If change is hard”…is “exponential change” harder? or easier?

As I wrote last month, “Change is hard.” but “hard” is an assessment — an interpretation — not a testable, provable truth. “Hard” drives some people away — and it invites some people to buckle up and head on in — people like Peter Diamandis of the X Prize and Salim Ismail of ExO. I spent three hours last month listening to them lay out their distilled methodology for driving 10X — not 10% — improvement.)

The “exponential organization” strategy may be just the ticket for the challenge I posed — “What if we had to? What if we had to drop GHGs rapidly? What if we had to transform the entire economy on a dime — as the US did effectively in 1942? What if we had to reinvent everything?”

The <tl;dr>:

- a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP)

- 5 External Attributes: Staff on Demand, Community & Crowd, AI & Algorithms, Leveraged Assets, Engagement (SCALE)

- 5 Internal Attributes: Interfaces, Dashboards, Experimentation, Autonomy, Social (IDEAS)

All good. In fact, very good. But, in my listening, something was missing from the very compelling presentation — a grounding in biology and ecology, and the richly intertwingled dynamics of living systems.

Yes, there was concern for the living world — expressed in commitments to ending hunger, building health, providing clean water — but through an all too familiar reductionist/mechanistic/extractive lens, not on its own terms. (Just one example: the fascination with high-intensity, closed environment agriculture, with little regard to the role of living soils in both the nutritional quality of the food produced and the moderation of the global climate.)

So I wonder:

What might it look like to infuse living systems perspective — and a sense of belonging to the living world — into the ExO methodology?

I might just try to find out. Please let me know if you try too.