A Tentative Manifesto for the Future of Organizations—3

Designing Imagination Infrastructure within Organizations

We are living in what the Greeks called the καιρóς (Kairos) — the right time — for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.’
~C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958).

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!
Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible madhouses!
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
~by Allen Ginsberg

Scott Alexander in the Meditations on Moloch writes, “The implicit question is — if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct — nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything — but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.”

The essay is definitely worth reading in today’s context where the current civilizational order — buttressed and scaffolded by policies and laws, rules and regulations, politics and economy — appear to be an invisible yet invincible agent.

Daniel Schmachtenberger in his conversation with Liv Boeree on Misalignment, AI and Moloch talks about Moloch as the god of negative sum games, a system of bad incentives driving a race to the bottom across sectors and industries. Here are some concrete examples: In A.I. Race, Microsoft and Google Choose Speed Over Caution to get the first mover’s advantage, the tragedy of the commons with every actor pursuing near-term profits and externalizing the cost, the race to develop bio-weapons could be potentially catastrophic and unstoppable because of the secrecy involved.

The economy today incentivizes extraction and exploitation, and externalizes all losses and negativities. If it didn’t, nothing would be profitable under today’s market dynamics. The unending pursuit of profit and capital accumulation has only one logical end — institutional decay and catastrophic systems failures. The sense of separation has been driven in so deeply that humans are not only separated from nature, but also from each other, and one’s own Self. This triad of separation leads to a profound sense of loss and desperation.

These are all the outcome of an interlinked system of Molochian incentives coupled with extreme trust and coordination failures across political divides and nation-states in an essentially uber-connected and inter-dependent world. The Molochian structures ignore our indelible interconnectedness and entanglements with all living systems leading to poly-crises where we are faced with an increasing number of simultaneous and global catastrophic risks. A viable society with viable organizations have to completely rethink and reimagine the foundational narratives from the ground up. And the time is now, “the right time for the metamorphosis of the gods.”

Who is doing it? Moloch.

A system of bad incentives powered by exponential tech in the hands of a few is bad news. Narrow matrices of endless profit and limitless accumulation are being advanced at the cost of a wider set of matrices that impact planetary wellbeing. What we have is a misaligned super-system running the world, encouraging all kinds of socio and psycho-pathic behaviors that would continue (because the system spawns them) even if all the current elites were vanquished. Oxfam calls this the Survival of the Richest. Umair Haque, in his fierce and succinct style, writes about why the richest 1% doesn’t care about extinction, and the corresponding rewinding of history.

All of these information can be debilitatingly paralyzing because of the humongous nature of the catastrophe facing us. We are in the midst of what Joanna Macy calls, The Great Unravelling. But staying too long in this space can paralyze us. Like Macy, I believe we need to move forward, into the space of emergence and creative human responses, and offer our collective gifts in moving our planet towards a Life-Sustaining Civilization. Will we succeed? I don’t know, and that is perhaps not the point.

The point perhaps is to ask:
Where do we focus? What do we energize?
Which narrative do we move forward?
How do we find our allies and co-creators?

The good news is that the veil of hegemony that has been running the show for almost five centuries is being ripped apart. The cracks and fissures in the old system are becoming increasingly difficult to paper over. Words like progress, development, and growth no longer fascinate; tech utopia is rapidly vanishing as the promises of social tech degenerate into misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, surveillance, and farmed content.

Some of the promises of tech are being salvaged by the visionaries and the dreamers — those who are energizing the creation of a life-sustaining civilization. Online dialogue spaces are opening up across platforms like Zoom and Clubhouse spanning continents, bringing people together in shared vision toward a regenerative planet. There is hope yet.

In this liminal space between narratives, I see organizations as Wayfinders stepping in — as Connectors, Communities, Weavers, Narrative Builders, and holding spaces of Emergence committed to the path of a life-affirming future. The nascent seeds of new narrative(s) are becoming visible here and there. It is these seeds that need to be nurtures and nourished, and Wayfinders can enable that by becoming the crucibles where the seeds cross-fertilize and pollinate each other.

What intellectual, affective, and relational capacities do organizations need to develop to hold space for the emergence of a life-affirming civilization?

To become Wayfinders, organizations need to build capacities that are counter-intuitive, and often deemed counter-productive in the current GDP-driven era. In this article, I argue that Wayfinders have to invite imagination back into their organizations and businesses. Collective Imagination is one of the key capacities that can save our civilization from annihilation.

Decolonizing our Imaginations:

Reimagine, Reinvent, Recreate

Speak the Truth

“Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough.”
~Donella Meadows

Imagination is a dynamic and subversive force that defies conformity and oppression. It has always been at play in the formation of cultural tapestries from mythologies to migrations. Migrants require immense imaginative capacities to weave the memories of the past from a known cultural context with dreams of a future in a foreign land into a coherent semblance. Electronic media, e.g., provide resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project, and anyone with an online presence knows this.

Who gets to imagine becomes more important than ever. Imagination draws upon all kinds of intelligences and ways of knowing beyond the cognitive and the rational. Fearless imaginations asks, What else is possible? What can we collectively imagine that an individual never can?

So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.
~Saidiya Hartman

Who gets to imagine?

This question is of paramount importance as Wayfinders strive to dismantle the building blocks of the old narrative. In a pluriversal planet, the universal has been imposed for far too long as an imperial project of colonization, and later, as neo-colonialism. Becoming crucibles and containers for the unheard, unacknowledged, and deliberately delegitimized voices in the intentional processes of collective imagination will be the first step to creating life-affirming organizations.

Wayfinders create infrastructures of imagination to build imaginative capacities.

The beneficiaries of the current status quo, those in control of the political, social, and economic levers are going to do their utmost to destroy and dismantle all semblances of imagination. Because fearless imagination have the power to shift paradigms, craft new stories, envision bold possibilities. As a case in point, the Delhi police in India were instructed to deface and paint over all graffiti created by students and peaceful protesters during the anti-CAA protests that took place in India. The graffiti now exist only in reports and photos.

Those in power fear imagination, creativity, and any form of non-conformist actions that arise from our ability to imagine and envision futures vastly different from the present. Shilo Shiv Suleman started the Fearless Collective in 2012 to “move from fear to love” through participatory art. Her huge murals stand testimony to the power of co-imagining and co-creation.

Fearless collective are looking to arm women with paint brushes and self expression tools, to reclaim public spaces and affirm expression via beauty; ‘fearlessly’.
~Fearless Public Art Residency: Protest by Creating Beauty (https://www.thewildcity.com/news/6083-empowering-resistance-fearless-collective-public-art-residency)

The power of imagination is immense; hence, societies, politics, the powers in control of economies and institutions have always tried to reign in the creatives, the artists, the poets, the playwrights, the visionaries. They fear the power of collective imagination, and so they should. Imagining in the form of art goes as far back as cave paintings, and maybe beyond that, into prehistoric and deep times. Imagination is thus one of the fundamental and sacred human capacities that we often renounce in the name of logicality, objectivity, and rational thinking. Not only do we lose out on a vast treasury of untapped wisdom within each of us but also on our collective sensemaking ability as communities and societies.

There are already existing and well-established processes for collective imagining like Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing, an important part of the Theory U process where she draws the emerging vision of the room on a board as a form of collective sensing and participatory visioning.

“Generative Scribing is a type of practice where you’re making something visual that is from the social field, embodies the energy of the social field, and is in service of the social field. … But with Generative Scribing you’re in a room full of people anywhere from 12 to 1000 — or when we broadcast for u.lab, up to 10,000 or more people — and there is an awareness of the energy that’s between them.” ~Kelvy Bird

Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing from the Presencing Institute

Imagination doesn’t mean unfettered and impossible daydreams. Imagination requires focused attention to one’s intuition, pattern-sensing abilities, synthesizing capacities, and a deep trust in oneself as well as one’s fellow beings. Imagination in this sense is a lens into the emergent future — one that enables us to see the implicate order underlying the chaos and breakdowns. It is a form of tapping into core wisdom to sense and manifest what is already there.

It doesn’t have to be only art in the form of drawings and murals. Other forms of intelligences that exist within us at a somatic level but often escape our cognitive limits can be expressed through forms like Social Presencing Theater (SPT), a practice developed under the leadership of Arawana Hayashi and is a part of the Theory U process as well. SPT is a synthesis between theater, embodied presence, dialogue, stillness and presencing. It is an emerging art form that explores the creative potential of Theory U and presencing.

Going back to the quote I started the article with. “We are living in what the Greeks called the καιρóς (Kairos) — the right time — for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.” It is time for the fundamental principles to shift and that will require the coming together of the collective power of our imagination. Fully, fearlessly, with radical tenderness and compassion.

It would be a mistake to seek an endpoint to the journey of a Wayfinder. Wayfinders will be forever laying the path, clearing the undergrowth, and acting as compasses for map-less territories of untraversed narratives. They will strive to bring together different narratives from diverse spaces and cultures, and work at their intersections.

“Working in the entanglement of what is and what might be” ~Cassie Robinson

I couldn’t have put it any better. Wayfinders are meant to do precisely this — work at this intersection, at this chaotic space of entanglement of lives and living, of the planet and its sentient beings, of the economy and ecology. And work, not to maintain but to subvert the current status quo, be evolutionary in purpose and emergent in design. Embodied imagination and expanded empathy lead to new internal territories and perception, which open doors to different decision making, direction and action towards more life-affirming futures.

“We talk easily and endlessly about our frustrations, doubts, and complaints, but we speak only rarely, and sometimes with embarrassment, about our dreams and values.” ~Donella Meadows

Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe Wayfinders have to build the infrastructure and core capacities for collective imagination. I am not denying the value of other capacities necessary to run organizations; but they are simply not enough any more. Linear, reductionist modes of thinking practiced by organizations from planning to project management, from task breakdowns to sprints will not help to create a thriving, anti-fragile organization in these times. Playing by the old rules are no longer viable. And new rules will be vastly different honoring the pluriversal and entangled nature of our existence.

Deliberately designing imagination infrastructure and putting in place practices for collective imagination to take shape in stewarding the new is the first core capacity for Wayfinders.

I will expand on this in the next part.