The search for the next "killer app" is going on for decades already. So, obviously, not much brain was needed to write about "killer communities". (As spotted in a presentation on the slideshare front page.)It has been said that we need to change the stories that we tell ourselves in order to be able to transform who we are. The story of Pandora's box may be one such story. As Wikipedia explains, "Pandora had been given a large jar and instruction by Zeus to keep it closed, but she had also been given the gift of curiosity, and ultimately opened it. When she opened it, all of the evils, ills, diseases, and burdensome labor that mankind had not known previously, escaped from the jar, but it is said, that at the very bottom of her box, there lay hope. There is no reason to think Pandora acted out of malice in opening the jar, for she was exercising her curiosity, and when she saw what was let out of it, she quickly closed it."
This beautiful animation by Gobelins retells the story very differently. While curiosity may be the reason why The Evil comes into the world, it is also fearless curiosity that becomes key to outwitting The Evil and to personal growth (in a very literal sense).
While the demon in the video insists on enacting patterns of domination and victimization (another old story) - the child refuses to play according to this script. She even has the courage to dive right into the mysterious dark box, from which she re-emerges as a grown being.
When I came across this video I had just finished reading Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin. Bill Plotkin believes that by courageously facing the underworld of the soul, we can find our true place in the world and our authentic self. He describes various “soulcraft skills”, such as dream work, wandering in nature or vision quests, which help to step out of the ordinary world with its usual scripts, and into a process of self-discovery. A process that is, by necessity, a terrifying experience for the ego, which would prefer safety and comfort to transcendence any time.
So what do we do with Pandora's Box? Do we continue to complain about "The Evil", be scared by it, try to control or fight it. Or do we have the courage to accept and face it, study it without looking for blame, - and be changed by this process.
(I have commented on "Pandore's box" also at Freshcreation.com)
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend the CEB (Creative Economy and Beyond) conference in Helsinki - a great place to mingle and to pick up ideas.
Among the people I had met was Roosevelt Finlayson from the Bahamas who spoke about Festivals as a model for building creative communities, and for establishing commitment and self-esteem.
His presentation was the last one that first conference day, so in the conversation afterwards we not only moved from one topic to the next, but also from the harbour district to the city center. I noticed that people responded to Roosevelt as if they knew him, as if they regarded him as a friend, even before he said a single word. (And that is certainly not the typical Finnish mentality). "How do you do this," I asked Roosevelt. "Well, I love people," he said simply. And by then I could tell that this was indeed a fact, not an idealized vision of himself.
In a way, Roosevelt Finlayson embodied a finding from a study that Helle Hedegard Hein presented at CEB the next day. In order to find out how highly creative employees should be managed, she had spent three years at the Royal Danish Theatre observing how managers and creative specialists behaved. She found that creative specialists can basically be grouped into four categories:
The Prima Donnas who feel that they have a higher calling: Prima Donnas experience flow and get kicks out of working hard and stretching their personal limits. What they want from their managers is honest feedback, recognition and a shielding leadership. Status and financial rewards are not motivating for them, as they feel they have a mission to give their personal gift to the world.
The calling to a higher mission was totally missing in creative specialists in the other three categories: The High Achievers, the Pragmatists and the Pay Check Worker are, in varying degrees, more motivated by status, public praise and financial rewards, while their creativity and commitment decreases. The most difficult creative specialists are those in the "Pay Check Worker" box, as they constantly demand a higher salary while at the same time they defend low performance standards. For them, just coming to work already deserves a special bonus.
Two observations were especially interesting:
For some reason, enforcing rules often seems to produce ugliness. (Pictures from Helsinki)
While on a rational level, most people agree that a fundamental shift in society and culture is necessary to tackle the problems of today, it seems very hard to make that leap on a personal level, leave alone a community or institutional level.
I was reminded of that when I watched the speech that UK prime minister Gordon Brown recently gave at the TED conference. He states that we are at a unique historic moment where we are more interconnected than ever before and we are also developing a global ethic, both promising preconditions for solving global problems - poverty, climate change, economic crisis - in a global way.The solution he proposed remained vague but he clearly saw a need for a central institution which would have the means to globally enforce agreements or regulations. While this may certainly be part of the solution, I missed concepts of co-creation, empowerment, collaboration and individual responsibility in his vision. Being inside a politician's story maybe did not allow him to see that new forms of governance would be central to such a solution, if it is not just to repeat the patterns of administrative institutions stricken by political power-struggles.
Another example for a solution that repeats past patterns is the idea of a British company to put RFID barcodes on trees so that controlling the sustainability of forests becomes more transparent. They even assume that tagging trees could play a role in fighting deforestation, and therefore, could be seen as a measure to stop global warming. But the underlying concept is still that we can care only for things that we can control and that nature has to be properly put into our warehousing system for us to see its value. An alternative to applying technical control mechanisms could be to bring forests and communities together, something that Roald Gundersen and Amelia Baxter are trying to do with their Community Supported Forests. Members will get a specific part of the forest where they "can camp, hunt and garden on the land. They can forage for mushrooms, garlic mustard and wild ginger. They can get firewood, sustainably milled lumber, landscaping stone or fresh spring water." And in doing that, they will have a chance to get to know the forest as a friend and not just as a distant resource. That's a very different story, right?
Recently I heard of the Dark Mountain Project, a literary movement to rewrite the stories that we base our assumptions on. "We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world."
Becoming aware of the narratives that we live by and re-inventing them is very much what we need, in my view, to have a new context for transformation - on a personal, community or even institutional level.
