This Must Become a Collaboration
So far, nearly all of the postings at this website have been my own. However, I do not want this to continue. I have invited Society members with whom I correspond; men and women of accomplishment, to write guest blogs. None has yet found the time. They are busy people who, unlike me, are not focused on this, so that is no surprise. But it will come.
More importantly, as I see it, the next two major projects should be a simulation and developing a plan for building a Celebration Society. The two would appear to support each other. (Ideally, there will be a virtuous cycle of mutual feedback and improvement.) The key difference between them is that the simulation will be a co-participative process involving large numbers of regular people, while the planning process will be a co-participative process involving experts in all of the relevant disciplines.
In neither of these do I see myself as running the process. I have no expertise as a planner, nor with simulations. A Celebration Society will not happen in a hierarchical fashion. It will happen as a network of people, with deference granted based on the ability to articulate a persuasive argument. As I said in the book, “Leadership will not be based on hierarchical power structures of how many people are obligated to follow your orders, but rather on a collaborative model of how many people are willing to follow your vision.”
It needs to go beyond even that. Mature people recognize both their competencies and their limitations. A project of this magnitude will require one of the widest sets of expertise of any project in history. What we will need, then, are mature people whose strengths and weaknesses overlap. If I am strong where you are weak, and you are strong where I am weak, we complement each other. If we both recognize this, and defer to each other (not blindly, but based on evidence), we can be stronger together than apart.
Extend this thinking to dozens of people, and you have the basis for a project. If each domain of expertise goes further, creating its own collaborative team, then we will avoid many of the mistakes that inevitably happen when an individual (however gifted) is solely responsible for such a domain.
The book is a very high level overview. It offers a scaffolding upon which many different ideas can be hung and tested. It doesn’t go deeper than that, because I lack the expertise to do so. Even if I did have relevant expertise in some of the domains, it would be imprudent for me to go into such depth.
If this isn’t a collaborative process of definition, testing, and refinement, we will fail before we begin. For that reason, I am deliberately limiting my role to those things I do well: articulating a vision, enrolling people into that vision, speaking and writing.
Already, our allies include experts in transportation, architecture, software security, organizational development, education, and certain other disciplines. I am excited to see how this is unfolding!