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October 12, 2019
the Scale Independence of the Core Design Principles
polycentric governance,
(1) life consists of many spheres of activities,
(2) each sphere has an opt...
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(3) good governance requires finding the optimal scale for each sphere of activity and coor...
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polycentric governance does not spontaneously evolve—it must be mindfully constructed, similar to relations among individuals within single groups.
Polycentric governance offers a fractal view of groups as organisms in their own right,
if your group or multigroup organization has become prosocial enough to function as a corporate unit, then you can work with like-minded groups to form prosocial consortia that thrive in competition with less-organized groups.
I describe it as like a virus spreading wherever there is an opportunity.
less influence is not the same as no influence.
good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding…
Why Goals Matter: Performance and Learning Goals
A collection of goals is called a Mission.
But, done well, goals can also serve another critical purpose: they can help people learn and adapt over time.
it more often than not requires a more learning-oriented approach, experimenting with trying out things to see how they work, and remaining open to flexibly changing direction in the face of feedback from the system.
A learning goal is focused less on what must be achieved and more on learning how to get to that outcome.
Learning goals help group members be more willing to make mistakes and less likely to seek to blame others if things go wrong.
In a learning context, they are not mistakes, they're learning opportunities.
learning goals make the process of evolution in complex adaptive systems more visible.
Think of a psychologically flexible group as a powerful and well-tuned car headed out on a trip.
Learning goals are focused on acquiring and testing new strategies to attain valued outcomes,
specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound
SMART! That's adorable 😚
how its activities in pursuit of a goal can be monitored.
Should it be measured by
On these cases, where the criteria or metric cannot be made exact, ASK THE PEOPLE WHO ARE AFFECTED BY IT.
Then ask at retrospectives what criteria people used to decide. In fact, ask them ahead of time and then publish the most common criteria.
Goals need to be relevant to individual and group learning and performance:
Time-bound
In the same sense that Sprints are time-bound. It doesn't mean that exact results will happen by a given date. It means that by the given date, the effort will stop and we will examine the results to date. Based on what we find, we'll set the next SMART goals.
It is at least as important to revisit the goals regularly, using them as a guide to behavior and revising them as more is learned about the system.
That's another thing that's missing from Nearsoft's five year Missions: more frequent reviews. Probably, every TBD.
the harder work of building a flexible and effective group culture.
goals that are specific, measurable, and time-bound—that’s just core design principle 4 (monitoring agreed behaviors) in action.
Worldwide, our politics are in turmoil, populations are shifting, and the economic order is changing.
multidimensional and multilevel evolutionary science, combined with functional contextual-behavioral science, do appear to give us a way forward.
Homo economicus is a pseudoscientific falsehood that is ruining the planet, while at the same time creating an enormous backlog of inequity, loss of meaning, and loneliness.
hierarchies of power also ultimately rest upon coercion and thus create the conditions for loss of personal choice and meaning, insensitivity to the particular needs of individuals and communities, and disengagement from creative efforts to foster growth and prosperity.
Instead of being driven by the greed of markets or the fear of breaking rules, the commons is driven by shared caring for particular purposes and particular others.
The “vanquished” group isn’t destroyed or forced to change: it is enabled.
the Prosocial program is a kind of field station for cultural evolutionary studies.
thinking globally and acting locally.
self-interest is protected but cannot dominate collective interest.
Complex adaptive systems of cooperation can grow out of more psychologically flexible people and environments,
restraining
… redeploying…
By “fear,” we mean that element of experience that causes us to withdraw—from our experiences and from each other.
in the very moment we imagine what we most care about, we’re likely to feel vulnerable—to feel woundable.
“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.”
the flip side of purpose is emotional vulnerability.
Hope is the enemy of cynicism.
I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.
Ubuntu!
