slide!

People who are out of control internally spend a lot of time and attention controlling the world externally: they work furiously to control their environment, their relationships, the behaviors of those around them, and more. These people run highly rule-structured realities. Their rules make them believe that things should be one way or another. Because of this they fixate on whether or not people are following ‘the rules’. They are bound to thinking within the rule structure.

When a system first emerges, rules are good. Rules help people understand the new reality. Rules structure and direct people’s attention. When it was first distributed the Bible offered powerful new ways to understand reality. It expanded people’s minds, helped spread important morals and values, and inspired the imaginations of millions. The stories of that book created an entire worldview. As well, an organization with massive power and global reach arose to enforce the rules of that book. And thus a new reality was created for a staggering number of people throughout the last 21 centuries. Once a system has existed for long enough the former worldview is lost or co-opted into the new one and the updated reality becomes stable.

However, after stability comes rigidity. Almost all institutions that expand people’s abilities to think make one mistake. In addition to providing a new structure for awareness, they also dictate the content within that structure. Books are awesome – but not if you can only read what I recommend. The same thing is true with all media. But most institutions mistake their rules for reality. They mistake their content for the Truth. But reality and truth both are constantly evolving. Especially in today’s day and age, we are increasingly exposed to knowledge that becomes outdated and obsolete within a few short years. So what happens to the organizations yoked to the old structure? They update or die.

Today’s emerging rule structure is the most powerful, broadly effective, complex and flexible system we’ve ever experienced. It is a reflection of the Internet and computer technologies around us – useful and constantly updated. However, if you’re stuck in the last rule structure, be that Newtonian science, fundamentalist religion, or bureaucracy of any sort – you will see mainly threat in the now-ubiquitous technologies. A threat to your source of income, your source of power, your source of control. And while you can fight the crushing waves of change for a time, ultimately, you will lose. People who are stuck in threat are also increasingly stuck in fear, limitation, and the inability to respond effectively to their environment. In fact, they can’t even see their environment anymore because they’re stuck in outdated pictures of how things really are.

What happens to an animal that can’t cope with it’s new environment? It goes extinct. That’s how Nature goes. Life is ruthless in it’s pruning of the evolutionary bush.

On the other hand, the people who thrive in this kind of environment are the ones who have a high degree of internal stability. Internally, these people are in control and spend little to no time trying to control the world around them. Instead they remain like a cork floating atop a river awash with new information. And all they pay attention to is where they want to float next.

With the radical advance of technology this deeper kind of internal stability and awareness is the most important thing each of us can learn. It is the platform for powerful reality creation. It is from this place inside that you can bend reality most effortlessly.

Technology is forcing this gift upon us. It is demanding us to become more aware, to process more information. This in turn forces us to use new parts of our neurology. Our awareness expands and we evolve. There is a unknowable wealth arising in the knowledge economy and it’s yours for the taking. All you need to do is find that place of inner stability and float in the direction that best suits you.

Is your business spiraling out from that place inside of you?

I am part of a new millennium family. We have half, step, and full-blooded siblings. We are the children of divorce and remarriage. We are one of the faces of the increasingly diverse American family.

As I mentioned recently, according to renowned futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, one of the fastest changing institutions in America is the American family. Fundamental institutions like education, business and family and the speed at which they change and adapt to the larger system are critical to the complex systemic shifts occurring in our world.

However, there was something crucial missing from the Toffler’s list; it’s the thing that drives all of the fundamental changes in our world and our environment – the structure of our own awareness.

Kids today move faster, process more information and regularly compete in domains far beyond the capacity of older generations. As an adult that grew up dominating most people in one video game after another I can attest to this. My youngest brother recently came to live with me. Today I put a large whiteboard on an easel in my kitchen recording the various wins and losses in our new family pass time, Stratego. Why did I do that? To showcase the last bastion of my ability to dominate in family games.

In one video game after another I find myself moving slower than my younger brothers. The reason? They have been reared on fast-paced, decision-based games that force them to be endlessly more aware of more things, more quickly than any activity in human history.

As Steven Johnson writes in his book, Everything Bad is Good for you:

…far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions…games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. …the primary activity (inside the gamer’s mind) turns out to be: making decisions, some of them snap judgments, some long-term strategies.

As Collin was learning the rules of Stratego he asked me what the bomb’s effective area (blast radius) was. It was a mind that thinks in cubes and tesseracts trying to understand the rules of a square game. Only moments later he was checking out some of the behavioral software I’m developing and, unbeknownst to him, giving me ideas for how to improve it by making it more complex, more engaging and more personal.

Split second, parallel processing, endless decision-making awareness like Collin’s is already shaping reality all around us. If you don’t want to be left behind, pay attention to how this generation filters the world, cause that’s where everything is going.

Everything is better with friends – especially changing the world. This is dedicated to you, my partner.

God’s imprimatur
Stamped on every one
of your 50 trillion cells
God’s imprimatur.

Why else
would i love you
so uncontainably.

image complements of justin case (click for link)

Today’s truths will be quickly overturned by newer more complete, more accurate truths. The simple ideologies of our grandparents are no longer able to cope with the deluge of information. Rigid internal rule structures are no match for flexibility and readiness.

Profile of the Pilot

Pilots hold an internal position that allows for the constant updating of information. Pilots do not cling to the constant informational feed of media and society but surf it. They operate from the stable knowledge of “who they are”. Unknown to most people, this knowledge is actually contained in the way they organize their body (their posture, speed of movement, and hundreds of other small factors). From this stable internal position pilots engage in constant learning. In this way, Pilots master information and use it to their advantage in creating choice realities.

This orientation has biological repercussions. The brain that is constantly learning is actively exercising its ability to learn and change. In brain-speak this ability is known as plasticity and refers to both functional and structural adaptation in the brain.

The Choice

As we continue into the age of information each of us has a choice – to be a Pilot or a Passenger. The onslaught of information today is demanding we learn to use ourselves well if we are to enter the world as autonomous beings co-creating our own experience and not robots solely at the mercy of the world.

The price for not using yourself well is to fall prey to the perpetual brainwashing machine that is society; to become hooked on the mandates of external direction, locked into the matrix of societal programming. The alternative is to cultivate readiness, to learn your own at-best position of readiness, to stay alert and aware – to take part in the on-going creation of the world with intention each moment.

The personal key to this kind of adaptability and success is structural well-formedness. Structural well-formedness is a measure of the integrity of the organism, in this case you, the individual. The more well-formed you are, the better you will be able to navigate the inevitable tides of change. As part of this, those people who think for themselves are more capable to navigate the rapidly changing world than those relying on external structures and rules as their guideposts. Pilots choose the life they are living and then sort for the signals that support them in that position. They are constantly integrating new facts and information from the extant world which then informs the template from which they frame out and create the world into which they are living.

As the future unfolds, people will be more easily identifiable as being in one of two groups: Passengers – dormant potential, led from the outside in; directed, robotic, brainwashed, tossed around by the changing of informational tides, and Pilots – potentiated reality creators, directing, alive, brainwashing, endlessly surfing the wave of change.

Self-awareness is an art and a science. Piloting your own ship is a skill that takes passion and practice. The future of our species is to learn to use its brain…you can begin now by learning to use your own. The choice is yours. For those to whom this appeals, those who are interested in assuming the mantle of responsibility for the world in which they live – both individually and inter-dependently, the choice is easy.

Spiral entrepreneurs are pilots. We are pilots guided by the northern light of our own purpose. And we use our businesses as tools to amplify the expression of that purpose.

We live in an ocean of information both natural and artificial. The constant pull of gravity, the chirp of a blue jay, the latest Lexus commercial – all are part of the continuum of signals in which we are immersed. The push and pull of information is forever attempting to impress itself upon us, shaping and reshaping the boundaries of our awareness. Every human has the ability to decide for themselves how they will experience this ocean; As a pilot – guiding and directing; responsive, alert, alive; Or as a passenger – passively adrift; asleep, robotic, rote.

In the last eighty years we have navigated bigger, faster, and more complex waves of neurological change than our species has encountered during the previous 10,000. The fast-paced change in technology and information is breeding segments of our species for rapid-fire signal integration and processing. Each generation has been raised to input, process, and output more complex patterns of information than its predecessor.

As technology development accelerates, tech-savvy cultures are exposed to more advanced and refined processes via innovation and media. The message of each new medium is learned at the neurological level simply through exposure and interaction. GPS guidance, ever-evolving smartphone apps, and on-demand everything is shaping your expectations, your habits and the way you perceive and engage everything in the world. The neuronal pathways and synaptic firings of a child reared on instant messaging and near-constant multitasking are different than those raised on books, scheduled television programming and parents with 9-5 jobs. New products spread technological advances throughout our culture. These technologies change the speed, rhythm and frequency of our culture. And they change us. In general, these changes make us smarter.

As intelligence is applied and reapplied to itself, our species begins to mutate . Where once it took hundreds of generations to breed noticeable differences, we have reached a point in which significant variation is occurring within a generation. The ability to accomplish such monumental achievements is accelerating. Now, humanity is striving to adopt new mental and behavioral postures to navigate this groundswell of technology and information.

These new postures are evident in the dozens of patterns which have emerged over the past four decades all of which indicate a significant trend towards self-awareness and a means to cope with and thrive amidst the growth of information. New scientific theories and models of consciousness are being introduced and overturned in greater frequency. The proliferation of yoga studios and new sciences of consciousness is increasing. Media watchdogs and grassroots-democracy groups are demanding more from our media networks than the sleepy societal programming of the past. Stem cell research and scientific inquiry have taken a reached recognition in U.S. political platforms. These are signs indicating a trend towards managing information both through external force, as in cases of legislation and media, and internal organization, as in the cases of meditation and yoga. These are just some of the signals exposing the elusive obvious; humanity’s use of consciousness is metamorphosizing. Our species is evolving.

Our individual ability to prosper in this new world relies heavily on our ability to use ourselves well. In this case, to use ourselves well means to attend to the new demands of our situation. This is a simple evolutionary formula. Humans in technologically advanced cultures need to be able to integrate and output information with ever-greater skill and efficiency. This evolutionary intelligence is the position of Pilots. It is a position based on flexibility and love-of-learning; neo-philia as opposed to neo-phobia. In this fast arising informational climate, this position is one of the greatest determinants of our success.

Two days ago I talked about interacting with people’s internal maps of reality. Yesterday I went into the fact that the maps aren’t true, just useful, so it’s good policy to design your maps to drive you into success.

Today I want to talk to you about one of the craziest things ever – a global plan of action.

We know that if you want to win a race you need to know where the finish line is. We know that if you want to build the life of your dreams, it’s good to have an idea of what that dream life would be like. We know that having a business plan is critical for developing a successful business. However, for some reason, we haven’t extended the logic of creating a vision of our ideal future to the global scale. Well, today we do.

Years ago I decided to promote a vision for the planet that I thought was vague enough to be universally acceptable but strong enough to be of actual value in helping us move our planet and species toward success. It was originally created by a man named Hardin Tibbs and it goes like this:

In fifty years we hope to have a stable, peaceful, prosperous, diverse global civilization, which honours freedom of personal belief, and in which democratic political processes dominate, with a high level of universal education and health care, and a genuinely impartial and accessible system of justice, and in which both advanced and basic technology is applied in ways that are in balance with the natural environment, and produce an equitable distribution of social benefits.

Step one is understanding and accepting the idea of a global vision. Step two is realizing the simple power that vision can have in guiding us into a better tomorrow. The next step is making sure our own businesses are in-line with this vision.

How about you, is your business in-line with (or at least not running contrary to) this vision of a successful tomorrow?

Yesterday I talked about interacting with people’s maps of reality. That knowledge is the linchpin to effective persuasion of any kind. However, in the quest to change the world, knowing how to influence people’s internal maps of that world is particularly critical. Why? Because our current maps have gotten us to the exact place we are today – and no further. If we want to create a real and lasting change, we need to help people shift how they think about the world so that they participate in creating a new and better tomorrow.

Excitatory vs. Inhibitory

People orient themselves in the world in one of two ways – they either have an excitatory bias or an inhibitory bias. A person with an inhibitory bias sorts for and notices the problems and limitations of the situation. A person with an excitatory bias sorts for and notices the possibilities and potential. Neither of them is True, both of them bias the system. While still able to notice problems, a person with an excitatory bias is naturally healthier and more potent. Highly successful and powerful individuals like Steve Jobs, Wayne Gretzky, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey all operate from an excitatory bias. A perfect example of the excitatory bias is Winston Churchill’s quote, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

Let’s illustrate these concepts with a few examples:

1) Debbie Downer has an inhibitory bias. She’s a real drag to be around because everywhere she looks, she sees limitations. She regularly answers a “How are you?” with an “Oh, I’m getting by.” Whenever her company has brainstorming sessions and the creative juices are flowing, Debbie is the first one to point out all the flaws of an idea. Her family’s nickname for her is “Fox News” because she is always calling them to inform them whenever there’s a hurricane, a tornado, or a flu going around.

One evening several weeks ago she was at home with a few friends. On a whim they decided to take a road trip. Debbie was aghast! “You want to take a road trip? It’s so late! Besides, take a look at the weather? It’s raining outside. Do you know how many car accidents happen in the rain?”

Debbie believes life is just about keeping her head above water. She is an extreme, but I bet you know someone like her. To varying degrees, most people have some Debbie Downer in them.

2) On the other hand, Pamela Potential has an excitatory bias. She believes anything is possible. She has the ability to work anyone into frenzy over her new idea, no matter how outlandish it may seem. She is so oriented toward what is possible that she’s already calculated for the Debbie Downer in other people and always has the perfect retort for someone’s “no you can’t.”

Her phone rings steadily, because whenever one of her friends is upset or confused about something, she always helps them see the possibilities and benefits of the situation. Pamela has sunbathed in St. Tropez, skied in the Alps and camped in the Negev desert. Why? Well, she’d say, “Why not?”

Pamela believes life is a huge canvas and she is painting a masterpiece.

When you remember the times in your life when you were happiest and most powerful, who were you more like?

In our mission to create an excellent tomorrow, the leader positions are all filled by Pamela Potentials. Then, those Pamelas do their best to spread their messages and share the wealth. Tomorrow we’ll explore the ultimate Pamela position and the world it creates. Stay tuned.

click the image to see the full-sized version

You see, reality is not so simple as we once imagined. It’s not like a block of cheese that exists the same for everyone. Rather, each person’s experience of reality is influenced by their genes, history, family, friends, community, life experiences, successes, failures, media, schools, teachers (good and bad), lovers, thoughts, beliefs and more.

These influences shape our personal maps of reality and our maps of reality guide what we notice in the world and what we can notice. Most importantly, our maps guide our decisions and behavior. Change what a person notices and you will change how they behave. This is the art of co-creating reality. It is the art of reality bending.

Anyone who is trying to succeed in the world has an interest in learning to bend reality by influencing and manipulating these maps – both their own and others. And of course, if you’ve been paying attention to this blog, you always want to do that with integrity and for the good of all parties involved.

The image above is a useful tool to help you remember where reality is really made – not out in the world, but first in the mind of the individual. Keep tabs on it, it will be useful in upcoming conversations.

Yesterday I posted about the trance-formational power of media. In the post I portrayed each of us as individual neurons with direct input-output feeds into the global nervous system. I asked these questions:

Which signals are you letting in?
Which are you putting out?
How are you trance-forming the world?

A friend responded to the post on Facebook with a challenge:

…there other powerful influences to our psyche that are perhaps even more disguised than media… I agree that we can harness … technologies to do good on some level, but I’m not sure how much blogging can have a real effect if not followed up with political action.

My response? That post wasn’t supposed to be comprehensive. It was merely a starting point. I’m drawing a picture of how the system works. Updating our story of how media and change occur. And I’m demonstrating that the global nervous system is something in which we are all enmeshed and therefore all influence.

So the next piece to address is how do we actually change the system? Of course, since I’m writing this on a blog specifically targeting entrepreneurs, my belief is that at least part of that change is driven by entrepreneurs and businesses. Blogging and social media in general are simply broadcast nodes for the individual business – outposts for inputting and outputting information to the system at large. But rather than diving into business at the moment I want to take a more general survey of the global system so we know what it is we’re working to change.

Seeing the Big Picture

In order to effectively to change the world you need to understand the institutions making up the central organs in the health of our global system – organs so vital that they must be included in our thinking about any kind of real and lasting change. Our global body is currently in a state of rapid acceleration. Each of these institutions is challenged by that acceleration. Their response to it influences the health and stability of the system as a whole.

Below is a survey of ten of the major institutions and their responses to change as outlined by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth (amazon affiliate link). The survey is designed to help business leaders, government policy makers, you and me to cope with and navigate rapid change. It is presented in terms of relative speed on the highway of change. Unless otherwise indicated the text is quoted directly from their book.

100 mph – The fastest changing institution in America today – the company, or business. It is, in fact, the driver of many transformations in the rest of society.

90 mph – Civil society. Thousands of churning and changing nongovernmental grassroots organizations (NGOs) – pro-business and anti-business coalitions, professional groups, sports federations, Catholic orders and Buddhist nunneries, plastics manufacturing associations, anti-plastics activists, cults, tax-haters, whale lovers and everyone in between.

60 mph – The American family. Family formats, frequency of divorce, sexual activity, intergenerational relations, dating patterns, child rearing and other dimensions of family life are all changing rapidly.

30 mph – Labor Unions. American unions remain frozen in amber, saddled with legacy organizations, methods and models left over from the 1930s and the mass-production era.

25 mph – Government bureaucracies and regulatory agencies. For example, a case in point is the excruciatingly long time it takes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to test and approve new drugs while desperate victims of disease wait-and sometimes die.

10 mph – The American school system. Designed for mass production, operated like factories, managed bureaucratically, protected by powerful trade unions and politicians dependent on teacher’s votes, America’s schools are perfect reflections of the early twentieth-century economy.

5 mph – Not all dysfunctional institutions that affect the world economy are national. The economy of every country in the world is substantially influenced, whether directly or not, by global governance-a collection of intergovernmental organizations, or IGOs, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and scores of less visible entities that set rules for cross-boundary activities.

3 mph – U.S. political institutions from Congress and the White House to the political parties themselves. The current political system was never designed to deal with the high complexity of and frenetic pace of a knowledge-based economy.

1 mph – The slowest of all our slow-changing institutions: the law. The law has two parts. One is organizational-courts, bar associations, law schools and law firms. The other is the actual body of law these organizations defend.

So, is blogging on its own able to change the world? No. And I’m not suggesting it should. Rather, I’m encouraging a fresh look at the health and illness of the global body. I’m suggesting that we draw useful maps and leverage them to make worthwhile change. And I’m saying that the blog is one node for effective communication within the larger system.

The real questions are, what do you want to create? And are you being effective at creating it?

Start with this premise: Everything is hypnotic; from the voice inside your head to the advertisement on your television, to the scent of your lover, to the words on this blog. Everyone, including yourself is selling you an idea, a belief set, a reality.

But realities were not so plentiful throughout human history. Prior to the printing press, there was a dearth of realities available to the average human. Information was held mostly by church officials and nobility, the few privileged to reading and writing, while the only reality your average farmer knew was the one he or she lived every day. They were familiar with their own lives, their own thoughts, their own habits and maybe those of their spouses and neighbors. Realities or at least behaviors and beliefs were not purchased so much as inherited.

Increasing Realities

Then, in 1436, with the famed emergence of Guttenberg’s printing press came the rapid growth of intelligence and the spread of ideas. No longer were people confined to the static world of their close compatriots, they could explore the minds and fantasies of others who had written them down. A flower could smell of poetry and love, a pitchfork could become a tool for revolution. People’s perception of the world transformed and reality became realities.

Centuries later, enter radio and the budding of multi-media communication. Suddenly, children everywhere are exposed to delicious Ovaltine and astronaut quality Tang. Text took to the airwaves with resonant reverb. Books grew vocal chords and enraptured children in a new world of media, while outside of our awareness our minds expanded into areas of previously dormant potential.

The Global Mind

From smoke signals to letters to books to radio to television to internet to statistical research-based studies on the demographic appeal of a new reality TV show, media and communication came a long way. And, in their manifestation they have joined an older story, one that began even before the pre-cambrian era, one that was played out by our bacterial progenitors in their constant colonization and networking, and continued in every animal and plant species since; nature’s constant playful testing of new hypotheses in its growing of a global mind.

Now, joining the other actors on the stage of planetary communication, humans have added self-awareness to the global mind. Mass media broadcasting is not only one of the most powerful cultural innovations in human history but in the history of life. With it, we have begun to reinvent the comprehensive network Mother Nature started growing so long ago. We are doing it with human-controlled technology. We now have the ability to shape and influence the realities, perceptions, and thoughts of entire cultures. And we are.

By right of superior intelligence, I am best suited to guide the destiny of this planet.

Trance-formation

Humans have taken a global mind that has been growing for 3 billion years and made it self-aware. We are not bees mechanically doing nature’s bidding, pollinating flowers. We are self-aware, cultural creators. We design culture. We design trends. We design behavior. And we do it on massive scales. While the conformity enforcers of other species may spread new behavioral memes to their companions over days and weeks through behavioral modeling and other signals, humans can introduce messages and inundate entire cultures almost instantaneously.

Advertising and mass media have become sciences of the mind. Broadcasting is a ubiquitous force. Each culture is a test tube and an incubator for the experiment called humanity. Mass media gave humanity tools with which to tinker, control, influence, manipulate, and guide the experiment called life. Tools that directly or discretely influence almost everyone in the world.

The cultural influence enacted by mass media is largely invisible. Like air or gravity, it is everywhere around us, so much a part of our lives, our history, our understanding of the world that it has become a part of the scenery. It has become a natural part of life, a hidden dimension, always directing, always influencing with its invisible programs passing into people’s minds unnoticed, signaling the appropriate responses from their central computers – each of our own nervous systems.

But as technology has evolved so has intelligence and our ability to select which messages we let in as well as which messages we spread. As a culture, we have gone from passive media consumption to active media broadcasting. Media has been democratized and people empowered. Now anyone can get into the game. We can create messages and influence others. We can register our opinions like so many individual neurons guiding the global brain. And sometimes, we can sway the attention of that brain to new aims and new ends.

We’re no longer just part of a cultural experiment. We are each individual search engines endlessly Googling new possibilities. Through media, most poignantly blogs and video blogs, we can share what we find. And in doing so, if only a little, we can change the world for the better.

So which signals are you letting in? Which are you putting out? How are you trance-forming the world?