Powered by ingenuity of innovation, the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the efficiency of human work. Where could the next revolution of this kind be coming from?

We look at the systems in which we live and work. Imagine them as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology, whose function is to take people's daily work as input, and turn it into socially useful effects. Incredibly, the ingenuity of our innovation has been focused on small gadgets we can hold in our hand—and we overlooked this far more important frontier.

Power structure wastes resources

The Ferguson–McCandless–Fuller thread is intended to serve as a parable, pointing to the wastefulness of our core institutions or systems in general (in this example they are represented by finance, and governance tainted by "special interests"). See it outlined on Page 4 of this article, and also here.

This conclusion suggests itself.

We have the resources needed to take care of world's problems. Our root problem is in the structure of our systems—which determine how those resources are distributed and used.

Power structure causes devolution

We chose to use here the keyword power structure, instead of "institutions" or "systems", to point to the reason why we ignored the possibility to adjust the systems in which we live and work to their societal purposes, as the Modernity ideogram suggests we should. The reason is they fulfill an entirely different purpose—they provide a relatively stable environment for our various turf strifes and power battles. We have learned that by complying, we increase our odds of success.

Ironically, and in ways that need to be carefully understood, when we surrender our power to the power structures, they give us an illusion of power; and they acquire power over us, which we tend to ignore.

In this way, the devolution of our system proceeded unhindered, even unnoticed.

The Chomsky–Harari–Graeber thread is intended to serve as another parable. It points to a sobering conclusion: The social-systemic "survival of the fittest" favors aggressive systems, which are damaging to both our culture and ourselves. See it outlined here. Conclude with the reflection on Joel Bakan's "The Corporation", which follows. It will show that although the results of this systemic devolution may look different in our time than they did centuries ago, their pathological character has remained unchanged.

Systemic innovation is the solution

Erich Jantsch's insight

Having delivered the opening keynote at the inaugural meeting of The Club of Rome, Erich Jantsch clearly saw what needed to be done, if the "problematique" was to be resolved (see it outlined here and here).

Our society needs a new capability—to update the systems in which we live and work. Jantsch called it "systemic innovation", and we adopted from him this keyword.

We let Jantsch be the symbol of a missing link between two bodies of work and lines of interest: cybernetics or the systems sciences, and the need to make our civilization "sustainable". In the present holotopiaprototype, those interests are symbolized respectively by Norbert Wiener and Aurelio Peccei.

System ideogram

The System ideogram suggests that our institutions, or more generally the systems in which we live and work, need to be perceived as gigantic mechanisms, comprising people and technology; and also handled accordingly.

The socio-technical systems determine what the results of our work will be. They form an environment by which our life quality is determined, and in which our human quality either grows or decays.

Power structure

Every genuine revolution—and our proposed revolution in knowledge and awareness is not an exception—is also a revolution of the way in which power relationships, or "justice", are perceived and handled. We coined this keyword to point out where the next such revolution may be coming from.

The power structure keyword models the intuitive notions of "power holder" and "political enemy"—in an entirely new way. (All five insights are required, however, to understand its meaning fully and correctly.)

George Bernard-Shaw's dictum is familiar:

“All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”

"The conspiracies refer to the methods used by professions to acquire prestige, power and wealth", explains Wikipedia.

The power structure keyword allows us to extend his insight, by observing that the professions can be, and surprisingly often also are, conspiracies against the professionals themselves as well! They make the professionals busy and stressed competing with one another—and still leave the work undone. Our society remains non-[[wholeness|whole], and we all suffer the consequences.

The power structure may be understood intuitively as social-systemic cancer—a 'malignant' growth of otherwise normal and necessary societal 'tissues', which saps the 'organism's' vitality and majorly disrupts its wholeness.

On occasions, we used the power structure definition to argue that the proposed approach to knowledge is a necessary element of our 'societal immune system', because without it we cannot even see our enemy. See the blog post Holoscope for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, where the history of the power structure definition with links is provided at the end.

Systemic innovation

To restore agency to information, and power to knowledge, we must develop ways to extend them into systemic change. That is what systemic innovation is about.

Systemic innovation can be interpreted in two ways: As "making things whole", and as innovation on the scale of basic socio-technical systems. Both are needed to counteract the power structure devolution, and closely related.

Knowledge Federation transdiscipline

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline is an early prototype of what Erich Jantsch was calling for—an academic institution that is capable of federating information into systems. The method we use is straight forward: We create a systemic prototype, and organize a transdiscipline around it to update it continuously, by weaving together relevant disciplinary insights. The Knowledge Federation initiates or bootstraps this approach by creating itself as a prototype of the transdiscipline.

This self-organization was initiated at Knowledge Federation's second biennial workshop in Dubrovnik in 2010, and announced publicly at our first international workshop, within the Triple Helix IX International Conference at Stanford University, in 2011. See the blog report with link to article here. See also our concise summary titled " Enabling Social-Systemic Transformations", contributed to the "Transformation in a Changing Climate" conference.