But there’s one big lesson in life that I didn’t really get growing up. Its the price we pay when we don’t trust…the things we lose when our guard is up. When I trust deeply, there will always be that person that might take advantage of it, and when that happens I’ll pay a price…no doubt. But when I mistrust, I pay a price on every social transaction, and its a tremendous opportunity cost. I miss out on the profound and life altering interactions that would make a hundred betrayals well worth the sting. Plus…I don’t believe that “he who dies with the fewest scars wins.” I’d like to accomplish more than that in my life.

When I view the world as a dangerous place full of people who can hurt me, then that will be the world I will live in…in a very real way my thoughts become my reality. And I’ll blame all the people that betrayed me, and I will have really good arguments and a great justification, and I’ll be right no doubt. I just will have neglected the fact that this doesn’t need to be my reality…its not so simple that I can crucify someone because of something they’ve said or done, because reality is not so simple that it can be viewed, let alone understood and judged, through the vantage point of one lens. And I fall into this trap…constantly.

This is why I do my best to avoid tv like the plague. My environment influences me profoundly, and though I may admit it, I doubt that I’m alone. I am reminded enough about the cost of trust everywhere I turn. I want to be reminded about the cost of mistrust. I don’t want to be reminded that people should earn my trust. I want to be reminded that, at the minimum, people should earn my mistrust. When I get angry about my reality I don’t want my comrades to join my crusade. I want them to remind me that there is a lot I can change by simply shifting my gaze.

If we believe that reality is an integrated whole, then a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge will never approximate an accurate understanding of the underlying structure of reality. No wonder then that our social systems (i.e. governance, economies, etc.), built upon our perception of the structure of reality, often don’t seem in line with the rest of the biosphere.

I am happy to say that one of the central elements that will guide our efforts in this particular project over the next 6 months and beyond is that we will focus on the integration as a central theme. More later!

The thrill for me is not just that this is an incredible partnership between the disaster risk community and the software engineering community, but that it involves three of the world’s largest corporations who are generally known to compete aggressively with each other. In this endeavor, however, they are not only co-sponsoring this event, but actually co-organizing it. The organizing team is composed of champions in these organizations who are looking beyond strict allegiance to the corporations they represent and instead choosing a wider allegiance. The challenges, of course, are clear in that this collaboration is happening in an environment that expects and often encourages competition between the organizations but then again…what noble effort has not met with challenge at its inception.

I say this is a fantastic example of what I believe to be a manifestation of world becoming increasingly conscious of its oneness and that fact that ultimately we are all citizens of one homeland. If you blog or know others that do perhaps you’d consider blogging about it and spreading the word.

More information for Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) here at the Press Room

One of the themes that’s come up frequently recently is the practice that Baha’is refer to as consultation. Its the community’s mechanism of collectively seeking truth and finding consensus. In consultation you don’t own your contributions per se, but rather once you share your perspective on the matter of hand that perspective belongs to the consulting group. We try to maintain both a frank as well as a loving atmosphere and the goal is at all times to put truth before our current thinking. As such it is my understanding that you act upon the consultation just as much as the consultation acts upon you. You might be informed as deeply by the consultation as you are informing it, and often may find yourself in the position of changing your opinion on a matter a number of times during the course of the consultation.

I’ve also experienced in the work we’re doing with HEG a collective phase transition or paradigm shift in the way that we’ve been thinking of things. This has led me to put a lot of thought in how to create structures that not only are capable of change but rather organizations that encourage change — fundamental change — on a regular basis and perhaps driven by reflection on action taken thus far. Recently a friend and close collaborator of mine shared the idea with me that is extremely profound. He said that he felt that consultation is the tool that can free us of paradigms. The idea that progress doesn’t have to be bound by these phases where we have to have a transition to a higher phase of understanding, but that progress would be seamless is something that deeply intrigues me, both individually as well as organizationally. If you truly embark on a consultative approach to truth then you don’t need a paradigm shift, because you’re engaged in ever-advancing progress.

Right…keep your blogs short Toddi, that way you’ll do it every couple of days.

In my first undergraduate economics course, a rather self-assured professor of mine stood in front of the classroom and confidently declared that humans are “selfish, greedy, have unlimited wants and the world has limited needs and thus the field of economics.” What he really meant to say was that “we have a conceptual framework that has evolved throughout the history of civilization and this framework has underlying assumptions about human nature, the purpose of governance, the distribution of wealth and other things. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate and sometimes they’re a bit inaccurate and what the field of economics is based on today is the assumption that human nature is exclusively selfish, greedy and has unlimited wants”….that’s what he really meant to say I think…it just came out wrong.

Whether we state it or not, we have a conceptual framework, and whether we want to or not, our conceptual framework deeply influences our methodology. By methodology I only mean what we do…our actions, our decisions. In terms of an organization, the way it will go about doing whatever it is that it does. To take an inadequate example a society that believes that people are inherently “bad” (selfish, greedy, etc) may spend more resources on prisons and laws to contain deviant behavior than on education and increasing capacity to allow for the full expression of what it means to be human (because what it means to be human as defined by this society is to be bad). A society that believes that people are noble may have the emphasis the other way around and a society that believes that people are noble but can also express “badness” may place the emphasis on increasing capacity and establishing a moral framework at an early age but have safeguards just in case.

As the Harmony Equity Group, or any other organization, continues to refine its (hopefully) ever-evolving conceptual framework, we also are developing a methodology which I understand to be the practical implementation of that conceptual framework. Because the methodology will get us the practical experience that will provide much of our data to inform the development of the conceptual framework, it is important that the methodology also be well thought out and refined.

I see other organizations and other initiatives that have done just that, but I also see that because the methodology is what everybody really sees that it tends to take up the bulk of the organization’s energy, and perhaps rightly so since we don’t want to take up all of our time in hypothetical debate. The trap seems to be that we can become so invested in our methodology that as time goes on we adapt our conceptual framework only to the extent that it does not jeopardize the methodology that we have painstakingly developed and refined. And I can really see how we could mistakenly justify this strange role reversal in the name of efficiency.

Of course there is a balance because it seems to me if you change your conceptual framework at every turn you won’t get anything done. You know how Christensen in his disruptive innovation theory talks about how the giants of one industry will often become blindsided by a disruptive innovation because they are looking for short term profit in order to survive and to be relevant to the market, but in doing so they end up losing their entire company with the disruptive innovation that transforms the industry in a radical way (e.g. hard drive industry)? Same as how centralized massive agriculture, for instance, in the name of efficiency does not allow for innovation at the fringe, because really there is less and less of a fringe. As such its making its own tomb in a sense. So there are definitely certain efficiencies of staying the course long enough if you are eventually willing to scrap the current methodology or at least be open to the possibility of radical alteration of that methodology should your new and improved conceptual framework warrant that.

The question for me, is that I have seen far greater men than me become trapped within their original conceptual framework because of what seems to be an investment in a methodology (a book, a theory, a “method”, etc). How do I avoid that? What are some of the elements that I need to develop within myself to be open to the possibility of that sort of change? Clearly there are a number of spiritual qualities at play here: humility, detachment and holding the truth above my own opinion come to mind. But in addition to the obvious personal element of this dilemma, I am wondering if there are institutional safeguards to this. The more I work with the UN and other large organizations whose names I won’t mention, the more I see how they have almost been designed to resist meaningful change. With HEG, we don’t only want to make this organization one that allows for change or tolerates such change, rather we want to build an organization that instead encourages and facilitates that change. What are some institutional safeguards that could allow for this? Is it possible to weave this into the very structure of our organization? I hope I am articulating this clearly. Change is so damn bumpy…I feel that we’re often like a beginner driver learning how to use a stick shift and that we build organizations more as a monument to our own egos and perceived brilliance than as a continuously evolving organization that would instead always reflect our increasing consciousness of reality. So…this is what I’m struggling with at the moment. Help Wanted.