Met up with some friends today who are starting a company together. Really ambitious with a focus on campaigns for good things like fighting hunger, stopping climate change, etc. My friends had called an idea meeting with a group of people to pick our brains, etc.

In a lot of ways this was a powerful and dynamic meeting. Yet when I’m on the bus heading home, I’m struck by the fact that we’re all so stuck in our mental models that we can’t see that we are trying to fight things with the very same (industrial paradigm) methods that created them. Putting out the fire with fire, so to speak.

As I have quoted Daniel Quinn here before – there are a lot of old minds with new programs. Including my own mind :-(

What we really need are new minds with no programs. Example: If we don’t like the consequences of commercial TV, we should abandon it. It can’t be ”fixed”.

Damn, why is that so hard? Why do we think we can fix the failures of our system with the thinking that generated the system?