‘Seeing is believing’ has morphed into “Believing is seeing.” What follows is a collection of beliefs and ways of seeings foundational to GlobalGEA’s mission.
We are on the brink of what could be an irreversible man-made collapse of our life support systems that have taken literally billions of years to evolve. Unconscious social system design has brought us to the brink of species-wide disaster.
“All systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get.”
Three social system design choices are at the root of essentially all of our global crises:
We have been stuck with these three design choices for millennia. Men (almost exclusively) made those choices. Men and women together can make new choices. It is time to break free, to grow up, and to reinvent our social systems in ways that nurture and evolve the well-being of all affected by these systems.
Reversing the above three design choices is fundamental to our moving into an Age of Conscious Evolution, an age when our social systems become increasingly conscious of and accountable for the long term consequences of their choices.
Unfortunately, the social systems that must reinvent themselves (governance, health care, commerce, education, media, agriculture, defense, etc.) were not designed to even consider, much less undertake such a fundamental re-invention.
Unfortunately, time is running out. If we wait for the great mother of all crashes to wake us up, we will have waited too long.
Fortunately, scattered throughout all our social systems are people who are waking up, who clearly see the need for a fundamental transformation of all these systems, and who are ready and eager to take initiative — if only there were a pragmatic path forward — if only they didn’t feel so alone.
Fortunately, we have been evolving in other ways (connectivity, communications, learning and change methodologies, embracing of the possibilities of conscious evolution, etc.) that open up strategic opportunities that would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago.
Fortunately, there are paths forward (some known and many to be discovered and evolved) that can not only move us collectivity toward sustainability, but also take us to unimagined heights of well-being.
Fortunately, many individuals and communities are beginning to wake up to the fact that most of our traditional problem-solving solutions often create new, more pernicious problems and/or exacerbate the original problems.
Fortunately, the more generative the path forward, the more enlivening and rewarding the journey. It is possible to evolve our social systems in a way that will multiply their contribution to the well-being of all life. The greater a system’s contribution to the well-being of its stakeholders, the more sustainable and resilient it becomes. Good things can begin to happen very rapidly as we begin to make any movement toward what we call a Blue Star Future.
We believe our species can achieve a Blue Star Future, as reflected in these five “audacious dreams:”
We believe that it is possible for systems and regions that are deeply committed to the community-building and systemic capacity-building essential for a Blue Star Future, to make it past the ‘tipping point’ within this decade — by 2020.
The Great Growing Up
We believe we are at the caterpillar stage of development as a species:
Like the caterpillar our collective social systems (commerce, governance, education, health care, etc.) are myopic and fixated on consumption and growth.
Unlike the caterpillar, our social systems have not been designed with the capacity to transform themselves into “social organisms” that touch the earth lightly, that enhance all of life, that are models of boundary-crossing collaboration, and that bring beauty and joy into our world.
As a species we have evolved to a point where we have the expertise and the resources to spawn a societal metamorphosis movement throughout our planet. However, the expertise and the resources are scattered and/or otherwise deployed. Infrastructure has not been developed to promote and support such a movement.
Fortunately, the same source that imbued the caterpillar with the capacity for metamorphosis is also available to us (and in us) to support us in transforming our social systems. The difference is, we must choose to open ourselves to that kind of support. We will need to step up to our highest purpose and take responsibility for co-creating a future that works for all of life. We will need to learn to become masterful at ‘chrysalis work’ — at all levels of system (from individual to systemic).
We believe that our main job as humans, at this particular evolutionary instant, is to invent and evolve how best to support the metamorphosis of our social systems — to steward a conscious, caring, committed coming of age as a species.
In undertaking such a societal metamorphosis, we see the ‘region’ as the ideal unit of design. Our initial thinking on bounding a region:
We picture pioneering regions emerging and serving as planetary pathfinding laboratories committed to evolving our way into an Age of Conscious Evolution.
We see this web site as a vehicle to —
We have been evolving potential strategies and tools designed to support committed leadership (of regions, cities, communities, organizations, etc.) in developing their capacity to self-evolve (as individuals and as systems) toward a future that works for all of life.
We believe that our Generative Action-Learning Expedition (GALE) approach offers us a broad, robust, flexible and highly leveraged approach to the enormous leadership/practitioner educational challenge implicit in going for a Blue Star Future. We see evolving this GALE approach as a core strategic element in co-evolving a pragmatic path forward.
