under construction

This is my tumblelog - a collection of quotes and thoughts I want to hold onto for a while. Until they've helped me form a new thought.

[hansbroeks]

[hansbroeks]

Global uprising in Amsterdam

[hansbroeks]

Social organization

Social is bottom-up self-organization and real authority, out of craftsmanship instead of hierarchical position.

[hansbroeks]

Social economy

Social is anti-anti-social

[hansbroeks]

Social society

Social is including as many individual autonomous needs as possible

[hansbroeks]

The Age of Social

Societal uprisings like the Occupy movement, the rise of social enterprises as an addition to our economic landscape and the growing popularity of ideas like Servant Leadership, Appreciative Inquiry, Theory U but also agile methodologies and Lean - these social changes of recent time on the level of society, economy and organization are expressions of a paradigm shift. 

Even though global politics and big listed companies and multinationals still operate on Command-and-Control thinking, it will prove more and more difficult to use this thinking with lasting success in our network society. We don't want it anymore, the mistreatment of our humanity as merely a resource for someone else's profit-making scheme. We are more than a function some process needs for it's output. And we share how we are more, on the internet, on the streets. We want to find meaning and purpose in our daily lives, in our work, the products we buy, the food we eat. In the stories we need to tell. And governments and companies that act wrongly in our eyes - unfair, unjust, exploitative - we leave them behind. We start our own businesses. We create our own economies. We'll help our neighbors ourselves. But companies still need us. They need us as their employees, and so they must change. But the change better be true. Cause a wash-over smells bad. It's worse than the original - it's not authentic.

The kind of thinking that gives meaning to all these things is Systems Thinking. Some tags: outside-in, inclusive, what's the matter, cooperative, learning, adaptive, value driven, intrinsically motivated. Serving the needs of life. Taking meaning out of its crisis. Putting purpose first. The shift from Command-and-Control thinking to Systems thinking is happening as we are learning to live in a network society and as we are realizing our power to organize ourselves anew, with different ways of control. When we look at ourselves now as a living system we can do things better than we used to, more intelligently and with less harm for both people, planet and profits. It's a win-win-win situation. And that's why it's happening.

[hansbroeks]

We need innovation not only in physical technologies but also in social architectures. If physical technologies are about the what of the economy, social architectures are about the who: who will make economic decisions, and how, using what kinds of organizing structures?

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

We know the next economy will require things like wind turbines, limits on carbon emissions, and sustainably managed forests. The questions that remain largely unanswered are about who will own these, who will control them, and who will flourish in the world they create.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

Through systems thinking, we can see that the task of redesigning ownership is part of the larger task of bringing human civilization into harmony with the earth.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

Living systems have the ability to make sudden, creative leaps into novelty, reorganizing themselves into something wholly new. They do this when they're undergoing intolerable stress. At critical points of instability, some new way of organizing things emerges. This may be what generative ownership design is: the something new emerging - the thing we need, at the very moment we need it.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

It no longer seems sufficient to speak of economic democracy as the solution. A more appropriate frame of reference may be the living system of the planet.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

How ownership is framed is more basic to our daily lives than the shape of democracy. (...) How owners wield their power over companies determines whether we're empowered or belittled by our work, how much anxiety we suffer over our debts, whether we're able to own a home or be secure in retirement.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

emergence is about connecting with people who share a common vision. This is how local actions spring up, connect through networks, and strengthen into communities of practice. (...) Ultimately, a new system can emerge at greater scale: not magically, but through a combination of unplanned emergent activities and later more focused efforts.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future (quoting Margaret Wheatley)

[hansbroeks]

For what's at work isn't economic innovation as it's usually meant, which is about better and better ways to make more and more money. This innovation is almost unimaginably more profound. It is a reinvention at the level of organizational purpose and structure. It is about creating economic architectures that are self-organized around serving the needs of life.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

Emerging ownership models are new members of an older family of designs that include cooperatives, employee-owned firms, and government-sponsored enterprises. (...) As a class, these alternatives represent an emerging family of design. If industrial-age ownership is based on a monocultural model, emerging designs are as rich in biodiversity as a rainforest.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

But as we make the painful turn into a new era - characterized by climate change, water shortages, species extinction, vast unemployment, stagnant wages, staggering differentials in wealth, and bloated debt loads - the industrial-age model of ownership is beginning to make less sense.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future

[hansbroeks]

Questions about who owns the wealth-producing infrastructure of an economy, who controls it, whose interests it serves, are among the largest issues any society can face. Issues of who owns the sky in terms of carbon emission rights, who owns water, who owns development rights, are planetary in scope.

Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future