Innovating from the Future – Part 5: Co-Evolving: Grow Innovation Eco Systems

The movement of co-shaping focuses on scaling the new while growing and evolving innovations Eco-systems for collective impact.

The problem with today’s societal eco-systems is the broken feedback loop between the parts and the whole. The essence of consciousness-based systems thinking like Theory U, is to relink the parts and the whole buy making the system sense and see itself – by closing the feedback loop between collective impact and shared awareness.

It is why innovation labs are working; it is why their initiatives have been able to succeed. But what about the larger eco-systems in which they and all of us operate?

That is where these new innovation infrastructures for making the system sense and see itself are largely missing. The lack of these infrastructures is one of the biggest barriers to societal innovation today.

This is important because we are in the midst of seeing the birth of a fourth co-ordination mechanism. The traditional mechanisms that co-ordinate our social and economic systems i.e. hierarchies, markets and interest group negotiations are not able to provide the governance mechanism required today. Therefor the fourth co-ordination mechanism is critical: acting from shared awareness – acting from seeing the whole.

The development of that collective capacity requires cultivation, practice and enabling infrastructure. That is what Co-Evolving is all about.

Outcomes of Co-Evolving:

1. Reviewing prototype initiatives
2. Sharing key learnings
3. Deciding which prototypes/ideas to advance to the pilot phase
4. Widening the focus from prototype to evolving the eco-system as whole
5. Infrastructures that allow the eco-system to see itself
6. A set of bottlenecks that, if removed, allowed the new to go to scale.
7. Newly formed generative partnerships and alliances for scaling the new
8. A new narrative that links the work with societal or civilizational renewal

Principles:

1. Creating Enabling Infrastructures that allow the system to sense and see itself.
2. Create Massive Capacity-Building mechanisms
3. Labs and Platforms for Cultivating the Social Soil

Next write up: 24 Principles of Large Scale Leadership and Change Management Interventions

This write up is based on Theory U by MIT Prof. Dr. Otto Scharmer