What will we mean by INNOVATIVE Democracies, INNOVATIVE Enterprises, INNOVATIVE Organisations, INNOVATIVE Communities and INNOVATIVE Societies
You’ll note that “Innovative Technologies” is missing from the list and yet, of course the rate of technological innovation over the past few hundred years has been incredibly fast and is constantly accelerating.
Since the invention of the steam engine 300 years ago, our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies have been shaped by a constant flow of technological innovations.
We now understand, however, that no matter how impressive, elegant or seductive they may be, technological innovations have been increasingly anti-Gaian and anti-human.
In all that time, with the exception of innovations in medicine and public health, technological innovations have mainly served the interests of the commercial, financial and military elites.
In adapting to those innovations our Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies have seen many non-technological innovations: income taxes, trade unions, a huge range of public services, and a vast expansion of bureaucracy in all its forms.
By contrast, since the English, American and European revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of the non-technological components of our Democracies, remain much as they were 200 years ago.
This is where we will need to devise and implement many radical innovations if we are to come through the 21st century in good shape.
Not that the human family will be able to survive the 21st Century without a lot of technological innovation, but they will happen in order to fulfil the purposes of achieving and sustaining (all together now!!) Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies.
As we’ve already discussed. Viable and Gaian are terms with specific, objective meanings from cybernetics and earth sciences.
In the context of 21st Century Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies, however. “Innovative”, will have to carry a wide range of meanings.
It is impossible to predict where the innovations will come from that will make our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies increasingly – even triumphantly – Viable and Gaian.
BUT we can predict that they will come from people like us. Millions of people like us. People who have decided that they want to think, act and learn together, to make our Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations, Communities and Societies, ever-more Viable and Gaian. People who stick at it for years and years and get better and better at understanding – and doing – what needs to be done.
That in itself will be a major, a revolutionary, a hugely complex, innovation. And, in spite of what you may have heard, or would like ot believe, such innovations do not just happen by some sort of spontaneous evolutionary process. They are the result of the determined values, the skills, the efforts and the purposes of teams of liberating leaders, as is explained in VIGDEOCS AND CULTURAL CREATIVES. # 8,
After Obama?? 