This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend in Copenhagen, a member of the Danish CIPI (Collective Intelligence Practitioners Initiative). Among other fascinating subjects, we touched on the dynamics of collective evolution in spiritual movements that allow and encourage a whole range of participation intensity. We noticed a variety of needs that attracts members and a corresponding variety in their capacity to sustain the quality of presence reached together, when they are not in the same space. We also revisited the Wilberian distinctions of “states” and “stages,” where higher states are gifts but higher stages must be earned by practice.

This afternoon, a friend from Amsterdam forwarded me Andrew Cohen’s article on A Collective Emergence. It came very timely, opening a whole new perspective not only on the conversation of the morning but alos, how I want to live my life. After seeing the powerful patterns of meaning that emerged from my silent conversation with Andrew’s article, I cannot back go back to live the same way as if I wouldn’t have experienced what I did. Here are some excerpts from A Collective Emergence, with notes from my contemplating them. (Emphasis is added by me.)

“As we progress in our engagement with spiritual evolution, we will notice that our attention gradually moves from being focused only on the individual to becoming attuned to the collective, until finally it is drawn directly to the field of consciousness itself.”

“While this process infinitely transcends the individual, paradoxically it is completely dependent upon the individual. Personal enlightenment is an individual attainment; radical impersonal evolutionary enlightenment is a collective emergence. But if it is to be more than a short-lived foray into the glory of our higher potentials, the stability of that collective emergence is entirely dependent upon the individuals upholding a very high standard.”

Radical impersonal evolutionary enlightenment – just like that, without commas, because the first three words are not a list of adjectives but inseparable parts of a new, emergent whole, a new groove in the evolution of consciousness. For many, it is inconceivable to imagine, let alone experience a state of enlightenment beyond the individual. I wise man said once, never argue with anybody’s experience, so I don’t. But neither do I deny my own, the experiences of “short-lived foray into the glory of our higher potentials” that were necessary steps, giving me and us glimpses but, by themselves, they couldn’t equip us with what was needed to realize that potential in the world outside the enlightened communication or the magic in the middle conversations.

What has been their function, they did it well: to awaken us to the possibility and experience of inter-subjective consciousness raising. However, Andrew’s A Collective Emergence article points to an even more enticing possibility that became a reality for me as I was reading, then contemplating it with the following question in the back of my mind. What is the next edge that my experience is asking me to live on?

“If a group of people has met in this extraordinary shared revelation, what happens when they leave that intersubjective context and go their separate ways? Will they each honor and uphold the higher level that they reached together? This is the moral imperative inherent in the evolutionary process at the leading edge. If the individual feels obligated to sustain his or her own highest attainment, which has occurred in an intersubjective context, then individual transformation becomes the only moral response to the collective emergence.”

The last sentence encapsulates the essential story of my recent past, since I first participated in enlightened communication circles, in a retreat with Andrew, in 2002. Experiencing that the quality of attention/presence/consciousness that I am able to sustain over time is, actually, my contribution to the whole, struck me as full of implications for who I am and how I want to live. (By “whole,” here I mean all who rally with the banner of conscious evolution, comprised by the first millions of people, including those who may have not yet realized the constant transformation that it is asking from each of us.)

“What is actually coming into being, at the level of consciousness, is that which compels each individual to rise up and meet the very potential that he or she is participating in creating. That’s emergence; that’s conscious evolution. The individual, in relationship with others, is literally creating that which will demand his or her transformation. That’s nondual evolutionary enlightenment at the most subtle and profound level... That is the beauty in the process of conscious evolution: together we generate this miraculous higher potential and then we each find ourselves obligated by our own development.”

It is so true! Yet one has to experience “collective emergence” to get the fuller sense of what Andrew wrote about. Intellectual grasping is not enough because it’s not implicating, it doesn’t call for stepping up to the challenge of reaching and sustaining higher stages, for the sake of the whole. Sustaining is the responsibility of all who experienced them at least once and awakened to that moral obligation. I am talking about a felt sense of “I need to drop the bundle of bad habits called ego to realize the highest potential of not only me but also me as the world.”

An inner-driven moral obligation is minimum but not sufficient ingredient to the victory of the long march of consciousness through the wastelands of our individual and collective egos. Another one is following through with transformative practices, also individual and collective. Only sustained practices can break the power of habits that we built in a time of our story when they served us, and that now block our moving on.

By “practices” I don’t mean only spiritual practices; or yes I do if we take the latter in a sense as broad as to include the use of inter-subjective consciousness (Lower Left) for generating inter-objective (Lower Right) results, e,g.: addressing tough, whole system problems at increasing scale. To create evidence showing the power of the interplay of that kind of inter-subjective and inter-objective, we need to form sustainable communities of practice.

Such communities are widely known in large organizations, where they mean, most frequently, “groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better." (Etienne Wenger). Practitioners of collective emergence will, most likely, form communities that include being as well as doing practices. Collective intelligence, the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, requires both.

This evening, when I will put the day in bed, with a final contemplation of the lessons learned today, these will be my two inter-related focusing questions: How to integrate better in my life the work of a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment, social innovator, social scientist, and facilitator of organizational change and transformnation? Where will I find my community (-ies) of practice?

There’s more to say about what "A Collective Emergence" means to me but that should be the subject of another blog entry.

Albert Klamt wrote, "the Guru function will come in ever more diversified forms. Innovations like Big Mind Process…will accompany more classical ones. And  in the world of corporations, politics, media and science, learning orgs and communities, institutions etc. there will be the most essential fields of testing."

I fully agree, except with two words, the "will be." In my view, they are already in the world of social systems because the latter largely define the life conditions for billions of humans, which in turn strongly influence human consciousness and memetic evolution. In other words, the evolution of consciousness is not separable from social evolution. I know, the quadrants are tetra-arising, AND if one of them is lagging too much behind, it but holds down the spiral, becomes a block. When that happens, evolutionaries need to bring their attention to the question: what does it take to liberate the creative energies in the social sphere, caught in obsolete structures?

Where does the wisdom will come from to guide that process? That question led me to ponder the evolution of the Guru function. Andrew's A Collective Emergence article has a rather enlightening passage about it:

"When the Authentic Self begins to awaken in and through the individual and the collective, the guru principle starts operating directly through the field of consciousness itself, fueling and guiding the dynamic surge of intersubjectively self-generating evolution beyond ego."

It feels like Aurobindo's "Supermind" is touching down,  embracing and guiding those who gather in circles of conscious co-creation with It.

All gurus and spiritual teachers from and with whom I learned, said something about the real teacher being not he or she but the Source, Life, etc. What I hear Andrew saying is radically new:

"The individual, in relationship with others, is literally creating that which will demand his or her transformation."

This gem of post-metaphysical spirituality points to the fact Alpha and Omega are one;  we are "creating" the creative impulse as we embody it. It is mysterious AND scientific, reproducable in the collective experience of intersubjectivity embracing interobjectivity.

Did you know how the word "GURU" spells? Gee, you are You! Here's how I read that. The first "you" is the Other, the Beloved that takes the form, this time, of the sangha. The second "You" is the Guide. It coincides with Thich Nat Hahn's saying that if Buddha would come back today, he would come as community. (Of course as long as we need to be reminded of that, we can benefit from the "reminding services" of those higher in the natural hierarchy of stages of consciousness.)

In Adrew's teaching, the discovery that "the guru principle starts operating directly through the field of consciousness itself" goes futher than the "teacher is the community" statement. It is also, more than a metaphor; there's a rigorous method to it, which can be practiced and continually improved.

As it becomes the focus of a growing number of communities of evolutionary practice, collective emergence will scale up, not unlike it is sketched out in "Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale."

I am curious whether he would resonate with these ideas. In the next couple of weeks I hope to see him in Amsterdam and London and find out.

Commenting on my blog entry, Yeshe wrote: 

> We have talked about this many times - you could almost say it's the only thing we ever talk about. What it is, why it is, how to help it happen.

Yes, indeed! Because it wants to know itself and has only us, humans whose consciousness can be used for self-discovery tthrough our passionate inquiry into our higher potential.

> We're among the driven ones, held back more often than not by our own uneven
development in unexpected corners of the psyche.

And because of that, paying extra attention to those corners is not only a personal matter anymore. Particularly dangerous spots are our blindspots that we dont' recognize. The higher is the vantage point from which a mate or a Teacher can see me, the better is the chance that they can catch it.

> I sense a lot of potential in this conversation, so my question is:  What else/more can it become?

Let's look into togerther what it wants to become and share what we see,  here. Here's what I sense, in this moment. What if we used this conversation to sustain our inter-subjective field of consciousness, and do whatever individual practice we need to do in order to come here ready to play in the field?  That would help bringing our shared-attention to the highest potential of this unique juncture in time and (virtual) space.

We can explore tele-communion matching tele-agency, asynchronously but only to some extent. A breakthrough to a new phase of collective emergence could more likely occur in real time, on the phone, in the next couple of weeks.

Yeshe wrote:

> allowing our consciousness to be used as the vehicle for the highest evolutionary potential to emerge in the context of our immediate local focus.

Exactly! I hoped you will say that because I needed a little encouragement to share my view on the "immediate local focus," which is quite radical. In fact, it is a big bundle, easy  neither to express nor to hear in its entirety, but when it's done, it can open some unexpected opportunities for Zaadz to reach the next level of success for itself and the world.

In your comment, you quoted Jaworski and Senge:

Jaworski: “Serving the emerging whole means paying attention to what's right here within my awareness, what's completely local, and surrendering to what's being asked of me now.”
Senge: “So we have  a new systems axiom: What is most systemic is most local.”

We must have been inspired by the same source because it was that "most systemic = most local" perspective that triggered my thinking a few weeks ago, about what could be the highest evolutionary potential of Zaadz? Since we are having this conversation, here, on Zaadz, it makes lots of sense to ask ourselves, how what we know about integral community development, innovation architecture, scaling up emergence, ecosystem of business models, etc., how all that can be best brought into play for helping Zaadz reaching its highest evolutionary potential?

So far, they've been doing all the right move, like avoding the trap of focusing on quantity of members instead the vibrant quality of the seed culture, and committing to the pontential of individual Zaadzsters. However, for passing the chasm between today's 50,000 early adapters to tomorrow's Green/Yellow mass market that numbers millions, much more is needed and I am pretty sure that the Zaadz team is busy with trying to figure out what that may look like. So I guess, this is a good time to open a conversation with them.

For Zaadz to become a household name in 2008, and later a brand that expands into other industries, urban centers, etc., as Brian envisioned it in the recent issue of WIE, its core business, social networking needs to hit the sweet spot of business, social, learning, technical and spiritual innovation. It can be done through intentional and simultaneous cultivation of all 5 dimensions of the "innovation architecture." (I introduced that distinction and community development model in my  Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice chapter of the “Knowledge Economics: Principles, Practices and Policies” book.

The biggest change that will be most likely needed is to transcend Zaadz main concern being the individual and include it  in the broader, more integral concern for the whole social field of emergence that is proceeding from individuals networking to forming communities of practice and systems of influence as outlined in Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale. Of course, it can always remain a slocial networking company of and for individuals but to the extent that those individual change agents realize that it will take a network of communities to re-dream the culture, they will flock to those online systems that will provide them with the best platform for collaboration and co-creation.

Currently, those are week areas of Zaadz.  I gave a hint about a very small step in the right direction,  in the third paragraph of my  "Dynamic online engagement" comment. Why only a hint?

Well, I do have a whole picture of an "evolutionary social media enteprise" business concept that can be relevant to Zaadz but it is unavoidable fuzzy as long as it exists only in my vision. It can gain an actionably high resolution only in a generative dialogue with concerned parties who have requisite competences to bring the play. I am thinking of a first round of conversation with you Helen, Venita, Diederick, maybe  Albert if he is interested, and of course Brian if we can catch his attention. Needless to say, anybody reading this is welcome to  comment and ask questions.

Siona, thank you  for jumping in this conversation. Your presence makes the tasks of sensing  the huge potential of Zaadz to become a co-evolutionary force, even more appealing. The quality of your listening inspires the asking of the deepest questions we can about the highest potential of Zaadz.

Brian asked the question, in the interview with Andrew and Carter, "What can we do to inspire and empower everyone we serve to live at their highest potential?" That's a potent seed question that deserves to be set in the focus of a disciplined, collaborative inquiry. It is corollary to the other question that  I opned in my previous blog entry, how can Zaadz itself discover and realize its highest potential? I believe, that too would deserve a collaborative inquiry, using maybe Presencing for  discovering and prototyping the future that wants to come into being through Zaadz. Would there be appetite for that in Zaadz management? (That could also be an empowering context for  the rivers of ideas that you have, to reach the ocean of practically unlimited possibilities for continually increasing value creation for Zaadz current and future stakeholders.)

> Please say a bit more about the wiki idea!

That's a simple one. If you want to change world, you have to equip your communities with the right software tools for  boosting their collective intelligence. 

> We've meant the pods and blogs to be as collaborative as possible while still allowing authors to retain their own sense of autonomy, in part to further the self-inquiry, personal responsibility, and inner knowledge that has such a tranformative effect on the whole,

I think that was the right consideration two years ago, even one year ago, but it may not be sufficient to move into the next level of potential. Individual autonomy will not decrease but increase when coupled with the modern, Web 2.0-based community tools for co-sensing, meaning-making, and co-creating.

> I'd love to hear your vision

And I would love to share it just don't know yet what would be the best way to do it. Maybe you can advice me. When I worked at INSEAD as Senior Research Fellow, I used my time there to distill the previous 20 years of my research and consulting to online communities into the best design of a virtual environment for change agent networks that I could imagine. Just three years ago, I started upgrading that design into a business concept complete with product mix, revenue models, social architecture, technical architecture, market ecosystem analysis, etc. Later when I learned about Zaadz, I realized that you guys are doing all the right things and providing your users with at least 50-60% of the capabilities that I wanted to do. For a while, I thought that it would be still worth to do a run at the funding sources to bring to market the remaining 40-50%. It would be still possible but I feel our combined offer could generate more value to our markets in a shorter time than if we'd go on separate ways. If you want to know a bit more about my vision, here are some sections from my concept paper for an evolutionary media enterprise:

Provide social innovators, servant leaders , and other imaginal cells  of social transformation, and their communities, with a living online nexus, an evolving platform for enhanced connectivity in and across all transformational projects and initiatives. 

We will nourish an ecosystem of co-creative relationships across networks and communities, by connecting the connectors, broadening and speeding the flow of germinal ideas, trust, and successful practices.
 

As you may guess, the software architecture that we envisioned is optimized for community empowerment that could be a functional complement to Zaadz' main focus on individual empowerment. While every user comes here for the individual benefit from the system, it is not difficult to anticipate the moment when world-changers will ask for a technology architecture expanded in the direction of more applications and tools for enhancing their collective capabilities. Those are our strengths, and we're interested to explore what conditions would facilitate merging them with yours.

Besides that we, also have significant, quality content accumulated at Evolutionary Nexus that we could fold, under the right condtions, into partnering with Zaadz. Not to mention a team of editors who are also Zaadz users and familiar with both systems, thus could help with smoothing an eventual transition...  Lot to reflect on and talk about...

~C4Chaos asked me about the technolgy architecture that I envisioned for community empowerment. That's a huge topic and I will address some of the issues of technologies optimized for collective intelligence, wisdom and collective leadership, in a new entry. This is just a quick note of clarification to avoid any misunderstanding about what I meant by the following the sentence in my entry on "co-presencing the future of Zaadz."

While every user comes here for the individual benefit from the system, it is not difficult to anticipate the moment when world-changers will ask for a technology architecture expanded in the direction of more applications and tools for enhancing their collective capabilities.

What I do not mean is that users join Zaadz for selfish reasons. Individual benefits can include a sense of belonging, building one's social network, becoming more rersourceful in the various change projects that we are leading or participating in, etc. Zaadz is a great social enterprise just for providing a platform for all of that. But the opportunity is much larger. 

It could also midwife the transcend-and-include passage from a community of learners to a community that learns, from a collection of intelligences to collective intelligence, from a network of individuals with shared interest in change to communities of practice with members who are engaged in jointly developing better change practices.

The pods reflect Zaadz' recognition  of the emergent need for the latter, and they are a much appreciated baby step in the right direction. What else is needed is not simply more and better tools for collaboration, collective sensing, memory and meaning-making but an expansion of the business development strategies to include more attention and resources to cater to the needs communities of transformational practices as social organisms.

There's more about the difference between networks of interest and communities of practice in Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.

I promised  to write more about technologies optimized for collective intelligence, wisdom and collective leadership. To be congruent with my experience of what works, I first have to address the question of why not focus on the technology, just now.

Although I didn't talk with them, I almost certain that when the founders dreamt up Zaadz, what appeared in their mind's eye was not a set of tools and functionalities but how they and others would feel when using Zaadz, what it would enable to do and be, how would be the feel of the whole experience.

It seems that the Zaadz team has an emerging, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cross the bridge from the 50,000 innovators to the half million early adapters, in the next couple of years. Isn't it a good time to re-imagine and co-intuit the kind of company that the future wants Zaadz to be, and the kind of products and services that will be the most highly valued by its expanding markets?

Clearly, that question deserves to be in the focus of an ongoing, productive inquiry. I believe the U Curve could provide an empowering framework for that. Scharmer's next book, "Theory U:  Leading from the Future as it Emerges - The Social Technology of Presencing" will come out next month. You can download the two key chapters that may trigger some insights on how presencing can help co-initiating the next phase in the life of Zaadz. (I can also be available to facilitate that process if you don't have other trained presencers in-house.)

I imagine a bit more rigorous use of the integral framework would also go a long way to sensing more accurately what is needed in a possible move towards more support for communities of practice and co-creation, and their knowledge ecosystems.

A more AQAL Zaadz could provide increasingly more value because it could better respond to the growing human aspirations for wholeness and agency, communion and autonomy, as well as creative self-expression (individual and collective). How does that would translate into the dimensions of innovation architecture-- social, business, learning, technical, and spiritual--so that it can trigger a vortex of innovation that will involve large number of present and future Zaadsters? I guess, that question could be best addressed in the context of a daylong or 1/2-day strategic learning dialogue with Brian and the team.

Brian, thank you for joining this conversation. It seems, we need the presence of the evolutionary entrepreneur-philosopher to take it further.  You are a still rare embodiment of an archetype sooooo essential to creating a world where business (and all social institutions) are designed to help us realize our highest potential!

One of things I am passionate about in this conversation is the question of what Zaadz can do to make that archetype less rare? I know, it is already doing a lot, AND i see many  specific, untapped  contexts, tools,  practices that could up the game. In fact, so many that it wouldn't be possible to jam them into blog entries unless I became a full-time "Zaadz development" blogger, :-) something that I couldn't efford beside my "day job."

What draws me here, what motivates me to include in my morning  practice a contemplation about the fututre of Zaadz, then write about what comes up, is the spirit expressed in your words:

> you're correct. Our intention has been to create an oasis that honors the highest within us and gives us that much needed sanctuary that inspires and empowers us to live at our highest potential.

It is the same evolutionary impulse, the manifestation of the same Authentic Self that is working through you, the Zaadz team, and a good number of Zaadzsters, including myself. From our shared  commitment to realize the highest potential flows something that I feel as a moral obligation. It is  to put my professional talents--as evolutionary leadership coach, online community architect, and knowledge ecologist--in service of Zaadz. Same is true about the excitement of co-discovering a way that could bring together Evolutionary Nexus and Zaadz into a new, mutually empowering configuration.

Brian wrote:

> In 2007 we'll be focusing on empowering people in the business of empowering people as we offer micro-communities for life coaches, veggie restaurant owners, meditation and yoga teachers and other “conscious entrepreneurs” passionate about making a difference in the world and getting paid to do so.

It's a good focus, no doubt, but I'm wondering whether it is not too narrow compared with a fuller potential for growth with integrity. The examples you gave are practitioners in the business of empowering people, one person at a time. What about those who focus on empowering workplace communities, making social institutions wiser, practitioners of system change? Why  don't we see here more of the artists of the Art of Hosting, Action Learning, World Cafe, Collective Intelligence, Appreciative Inquiry, and some of the other 60 organizational change methods and disciplines described in the Change Handbook. Even if they are not in the current focus of Zaadz, they could have shown up here in a larger number. If they didn't, there must be a reason for that. Let me guess why it is so.

My guess is that their primary interest is not social networking per se, not even "social networking with a cause" but social networking with results that support their work on not only empowering people but empowering communities and changing whole systems. They would need collaborative workspaces, knowledge ecologies, and change processes embedded in software, so that they can invite their client systems to play with and explore them in a safe environment.

That's the need around which I built a business concept. It has  generated some interest in the "conscious business" funding circles but when I saw Zaadz having already implemented slightly over  half of the platform functions I wanted to build, I suspended pursuing it and started to reflect whether it wouldn't make more sense to join forces with you, given our high degree of philosophical and spiritual alignment and complementarity of professional competences and networks. From my perspective, it would. Would you guys want to explore that possibility?