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Scope of Co-Intelligence Y2K efforts




Here are my initial thoughts on the range of general co-intelligence-based efforts that could be carried out during the Y2K era, to enhance community well-being and cultural evolution through this crisis. -- Tom


- improving the capacity of local communities to self-organize

- supporting/developing leadership towards self-organization, at all levels

- helping Y2K-related groups of all kinds to function well

- generating coherence among stakeholders (in communities, in Y2K work groups, etc.), while at the same time promoting increasingly inclusive definitions of "who is a stakeholder" (e.g., the disfranchised, future generations, the natural world, etc.)

- facilitating shared respect, understanding and coordinated action among diverse players addressing any particular area of Y2K

- promoting dialogue and other high quality conversations of all kinds (circles, world cafes, etc.) throughout Y2K-related activities

- arranging things so that expertise (and leadership) is on tap, not on top

- building common ground that honors (and creatively utilizes) diversity

- evolving our culture's dominant story field by enriching its pool of subsidiary narratives and increasing the proportion of life-affirming narratives based on holistic assumptions and collaborative values

- helping our culture usefully digest (process) archetypal differences around Y2K (survivalism vs community resilience, speedbump vs the end of civilization, etc.)

- increased equity, peerness, and shared suffering and benefits through the crisis

- catalyzing collective learning (including functional information flows and feedback systems) and the emergence of community wisdom. This could be on-the-ground learning that improves community responsiveness, as well as culture-wide learning regarding the causes and meanings of Y2K.

- transforming our democracy towards wise, conscious, on-going collective co-evolution

- increasing the resilience of community life - and the resilience of individuals and groups THROUGH community life

- applying the fullness of human capacities (synergistically!) to this problem/opportunity -- individually and collectively. (Those capacities include perception, reason, emotion, intuition, imagination, narrative intelligence, verbal capacities, somatic abilities, musical and artistic capabilities, practical sensibilities, guidance by higher powers, etc.). Dealing with them all -- especially emotions -- in life-enhancing ways.

- using Y2K to stimulate greater participatory consciousness, participatory motivation, participatory competence and participatory opportunities. This includes both active engagement and letting go of control and blame.

- advocating collaboration and partnerships (with each other, with nature) as fundamental approaches to dealing with Y2K

- utilizing the free resources available through leverage (exercising one's influence on a system most effectively, given limited resources, usually by "moving upstream"), design (the capacity of a pattern or context to make a difference), synergy (that quality of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts), holergy (the aspects of a part that make it greater than its role in the whole), with-ness (moving with the grain/flow/energy/gestalt of a situation, rather than against it) and transcendence (shifting a frame of reference to increase the desirable possibilities available).

- advancing people's understanding of interconnectedness, wholeness, co-creativity, living systems, co-intelligence, etc.

- preservation of the knowledge, methodologies and infrastructure of co-intelligence in the face of (or even by means of!) Y2K disruptions