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 tell the stories of Douglas Engelbart – the icon of knowledge federation, and Erich Jantsch, the icon of systemic innovation. 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 responsible, and in a word NECESSARY alternative.

The opportunities on the frontier have a flair of a fairy tale.

But before we begin, let us make sure that the important message is in place: This is not about solving problems. This is about IMPROVING the way we use our time and ingenuity, in a most radical way. So let's share this story to illustrate this central point.

In our second presentation on the Bay Area Future Salon we presented "The Game-Changing Game", a generic prototype method for [[systemic innovation|systemic innovation. The Game-Changing Game is of course not a conventional game, but a game-changing way to conduct one's career, where one does not learn how to perform in a profession and 'plays' competitively, but is empowered to conduct one's career by changing the profession or the system, i.e. by changing the rules.

At the beginning of The Game, which is orchestrated online, one meets a metaphorical fairy who offers to fulfill a most audacious gain or contribution. "Make a fortune in business"; "Save lives and reduce suffering"; "Solve global problems" are some of the choices. Once a choice is made, The Game continues through two modules:

• The Vision Quest, where it is made clear why such larger-than-life achievements are indeed possible by working or "playing" in the specific way that is made possible by The Game
• The Action Quest, where the players receive help to make their dreams real, by co-creating prototypes or projects, or by joining some of the existing ones.

So let us here focus on the specific one of the initial choices which is most closely related with our theme, to make a large contribution to human knowledge. "What is the largest contribution to human knowledge you can imagine?" asks the fairy. You may think of an answer for a moment. Our proposed answer is given in the footnotes at the bottom of this page..

– 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? What is the scientific knowledge base, and the big-picture insight, that can redirect us to a radically better or sustainable new course? What is that pivotal piece in our reality that we above all need to be able to change?

We could have just as well answered those questions by quoting Norbert Wiener – a giant who saw and described an answer already in 1948, in his seminal book Cybernetics. The reason that we chose Erich Jantsch as an icon was that he took this line of thought and action a significant step further – into real-life action.

So here is the key point, in a nutshell: In the old paradigm the institutions are reified by their current implementation. Just as science is is considered to be "what the scientists are doing", so is democracy considered to consist of the familiar mechanisms comprising the "free press", the representative bodies, the debates and the elections etc. When all this is in place and functions as it's supposed to, it is believed that the democracy is also in place, and it functions as it should. A nightmare scenario in this paradigm is the dictatorship, where the control of the society has been taken away from the people by a dictator. But there's another, much worse nightmare scenario, and we are living it! It is the scenario where nobody has control – because the minimal structure is lacking in the system. We called it, metaphorically, the headlights, and so did Engelbart. The cyberneticians have called it "feedback and control". To have the function of control, a system must have suitable information, and the ability to use that information to make the necessary changes. Our system, flagrantly, does not have that structure.

So the story about Jantsch: "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." Like Engelbart, Jantsch was truly a progenitor of the new paradigm! 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. What will be the institution whose role will be to implement these necessary changes? Jantsch concluded that it would have to be the university. In 1969 Jantsch was at the MIT, lobbying... and writing a report about the structure of the future university. "The university must xxx itself for the new purpose of giving our society the capability for continued self-renewal. (SEE THE EXACT TEXT)

It is noteworthy that neither Engelbart nor Jantsch found any resonance for their ideas at the universities – although they of course both saw the university as THE place.

It may also be interesting to notice that Engelbart had an original and practical methodology for [[systemic innovation|systemic innovation already in 1962 – i.e. six years before Jantsch and other systems scientists met in Bellagio...

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.