MacroRisk Connect is part of an ecosystem of research, analysis and development which is co-creating a shared understanding of political economy (see Analysis) using the open source CoCreative Learning methodology.
CoCreative Learning is the natural alternative to competitive education practice and its power to accelerate learning and expand understanding has to be experienced to be believed.
Trained Ignorance
Learning is not a competition.
In Gulag Academia, we explain how, over centuries and our lifetimes, we’ve been trained to compete. From the time we enter school, we are tested, graded and sorted in a way that determines our “use” or value to the political economy. We are kept ignorant of our true condition unless we decide to educate ourselves independently of public and private education systems.
Those who succeed in academia are recruited into positions of power and influence and, irrespective of their “expertise” or its relevance to a particular event or issue, add weight to misinformation and misdiagnosis by virtue of their status or position.
Groupthink
Groupthink abounds in the current political economy, often polarised between two opposing ideologies. Our current political economy is founded on competition and, in academia, on competing ideas. Issues are “argued” between two polarised standpoints: true/false, right/left, right/wrong etc.- binary thinking.
But the political economy is infinitely nuanced and often ambiguous, yet there is limited time or room for subtlety or ambiguity in academia and, as a result, even less when trying to prioritise macro risks. Glaringly obvious contradictions and misrepresentations are lost within this cage of compartmentalised, binary groupthink.
Beyond the Familiar
So we need to move out of the comfort of our social and business circles to explore other perspectives. We must avoid being like the blind men of Indostan who tried, unsuccessfully, to describe an elephant while each “saw” (by touch) a different part of the beast. We need to listen to the “other” to comprehend the nature and effect of the political economy from their perspective before deciding we know how the world works and what macro risks we face. To gain a full understanding, we need to look beyond our usual sources of information.
Information volume and complexity
Another reason our perspectives are so narrow is that we can only absorb so much information, particularly when we attempt look beyond our usual sources. No one mind can absorb, sift, analyse and synthesise sufficient information to get a grasp of part of the system, let alone the whole because there are numerous hidden influences and connections at work. To “see” the political economy and how macro risks are interconnected, we need multiple perspectives to begin to unravel the nature and workings of the political economy. The only way to cover sufficient ground to gain these perspectives is through self-organised, co-creative learning.
Self-Organisation
Conventional wisdom assumes large complex enterprises or projects cannot function without organisational hierarchy. Frederic Laloux’s research and book, Reinventing Organizations, demonstrate how large, complex tasks are accomplished through self-organisation.
Frederic shows, with case studies, how self-organisation can effectively manage large scale complexity, such as in a distributed endogenous token system.
Self-organisation created the internet and related technologies, including distributed ledger technology (DLT).
Information sources
In order to understand the world, we need to absorb and share information and analysis from diverse sources, beyond institutions with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
We need to look to unconventional sources, particularly those we may have come to distrust. We need to explore different perspectives to begin to understand political economy. Diversity is key in co-creative learning – diversity of voices, diversity of worldviews and diversity of sources of information.
CoCreative Development
The methodology applied to co-creating a shared understanding of political economy is driving the co-creative development of the new political economy, underpinned by endogenous tokens, that avoids the structural flaws of the current money structure while satisfying human Needs.
CoCreative Learning Methodology
More information on the open source CoCreative Learning methodology is available on the website and at archive.org.