels like W-E-mergence is moving into higher gear.
We are just scratching the surface and doing so, laying down new Kosmic grooves in consciousness.

Waves of pronoia are coming in, yet incredible amount of man-made, unnecessary suffering
is still occurring everyday, threatening with worse-case scenarios.
What is our answer?

What is our answer that can seduce into the ecstasy of co-creation
a large enough number of lovers of beauty, truth, and goodness,
to awaken the massive collective intelligence and wisdom that humankind needs in this hour?

Source and Spirit are the primary manifestations of the One.
Honoring both is learning from both.
Doing and being it is our path to wholeness.

Together, they keep weaving our lives into a magic carpet.
The inner woman and inner man dance on it,
as they fly over uncharted territories...

Reboot is "Calling all practical visionaries of the world!" It's an event to reboot our minds, play on the edge of technology, and re-dream our culture. Its is a brainchild of Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, in its 9th successful year, happening in Copenhagen May 31 - June 1, 2007. The event is designed for 400 people ans is sold out but you can still participate in the Reboot online community, by registering (for free) here.

I will co-facilitate there an experiment in Boosting Our Collective Intelligence. The subtitle is: Presencing the future we care for, by liberating the potential of communities of practice and life-work communities.

Let me know whether you'd want to learn more about it, as it unfolds.

I am curious of what those Zaadz Wizards and users, who are familiar with Spiral Dynamics, think about the color of the Zaadz enteprise. Is it Green or Yellow or Turquoise, or neither, or all of the above? (If this is already discussed somewhere else, please point to it.)

Brian wrote:

> In 2007 we'll be focusing on empowering people in the business of empowering people as we offer micro-communities for life coaches, veggie restaurant owners, meditation and yoga teachers and other “conscious entrepreneurs” passionate about making a difference in the world and getting paid to do so.

It's a good focus, no doubt, but I'm wondering whether it is not too narrow compared with a fuller potential for growth with integrity. The examples you gave are practitioners in the business of empowering people, one person at a time. What about those who focus on empowering workplace communities, making social institutions wiser, practitioners of system change? Why  don't we see here more of the artists of the Art of Hosting, Action Learning, World Cafe, Collective Intelligence, Appreciative Inquiry, and some of the other 60 organizational change methods and disciplines described in the Change Handbook. Even if they are not in the current focus of Zaadz, they could have shown up here in a larger number. If they didn't, there must be a reason for that. Let me guess why it is so.

My guess is that their primary interest is not social networking per se, not even "social networking with a cause" but social networking with results that support their work on not only empowering people but empowering communities and changing whole systems. They would need collaborative workspaces, knowledge ecologies, and change processes embedded in software, so that they can invite their client systems to play with and explore them in a safe environment.

That's the need around which I built a business concept. It has  generated some interest in the "conscious business" funding circles but when I saw Zaadz having already implemented slightly over  half of the platform functions I wanted to build, I suspended pursuing it and started to reflect whether it wouldn't make more sense to join forces with you, given our high degree of philosophical and spiritual alignment and complementarity of professional competences and networks. From my perspective, it would. Would you guys want to explore that possibility?

Brian, thank you for joining this conversation. It seems, we need the presence of the evolutionary entrepreneur-philosopher to take it further.  You are a still rare embodiment of an archetype sooooo essential to creating a world where business (and all social institutions) are designed to help us realize our highest potential!

One of things I am passionate about in this conversation is the question of what Zaadz can do to make that archetype less rare? I know, it is already doing a lot, AND i see many  specific, untapped  contexts, tools,  practices that could up the game. In fact, so many that it wouldn't be possible to jam them into blog entries unless I became a full-time "Zaadz development" blogger, :-) something that I couldn't efford beside my "day job."

What draws me here, what motivates me to include in my morning  practice a contemplation about the fututre of Zaadz, then write about what comes up, is the spirit expressed in your words:

> you're correct. Our intention has been to create an oasis that honors the highest within us and gives us that much needed sanctuary that inspires and empowers us to live at our highest potential.

It is the same evolutionary impulse, the manifestation of the same Authentic Self that is working through you, the Zaadz team, and a good number of Zaadzsters, including myself. From our shared  commitment to realize the highest potential flows something that I feel as a moral obligation. It is  to put my professional talents--as evolutionary leadership coach, online community architect, and knowledge ecologist--in service of Zaadz. Same is true about the excitement of co-discovering a way that could bring together Evolutionary Nexus and Zaadz into a new, mutually empowering configuration.

I promised  to write more about technologies optimized for collective intelligence, wisdom and collective leadership. To be congruent with my experience of what works, I first have to address the question of why not focus on the technology, just now.

Although I didn't talk with them, I almost certain that when the founders dreamt up Zaadz, what appeared in their mind's eye was not a set of tools and functionalities but how they and others would feel when using Zaadz, what it would enable to do and be, how would be the feel of the whole experience.

It seems that the Zaadz team has an emerging, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cross the bridge from the 50,000 innovators to the half million early adapters, in the next couple of years. Isn't it a good time to re-imagine and co-intuit the kind of company that the future wants Zaadz to be, and the kind of products and services that will be the most highly valued by its expanding markets?

Clearly, that question deserves to be in the focus of an ongoing, productive inquiry. I believe the U Curve could provide an empowering framework for that. Scharmer's next book, "Theory U:  Leading from the Future as it Emerges - The Social Technology of Presencing" will come out next month. You can download the two key chapters that may trigger some insights on how presencing can help co-initiating the next phase in the life of Zaadz. (I can also be available to facilitate that process if you don't have other trained presencers in-house.)

I imagine a bit more rigorous use of the integral framework would also go a long way to sensing more accurately what is needed in a possible move towards more support for communities of practice and co-creation, and their knowledge ecosystems.

A more AQAL Zaadz could provide increasingly more value because it could better respond to the growing human aspirations for wholeness and agency, communion and autonomy, as well as creative self-expression (individual and collective). How does that would translate into the dimensions of innovation architecture-- social, business, learning, technical, and spiritual--so that it can trigger a vortex of innovation that will involve large number of present and future Zaadsters? I guess, that question could be best addressed in the context of a daylong or 1/2-day strategic learning dialogue with Brian and the team.

~C4Chaos asked me about the technolgy architecture that I envisioned for community empowerment. That's a huge topic and I will address some of the issues of technologies optimized for collective intelligence, wisdom and collective leadership, in a new entry. This is just a quick note of clarification to avoid any misunderstanding about what I meant by the following the sentence in my entry on "co-presencing the future of Zaadz."

While every user comes here for the individual benefit from the system, it is not difficult to anticipate the moment when world-changers will ask for a technology architecture expanded in the direction of more applications and tools for enhancing their collective capabilities.

What I do not mean is that users join Zaadz for selfish reasons. Individual benefits can include a sense of belonging, building one's social network, becoming more rersourceful in the various change projects that we are leading or participating in, etc. Zaadz is a great social enterprise just for providing a platform for all of that. But the opportunity is much larger. 

It could also midwife the transcend-and-include passage from a community of learners to a community that learns, from a collection of intelligences to collective intelligence, from a network of individuals with shared interest in change to communities of practice with members who are engaged in jointly developing better change practices.

The pods reflect Zaadz' recognition  of the emergent need for the latter, and they are a much appreciated baby step in the right direction. What else is needed is not simply more and better tools for collaboration, collective sensing, memory and meaning-making but an expansion of the business development strategies to include more attention and resources to cater to the needs communities of transformational practices as social organisms.

There's more about the difference between networks of interest and communities of practice in Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.