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communities of practice
July 2009 
Helping Zaadz reaching its highest evolutionary potential
Posted on Apr 15th, 2007
by 
Duri
Duri
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.
> 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.
Access: Public
Well, I've flagged this post to Brian, and we'll see what happens. You convene the others and we'll see what we can do!
Yeshe: Thank you so much for passing this post along.
George: I'd be honored, both personally and on behalf of Zaadz, both witness and weigh in on this conversation. You're off to an amazing start already and I can't tell you how happy I am to have you so engaged. (The article by Meg that you posted is a favorite of mine; thank you for that, too.) I have plenty of ideas–some of them still nascent, others merely waiting for the right time–but I'd love to see how this first round goes before leaping in myself. And George? Please say a bit more about the wiki idea! 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, but I too would love the eventually provide at least an area for more wiki-like knowledge sharing. I'd love to hear your vision–along, of course, with anything else you think might help grow our little seed futher.