Asian Energy Advisors

Yesterday I introduced yet another plank in my architecture of participation (reference here and here) and anointed it with the term Community.

This morning I read a good post by Robert Patterson who makes the case that Community is going to be “the organization of the future.” Wow!

He talks about differences among Simple, Complicated, and Complex problems. Here’s just a starting sample.

Five years after EPIRA we’re having the same conversations as we were having five years before EPIRA. We (myself included previously and the World Bank, USAID, ADB and others still today) have approached the problem with a tool set designed for the “Complicated”.

But we should be using the rules of Complexity. We cope with Complexity by searching for Emergence. Emergence is a Pattern and you can only see a Pattern with a lot of data. As Robert further says:

This is why Community is going to be the organization of the future where the Many talk to the Many.

Conversation between the Many and the Many is the Darwinian Creative Process that delivers Emergence.

For the right Conversations to happen - you need a Trusted Space. A Trusted Space must be Peer to Peer. Extreme power differences prevent conversation and hence emergence. Hence traditional bureaucracies have profound challenges in coping unless they find ways of opening up the space safely inside to allow for peer to peer.

Collaborative workshops in Manila (or Cebu or Davao) a just too exclusive to cut it. We have to eliminate the dark spots. The team is assembled but we have to realize it’s a process that requires a new ethic.