The power of contagion of an awakened organic collective

When I am in this state (which I never really quite know how to describe to anyone else that may make sense to them!), new ideas come in burps.  Like blips on the screen of life, they just show up, make their presence felt and then disappear.  However, something lingers and gravitates to yet another something that has been hanging there… waiting… sometimes for months! 

 They connect, each disappears and in its place is something new.  Not like pieces of a puzzle coming together and forming something larger of which the pieces are an essential part, more like two flavours of ice cream melting into each other and creating a uniquely different flavour.  Still ice cream, but not recognizable for what it once was.

Two such notions have come together for me.  The first is one that has been on the periphery of my awareness for months, and that is the notion of the power of contagion of an awakened organic collective.  The other is that of parenting as the most essential expression of leadership.  For me, these have become essential to explore.

Parenting shapes reality.  Try as we might to pretend that we’re over it, most of what exits in the world comes from what existed before.  Parenting is a far more potent expression of leadership, with deep and lasting outcomes that far too many of us try all our lives to outrun!   Although there are many versions of this notion, the bottom line is the same:  give me a child until the age of 7, and I’ll give you the man (woman/adult).  In other words, those first 7 years are critical to the ‘mind share’ to which the child will subscribe for life.  Pretty scarey, yet true.

We invest so much time, attention, money, words, training, development, etc in ‘leadership’ development.  And yet, the most fundamental and far-too-often primitive expression of leadership lives in a domain that is most ignored : parenting.  For good reason, too, given that the ‘hands off’ boundaries around parenting reflect the unspoken yet profoundly lived, underlying, seemingly impenetrable   presupposition of ownership.  My child – my world view. 

World transformation then becomes a numbers game of who can breed the most ‘soldiers’ for the mind-share. 

Parenting is the most powerful form of contagion in a collective.  Awakened parenting would be equally powerful in an awakened, organic (living) collective.  However, my guess is that the outcomes would be life-alteringly different.

After the next book on EmergingFutures is finished, my thoughts will turn to the relationship between leadership, parenting and an awakened organic collective as an unstoppable force for profound change.  That should be a doozie!

Breathing is good….