In this space we can co-create or federate our shared vision.

By doing that we

• motivate our alignment and orient our action
• co-create groundbreaking, reliable and agile messages to the world
• co-create a way to co-create such messages

What is provided below now is only a seed. Consider it a rough gesture drawing or even a provocation—its  purpose is to 'strike a conversation' i.e. give impetus and energy to a process that will lead to an increasingly more reliable shared vision.

What is presented here is (presently only a seed of) a further elaboration of the work reported in Toward a Scientific Understanding and Treatment of Problems and The Game-Changing Game—a Practical Way to Craft a Future

OUR VISION OF A THRIVING WORLD

In our vision of the future we see us living

• in a society of collaboration—beyond the end of scarcity—and in a world where people no longer (need to) compete to survive, or to have enough—as the Industrial and Scientific Revolution might have promised us a century ago; where work is no longer something we have to do to survive, but is seen as serving a spectrum of other key purposes

• in a state of wellbeing that is well beyond what we may now be able to imagine—and in a culture where the cultivation of each human's finer qualities, in particular everyone's ability to be well, feel well, and do well, is successfully cultivated, and is the focus of culture

• in societal structures that support—and are results of—this collaboration and such wellbeing

or put simply, we see ourselves living in a thriving world.

WHY THIS IS A POSSIBLE WORLD

Because all the external conditions for such a world are there: We have the resources; and we even have the knowledge that is needed.

What is still missing is two closely related abilities:

• to communicate what we know (it will turn out that we mostly don't, see below)

• to update our key societal systems (science, governance, public informing, economy, education...) 

• to reflect what we know, and to best help us thrive

OUR VISION OF THE WAY THERE (OUR STRATEGY)

Talking about how to achieve impact ('a difference that makes a difference' in contemporary problematique), Donella Meadows proposed "power to transcend paradigms" as the most effective in her list of twelve systemic leverage points.  

Our vision of a way to a thriving world is a series of new paradigms  in key areas of society (science, politics, culture, finance, business, environment, entrepreneurship, philosophy, education...), following each other in a society-wide domino effect.  

Our next step is an evolutionary one. As we once learned how to cultivate the land (the word 'culture' stems from there), now we are about to learn how to cultivate our human-made world—our institutions, our culture and ourselves.

WHY THIS STRATEGY IS FEASIBLE 

Because our systems are in such an abysmal condition. And because we now have all we need to change them—and lacking only our own good will.

The key now is to simply 

• make the systems visible (move them from the blind spot to the focus of the public eye)

But there's a catch: We are still lacking a system  capable of doing that.

Hermes undertakes to bootstrap that system.

And by doing that work out the second ability we are lacking—the ability to re-create systems!

OUR VISION OF OUR PRESENT WORLD

The key insight is that during the past period of progress—Industrial and Scientific Revolution—we have made impressive progress in our ability to change our natural environment, and to bend it to our will; we have however pretty much entirely ignored our systems; they have just 'emerged'—largely based on commercial interests. But they are what is turning our daily work into socially useful effects; hence innovating there is what will bring us another evolutionary quantum leap—similarly as during the last period. AND - enabling us to truly benefit from the results of our last period (it will turn out that our systems have largely eaten them up; a story version is the blog post Ode to self-organization—Part One).

Another way to see the key insight is the 'garbage in—garbage our' metaphor: In the early days of computing many people considered the new 'thinking machine' as almost a magical object, whose very nature it is to give us an objective truth. To correct this, the professional people created the slogan "garbage in—garbage out" to signal that what comes out of the computer cannot be better than what comes into it as data and programs. Similarly, our culture has developed an unwarranted trust in the magical properties of Darwinian-style survival of the fittest (the reasons why this happened are interesting, but beyond the scope of this brief summary). We now need a similar—of perhaps even the same—slogan to make it clear that what comes out of our systems—notably the global issues, world problematique or the life quality and the destiny of each of us personally—cannot be any better than the sort of intention we put into them. When we each play to win against the system as a whole, the effect is that the system as a whole plays against each of us—and we cannot win!

What normally triggers a new paradigm is the awareness of 'anomalies'—i.e. of something to be improved on. As we show here, the anomalies are abundant, and rather spectacular.

It follows that so are the opportunities!

We here largely focus on discovering the anomalies. This is not to say that we are shifting to a negative focus, on the contrary—we want to shift focus from complaining about problems, and even from dreaming about a wonderful future, to rolling up our sleeves and beginning to create a world without those problems—and finding joy and meaning in this co-creative act, through which we already begin to live in the world of our vision.

This is what's presented in the adjacent nodes. You may start exploring from Finance, then move on to Governance and then to (Systems) Science. These three—our current focus—will give you a sufficient insight to—we hope—understand, if not share, our enthusiasm.

OUR VISION OF WHAT WE MAY BE ABLE TO ACCOMPLISH (OUR TACTICS)

The goal of Hermes is to initiate or more precisely to bootstrap the above change—by developing the lacking memes amongst ourselves. Hermes enables us to co-create

• better ways to communicate
• better systems

by co-creating a system—which is a better way to communicate—amongst ourselves.

We do that here and now, by co-creating this Vision, starting from this seed.

HOW WE CO-CREATE OUR VISION 

(This is only a placeholder, pointing at ideas to be discussed and made precise)

The contents of this node (or any other node) are discussed by using the Discussion button below. Or by editing the Details directly.

We expect that this will be sufficient for our future vision and for our way to get there, and we focus on perceiving the status quo in a new way, i.e. on turning myths into models.

The nodes adjacent to this one are called domain nodes; they focus on one social-systemic domain each: governance, finance, (systems) science, public informing... In their Details we summarize the 'model results' for each of those.

The nodes adjacent to the domain nodes are called issue nodes; each of them defines an issue or a specific way of looking at the domain, revealing a major way in which the things can go wrong. 

The nodes emanating from issue nodes are called evidence nodes. Each of them is a story, supported by media material, to be challenged or supported by other evidence, using the standard, or adapted, DebateGraph-style public dialog.

Each of them specifies a summary view of the systemic condition in its area. For each of them, the details are provided in adjacent nodes, each of which introduces a specific angle of looking at the area, by asking a question. 

Each of the specific views is backed by thought-provoking or controversial articles and other media material.

We proceed by improvising a DebateGraph procedure that will transform this ad-hoc vision into a shared and reliable one. You may:

• add comments to an existing nodes, using XXX, pro and con nodes, to contest or support an idea

• add additional evidence to any of the above

• re-edit the ideas based on other people's comments...

And of course, you may help us improve this co-creation procedure

HOW WE CO-CREATE THE WAY IN WHICH WE CO-CREATE OUR VISION

Make comments on this node by using the Comment button.