How does one lift up an insight of a giant out of undeserved anonymity?

We tell vignettes – engaging, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories, to distill core ideas of daring thinkers and make them accessible. By joining vignettes into threads, and threads into patterns, we combine insights across fields of interest and reach general insights that are vital to us all.

We focus on what we must know to make our future sustainable.

We focus on the giants who can inform our core theme – a radically better use of our capacity to create. We'll see that they have not yet been heard. We'll see that they were not given a place in the academia. We tell their stories to show the zeitgeist we've created, the academic culture – and to make a case for opening up a radically more creative and NECESSARY alternative.

The opportunities that become accessible on the new paradigm frontier may sound like a fairy tale.

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– Digital technology could help make this a better world. But we've also got to change our way of thinking.

We point to Douglas Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution, because "the story of Doug" is emblematic of the paradigm shift we are in. Is it indeed possible that the Silicon Valley failed to understand its genius in residence, even after having recognized him as such? Is it indeed the case that the computer technology we now have on our desktops was conceived for a much larger and far more vital purpose than it presently serves?

In December of 1950 Engelbart decided to direct his career as it may best benefit the mankind. He thought for three months about the best way to do that, and then had an epiphany... What is it that he saw that he wasn't able to communicate? While the book titled "Systemic Innovation", and subtitled "Democracy for the Third Millennium" (which will be the second book in Knowledge Federation Trilogy) is being written to propose answers, you may already gather sufficient detail on these pages to construct your own ones. </p>

– The task is nothing less than to build a new society and new institutions for it.

What is that new thinking that can enable us to "make this a better world"? What might innovation and democracy have to do with one another? We answer these questions by combining the story of Doug with the story of Erich Jantsch. While Jantsch was a physicist turned systems scientist, we in Knowledge Federation elevate him as an iconic giant whose insights must inform our efforts to resolve the large global challenges and make our civilization "sustainable" or durable (or simply evolving in a good direction) need to be founded. In 1968, upon giving the opening keynote at the inaugural meeting of The Club of Rome (global think tank organized to investigate the future prospects of our civilization), Jantsch saw clearly what needed to be done, and organized some of the leading systems scientists to (as we now call it) federate their ideas together and compose a detailed answer.

"The task is nothing less than to build a new society and new institutions for it. With technology having become the most powerful change agent in our society, decisive battles will be won or lost by the measure of how seriously we take the challenge of restructuring the “joint systems” of society and technology."

And then there's the invisible elephant!

Perhaps the main reason why the best ideas of our best minds are still waiting to be discovered by us others is – paradoxically – that they do truly make a difference! To make sense, an idea must fit in snuggly with our other ideas, or into our shared paradigm. But as we mentioned – the best ideas of our best minds compose together an altogether different paradigm! And hence our giants appear to us as those proverbial blind men touching an elephant, each speaking excitedly about its different part.

We undertake to make a difference by describing the whole thing – and then showing how the pieces fit in and compose its different parts. As the organs of an elephant will only be truly understood when seen as functional parts of the whole big animal, so can the visions and contributions of our giants only be understood when seen in the context of the new order of things to which they are intended to contribute.