I’ve been traveling across America and everywhere I see a
new variety of wildflowers
springing up - the American people variety.
The rapid meltdown has disrupted the ecosystem in some positive ways, clearing out the underbrush and allowing whole new ecosystems built on imaginative intelligence and distributed tools of innovation to emerge; a variable Galapagos of new organizations, combinations and collaborations that are finding ways to harness the new nutrients from the fallout.
The continuous flows of contradiction and change bring the essential ingredients necessary for the sustainability and reliability of these new species.
This can be hard to see if your portals are the news cycles that have us evolving into road kill for India and China this century. The lens we need to capture this evolutionary shift through is more like programming found on The National Geographic Channel- footage Jane Goodall style.
What I see is everyday Americans - the microorganisms - evolving quickly to survive on a planet of failing organizations “too large to fail” by discovering and using their imaginative intelligence. Evolving under pressures conventional wisdom deems too great to support new life - they find a way.
Times and events of crises provide the necessary attraction and compression the diverse elements need to cohere. This is one of the major reasons so many great ideas and organizations are born of hard times, from The Muppets to Microsoft.
As we develop our imaginative intelligence, we allow ourselves to pull inspirations from a wide range of sources, to trust the creative process, and to draw on the innovators within all of us. Ultimately where change becomes the status quo, creativity becomes an essential and indivisible part of the enjoyment of everyday work and life. We learn to direct and enjoy the ride, rather than being thrown by it.
We become like boiling water: even cold water poured on us will heat up and transform.
How does pressurized imaginative intelligence manifest itself?
If you look deeply, everywhere you can see this societal shift. Americans are feeling a deep desire to connect- to end feelings of loneliness and narcissistic isolation. They are cultivating the best they have within themselves and actively searching for new ways to bring those skills back to the village and share them. Where ever this happens the connections become the genesis of new ecosystems, built on sustainable virtues with strong moral and ethical overtones.
As we change our ecosystem, our concept of self also changes within. We evolve from me to we. We see ourselves as part of a larger system, a greater purpose, a global community. This in turn stimulates a virtuous cycle of new global growth. Only this time, we will have collectively evolved to understand that “United we stand, divided we fall” is an organizing principle for all citizens of our planet- not only Americans.
This re-Evolution holds the seeds of the future that are going to save us from extinction.
So the question to consider is:
What is your re-Evolution?
