Message to Venessa Miemis about her “Pay It Forward Business Model”

Venessa wrote a fascinating blog entry  on

“A Pay It Forward Business Model [in transition to a new global society].”

It prompted the following open message to her.

Dear Venessa,

Your “pay it forward” model is hugely inspiring in all of the various scope of its meaning! 

I start responding from the one that is the juiciest for me, the scope of our Emerging Planetary Reality.  We’re in the midst of a world transition that still has to generate highly-scalable practices of value creation and exchange beyond the logic of the incumbent mode of production. I see your quest in the context of that larger one.

As Scott Lewis  wrote: “In regards to the gift economy, I don’t think we’ve ever been without it.” True, it persisted throughout human history but largely as an under current of economic activity. Now it is stepping into history’s limelight a second time.

This time, it comes with a mission: to help freeing the energies of our individual and social creativity, intuition, caring, and imagination, trapped in work systems that don’t honor our highest aspirations. Only liberating those energies, will Emergence gain enough momentum to lift us into the next civilization.  (Here, “next” means: capable to operate at a higher level of complexity and harmony.) The value of your offer to the world, at that level, is in its contribution to that liberation. It’s like “a small step for Venessa, one giant leap for mankind.”

You wrote, “The more conversations we have, the better informed we’ll be about what each of us has to offer, and what the most productive mix of people might be to have emergent, creative, innovative dialogues.” You’ve just listed two of the key ingredients for augmenting collective intelligence in any social system: frequent conversations that matter, and a team that is hosting/facilitating generative dialogues. The third one is an enabling innovation infrastructure.

Looking at your “pay it forward” pattern through the lens of the “here and now” of your ecosystem, and the increasing social capital of all involved, what I see is not less inspiring. You wrote: ” Anyone who adopts this model can choose what their Pay It Forward part looks like. Maybe for you, it’s not an individual, but an initiative.”  Well, I will definitely play with ways to make use of a variation of the model in my mentoring practice. Besides that, it can also become the conduit for any group of service providers to sponsor the resource requirements for augmenting their own collective intelligence (infrastructure, hosting, etc.).

That boosting of CI is not optional if the group wants to grow capacity to help its Clients addressing increasingly complex challenges. What I wrote above is just one of the many possible scenarios that your ideas triggered in my mind.

You also wrote: “With your permission, I would like to record and post these conversations, and do a writeup about the highlights and insights I gained from them, so that others can also learn by viewing them. (This again is part of the premise of Junto – when the platform is functioning at that capacity, all conversations will be recorded, timecoded, transcribed, and summarized, so that anyone can have access to the knowledge and wisdom that is shared through conversation.)”

I can hardly wait for that capacity to enable us to grow wiser together!  Clearly, Junto has the potential to become a CI accelerator or, at least, a big part of such an accelerator. It comes just in time, when organizations and social systems in transition need that accelerator more than ever before. As ever vaster volumes of generative conversations recorded and transcribed become available to all, to help making meaning of them, the other parts of the CI accelerator also needs to be in place: the collective mapping and sensing organs. But that’s another story.

Venessa, I see you standing in a precious spot of your “personal permaculture”, where your courage, authenticity, wisdom opened ways to multiple yield to society, your ecosystem and yourself. I tried to sketch out a few but obviously, there’s more to it.

I cherish the work that you’ve been doing on yourself to get to this point in your life. I’m holding it and your “pay it forward” pattern in their highest potential and am available to be your learning partner to fully realize it, if and when you can use one more.

Hope  to Junto  with you, sometime soon.

george

ps to Seb Paquet: thanx 4 calling my attention to Junto and Venessa’s work!