A leading "architect of generative change" in the fields of organization design, learning and change. A pioneer in organic learning community approaches to leadership development, he has designed and led numerous "generative leadership learning expeditions." Bill's professional background includes over 30 years of innovative organization design and large-scale change implementation experience in the US, Canada, Europe and the Far East, both as an internal and an external consultant. He founded the International Center for Organization Design and is co-founder of Pathfinders and MISA, The Monterey Institute for Social Architecture.

Mar

2

Let The Infinite Games Begin

Filed Under Fatal Flaws, Infinite Games, Infinite Players, Paths A and B | Comments Off

As a first tentative step into the world of blogging I’d like to share an article I wrote for KOSMOS, an Integral Approach to Global Awakening. This particular issue, Volume V, number 2, focused on “Creating the New Civilization — Towards World Community” and included articles by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ervin Laszlo, Hiroo Salonji, Hazel Henderson, Elisabet Sahtouris, James O’Dea and Nancy Roof.

I lead off with this article because it sums up my sense of the moment we’re at in our evolutionary journey and the incredible opportunity that’s underneath the horrorific global challenges facing us today.

LET THE INFINITE GAMES BEGIN

We are at a critical juncture in our evolutionary journey as a species. Path A represents our true destiny. Collectively we have everything needed not just to slow our current descent, but to reverse that trajectory toward ever-increasing well-being for all life on our planet.

Path B—our current trajectory, is a disaster-seeking course. If we focus only on its horrific specifics, we risk overlooking the incredible choice we have to redefine “civilization,” to embrace our true destiny. Path B is a direct consequence of immature design.

Graph A to B

Most organizations in all domains share at least three fatal design flaws: 1) a narrow, limiting definition of success, 2) mechanistic, “control-over-people” cultures, and 3) no capacity for generative redesign. Our global civilization has, in effect, been perfectly designed to get the results it’s getting.

Imaginative inventors brought us into the Agrarian and Industrial Ages. Entrepreneurs brought us into the Information Age. Our Information Age is not only changing the organizational landscape in all our civilization-shaping domains, e.g., Industry, Media, Governance, Education, Health, it is also growing a global nervous system, a prerequisite to creating a truly generative civilization.

Path A will be pioneered by the infinite players, the entrepreneurs for wholeness who are scattered throughout all organizational domains. Like the imaginal cells that transform the caterpillar into a butterfly, these players will clump and cluster in ways that let us realize economies of wholeness and escape the poverty of partial purpose implicit in traditional designs. A more generative civilization will be the natural consequence of a great entrepreneurial renaissance that unleashes the “technologies” of wholeness and aliveness—environmental, social and transformational—for the benefit of all life.

Finite players play within boundaries;
infinite players play with boundaries.
From Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse