The REALLY Big Picture
The three lenses described below are intended to help us focus in on what our true
work is as a species at this particular moment in our evolutionary journey. Our
challenge is enormous. It amounts to nothing less than a collective metamorphosis
of what it means to be a human.
NATURE'S DESIGN — Our design
heritage: Designing for life and for on-going evolution toward ever-increasing
intricacy, beauty, truth and goodness — wholes within wholes within wholes —
infinite possibility — a 13,700,000,000-year history of action-learning research,
design and development — the definitive infinite game.On this planet alone, nature has designed millions of interconnected and interdependent species to populate this planet. It's been a history of both small incremental adjustments and mind-boggling quantum leaps (e.g., bacteria, photosynthesis, the eye, birds, humans even) — always toward greater intricacy, capacities, effectiveness, resilience, beauty and goodness.
Humans are a newbie species. If the evolution of life forms on this planet were condensed to a 24-hour period, humans would have made the scene at about 11:59 PM, invented agriculture less than one second before midnight, and the Information Age just one millisecond before the clock strikes 12. We are clearly a work-in-progress. Though equipped with exquisite bio-circuitry and incredibly potent neural "hardware," we have yet to figure out the basics of not fouling our nest. In terms of the maturity of our collective consciousness we're somewhere between the "toddler" and "adolescent" phases as a species.
HUMAN DESIGNS — We seem to be the one species that has been gifted with a combination of freedom of choice, consciousness of our consciousness, opposing digits, extraordinary vocal chords and more. We have been growing increasingly inventive in making use of our gifts. The second circle in this "Big Picture" focuses on a few of the many wondrous and horrific inventions we have come up with to date — and most all of them only during the last evolutionary millisecond.
Our human designs include all our cumulative design choices as humans—all of our invented patterns of production and consumption, development and education, construction and destruction; all of our artifacts. Most of our human designs are strongly influenced by the beliefs and values implicit in our historical organizing forms.
We have shaped our structures and these structures have been shaping us.
GENERATIVE DESIGN — This web site focuses on perhaps our most crucial challenge as human designers:
- What does it take to evolve our organizations (of all kinds) in a way that enables them to serve the well-being of all stakeholders affected?
- What does it take for our organizational designs to approach the same level of elegance and genius that we find throughout the rest of nature?
NOTE: Refer to Worldview-Expanding Books for some of the Context-Shapers whose pioneering writings have paved the way for our exploring this new design territory as a species.