Making an impact in the 21st century - what does it take to make a difference?

What is the role of work? How can you make a difference in 2010?

These were some of the questions fitting in the flow that I went through during yesterday (Saturday the 28^th of November. )Jarda, Emma and Maritna had kindly put together a wonderful space aiming at creating meaningful elaborations on the questions above both on an individual level, but also for us as collective.

The last three months have been about scaling down, building context and practicing the beginners mind in my current context. I learn, I have fun and I am challenged–I feel a lot of gratitude towards my current context. That aside, yesterday was for me a reconnection to some of the bigger questions that I continuously need to ask myself, but also that we as humanity need to ask ourselves.

Yesterday was an investment in myself. An opportunity to bread and listen to what’s emerging. It was also an opportunity for me to understand how the last three months have impacted the way I think. Yesterday meant a lot for me because the space helped me to show up, ask questions, explore answers, learn and ask more questions. I was also happy connecting to some old friends and meet some new.

The key discoveries include issues on three dimensions: World, Society, Individual.

As opposed to attacking the problems, we tried to understand the causes. The group working on the world dimension phrased their cause beautifully as a “sense of separation” - between earth and humanity, body and mind. Exploring our societal issues we talked about the importance of de-couple carbon and development, and consumption with happiness, we discussed the rapid nature of the way in which things happens, we distinguished between knowledge and wisdom, east and west and we also discussed guiding ideas. It is important to recognize the difference between ideas and guiding ideas, guiding ideas being ideas, leading to action. Someone said, logic help us draw conclusions, feelings makes us act, the same distinguishes ideas from guiding ideas.

It could be argued that today’s guiding ideas in terms of success on an individual level is the number of cars we own, on organizational level it is shareowner return and on national level it is GDP growth. These guiding ideas have helped us to achieve prosperity in some parts of the world, but they are also causing some of the most pressing issues of our time. If we accept that our guiding ideas are steering our action and that the power of guiding ideas have created the prosperity in the western world during the last 200 years, an enormous opportunity to attack our current pressing issues emerges.

Viewing guiding ideas on these different levels also help us recognize the important of different types of solutions on different levels. On national level, e.g. a new guiding idea could be happiness, if that would be our guiding idea, our actions would fundamentally be different and the countries that we would look up to would also be different… as opposed to understand the western world being the index, Colombia would be the most advance nation., recognizing that Colombia has the happiest people in the world…! This shows how incredibility important the upcoming meeting in Copenhagen is, because that is an opportunity to change our guiding ideas on a national level.

It took 50 years to build the global brand of coke, 3 years to build the global brand of Yahoo, 2 years for google and 1 year for youtube… the rapid nature in which ideas can be spread and reach mainstream is super quick and that is really what make me hopeful. Combining the opportunity of guiding ideas and the rapid way in which those can reach the world, it is possible to be hopeful... because if we can get it right, the speed in which change can happen is enormously fast….!

As we came to understand some of the underlying causes to today’s issues, we continued to understand the personal visions that were in the room. I had the opportunity to visit 2014 and my life at that time – a very powerful journey! The remaining work will be to put that vision into a painting that I will carry with me going forward! I feel that I have a big mandate and responsibility, but I also feel very clear on my present and future!

Hosts and participants of yesterday – thank you for being there and helping me to create clarity about my present and future and for giving me hope about the world!

This was a rushed post, because Sunday also means preparing for another week, however, I wanted to get some of these feelings and thoughts down and then hopefully revisit the post soon again to add some more thoughts at a later date!

Until next exchange

Emanuel