My Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Startup Regeneration
The Past is In Front of Us
“Cascading failures occur due to stress on systems that were not versatile enough to withstand it.
Leading to a series of cascading failures.
A cascading failure can occur in any system of interconnected parts.
When one part of the system fails, other pieces of the system must now compensate.
And this in turn overloads them.
Nodes throughout the system fail one after the other.
Until the whole infrastructure grinds to a halt.”
The Khmer Empire – Fall of the God Kings, Fall of Civilizations on You Tube(1)
The conundrum
Within our complex and interdependent systems, the pandemic was sufficient stress to cause a cascading effect, rippling throughout whole networks.
Around the world people are witnessing and understanding how the unpredictable and variable events reveal our depleted and fragile ecosystems and imbalances. This includes over-extraction of limited natural resources that provide health and vitality to humans and other living beings. The systems impacts can be seen across nature, socio-cultural, technological, health, political, financial, supply chain and economy and more.
With so much information available at a scale unrecorded in the 3 millions years that we know humans have been around, we are not only aware of, but also directly experiencing the impacts of cascading failures as they occur in real time.
Not everyone responds to this continuous crisis in the same, standardized best practices way. For many this is the first time in their lives that they are dealing with mass existential events.
And unlike our ancestors from the past who could migrate and settle in other places…due to the inter-connectedness of the world we inhabit, it appears there are limited stable and safe havens to move to – unless you are extremely mobile, networked and wealthy.
Irrespective their fragmented worldview, what people have in common is that they are, in their own way, actively looking for and investing in beyond-sustainability solutions and industries to help them navigate and be successful and thrive in the future.
Here are my top 10 reasons to startup regeneration today
The regenerative moment offers active hope through positive approach goals, strategies to achieve these goals and the motivation to expend effort to achieve the goals.
Here is my list of what I think are the top 10 issues that also offer high potential and value for regenerative innovations.
1. A global dominant culture that simplifies, views and treats everything including human psychology and nature, generically – as if all humans and ecosystems are the same everywhere.
2. Don’t tell me what to do: Forcing behavioural change always results in denial and resistance. Even those comfortable with disruptive change now experience crisis fatigue and saturation.
3. Everyone is an activist and everything is activism permeates life and popular culture.
4. Deep distrust and cynicism in the sincerity, integrity and credibility of establishment leaders, institutions and systems of governance. Leaders’ complacency of disaster risks due to underestimation of systems vulnerabilities and sense of invincibility.
5. Trying to solve systemic problems with more leadership development, yoga, wellness and self-improvement experts, teachers and coaches. The result is an inward looking culture focused on self improvement as separate from what is happening in reality. These big business industries have not produced better leaders nor positive outcomes for the planet.
6. Misfit of the culture and values we inherited, and the new world in which we find ourselves.
7. The global scale of relationship estrangement and loss of core elements of consensus reality that used to motivate collaboration and co-creation: Continuous fragmentation and division of worldviews, values and reality tunnels forming stress lines across society.
8. Accelerated cognitive degeneration due to the constant existential news cycles and existential fears, anxieties and trauma.
9. Rebel culture and politically unthinkable going mainstream and even becoming policy: Shift in the overton window (window of discourse).
10. Nostalgia for past stability, entertainment, security, joy, vitality, hedonic wellbeing and positive and hopeful futures.
Reference:
(1) Paul Cooper, The Khmer Empire – Fall of the God Kings, Episode 5 of the Fall of Civilizations Show, You Tube