Tomorrow Making with Lilly Pads and Tipping Points

For several years when you visited this site, you would find our feature project: The Tomorrow Makers Game: Creating a New Operating System for Humanity. You may wonder what happened to this project.  While off to a quick and successful start, we found we did not have the energy to carry it forward. Other priorities of family and health took the upper hand. We were a bit early with the idea and funding for such outrageous proposals was not available. We do not consider it a failure, however.

First, we learned many things and met many wonderful change-makers and doers. We learned more about gaming and our research took us into many previously unknown places proving both historical context, adjacent possibilities, and future potentials and possibilities. As Tomorrow Makers, we discovered others with the same goal, to co-create a new operating system that works for all life with abundance and stewardship. Indeed, these others have been growing, and maturing and are now cohering and engaging thousands of people. We feel privileged to connect, knowing that thousands upon thousands—and increasing exponentially—are now in some way or another working, playing, and living into a new operating system. One that, as it matures, will enable us humans to human well with all of life on Gaia, this place we call home. 

Alas, you might say, a few, even thousands working to create a healthy world is not enough! We are still doomed. Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t think so. Consider the lily pad metaphor. Take a pond and give it one lily pad with the plan to double the number of pads every day. From one to two to four to eight to sixteen and so on… Guess what! The day before the pond is full it is half full! We live in a world of exponential change without taking time to realize the phenomena. So while it looks hopeless, these little initiatives, this gathering of energy and action, we are in fact quickly reaching a tipping point, where the game changes and we move swiftly forward into a new world, a new world that we, tomorrow makers around the world are making initiative by initiative, lily pad, by lily pad.

Here are a few, but certainly not all groups and individuals activating initiatives bringing them alive beyond the page. They are mostly comprised of “We the people,” ordinary people, learning to reach beyond ourselves for mutual benefit of Earth and all life into a new and far-reaching paradigm.  As readers and followers of Tomorrow Makers, I am sure you will recognize many and, in fact, see yourselves here.  

SINE (Synergized Impact Network Exchange) is a global alliance of social innovators committed to large scale behavior change through collaborative learning, innovation, and unprecedented unified action.

Living Cities Earth is an interdisciplinary action research network, connecting 10,000 cities and a web of integral experts serving Gaia’s well-being.

EarthWISE Centre collaborates as wholeness coders, future creatives, evolutionary catalysts, pattern weavers, and new paradigm storytellers for a thriving planetary civilization. Together we serve as a global Collaboratory for enabling human thriving in harmony with our planet and in support of future generations. 

The Alternative is a place to re-orienate, pull the strands together and build. Feet on the ground; mind, body and spirit in the emerging possible. Here you can experience futures organising, future economies and future flourishing in the present moment, ready to converge in a town or city near you.

The Leciel Foundation offers a set of foundational values and principles beyond cultures or traditions, in service of life, that aggregate into what we call Primordial Wisdom, a sense of knowing more than a “knowledge”, that puts universal values, principles and resulting ways into action.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute honors the legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) and continue his effort to make the world work for all of life, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation.

https://www.youthxyouth.com is one of the most exciting websites that I discovered. These are very young people working together to heal our world, step up and work together across all boundaries to recreate our wondrous, collective understanding for we as humanity have to offer, should we choose to do so.

These groups have a lot of diversity of nations, cultures, ideas, and philosophies. They are learning and practicing co-creation as ordinary citizens scattered liberally around planet Earth.  It is an honor to participate in any of them. Your ideas and skills will be welcomed. Your unique difference matters to them. 

Additionally, there are individual initiatives like ecocities, organic farms, doughnut economics, city restorations, prison reforms, world peace making and keeping, changing goals in education … all to become places for humans to human well.  While scattered, they are coming together, finding each other, not to compete or swallow each other up, but to join each offering their difference. This is the greatest magic … where emergence steps through a door offering next steps, ways of togethering for a greater purpose.  

We believe, that while dollar resources are in short supply, this will not be the case much longer. Slowly, we are shifting from earning a living any way we can, making money any way we can, playing individual against community, rich against everyone else. We are all learning the art of stewardship and what it takes to restore the earth as a work of art for all life. We are working together, finding new economics, ways of helping, taking care of, and having each other’s backs. 

All this is happening while the news rolls out and over us with bad news, news of corruption, pettiness, fake news, and fears and disasters. We can’t afford to let this overwhelm us or seem like all there is. It’s not, certainly not the majority!

Tomorrow Makers is investing in you and me, we the people, on a journey creating a different operating system for and with Planet Earth. We are stewards of Gaia. -Gail

UpCreation Workshop coming this July 2020 through January 2021

The World in UpCreation!

“The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers who do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping the systems that interact with other forces, ideas, events and other designers. This essay is an exploration of what it means to participate.” 

In another part of this newsletter is the story of Joi Ito, head of Media Lab, while driving with friend and conversing on complex adaptive systems.  They were stopped in the midst of a traffic jam.  One said to the other, we are stuck in a traffic jam. The other, took note, and replied, we are not stuck in traffic, we are the traffic.  A stark reminder that there is no out there. We are all in this together.  

From https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation/release/1

There is no doubt now that our world is undergoing a global transformation, its own upCreation,  prompted perhaps by coronavirus pandemic.  With Black Lives Matter suddenly becoming relevant, and surely there will be more, perhaps even before this pandemic goes away. Almost all existing  systems are beginning to give way to new and hopefully better choices for all life, including Earth, our wondrous, awesome home base.  If we fail to assist Earth in her upCreation process, we will likely move toward worst case, mass extinction.  

We know several things about this unfolding:  1) We have more opportunity now, than in our lifetimes to shape and bring about systemic change.  This is true with any major crisis is that crisis and opportunity go together. The center begins to fall apart, dissipating the energy of failing strategies.  2) This transforation will be largely self organizing by we the people as no politicians can lead us where we need to go.  3) We can only do this by working together.   That’s why I am so excited by the upCreation offering which will begin on July 20 and continue for seven moons.  We will meet formally seven times on the day of the new moon. In between will be personal work, journaling, and small team interactions.  

These thoughts are to nudge you into joining us as we bring our collective expertise and stewardship together to explore how we each can make major contributions to our world while becoming more fit ourselves and thus being able to help clients, friends, family become fit too.  Please don’t let financial concerns prohibit your participation.  We can make adjustments. And note in the invite, that we encourage you to reach out to clients, competitors, families, and good friends in this mutual learning experience.  In this liminal time of redesign and upCreation, there are no experts.  There is only us, together, coming to knowing our Humanity, perhaps for the first time! 

Good Enough to Be True

One time a participant in one of our DesignShops came up to us after a DesignShop and shared this thought. “My Mom would always say when something good happened, ‘Oh this is too good to be true!’ But now, I have turned that saying around and I will be looking for things ‘Good enough to be true!’

Why is it that we are so willing to accept bad news? What keeps us from believing we are worthy of good news? These questions are vitally important to consider as we go about creating a world that works for all of us… to design our collective well-being by design, not default.

Matt and I in our early days with our MG Taylor Process would develop simulations customized with the clients objectives in mind. These simulations were challenging and often showed the clients where they were vulnerable. By participating in the simulation they were directing their own future. A knowledge worker core team played the role of newspaper. We imposed one rule on them. “When the participants acted negatively about an idea or a headline we published, we would pile it on, adding one negative headline after another. However, when one of the teams would publish a positive response to an article or situation, we would pile on positive headlines. And do you know what? When the participants caught on to the negative/positive headline offerings, they began to really put their heads down and find positive solutions to the situation. They stopped griping, whining. They were eager to contribute, to find good paths forward.

Today, the news seems mostly bad. One crisis after another is reported. One killing after another. One failure after another. Recently, however, I am beginning to see some really positive and action oriented good news. By looking I am discovering that there are thousands of people working hard to solve the problems we have created for ourselves and Earth, this place we call home. WOW! Are we reaching a tipping point where good news can be recognized and honored?

The Tomorrow Maker challenge to design a new operating system for humanity is being well received as are many other bold initiatives. Lets celebrate and act with these projects, make them better, take them further. I would truly like for us as global citizens to recognize that the world we are creating with so much good energy and purpose is intact, Good enough to be true! We can celebrate the old world crumbling, no longer useful as it morphs and transforms into a culture of “Yes, just watch us step up to the challenges and opportunities the future is offering us.”

I believe that together we have choices we do not have as individuals. Its a scary world to be an individual in todays world. But collectively, wow, there is no stopping us and we are good enough to be true. And working together in no way stamps out the fact that we are each unique, unrepeatable with our own contributions to make.

Look for good news. Add to it. Record it; pass it along. Imagine our delight in 2030 to 2040 when we wake up to the fact that we have/are creating a world that works for 100 percent of humanity while restoring Earth, our home planet. We are good enough to be true!