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(((moonshots)))

Patience/Impatience

Innovation is a delicate thing. It needs just the right mix of serendipitous discovery and structure. There’s no step-by-step manual for striking this balance, but there are some mindsets and habits that will help improve your odds.

Moonshots need to have the patience to let difficult solutions unravel and the impatience to undertaken them as quickly as you can.

Experimenting and learning quickly is paramount. Make sure your teams know how to set up great experiments where they can derisk loads of important unknowns with little costs. Even if the results are negative, this is great if you learn them fast. Focus on the experiment, not the result. The only real failure is that of not learning anything.
Prototype early and deliver intermediate proof points. Don’t think too big for your intermediate experiments, in fact think small. If you take a small risk and fail, who cares. 
Take the minimum effort to learn the most and do it super cheap. Create quick objects from the future, videos with explorations of ideas, paper prototypes, and achieve intermediate moonshot milestones — which could even be self-sustained small(er)-businesses, before eventually turning into a full-blown moonshot impact.
Spend a couple of days prototyping something very rough. If it goes nowhere, no one will care. But if it’s interesting, you make the next prototype. Maybe a week’s work. And then you move on and on from there.

Emergence calls for Initiative

Just get going
There’s no instruction manual for moonshots; we roll up our sleeves and take the initiative to figure out a way. Grab a shovel and start digging.

Learn to love “version 0.crap”
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. It’s more important to get going than sit around thinking about the perfect outcome. It’s okay to share early drafts and fragments of emerging thoughts, so others can also help.

Brutal Honesty/Authenticity
Go for impact, not intellectual wandering. You need to keep yourself intellectually honest, with rigor, and be dispassionate about trying to find the reasons why the moonshot will fail and tackle them first. De-risk, and learn super fast.

Proactive prototyping

What if everyone has the potential to do things that are inside them, but they never act on it? In fact, we all probably have a moonshot inside us. And many of us die with that moonshot because we refuse to act. 

No fantazise, act on it. Creative Futures is not in the realm of theoretical imagination. It is very much about f creating (and recovering) blueprints for action. Prototyping and the emergence of “provisionally specific” artifacts is a very powerful creative tool. Prototyping is a catch-all term for rapidly something emerge to see if it works, if it sticks with you and others, but a good prototype also offers a secondary function. It helps a group of people move beyond conversations and loose ideas by creating an embodied thing. It brings people together behind a single articulation of what might otherwise be a broad range of possibilities. It encourages detailed discussion as opposed to abstract opinions. We use prototypes in Moonshots to express where we think something might be going, without being sure. We also call it provisional specificity.

Many times during a project we reach a point where we can’t be exact about something, there are just too many unknowns, it feels like there’s no clear path forward and this can be paralyzing. Instead you put ‘something’ there, let something emerge, our best guess, just for now. Let’s be provisionally specific, about the creation. This is a way of emerging. 
This can be a model of something, an object from the future, a new way of seeing things, a poem, an image, a song, a piece of software which appears to work. It can be focused on a tiny detail or the big vision, but expressing the emergence of something that has been created through us, in us — anything — can almost always accelerate thinking, help make decisions, uncover blindspots and bring teams together.

In truth, emergence is messy. It follows no clean path, and doesn’t flow naturally from one step to the next. 

Speculative Design prototypes often look and feel like the prototypes I described earlier, but they don’t exist as statements of ‘things-to-be-made’; they exist to provoke you and others, as a means to facilitate conversations, to pre-visualize issues and impact. Bringing people together through the story of the dream(more here) 

Unintended consequences

The creations, either the creation of ourselves, the new iteration of an idea or a moonshot, or whatever we are creating and bringing into the world, have been buried or in an incubation mode or in the tunnel before they are brought to life.
And where those ideas meet the world of light and air and fulfillment, are not always just like this glory moment. It can feel really overwhelming and has unexpected consequences.

The power of Emerging a v.0.crap is that it also allows us to tackle not just positive, but neutral and negative outcomes of our creations. To think through the potential impacts — positive and negative — of the creative work. 

By speculating on the impact of these interventions, we’re able to think beyond the ‘perfect’ solution, to discuss externalities, to consider people who might be averse to the idea or whose livelihoods may be negatively affected. 

By producing prototypes of these events (a newspaper headline, a protest poster, a poem) we are able to explore and iterate fast.

It’s not a perfect or foolproof approach, and there will be countless unseen blindspots in any project, but producing these emerging prototypes forces awkward conversations to become tangible, unavoidable and focused.

Knowledge Hub Emergence

Emerging and solving the gap from believe to impact, requires building Communities where you can engage with the community of experts, misfits, social entrepreneurs, doers and kindred spirits  for the whole duration of the moonshot. People who build an atmosphere of gratitude. I believe the reason why some of the work we are doing here could be so impactful, is because we are all doing our own work in the midst of being in community. We are building the fabric of ourselves and of a moonshot concept in the midst of this group container.

When it comes to letting go of what no longer is aligned or letting go of what no longer serves you, showing gratitude is essential. It is super important to do this work, finding the next moonshot idea in groups of diverse human beings where gratitude can be expressed as you navigate chaos.

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(((alchemy of chaos)))

Emergence, Entropy, & Abiogenesis

There is an entire science of the origin of life embedded into the notion of Emergence. There is a whole connection between the origin of life (out of the primordial soup of chaos, no less) which is apparently called abiogenesis, and entropy, and emergence. In order for life to spontaneously emerge from the primordial soup, there is a perpetual influx of energy…and not just an influx of energy, but the understanding that systems will attempt spread energy out (in the form of light, heat, etc) in order to disperse it. In order to disperse energy efficiently, that is when the beginnings of RNA and DNA form. So matter has this imperitive to self-organize in an effort to better disperse energy. And nature, in an effort to promote disorder and chaotic tendencies aimed at dispersing energy (like a tornado, or a lightening bolt), ends up creating...wait for it...order. Pockets of order. It is these pockets of order that are structures that escalate the chaos of a system, and thereby create entropy, which is the necessity of things falling apart. A thundercloud collecting energy and reaching capacity then organizes itself into a bolt of lightning to disperse the built up energy into the earth - a moment of chaos which results in a rebalancing of the ecosystem. And Pablo mentioned how curiosity diffuses the energy. Curiosity is a lightning bolt. Truth is a lightning bolt.

So, just to be clear, the building blocks of our very existence (literally!) is in the truth that chaos = energy influx = dispersing energy = entropy = emergent order. As it turns out, non-life can’t work with energy, and life is an exceptionally efficient tool for rebalancing chaos. There’s a cool connection point between this and Activation…but we will get to that on Saturday.

Surprise

An emergent world invites us to be alert in the moment for what is unfolding. Emergence is an interesting state - it is a place where the creations that have been buried or in incubation mode meet the world of light and air and fulfillment, so what I am interested in is highlighting the importance of cultivating the ability or environment to be surprised, as well as acknowledging cycles of completion in order for emergence to happen. Usually if we are not in a habit of naming cycles of completion, what tends to happen is that we are more likely to bring old patterns and old habits and old behaviors and old karma into our next iterations of ourselves, into what we are creating anew. In my experience, dragging the past into the present really colors the way we are able to show up and limits our possibilities. Being consciously aligned with emergence requires presence, awareness, and being vigilant for the newly visible. We need to notice things we weren’t looking for, things we didn’t know would be important, influences we hadn’t thought of, behaviors we couldn’t predict.

The Third Great Shaking

A friend’s mentor said that she spoke with a Hopi elder who called this pandemic time the Third Great Shaking in the history of humanity, and that it is a powerful time for awakening. The elder said the COVID-19 world is a cocoon time. A forced stillness, an inner winter. And she shared that the DNA that comes into play which allows the caterpillar to turn into a butterfly is the same DNA that comes into play when a virus moves through the body. So we are literally and metaphorically in a DNA-altering cocoon time. We are changing, becoming, and morphing. And becoming doesn’t always look as we expect it to, like in the case of the one-winged butterfly…but a lesson we have learned separately and together is that the struggle is what allows the unfurling of the wings to happen, and that to attempt to mitigate that struggle could paralyze someone’s ability to fly. As Salome pointed out: “Do not steal someone’s struggle from them, or you take away their power.” There is something about emergence, becoming, expressing, flying…all wrapped around struggle and expectation and death and life and regeneration. 

Facing Ourselves, Facing Each Other

Emergence is not as much about emerging into someplace new, as it is about emerging into a new piece of your own self. Emerging into a new world that already exists within. So much of the work I continue to come back around to is the importance of being able to become aware of the expanded perspectives of ourselves that exist within. The journey inward is an infinite journey. There are multiverses inside. It’s like seeing the human soul as an onion, and with inquiry and experience achieved through mirrors and flashlights, you peel off those layers. But as you move inwards, the layers/veils get thinner and more numerous, to the extent that you would never be able to “achieve” or “arrive” or “accomplish” the discovery of yourself. There is no center to the human soul. 

Something that I think is a stumbling block on the trajectory of this deeper level awareness work with what “emergence” means is a belief that there is a place to arrive in the midst of this work, that once you emerge, you’re done. Update: there is no arrival. There is emergence, but only to emerge again and again. If there is an arrival point, it is in the understanding that there is actually not an arrival. By fully participating in our lives, we continue to become, and as we become, there are new aspects of ourselves that are born and that come into focus, and as we get curious about those new aspects, we face ourselves in new ways, and as we face ourselves in new ways, we face each other.

Emergency

We have framed "emergency” as something to be avoided, as something we don’t want. My deeper hypothesis is that it goes back to our discomfort with change - or as was mentioned in session, movement - in general. But we can choose to see this word emergency in a new way. An emergency is a situation that was unexpected, and something new or different is emerging from what we perceived to be a stable situation...or at least our perception of it was stable. 

Another thing that is interesting about an emergency is that our full attention tends to go towards whatever the emergency is. This is also something to note because I do think for our purposes, Emergence does require our conscious acknowledgement and attention. So an emergency claims our attention, so that we can be with this new something. But so often we are attempting to mitigate the emergency. 

What if we practiced seeing emergencies as a necessary (albeit usually unwelcome) shift? How would that change our behaviors, beliefs, and beingness? 

Emergence is happening all the time. What makes the difference between a 5 alarm emergency which we defend ourselves, our stability, our loved ones, from, and an emergent new reality which we more gracefully usher in?

Dissonance

We create limits to remember that we are limitless. Transformation, therefore, is an expansion beyond what we previously thought was perhaps impossible. To expand to this place, I must un-become the version of me that is still fixated on an old limit. That limit serves me because it is in facing it that I have the opportunity to move beyond it. The outside world isn’t known for responding well to us emerging into different iterations of ourselves, because just like we avoid dissonance in ourselves, we reject dissonance in others. And just like we discussed in session, we also tend to reject struggle. It almost comes back down to supporting everyone else around us to do the work to recognize and experience the value and gift in dissonance. I believe the reason the work we have done here has been so impactful, and why this group feels safe, is because we are all doing our own work in the midst of being in community. We are weaving the fabric of ourselves in the midst of this group container serving as the loom. Without the loom, it’s harder to weave. When it comes to letting go of what no longer is aligned or letting go of what no longer serves you, showing gratitude is essential. This is because whatever you’re letting go of has played an integral role in your life, and without the process of that you wouldn’t become who you are. What you gain from navigating the dissonance is just as much a part of who you become.  

Releasing the Bow. Diving In.

“A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them.” That is exactly what we are doing here.

Emergence refers to the existence or formation of collective behaviors, acknowledging what parts of a system do together that they would not or could not do alone. This makes me think of Alchemy. In describing collective behaviors, emergence refers to how collective properties arise from the properties of parts, how behavior at a larger scale arises from the detailed structure, behavior, and relationships at a finer scale. So Emergence is spotting patterns by seeing the details and the big picture at the same time, as well as understanding the relationships among the parts themselves AND the relationship of parts to their environment. When we think about Emergence we are, in our mind's eye, moving among views at different scales. We see the trees and the forest at the same time, in order to see how the trees and the forest are related to each other.

The whole program thus far has been pulling back the arrow farther and farther, each week, diving deeper, unearthing more, naming multitudes...in order to arrive at activation and release. Release our emergent selves and emergent perspectives into the world in order to activate new possibilities. Of course, I like to also picture that when doing this level of work, you’re swimming in water, and with each new insight, a new movement happens, which creates a new ripple that you send out, however subtly. So many of you have been sharing with me in sidebar conversations some very real shifts that you are seeing in your world in the past 7 weeks. It’s not a coincidence. When you dive into these waters, shift happens. The deciding to dive part is where the initial magic is...and to acknowledge that you arrived at the place where you even are considering the decision to dive...that is also such real and true work. And then the diving. And the moving. And the ripple creating. And then the emerging onto new land. And then the seeing of new things. And then the coming back to the decision to dive back into the water, from a new place, perhaps from a different height, as a new self. And on and on it goes. Life is death. Death is life. The struggle eventuates in the liberation of freefall, the realization that you will land, and it might sting, but you will already be off swimming and rippling in this newest iteration of discovery of yourself within the context of your life. You will continue to release more arrows into the world of your life, for as long as you dare to keep creating tension in the bow.