Institutional inertia, meet collective intelligence

I keep coming back to this sparkling aggregation of collective intelligence. Mused about the energy you may have felt, Venessa, and followers. Bigwig institutional inertia traveling in a direction not aligning with yours, and you choose to act on it. Bravo.

To me, this is like kinetic energy of a cartel, of which there are probably eight, according to Jon Rappoport:

GOVERNMENT, MONEY, MILITARY, INTELLIGENCE, ENERGY, MEDIA, MEDICAL, AND ORGANIZED RELIGION.

These cartels grew on internal trust, and probably a fair set of silos. They deliver some value to society, yet endanger it at the same time. Among the most sinister  dangers is their sheer inertia, obstructing innovation, stifling invention, insisting on solutions that worked in the past, stepping over corpses in their organizational quest to survive and profit. Most of them have found ways to externalize side effects that make the whole deal unsustainable for society.

Yet, not knowing better, society let them grow, sacrificing resilience from diversity for a sense of security by limiting competition, by self-control, and by regulation. We know how that works out in an era of mounting pressure on companies while  returns on assets plummet. Does this mean for incumbent business they will  leave  a whole lot more  money on the table;  banks too? Watch  Ripple, the open alternative to Paypal? Or read  Competitive advantage from better interactions.

Feel like enough reading, move to acting instead? OK...

 

Start a movement

Now, it is faster to galvanize a movement against than a movement for. Part of the reasons:

Against, you have a tangible object that exists, and the human mind is geared to highlighting the things that may mean negative consequences. A biological survival mechanism.

For, you have a fuzzy future, a vision, mission, policies maybe, everyone is a beginner. For leaders it won't be easy to get their tribe to focus. It may be more efficient to help them self-organize.

You can read more about it in the tribes Q&A e-book we cocreated with Seth Godin well before his inspiring TED Talk.

If you only have 4 minutes for the 18-minute TED talk, watch from 15 minutes to the end or open the interactive transcript and scroll way down to What all these people have in common is that they are heretics (cannot link you directly, sorry). Or read how  people asked him absolutely anything.

 

Postponing progress?

If we are correct to perceive accelerating innovation all around us, we will see preferences changing faster. As alternatives become viable, the cartels and their lobbyists will run out of customers to fleece before their clientele goes broke. They will literally find you can't eat money. They may, faster than they expect, find themselves surrounded by thrivable resilient organizations as in The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. 

If so, then what starfish movements are we building?

So far for today's morning musing between bed and breakfast (before reading listening to anything). Originally manifested as pencil scribbles on a post-it size notepad. Thank you for the live energetic conversation.