When I was doing my evolutionary stuff -- I have it on my wall in front of me -- I had to force myself to think about the centrality of life energy. What is the evolutionary process through which exuberance came to be in all of its manifestations?

There’s something really important about what you’re doing. I’m not even sure I’m built to recognize it, partly because of your relaxed, fun, center of gravity. I enjoy having fun, but fun is not the center. I’ve had to work, because other people, like the exuberance card...

Right, right. When I looked at your stuff and all the things I wrote in that 10-page thing, which I’m not embarrassed about. It was my adolescence, a developmental stage.

I can’t think in those terms, and I have zero...You’re one of the few truly international, cross-cultural engagements I’ve had. I’m so American, Western, white guy, it’s pathetic.

In terms of the development goals. There was a big thing, with tons of money attached to it, on global governance. Did you run across that thing, a contest for global governance, that had a million dollars guaranteed to the winner of the thing?

Whenever we have linear things we’re trying to do, it’s going to take too much time. It’s got to be nonlinear, the impulse that I bring, which has probably too much linearity and seriousness for you, but you’re on to something. Actually, you’re not on it, you’re in it. You’re ...

You can frame it in those terms. How do we collectively, co-intelligently, wisely do our work together on the ground to get stuff to happen? You’re doing a variation of it. There’s a number of things I’m involved in, where this is another form of that, that has things to ...

We’ll be looking for money, blah, blah, blah. It’s just another fact that these networks are trying to work together. We’re working on real-world problems, and they’re cross-sector. Once again, I look at your stuff and go, "That’s a manifestation of this, in a very different way than we’ve been ...

It was a really interesting exercise. It took months of every-other-week meetings to do that. That’s the stage we’re at. We’re in the process. There’s a small group that has been researching case studies, different networks that are working together in specific places, doing specific things.

They said, "Then that’s your narrative. That’s a narrative of what your group is trying to do, is what’s that thing, over time. You need to use that to create texts or videos or whatever to tell people about what you’re doing."

The cluster names are clustered and feedback loops are drawn between these different dimensions of each of these things, showing how they support each other or block each other.

Once we settled on the clusters, then we had to agree, collectively, on Zoom, what to name the clusters. All of that was laid on the three horizons. Then there’s another level of abstraction, where the clusters are pulled out and laid along the three horizons.

I don’t have this. They reduced our answers to Post-It notes that they put on the horizon charts. First, they put them all in a big rectangle, and we had to collectively sort them into groups, all our little answers. That was very frustrating, because the Post-It notes kept flying ...

We’ll go to horizon three next. What’s world look like that you want? If you really achieved your purposes, what would it look like? We wrote our answers to for that kind of thing. Then, "What needs to happen for that to happen? What are existing things and things that ...

There are exercises. I could take you to an illustration. They do an online whiteboard with online Post-It notes. They asked us questions like, "What is it about the way governance is now that you can’t stand?" We all wrote our answers to those, for questions for horizon one.

The second horizon goes up over it, overlaps the first, as it’s going down. The second horizon, which is things you’re doing to change things, it rises up, and then levels off. Horizon three rises from the middle, and goes way up. That’s the world that you want.

There is a visual. There are three curves. The first horizon is a curve that starts high, goes a little higher, and then goes down. This is the way things are is going to die off.

No.

It’s a practice.

Hmm?

Three Horizons. The way things are now is horizon one and the things you don’t like about it.

Yeah, Network Governance. We’re going through very step-by-step kinds of organizing, which I don’t know how to do. I’m along for the ride. Have you ever heard of Three Horizons practice?

ENGI, Emerging Network...

Out of all that stuff is emerging a thing currently, ENGI, Emerging Network Governance Initiative. Tracy, who is a very good organizer, Steve is supporting Tracy to relieve some of her consulting to...

Yes. Those seven people, when asked, "What are you observing and what’s needed," they say, "It’s a struggle trying to work together." I’m thinking, "We have such incredible tools to work together. If that’s your problem, there’s a match made in heaven here."

That’s happening. There’s hundreds of these happening all over the world. I connected up Tracy and Steve, and we ended up talking every week on Zoom for months. Then we did a session at a conference on democratic innovations. Out of 200 people at the conference, seven people came to ...

They don’t necessarily know how to do that. Sometimes big players, like multinational corporations or government people, will try to take over and try and get everybody else to do what they want. Other ones are much more peer-based. That level of collaboration, across that level of difference, is new, ...

She referred me to a guy named Steve Waddell, who had been working for years and written several books on it. He was noting that the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations, every one of them is gathering around it multi-sector, multi-stakeholder, multi-scale networks that are trying to ...

She’s an online facilitator and does graphic facilitation online.

She was going, "This is an emerging form of governance." Several weeks later, another colleague, Nancy White...Do you know Nancy White?

This Tracy Kunkler is a consultant -- yes, that’s the MS3 stuff -- largely with networks that are involved with food systems in Appalachia. She wrote a little blog post noting that she was seeing the farmers have their networks. Consumers and groceries have their networks. Government regulators have their ...

Network governance, multi-sector, multi-stakeholder, multi-scale networks collaborating is an emerging form of governance. I realize this overlaps totally with your stuff. You are practicing it in a very dynamic way.

That brings me to another piece. You probably already read my blog post. [laughs] I’m predicting now how you behave. You’re so predictable. You’ve already done everything.

You plug in different things. They made that first with a school that was having all these problems. Instead of addressing the problems, they had them do a little café on, "What could this school also be." It’s like, bling, you’re outside of the whole frame of reference, instantly.

One of my favorite what I call zipper questions because you can put all sorts of things into it, it’s like, "What could this conversation also be? What could vTaiwan also be? What could governments also be?" [laughs]

That’s another one of the powerful, nonlinear processes. They are masters. I have a list of people, Quakers, and the World Café. The World Café people are brilliant.

Questions can have linear power or non-linear power, in the sense of questions that open space. You’re directing attention, but you’re directing it to a space, not a point. Questions that have answers -- what’s four times four -- is directing you to a point. The World Café people -- ...

That thing that I mentioned earlier, when Miki was on, of questions, there’s a whole page on the Co-Intelligence Institute website, if you want to poke in it and instantly see it a bunch of links, about questions and the idea that questions have power.

They’re not necessarily physical. These are virtual spaces. Language is a virtual space. Then new varieties -- co-intelligence is a new word. It’s like a new species has shown up, the ecosystem of language, and that’s another kind of space.

One of the things when I was studying evolution, which connects back to this space thing, the invention of video games created a realm within which evolution happens. The creation of language creates a realm. It’s like this branching off. We’re really good at creating new realms for evolution to ...

The great grand-mama of all activism is the evolutionary process, and we better learn from great grand-mama and not ignore her. That’s my "Reflections on Evolutionary Activism" book. What would it mean to try to learn from evolution, and not just be evolutionary agents, but take on that identity of ...

To me, one of the language of people like Michael Dowd is that we are evolution becoming conscious of itself. We are the universe looking at itself through telescopes -- all these inversions. If we are evolution become conscious of itself, then all our efforts to change conditions in the ...

He wrote a book called, "Thank God For Evolution," and has a website thankgodforevolution.com. His name’s Michael Dowd. I became a close colleague of his for several years, and became finally unsatisfied with his work, where it was limited by not having enough about activism.

He got converted to the science-based story of evolution as our sacred formation/creation story, from the Big Bang till now. He totally reframed Christianity in science-based, evolutionary terms. God is reality and facts are God’s native tongue, and stuff like that, "You gotta get right with reality. Get right with ...

Space, to me, doesn’t necessarily have boundaries. Space is big. It’s one of those things I have an intuition for, and the words don’t...A bounded space is a specific kind of space. It’s like a realm. The word realm I use a lot. I have a colleague -- I have ...

Something tells me that Nora will understand that better than I will. She has a list of about 15 different scientific principles or theories that you need to understand before you can name what’s called a "station" in her warm data labs. I go, "This is unnecessarily complexifying it," but ...

I stumbled on an article of mine. It wasn’t on any of my websites. It was on this consultant’s website with his name as the author. I went, "Wow, he’s carrying my words on. That’s great." [laughs]

I live in a co-op house with young people, and they every now and then pull out the Magic...

I may have lots of philosophy about what that means, but I have not seen anybody who comes close to doing that the way you do. [laughs] "Whoa, has this guy got that down."

There’s only a couple of references to the Tao Te Ching in there, but the key one is that the leader leads well when the people say they did it themselves, and the idea of action and no action.