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MISA is advancing two complementary strategic initiatives to promote and support the emergence of a societal metamorphosis movement: Regional Metamorphosis Initiatives and Global Guild of Evolutionary Architects.

The purpose of any Regional Metamorphosis Initiative (RMI) is to promote and support the transformation of that region’s culture and social systems in ways that make a huge and lasting contribution to the well-being of all life in that region and beyond. Such a far-reaching capacity-building initiative will require developing all three spans of the 3-Span Bridge:

• Growing the regional expertise to support generative B/C-work in support of both community development and systemic capacity buildng.
• Designing and evolving the special regional infrastructure required to support on-going and ever-evolving generative B/C-work implicit in region-wide transformational work.
• Attracting and investing regional resources (money and committed participation.)

The Global Guild of Evolutionary Architects (GlobalGEA) will be focused on growing global expertise, infrastructure and resources in support of regional metamorphosis initiatives (RMIs) as they emerge throughout our planet. More specifically:

• GlobalGEA involves developing autonomous self-evolving generative alliances with and among global expertise most relevant to the work of regional metamorphosis
• Each GlobalGEA generative alliance will fill a niche in an ever-growing, ever-evolving marketplace for providing regional metamorphosis related expertise, products and services. The global infrastructure supporting the growth of these generative alliances will complement and overlap with regional collaborative and communications infrastructure. GlobalGEA will establish a high level social architecture designed to encourage co-creative collaboration among the global experts and regions committed to becoming self-evolving.
• GlobalGEA will attract and deploy global resources in a way that maximizes the True Return on Investment (ROI) of those investments.

The image below sketches out one possible configuration for an infrastructure designed to support region-wide metamorphosis work as it could appear when a region is 3-4 years into its journey. What follows is skeletal description of what such infrastructure might include.

Local place-based Action-Learning Teams (where the rubber meets the road) include Neighborhood Action-Learning Teams and Organization Action-Learning Teams. These action-learning teams are where regional metamorphosis happens. Growing regional neighborhood and organizational capacities to self-transform is at the core of this regional metamorphosis strategy. All other infrastructure described below is in support of these local place-based teams.

Regional R&D Teams include Issue-Centered Teams (e.g., gang violence, unemployment, health care, water, food, literacy, entrepreneurial innovatoin, teen pregnancies) and Practice-Centered Teams (e.g. Conversant Communications, Non-Violent Communications, Richard Barrett’s Cultural Transformation Tools, Stu Winby’s methodology, Chrysalis Work, Regional Dashboard development, communications/collaboration infrastructure.)

Each of these teams/cohorts will do R&D work on behalf of the entire region. The teams would especially draw from elder and youth players who are passionate about their particular R&D-focused generative action-learning expedition. They would work as a cohort to —

• Assess the current state of the region with respect to their area of focus
• Research and engage most relevant knowledge/expertise, within the region and beyond
• Develop meaningful measures and potential feedback loops
• Develop themselves as valued regional leaders/practitioners

Annual Regional Metamorphosis Festivals - these gatherings would be designed to:

• Acknowledge and celebrate progress
• Present an integrating picture of the whole
• Evolve the vision of an ideal regional future
• Issue generative challenges
• Serve as a marketplace promoting/supporting cross-fertilization, face-to-face “clumping and clustering,’ and more.

Center for Regional Metamorphosis would serve as the educational hub for developing generative B/C-work capacity throughout the region. It would also be the primary center for synergy-seeking exploration with GlobalGEA and with other committed regions throughout our planet. This might come under the umbrella of a local community college or university, serving as a protected laboratory for evolving “purpose-based transformational education.”

This center could serve as the “mother chrysalis” promoting and supporting community building and systemic-capacity building throughout the region.

Regional Stewards for the Future — this generative action-learning cohort would consist of regional leaders committed to pioneering, leading and guiding a region-wide action-learning journey that demonstrates the art of the possible in social, economic and environmental sustainability. This group would be analogous to Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. They would serve as “social venture capitalists” seeding a wide spectrum of entrepreneurial initiatives as well as the infrastructures described here. These stewards would include players capable of attracting the resources needed to seed and guide the overal regional metamorphosis initiative.

The above hypothetical infrastructure would be designed expressly to develop generative Blue Zone B/C-work capacity throughout the region’s social systems. This infrastructure would not compete with any existing entities. Rather it would exist to help committed social systems (organizations, neighborhoods, communities) develop their capacity to multiply their contribution to the well-being of those they serve.

All of these teams would be working in ways that help multiply the effectiveness of the other teams. The work of all of these various teams would be designed in a way that supports on-going transformation at both individual and systemic levels.

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