Radical NLP, Mythology, Spirituality, Leadership, and other Change Technologies » Paul Kordis

#153 Swimming with Dolphins – Passion – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 16

RCG — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:00:23 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Paul has been researching writing, and speaking to groups for over 20 years about the processes of profound change. He is a globally traveled speaker and seminar leader on futuristic, human development, change and other topics. He received his Ph.D. degree (with honors) in human capital and economic development from Colorado State University in May, 2008.

His 1,500-page dissertation is entitled “The Superhighway to Serfdom: How False-Social-Norms Marketing is Hijacking the American Dream.” He is a co-author (with Dudley Lynch) of the books The Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World, which has become a best seller, and Code of the Monarch: A Guide to the Real Global Business Revolution. He is also the author (with his wife, Susan) of the book Name Your Passion: A User’s Guide to Finding Your Personal Purpose.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

How do I know what my gift is?
What is the story that we are moving into?
- Each world view has its own mythology
- Moving from one world to the next through the narrative
Myths for each of the value systems
Surprises

#152 Swimming with Dolphins – Passion – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 15

RCG — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:00:39 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Passion
- Doing what you love
- Doing the way you love to do it – a good context
- Need to do it where it is needed – finding the right place
- "If you feel good at work, you are not doing your work" – the social myth to overcome
"The Secret" fad
- Envisioning is only half the story, you have to take action
- "I love a good breakfast, but I don’t like to make it". Try lying in bed manifesting it.
Attributes of the winners – people who have successively lived being on purpose
Bigger than self

#151 Swimming with Dolphins – Power – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 14

RCG — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 15:00:14 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Conscious consumption & investment
- Let’s all agree to work less
Cooperation
- Punishing the non-punisher
Manipulation of symbols
- Any codification and shorthand is a gross overgeneralization
- Breaking the power of symbols – going to process thinking
Linear & Systemic Thinking
- Majoring in minor things
Decision making & decision systems
- Cannot make a true transformation without entering the people’s map first
Knowing your board of directors
- Life is more complex than we would like it to be

#150 Swimming with Dolphins – Power – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 13

RCG — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 15:00:35 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Value Systems & Power
Architecture & Power
- The tallest building indicates the prevailing power
Motivation for Transition
- It has to be painful enough where you are, and the pleasure of where you want to go must be high enough in order to motivate you to endure the pain of the transition
- Learned helplessness – after some point, people give up
Power of Narrative

#149 Swimming with Dolphins – Power – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 12

RCG — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 15:00:51 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Religion – Fundamentalism
Corporate and Military
Media

#148 Swimming with Dolphins – Power – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 11

RCG — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:00:50 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Economy
- If we work less, we may have higher quality of life
- From deadlines to lifelines
- From maximizing profit to maximizing value
- Spreading ideas
Power
Holy and Unholy Trinity: Economy, Religion, Politics

#147 Swimming with Dolphins – Mirror Neurons & Social Capital – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 10

RCG — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:00:09 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the complete series.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Social Capital
- Economic ladder
- Social capital – doing business is a social process
- Context and environment is important
Mirror Neurons
- Empathy – mixing rich and poor makes rich want to help, if only not to feel the poor’s pain
Rapport, Brain and Autism
- Rapport – maching & mirroring – it’s a tool, the difference in application
- Autism – a disfunction of mirror neurons
- Monkey moving the cursor
Disconnect of empathy in our society
- Manipulation is not always bad

For Everything Else, There’s Mastercard

Paul Kordis — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:34:44 +0000

Each week I spend several hours of “porch time” (a la Boston Legal) with my friend Michael Szczepaniak discussing our newest insights into social and political economics. In several of these discussions I’ve related my frustration regarding my next blog contribution to this site. I just didn’t feel that I had a coherent way to craft a short and readable description of the madness we in America are currently experiencing. After venting my disappointment our conversation turned to the movie “The Soloist.” We especially enjoyed discussing the special features included in the DVD that provided all manner of data and rationale for helping the homeless. The next day he e-mailed me a short note that, to me, encapsulates the blog I wished I had written:

$16,000/yr. to house a homeless person and help them build a better life
$100,000/yr. to leave a homeless person on the street
$1,000,000/yr. to send them to Afghanistan

Having your priorities completely skewed – PRICELESS!

For everything else, there’s Mastercard.

Thanks Michael, that says it all.

#94 Swimming with Dolphins – Learning to Learn – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 9

RCG — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:00:29 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the previous episode (#93) of the series, or start with the first episode (#52) , if you haven’t heard it yet.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Choosing the change
- At level 7, change becomes autogenic and conscious
Learning to learn
Solutions at one level are the problems of the next
- Or, as Joseph Campbell put it, "Gods of one level are demons of the next"
Progress and Regress
- Transitions may happen backwards, to the lower levels

Previous value systems are necessary for the higher ones to emerge

False Freedom of Speech and the Perversion of the Golden Rule

Paul Kordis — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:30:44 +0000

False Freedom of Speech and the Perversion of the Golden Rule

Most of us have heard the admonition, “Treat others as you would have others treat you.” It’s the golden rule. And most of us have also heard it’s corrupted corollary, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” The first is a recommendation for getting along. The second is a sad recognition of the current facts.
This recognition is doubly sad as we observe America’s ongoing debate, if one could call it that, over healthcare. Once again those with the wealth, i.e. pharmaceutical companies and health insurance providers, are making the rules. And by what yardstick are these rules being measured? The primary metric for the pharmaceutical industry is the one with which we are the most familiar: charge as much for your product as you can and don’t worry too much about the product’s quality or ultimate effect. The primary metric for insurance companies is similar. It’s called the Medical Loss Ratio. This ration is the amount of money the insurance companies get from their clients versus the money they spend to keep their clients healthy. Currently the ratio is about 20 percent profit versus 80 percent outlay for the client (see http://www.pnhp.org/news/2006/march/medicalloss_ratios_.php). This ratio makes Wall Street very happy, but what does it mean for the rest of us if cutting client care is the most important item on health insurer’s agenda? It most likely means that even more people in America won’t be able to afford health insurance and that even more people who can afford it will go underserved. This also means that those who fear a healthcare system run by government, such as Medicare which operates five to ten times more efficiently than private insurance providers, are currently faced with a healthcare system run by Wall Street, the same folks who created the current financial debacle (see http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/transcripts/index.html).
But this is merely an instance. When it comes to any of the critical issues facing our nation the same players are making the rules, those with the gold. Whether the issue is energy, unemployment, the environment, war, healthcare, retirement, or almost any other important issue you can shake a stick at, the game remains the same. And the game is rigged. Recently I read a blog lamenting that America will soon have a population where the bottom 90 percent feed like leeches on the top 10 percent. But ignoring the fact that this is economically improbable if not impossible, the real truth is just the opposite. The top 0.01 percent have been living off of the bottom 90 percent for the greater part of the last 5,000 years (Korten, 2006, 2009; Rothkopf, 2008; Simon, 2005). That is, those who don’t work make their living from those who do by employing them for less than they are worth, selling them products for more than the products are worth, and by stealing their taxes.
So how is it that the rest of us, the regular people, have no voice whatsoever in all of the important decisions?
The answer is:
• Our government representatives are for sale to the highest bidder
• Our government representatives are continually campaigning rather than governing because they need the money
• Our government representatives are sold at a higher price than most can afford
• Our government representatives see no alternative
See (Blumenthal, 1980; Johnston, 2003, 2007; Ornstein, 2000; Phillips, 2008; Sirota, 2006; Thurber, 1995).
And how has this happened?
It most recently has come about by way of corporate personhood. That is, corporations are now legally considered to be persons, with all of the rights and fewer of the responsibilities of the real people who compose the true citizenry of the United States. This reality is based on a lamentable and infuriating mistake, but it is still a reality (Hartmann, 2002; Korten, 2000, 2001). This reality dictates that giving money to government officials is protected by a corporation’s right, as a person, to free speech. And whenever campaign reform is mentioned, one that would limit the ability of corporations to give money to a politician via campaign contributions, the cry is heard loud and clear that the free speech granted to the corporate world would be violated if such reforms were to be enacted.
But in reality it is the free speech of those who cannot afford opulent campaign contributions that is being continuously and overtly violated. We now have a system of “one dollar, one vote” rather than “one person, one vote.”
Many solutions have been suggested, including the one I like best, the elimination of corporate personhood. Another one that I like is as follows:
Allow anyone, even corporations, to contribute to political campaigns. The money would then be pooled and divided equally among the legitimate candidates. This would also force the media to give equal time to all candidates for free, which was their original public charter.
Ironically, this would take lots and lots of money to initiate and implement. But there is an equally powerful option that would have a similar effect in the long run. Simply put, we can and should exercise our economic power as citizens to withhold money from people and corporations who violate the public trust and the public interest. If money speaks so loudly in Washington then it can be deafening on Wall Street. They can’t buy our government if we don’t give them any money with which to do it. This would create another corollary to the golden rule, “I won’t give you any gold if you would use it to rule me.”

References

Blumenthal, S. (1980). The permanent campaign: Inside the world of elite political operatives. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hartmann, T. (2002). Unequal protection: The rise of corporate dominance and the theft of human rights. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press.
Johnston, D. C. (2003). Perfectly legal: The covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich – and cheat everybody else. New York: Portfolio.
Johnston, D. C. (2007). Free lunch: How the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill). New York: Portfolio.
Korten, D. C. (2000). The post-corporate world: Life after capitalism. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Korten, D. C. (2001). When corporations rule the world (2nd ed.). Bloomfield, Connecticut: Kumarian Press, Inc. and Berrett Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Korten, D. C. (2006). The great turning: From empire to earth community. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Korten, D. C. (2009). Agenda for a new economy: From phantom wealth to real wealth. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Ornstein, N. J. (Ed.). (2000). The permanent campaign and its future. La Vergne, Tennessee: AEI Press.
Phillips, K. (2008). Bad money: Reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism. New York: Viking.
Rothkopf, D. (2008). Superclass: The global power elite and the world they are making. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Simon, D. R. (2005). Elite deviance (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Allyn & Bacon.
Sirota, D. (2006). Hostile takeover: How big money and corruption conquered our government – and how we take it back. New York: Crown.
Thurber, J. A. (1995). The transformation of American campaigns. In J. A. Thurber & C. J. Nelson (Eds.), Campaigns and elections American style (pp. 1 – 13). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

#93 Swimming with Dolphins – Systemic Consciousness – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 8

RCG — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:00:33 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the previous episode (#90) of the series, or start with the first episode (#52) , if you haven’t heard it yet.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Systemic Consciousness
Interconnectedness of the modern age
Break-through to level 7
- Bigger than all the previous levels combined
Neurological changes
- Level transitions are reflected by physical, neurological brain changes

#90 Swimming with Dolphins – Meet the Dolphin- conversations with Paul Kordis, part 7

RCG — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:00:32 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the previous episode (#89) of the series, or start with the first episode (#52) , if you haven’t heard it yet.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Team dynamics model
Ideas for the sequel to the Dolphins book
Dolphin behavious & attributes
- Levels 6 through 8

#89 Swimming with Dolphins – Emotions of Change – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 6

RCG — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:00:26 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the previous episode (#88) of the series, or start with the first episode (#52) , if you haven’t heard it yet.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Emotions of Change
- Dolphin book – written in late 80s
- Win-win concept
- Dolphin metaphor
- Sharks and Carps
- Types of behavior: sacrificial, selfish, compromise, collaboration
- Emotion cycles for each side of the wave
Decision strategies
- Accelerating rate of change
- Openness to change, ability to see it coming
- How much involvement you have in decision making
Purpose
- Why are we here?
- Context for the decisions

#88 Swimming with Dolphins – Value Systems – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 5

RCG — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:00:43 +0000

We are continuing our Swimming with Dolphins series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Check back to the previous episode (#64) of the series, or start with the first episode (#52) , if you haven’t heard it yet.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Graves model
The basic value systems

Autistic (right now)
Tribal (family, clan, blood relationship)
The loner (motocycle biker, leave me alone)
The loyalist
The achiever
Egalitarian
Dedication to what works. Negative side: arrogance.
Global

Movement from one system to the other
- It’s a Hero’s Journey
The rule of fours
- Freedom and Structure
- Task and Relationship
Importance of all systems

#85 Transformational Leadership – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 3

RCG — Sun, 31 May 2009 15:00:40 +0000

This episode concludes our series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis on the transformational leadership. Paul has been researching writing, and speaking to groups for over 20 years about the processes of profound change. He is a globally traveled speaker and seminar leader on futuristic, human development, change and other topics. He received his Ph.D. degree (with honors) in human capital and economic development from Colorado State University in May, 2008.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Resistance to Change
Taking Responsibility
Head, Heart, and Hand
Emotional "Proud Flesh"
Through Suffering to Joy
Poetry – David Whyte

#84 Transformational Leadership – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 2

RCG — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:00:14 +0000

We are continuing our series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis on the transformational leadership. Paul has been researching writing, and speaking to groups for over 20 years about the processes of profound change. He is a globally traveled speaker and seminar leader on futuristic, human development, change and other topics. He received his Ph.D. degree (with honors) in human capital and economic development from Colorado State University in May, 2008.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

The Dark Side of the US Politics
The Dark Side of Business and Organizations
Blindness to the pattern
Emotions of change (see the article at Human Capital Sustainability)
As above, so below
- From system level to personal level
Why acknowledging the dark side is importart?

#83 Transformational Leadership – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 1

RCG — Sun, 17 May 2009 15:00:40 +0000

Today, we are bringing you another series of conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis, this time on the transformational leadership. Paul has been researching writing, and speaking to groups for over 20 years about the processes of profound change. He is a globally traveled speaker and seminar leader on futuristic, human development, change and other topics. He received his Ph.D. degree (with honors) in human capital and economic development from Colorado State University in May, 2008.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Dark and Light Side of Leadership
- The two extremes, and the middle – the transactional nature of leadership.
The 3-legged stool
- The Seat: Doing the right thing
- The legs:
  - Do you want to do it? Motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic
  - Can you do it? (Skills, abilities, etc)
  - The Resources – that’s where the leadership really falls into (tangible, intangible, etc.)
- The "Race Car Driver" model
Transformational Leadership
- Considering the emotional and spiritual aspects of leadership, in addition to the transactional aspect.
- Comes difficult in the business environments where the main idea is that the only purpose of business is profit. Yet when implemented, transformational leadership brings lots of profit.
- Ethics
The Dark Side of Leadership
- How it’s been ignored for too long, and what it cost us. A good leader should lead people to confront the dark side.

Radix Omnium Malorum Avaritia

Paul Kordis — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:58:01 +0000

Originally on my Web site I posted something similar to the following:

Whereas an interest in one’s philosophical foundation seems these days to surrender to sound bites, simple rhetoric, and ideology, it is still an imperative when discussing human capital sustainability. Therefore, I shall divide the issue into three axes, each with diametric opposites at either end. These axes are love – greed, connection – isolation, and life – death, and are illustrated in the figure below:

From an historical perspective these axes seem to have always been in play. For example, when the universe first came into being, the big bang, it expanded for a short while and then almost immediately began to run down, that is, to succumb to the force of entropy. But just recently in the history of the universe life emerged on planet Earth, the little bang, and against all odds, even against the force of entropy, life began to run up, to escape to higher and higher orders of complexity, processing and organization. Life was then and continues now to be syntropic, that is, anti-entropic. Individual life forms may die, but life as a whole continues in an upward spiral of greater function and complexity. (From this perspective, for example, it would be erroneous to argue whether or not life begins at birth because life began eons ago and should continue unbroken into the future. Some even argue that the purpose of the universe is to foster life and its advancement, the strong anthropic principle. Therefore, the beginning of life was when life began and the only end of life would be the utter end of life everywhere.)

Once life was up and running, genetic evolution eventually led to memetic evolution in the form of intelligence and communication, and ultimately humanity’s genes and memes gave rise to phemes, or wisdom. Over the course of history humanity has done a marvelous job of transferring its genes and a fair-to-middling job of transferring memes, but it has really botched the job of transferring and disseminating phemes. However, this is a subject for another section.

For now suffice it to say that love, connection, and life appear to be essential ingredients of syntropy whereas death, isolation, and greed fall within the critical mix of entropy. This is not to say that one group is always good and the other always bad, or that one always represents syntropy and the other entropy. But for the most part these key ingredients define entropy and syntropy most of the time.

Therefore, the essential philosophical foundation for human capital sustainability, at least on these pages, will be grounded in the primary aspects of syntropy, i.e. love, life, and connection. Other similar ethics will certainly come into play, but these are the syntropic triad upon which they will be built. In aggregate, unfortunately, America appears to have spent several decades leaping into the gaping chasm of entropy, having strolled towards it for at least forty years and sprinted towards it for the past eight. This must change absolutely.

The only difference was that I used the word fear in the original text instead of greed. Having grown up in the psychological community, it was almost de rigueur to think of fear as the opposite of love. But love is such a big category and fear is rather small. And, at times fear is appropriate.

The notion of fear being the opposite of love was starting to feel wrong and worrying about it a real nuisance. If love could contain so many things that were good; compassion, generosity, kindness, peacefulness, forgiveness, etc., then what was an equally large category into which most of the bad things fit?

A PBS presentation on the seven deadly sins provided an answer. Although the seven deadly sins were never in the Bible, they had come to be considered by many spiritual authorities to be characteristic of the most common set of bad behaviors among we humans. But the sin that they consider to be the father of all sins, and to contain within it the seeds of all the others, was greed. And greed was the bad behavior bucket that I was looking for. Fear is merely a tool greed uses to get what it wants. Greed is the big enchilada. Greed is what has brought our ecosystem, economy, government, and society to the brink of disaster. And it doesn’t just exist at the top of the economic ladder, although the top has a disproportionate share.

Most citizens in America now demand that their merchandise be purchased at absolutely the lowest price while simultaneously demanding that they get the highest return on their investments – regardless of the cost imposed on other people or the planet (Reich, 2007). The herding instinct, when manifesting greed or fear, is what makes the market behave so erratically; when one person gets scared most everyone else gets scared; when one person gets greedy so does most everyone else (Ferguson, 2008; Shiller, 2000). Smart crowds do not operate well in this environment and they most likely never will (Surowiecki, 2004). When we spend most of our time and resources on quid pro quo and caveat emptor there is little time left over for summum bonum.

And we behave badly because this is what most of us have been taught. The classical and neo-classical creed have been drilled into our little consumer minds. The Market and unrestricted Capitalism, we are told, will work through an invisible hand to produce maximum benefit for everyone. Misquoted and misunderstood, Adam Smith is cited as the venerable father of this philosophy. But capitalism wasn’t even in the lexicon when he was writing his tomes on the economy, and the invisible hand only worked in the local market economies that he studied.

In the past people had better information, because things were not that complex, and they could deal with local bankers, suppliers, and producers on an eyeball-to-eyeball basis. At that time it was in the self interest of the provider to take care of the customer. In the past the rich rubbed elbows with the poor on a daily basis. At that time it was in the interest of the wealthy to protect their sensibilities by providing for the less fortunate. But now things are different. Neither honest business nor charity thrive when the wealthy are cocooned and live separate lives or when the banker, investor, supplier, manufacturer, etc. live at great distances from their customers. We are no longer, if we ever were, perfectly informed, purely self-interested, and perfectly rational — nor is the market free. There is no perfect competition and large businesses are forever the recipients of tax breaks, favoritism, protection, subsidy, and so on. Therefore, greed has been left to run rampant and unfettered, and what most of us are now experiencing in our tattered economy is the result. The invisible hand moved to coddle the rich, strike down the poor, and squeeze out the middle class.

So greed is a bad thing, even in small amounts, and has no laudable rationale. It is also the progenitor of many if not all of the subsequent bad behaviors that we exhibit as individuals and as a society – and this truth has been know for a long, long time. The Bible has often been misquoted by the anti-Herans as proposing that, "Money is the root of all evil." Some will then correct them by noting, "No, it says that the love of money is the root of all evil." But, in fact, the original Aramaic reads, "Radix omnium malorum avaritia," or "The root of all evil is avarice."

Recently Barack Obama has made a point of telling Americans that we must work together to love each other better, to make life richer, and to focus on the non-monetary things that improve our quality of life. But this will not happen until America gets over its case of addictive greed. For far too long we have worshiped greed as a virtue. It’s time to turn our backs on it and recognize it as the deadly vice that it truly is.

References

Ferguson, N. (2008). The ascent of money: A financial history of the world. New York: The Penguin Press.
Reich, R. B. (2007). Supercapitalism: The transformation of business, democracy,
and everyday life. New York: Knopf
Shiller, R. J. (2000). Irrational Exuberance. New York: Broadway Books.
Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. New York: Doubleday.

Happy New Year – and What’s Coming

RCG — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:00:04 +0000

Happy New Year 2009 to all of you!

As the founders of RCG, we have gone a long way, and sometimes,
looking back, it is hard to recognize the people we were just over two
years ago. And yet, as we look forward, we see that the journey has
but just begun.

In the coming year, we have a whole bunch of podcasts already lined up
for you as gifts from the Radical Change Group, and from the people
and practitioners who are working with us, and through us, in bringing
this to you.

The coming year will see some exciting topics that the three of us
cover – the original trio of the three friends.

In addition, we’ll be introducing some new conversations. Some
highlights of the topics include:

The talks on Shamanism with Ismana
On 5Rhythms dancing with the originator of the 5Rhythms Gabrielle Roth
Continuing our conversations on the strategy of the dolphin with Paul
Kordis
Speaking about a form of theatre known as ParaTheatre with Antero Alli
Mythology with Paul Rebillot

And we’re going to have a new focus on a few other areas, such as the works of Buckminster Fuller that impacted us deeply, and the work of Joseph Campbell and Richard Roberts.

We are also going to have more regular blog posts on our webpage – please visit us, read it, and if you like it – share it with your friends, and help us spread the word.

Why are we doing it?

In the spirit of Positive Deviance, because some things need to be done – to cause both societal and personal change. The key questions that we ask are:

What if… Transformational teachings were given as gifts, rather than traded for money?
What if… You had access to iconoclasts and change makers on-demand, rather than at their limited availability?
What if… The conversations were spontaneous, open, and emergent, rather than scripted, dogmatic, and dry?
What if… Change was approached holistically, through the synthesis of many streams of thought?
What if… The project was based on a sense of contribution to a vibrant community of like minded individuals?

The Gift Economy

This is a whole notion that we have started with the RCG. We want to get involved – help us shape what is becoming a shared gift, a shared reality, and also for you to take charge and shape it in your own ways.

Currently, we have two more projects going:

For both of them, our goal is to restore these tapes and videos, digitize them for the modern media, and distribute it across the World for free. We need your help here, we need you get involved, in any way possible.

We also have a Listener’s Survey – please take a minute to fill it out, so we know what resonates with you and what doesn’t, and how we can improve this.

Technocrati Tags: Radical Change Group, Transformation, Gift Economy, New Year, Shamanism, Ismana, 5Rhythms, Gabrielle Roth, Mythology, Paul Rebillot, Joseph Campbell, Strategy of the Dolphin, Paul Kordis, ParaTheatre, Antero Alli, Positive Deviance, Buckminster Fuller

#64 Swimming with Dolphins – The Inter-Dependence – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 4

RCG — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:00:09 +0000

We are continuing our conversations with Dr. Paul Kordis. Paul has been researching writing, and speaking to groups for over 20 years about the processes of profound change. He is a globally traveled speaker and seminar leader on futuristic, human development, change and other topics. He received his Ph.D. degree (with honors) in human capital and economic development from Colorado State University in May, 2008.

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Wave 4 – relationships and inter-dependency
- Wave 5 will be about spiritual and ethical
On "normal" distribution and the Gini coefficient
- Mutation – punctuated evolution
- Our society is far from "normal"
- Changes the entire economics
Leveling the playfield
Revamping Economics
- Rather than predicting, the economists should give us goals
- Normal distribution of wealth could be one measure / goal
- Cybernetic loop between me and the environment; continuous feedback-correction mechanism
- Quality of the feedback
- European Union is investing in the future by sacrificing something now. In the US, we are sacrificing the future to maintain (not even improve) our current level.

Technocrati Tags: Paul Kordis, Dolphins, Economics, Gini Coefficient, Inter-Dependency, Waves of Change, Generosity, Purpose, Passion, Globalization, Localization, NLP

#62 Swimming with Dolphins – The Waves of Change – conversations with Paul Kordis, part 3

RCG — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:00:19 +0000

Today’s conversation touches upon the following topics:

Emergent phenomena – that enhances people’s life. It’s in the systems, institutions, organizations.
- Developments in the economic, political and religious systems are leading towards bifurcation point.
- Artifacts
Waves of change
- Take human history as a 30-day month
- First 29 days – hunting and gathering
- Wave 1: The agriculture came along – peaked in early 1900s
- Wave 2: The Industrial wave – started in 1650s, peaked in 1950s in the US
- Wave 3: Informational wave – peaked out in mid-1980s
- Wave 4: approaching the bifurcation point. Characterized by 6 primary technologies
  - Bio-engineering
  - Nanotechnology
  - Robotics (macro)
  - Machine cognition
  - New material science
  - Exotic energy sources
Key observation: in waves 1 & 2, change was slow, and we could adapt on the back of the wave. Wave 3 was faster, we had to adapt with the change. With wave 4, we may have to adapt before it happens.
Wave 4 technologies
- Car battery – building the capacitor with a virus
- Water filtration plant "Slingshot" – by the guy who built the Segway. Runs on methane, produces about mega-watt of energy, and produces enough fresh water for the entire village.
Betrayal of the technologies
- They de-centralize power, hence less profit for the richest

Technocrati Tags: Paul Kordis, Dolphins, Waves of Change, Syntropy, Spheres of Human Influence, Generosity, Purpose, Passion, Globalization, Localization, NLP