This discussion has started end of January 2011 on the Systems Thinking World Group on LinkedIn, around the question: UN call for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival... How to make this happen? Warning for global suicide and time running out, Ban ki-moon called last Friday at Davos for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival. What is needed to take a global interconnected perspective on the issues and threats our planet is facing and start action? How can this gain traction and produce the desired effect?
“To make it happen we have to be prepared to make major changes – in our lifestyles, our economic models, our social organization, and our political life. We have to connect the dots between climate change and what I might call here, WEF – water, energy and food… Together, let us tear down the walls,” he declared. “The walls between the development agenda and the climate agenda. Between business, government and civil society. Between global security and global sustainability. It is good business – good politics – and good for society.” Note:
The content of the first 1250 posts has been summarized on this map. After 18 months of existence and being nº1 in the charts of the group for several months, the thread has reached 6500+ comments. This conversation and the Linkedin group discussion format highlighted how difficult it is to capture and harvest collective intelligence to reiterate and reprocess its content effectively, other than doing it 'by hand' in real time...I am still on the look out for a tool that can help parse discussions afterhand. One striking conclusions of this discussions and those I have been holding in the past two years on other Social platforms and in 'real life' work groups is that even when animated by similar overall intentions and driven by converging purposes, people seem to struggle to find common ground and to agree on priorities, goals, outcomes, methodologies…
This led me to reflect on the dynamics of change and transformation and on the conditions under which transformation and evolution could occur more than on the actual resources, models and systems that needed to be put into place. Because when thoroughly researching what is available, one discovers that much of the required solutions are already known and running somewhere. And what is missing is visibility, accessibility, actionability, interoperability, and the power to act; the means to optimize the match between needs and resources, between intentions and actions, and to get people to effectively use their collective intelligence capacity to co-create and co-implement solutions.
Helene Finidori
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