Conspire, Collude, Corrupt, Compete & Collapse #55 #cong20

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Total Words

1,615

Reading Time in Minutes

6

1. Wake-up
2. Find ways to to breath the same air
3. Play together
4. Seek together
5. And maybe we survive together

Gar Mac Críosta is an IASA certified architect and spends much of his time trying to figure out what being a sociotechnologist is; so he can be one. He regularly engages in humane human experiments and is very certain that he spends most of his time being uncertain. Currently (since March 2020) he is the Product Lead for the COVID Tracker App in the Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland (www.covidtracker.ie) a COVID-19 pandemic response app. Gar has worked as a Digital Advisor to the CIO in the HSE since early 2019. Gar is the founder of Business Model Adventures and has been an active contributor to IASA Global since 2006, developing & delivering education and certification programs. Gar has facilitated the development of change programs with C-level executives, senior managers, technology leaders, and executives in the areas of business model innovation, digital strategy, architecture, and design across various indus­tries. Gar is a Certified Architect Professional (IASA CITAP), a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society, a LEGO Serious Play Practitioner (LSP) and in the process of becoming a Cynefin Practitioner.

Coming Soon

By Gar Mac Críosta

Conversations about the future tend to hinge around what it will look like when we get there. How things will be better, fairer, more just, more equal. If you had a subatomic particle sieve that you could push our universe through i don’t believe you will find one ounce of fair, one atom of justice. We the talking monkeys on the back of this organic space ship who at this point after 200,000 years of development have a story about ourselves that includes the ideas of heroes/villains, good/bad, right/wrong, success/failure, friend/foe. These are all stories that we use to make sense of the world we briefly inhabit, they are passed down, distilled, washed and amended to suit. We can tell ourselves these beautiful stories and it’s entertaining, hopeful and optimistic. It also gives us a sense of certainty we imbue the story with belief, we invest time, we give this future, life and we jointly share it with each other.

We have created a story about the way the world works and for many people we cannot see this matrix-like weaving of story internally, communally and globally that traps us into a system that is adversarial, self-terminating and running out of time unless the techno-optimists dreams come true (Mars, Meteors and more).

If we accept that we are in some ways trapped in this mesh of stories in a potentially self-terminating system then waking up from this can be quite scary. It’s easier to cling to these fantasies. This situation is compounded by the increasingly partisan nature of communications, the pollution of the information ecology and an increase in mis-information and dis-information. Our loss of self and loss of sovereignty render us like a neotenous newborn who cannot survive outside of the current system.

Wake Up

• How do we wake up and what do we do if we wake up? I’m not an naive idealistic believer that this will all magically fix itself. I’ve got the baggage and the mental malware associated with 20+ years of work plus 20+ years of education running inside my cranium. Leave aside the bad code – the wiring isn’t great and the plumbing could do with some work.
• That said the conversations I’ve been having over the past 36 months give me a sense that there is an increased awakening and recognition not just of the immediate risks but rather of the the existential risks and generator functions that are leading us down a self-terminating path.
• Waking up is not just being alive to possibilities it’s about investing time in the development of self – (not just woo
• -woo self development stuff) our relationship to information and our relationship to others. This is real development of self with relation to sensemaking and choicemaking, our relationship to others, our ability to engage in the world in a different way are a prereq to anything.
• Given the scale of the problem this is not one we can tackle alone, nor is one person (definitely not me) able to make sense of it all, therefore collective sensemaking will be needed.
• Cong is a place where we get to glimpse, we meet, we share and we marvel with others who are in varying degrees of waking up and some still sound asleep. What do we do next?
• Well we make some moves and throw some shapes and see what happens. The moves we make will use familiar words in unfamiliar ways.

Conspire – breathing together

• conspire – make secret plans jointly to commit an unlawful or harmful act breathing together with
• etymology – fromcon– ‘together with’ + spirare ‘breathe’.
• Conspire has such a bad name but unless we breath the same air and plot together we will never get out and make progress. The unlawful or harmful nature is only with relation to the current prevailing story and narrative. If our goal is to break free we need to mentally unhook ourselves from the shackles of this story. Breaking the mold is never comfortable, but finding people to explore idea and breath the same air is a start. Cong is one such place to start to breathe the same air.

Collude – playing together