Yesterday, I had a lovely meeting with my friends from CICOlab, where I had a chance to present, for the first time, the concept of the platform project that I’m working on as a candidate for hashbin. We decided to continue the conversation here so that other OGMers, too, can bring their reflections and questions to the project. SymmaSys, the current name of the project is explained here.
Presently, the project is stewarded by Future HOW and I’m using this post for opening a conversation with CICOlab and other OGMers interested to learn more about and, eventually, participate in it.
In a broad sense, I can say that this is a project that I’ve been working on in the better part of my adult life, but in a more specific sense, only the last few months.
1. NEED
My projects don’t start with customer need analysis but with my compelling reason for doing them. I’m discovering that by sensing into what is a mission-critical need on humankind’s evolutionary journey, which I have any capability to contribute to addressing. Typically, I’m getting there, by asking such questions as: What time is it in the world? What is the need that this project can uniquely meet?
What does the world need this project to be?
In this first section, I describe the need in the world that SymmaSys is aimed at addressing.
When the old world is dying and the new is yet to come, the complexity of the shift, at the scale of our planetary civilization, is inconceivable. It is so overwhelming that when we try to sense and make meaning of it, the most that even some of our best minds can do is to “build bridges into the fog,” as Tomas Björkman wrote on the “What Is Emerging?” website.
Once we accept that our individual mind’s capacity is orders of magnitude smaller than what is required to sense what is really happening in these tumultuous times, then what?
Most people throw up their hands, saying, we can’t figure this out, whatever will be, will be. Que sera sera. Have you ever listened to that song which was very popular, worldwide, when I was a teenager?
The three verses of the song progress through the life of the narrator—from childhood, through young adulthood and falling in love, to parenthood—and each asks “What will I be?” or “What lies ahead?” The chorus repeats the answer: “What will be, will be.”
Unfortunately, that answer wouldn’t let humankind pass its evolutionary test. I addressed why it is so in Towards a Generative Action Research for Influencing Intentional Evolution, where I wrote:
“Spontaneous, unguided social evolution can keep developing powerful forces of science and technology, but not a just social system, where all can benefit from their fruits… In fact, the one-sided development of those forces… is raising the risk of systems-wide cataclysms due to the galloping complexity of our intertwining, global messes. Our global problematique is simply unmanageable at the level of social organization and consciousness that created them.”
Think of blind evolution that brought us so far as humanity’s childhood. For leaving its childhood and becoming a young adult, humanity needs to develop new neural pathways in the global mind.
I’m talking neural pathways for self-organizing, global-scale collective intelligence, that needs to be supported by an adequate infrastructure that I call an “innovation ecosystem.” That’s the need that the SymmaSys will respond to.
As you can see in my conference paper of 2001, referenced above, and in my related writings, until now my reflections about meeting that need were purely conceptual. I’m thrilled that finally, thanks to the emergence of new software components that can go the MindLinking platform, i can articulate the project with a strong R&D component.
In the next section I will introduce the core idea of the project, in terms of its WHAT and HOW, but before that, let’s stay with the WHY that I described here, for a week or so. How does it land with you all? Does it resonate? What needs to be clarified or challenged?
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