Spark Series: Impact Networks
Converge founder David Ehrlichman joins us this Wednesday night (3.23) at 8pm EST
Amidst the madness, this much seems clear: we won’t get out of the mess we’re in by applying the same logic that got us here in the first place.
We need a new path, and a new story.
Whereas for centuries we’ve all lived under the same systemic trappings of modern life (from capitalism to communism), today we require a new kind of order, and a new source of strength. “Anything not built for a network age — our politics, our economics, our national security, our education — is going to crack apart under its pressures,” argues journalist Joshua Cooper Ramo.
“Our era is one of connected crises. Relationships now matter as much as any single object. And puzzles such as the future of United States-China relations or income inequality or artificial intelligence or terrorism are all network problems, unsolvable with traditional thinking.”
This feels like an especially relevant observation when the problems we face – now and in the future – seem so overwhelming. Yet David Ehrlichman, the cofounder of Converge, believes the way forward is more apparent than you may think.
“Not only are networks the organic social structures that we naturally form,” he explains; “they can be cultivated to accelerate learning, spark collaboration, and catalyze systemic change.”
He’s not alone in thinking this way. For years, scholars in fields ranging from biology to ecology have been revising the metaphors they use to describe their work — from hierarchies to networks — and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”
In the daily whir of our personal and professional lives, that means we need one another more than ever – and not just the people who make up our proximite physical pods, but those of us who, thanks to today’s dialectical technologies, can now foster meaningful connections (and expand our respective self-creating patterns) across miles and time zones and traditions.
"When you form groups,” writes Iain Couzin, who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior, “you suddenly have a network system where social interactions exist. We have traditionally assumed that intelligence resides in our brains, in the individual animal. But we have found the first evidence that intelligence can also be encoded in the hidden network of communication between us."
This is why we created the Seed + Spark Network – as a space for new rituals in this highly liminal period of our lives.
And this week, in the latest installment of the Spark Series (public conversations about a new story for humanity, using nature as our guide), I invite you to join us as we host David this Wednesday night, March 23, at 8pm EST (via this link) for a conversation about networks – and how we can help support their creation in order to build a better world, by design.
This is how we #changethestory . . .