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The Emergence of Our Natural Culture

Just viewed a couple of videos by Don Tapscott that are remarkable close to what I, myself, have perceived through my own systems thinking and observance of cultural patterns.

Institutions are failing. They can’t handle the weight of the complexity that is overloading them. We are effectively living in the past, utilizes approaches from many years ago that no longer work today. We’re at a turning point, a transition and transformation from the old world view to a new world view that is being born as we speak. We need to stop trying to iterate on the past and instead leap courageously into the future.

We’re not leaping blinding though. There are many people around the world with the foresight and vision to see this change and embrace it openly. They’ve been working for years to prepare this bridge, each in their own way, and to help people to navigate across it into this new world view.

I find it somewhat ironic that Don initially indicates that we’re creating this global machine or computer via the Web. Actually the reason that things have gotten so bad as they have is because things have become too machine-like. In effect, we’ve lost our humanity, our human nature, somewhere along the way, in exchange for efficiency and desired perfection that is failing us dramatically because of our inability to adapt and change our “programming”.

We’re not machines and we’re not perfect. And that, strangely enough, is a good thing because it our imperfections that make us human. It is our frailties, our vulnerabilities, that make us human to each other, thus making us want to reach out to one another and connect. But it’s apparent that Don himself even realizes this at the end when he indicates the emergence of a networked intelligence, a collective mind, that allows us to learn, grow, and adapt collaboratively in ways we’ve never dreamt possible before.

So what’s happening here though? What are the core components of this cultural DNA that is effectively changing mankind, helping it to evolve to its next stage of evolution? Open, sharing, and caring are the core trinity elements that I’ve seen, as Don seems to attest to as well. But it goes further than that. It’s how these elements are utilized together as a sort of cultural vaccine that rewires an organization, effectively transforming the people within it into a neural network for the emergence of a collective mind, thus allowing them to collaborate in an almost symbiotic nature. (And yes I’ve seen this level of collaboration within a team before using this same cultural DNA and it’s simply amazing to experience.)

But really what’s the composition of this cultural DNA? Well that’s what I’ve been working on for years and, yes, I believe I’ve finally cracked it. The hard part, as usual, is articulating what I intuitively know. What I can say though is that I’m calling it “Natural Culture” because from my perspective it’s a culture that restores the human nature within organizations and kickstarts it to life, transforming it from a machine into a living collective entity that can finally sustain the life within it.

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