Movement @F-L-O-W

Find, Design, Use TALENT to Emerge Happiness & Success
 in a Postmodern World

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals or organizations which focus on specific political or social issues. In other words, they carry out, resist or undo a social change.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_movement

1) Can F-L-O-W be a movement?

2) Is there a reason why a movement is even an appropriate idea at this stage?

In speaking with the brander, I wanted him to focus on branding F-L-O-W and NOT Mike R Jay, for a lot of reasons. One, I prefer Oz, and Two, this is bigger than one person, in fact, the whole idea is peering, sharing, glocalization, openness, and collaboration. At least as I’d like to think so.  Those values are heavily borrowed from wikinomincs, substituting glocalization (local action, global consideration), and collaboration. There were some additional earlier values, but for now, let’s play here.

A movement would have to be in response to a "need" for a movement.  With everything that is occurring around what is "underneath it all"–a paradigm shift–I’d like to propose @F-L-O-W for consideration.

Reasons for a movement:

-Disruptive Incremental Change Occurring
-Discontinuous Change Emerging
-Lack of efficacy with old legacy solutions
-Need for a solution which is less violent, than gamma traps currently running–those "cultural sinks" which will wash us back to the base level of support.
-Deleveraging of the Money & Credit Cycle
-An opportunity to shift back from wants, to needs, having shifted from needs to wants some 100 years ago, during another paradigm shift after the Industrial Revolution
-Diminishing returns marking the extension of a system past it’s prime

@F-L-O-W

(I added the @ sign to depict several ideas around movement, and stability, and the democratization of technology, finance, and education, as a result.)

Without going into a lot of details, but to just raise the issue, we need a movement to "substitute" less violent means, while taking into the consideration the time span involved in replacing the legacy paradigm in process and giving people along this continuum something to hold onto during the turbulence.

F-L-O-W recognizes a number of key leverage points expressed as elements, and those that are PRIME, are noted in the book, called F-L-O-W to be published soon. (Thanksgiving, 2012).

Among other important factors, I’ve chosen a few to highlight:

What the legacy platform has created are summarized briefly, and oversimplified:

• Money and Credit Based Fractional Banking System to drive demand for consumption
• Widespread proliferation of rules designed for those who won nature’s lottery
• Focus on Rational Consumption leading to wanting more…even as you have more
• Worldwide Asymmetry to mirror nature’s lottery winners (10%) holding 85% of global wealth*
• No net increase in happiness for the past 50 years
• Growing animosity for the inequality experienced by those not in the top 10%
• Widening gap globally between the haves and the have-nots
• Global consumption trends threaten all limits to growth

*A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned 1% of global wealth.^[12] Moreover, another study found that the richest 2% own more than half of global household assets.^{[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth}

While certain levels of poverty have been alleviated, the differentials between haves and have-nots, have added additional population–and more people are actually living in poverty outside the Western Countries, due the population equation.

Global poverty facts:

• $1 challenge. More than 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day and more than 2 billion live on less than $2 a day.
• Check your assumptions. Americans believe that their government spends 24 percent of the federal budget on aid to poor countries, but the actual figure is less than 1 percent.
• Daily disasters. HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria—all treatable diseases—claim the lives of over 8,000 people every day in Africa due to lack of access to health care.
• The water walk. Women in developing countries travel an average of almost four miles each day to collect water.
• The poor pay more. People living in the poorest slums can pay as much as ten times more for water than those in high-income areas of their own cities.
• Gender disparity. According to the U.N., the majority of people in poverty are women, who globally earn roughly half as much as men.
• Daily bread. Food prices have risen 83 percent since 2005, disproportionately affecting those in poverty who spend a higher percentage of their income on food.
• No school for you. In 2005, a conservative estimate stated that 72 million children around the world of elementary school age were not enrolled in school.
• The global wealth gap. The richest 20 percent of the world’s population receives 75 percent of the world’s income, while the poorest 40 percent receive only 5 percent of the world’s income.

Statistics are from the World Bank and the ONE Campaign http://www.onedayswages.org/about/what-extreme-global-poverty

Helpful Hint: @F-L-O-W, as a movement, offers the following benefits:

• Shift from wants, to needs, slowing individual consumption
• Since the shift will come slowly, the opportunity to unwind the legacy system can be done slowly over decades.
• Offers individuals a solution to middle ground, where they can reduce asymmetry individually and collectively through design
• Decreases the gap between the haves and the have-nots due to decelerating asymmetry
• Respects those who won nature’s lottery, but educates them about differences, and inbornness
• Protects fairness, but deleverages sameness, because we are different
• Offers a new moral definition for understanding why luck gets more credit, and less blame
• Institutes a new design formula for reducing poverty as part of the population equation
• Immediately begins to fuel savings, to be used for investment
• Immediately begins to implement taxes on those most likely to earn large amounts of income, to reduce asymmetry
• You owe because you are, not because you did…a shift of philosophy required to understand discontinuous change required

@F-L-O-W is not the answer to everything, perhaps nothing, but what it does offer is a transition approach that is much less violent than what is emerging around the world because of asymmetrical life design.

Mitigating the effects of asymmetry are key in encouraging balancing loops that can eat away at disparity produced by happenstance, planned or unplanned.

Action Steps: @F-L-O-W asks for a simple set of actions:

• Recognize that Happiness is natural, success is not for the vast majority
• Self-knowledge leads to a deeper, more profound understanding of how we are different
• Understanding ourselves and our deepest needs, leads us to want less, not more
• Stop pretending we are the same, and equal with regards to everything but inalienable rights
• Realizing YES and NO decisions are often made irrationally, and we can account for that, rather than become a victim
• Reaching Out transcends our natural misalignments with life
• Sustainable Success comes out of design and those who can, should
• Getting Feedback is critical to becoming more competent
• Noting that values do matter, and each has their own "best" practices, suited for specific life conditions
• Keeping score helps us address inequalities and misalignments
• Using Recalibration rather than suffering from diminishing returns in accelerating change and complexity
• Establish Culture as key to reading the signs in our own lives and the lives of those in different cultures
• Accepting ourselves and others as we/they are, and living from that realization
• Implementing recursive methods to unwind, unlearn and unravel the unfolded experiences
• Changing our attribution supports the philosophy @F-L-O-W, about what is…

These actions are not simple, but they can offer, as a PRIME set of elements in an action theory of transition, along with a supporting cast of Teachable Points of View [TPOV], which can be used in the process of gaining awareness, unfolding purpose, enhancing competence, wellth, and the necessary scaffolding for those who can’t.

At the outset, I believe this set of contingencies starts out on this side of complexity, but can be used to transition us individually and collectively to the other side of complexity with facilitators, coaches and guides who–over time-differentiate and integrate more of F-L-O-W to be @F-L-O-W.

Comments:

Charles Tilly defines social movements as a series of contentious performances, displays and campaigns by which ordinary people make collective claims on others .^[1] For Tilly, social movements are a major vehicle for ordinary people’s participation in public politics^[2]
He argues that there are three major elements to a social movement:^[1]

1. Campaigns: a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims of target authorities;
2. Repertoire (repertoire of contention): employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special-purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering; and
3. WUNC displays: participants’ concerted public representation of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitments on the part of themselves and/or their constituencies.

Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as collective challenges [to elites, authorities, other groups or cultural codes] by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and authorities. He specifically distinguishes social movements from political parties and advocacy groups.^[3] 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_movement

"A movement has an emotional heart. A movement might use an organization, but it can replace systems and people if they disappear. Movements are more likely to cause widespread change, and they require leaders, not managers. The internet, it turns out, is a movement, and every time someone tries to own it, they fail." – Seth Godin

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/06/organization-vs-movement-vs-philosophy.html

Video: http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

For more TPOVs, visit: [not yet active]

If this struck a cord with you then you will want to read and study the soon to be released book:

@F-L-O-W
Find, Design, Use Talent
to Emerge
Happiness & Success
in a Post-Modern World.

Visit http://F-L-O-W.com to register for the book and access our videos.