How might we, as equity muses, build a change agent leadership movement to co-create a fair-free-flourishing-future to benefit all?
How might we ask Big Hairy Audacious Questions to zoom out, understand and collaborate in solving our complex web of wicked problems in the 21st century?
BHAGs drive outcomes
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras coined the phrase, Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), in their 1994 business book "Built to Last” about visionary companies. BHAGs are ambitious, inspiring visions of future possibilities that stretch our imagination and creativity to collaborate on achieving what seems impossible.
The aim of BHAQs is to motivate communities, organizations and networks to take on challenging causes, campaigns and quests over 10-30 years and to serve the greater good, such as striving to build an equitable-regenerative-sustainable future.
BHAQs empower the inter-being process of community-building
The inquiry process of asking BHAQs sets up virtuous frameworks of opening, inspiring and aligning our mindsets to collaborate together, despite our different priorities in values systems. Our conflicting value systems create toxic dysfunctional polarizations that fuel the epidemics of distrust-fear-paranoia-disinformation-propaganda-hate and factitious conspiracy theories: the rabbit holes of self-righteous, fundamentalist indoctrinations.
In contrast, the collaborative inter-being process of community-building enables humanity to co-create the middle ground needed to use our differences to make a difference. This strategy empowers us to do good for all, and not destroy ourselves by competing, exploiting and taking advantages over others and our planet.
How might we resolve the internal battle of our brain?
This equity moonshot quest is afflicted with the internal battle of the the brain that arises between the transcendent equanimity of our neocortical brains and the ego-centric shadows of our amygdala and reptilian brains. This internalized battle between our cultural humility of open wisdom and the maverick hubris of propriety knowledge is externalized on the global stage.
BHAQs set up inquiry frameworks to process and align our communities, organizations and networks to work on equity moonshot. The aim of BHAQs is to enable us to zoom out, understand and solve our wicked problems.
As equity muses, we ask our BHAQs about how to redress our monumental governance failures in solving our complex web of wicked problems in the 21st century.
How might we, as equity muses, enable people to collaborate in becoming open-minded, truth-seeking and virtuous free-thinkers to solve our wicked problems?
How might we muse and take the time for slow thinking?
The purpose of asking BHAQs is to invite people to stop and think slowly about the nature of our wicked problems in new ways. This self-reflective process sets the stage for engaging learning communities in generative dialogues and collaborate in developing catalytic (socio-political-technological) innovations and entrepreneurial solutions.
This exploration process of understanding the purpose of BHAQs enable people to reflect more deeply about unraveling our wicked problems. Our self-inflicted wicked problems arise our reductionist failures in co-designing a fair, free and flourishing future.
Reductionism without zooming out to view the interconnectedness and independencies of our wicked problems is our original sin.
The reductionist thinking of neoliberalism simplifies how we address wicked problems with unintended negative consequences of making our problems worse. Neoliberalism (aka the Godfather Milton Friedman) as the market savior for our current woes is a smoldering cult trance that climate change has not extinguished. The blind faith in this economic hegemony keeps the cinders aflame. The fire will not die.
How might we:
Extinguish the forest fires of neoliberalism and cultivate regenerative soil for social and educational impact investments?
Better understand how the original sin of reductionism inflicts the traumas that drive our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems?
Heal the traumas of our original sin and expand our capabilities and capacities to solve wicked problems and to take on wicked challenges?
Zooming in-out-in-out and collaborating together with a deep understanding of how to apply systems, complexity and human-centered design thinking, along with indigenous and modern wisdom, within and across learning networks of communities and organizations is a healing, redemptive path to solving our self-inflicted wicked problems.
As equity muses, we pose BHAQs about how we, the people, might collaborate more effectively together in addressing our wicked problems.
How might we, the people, use a framework of ecological BHAQs that make us feel so overwhelmed that our individual insignificance compels us to collaborate in learning communities to solve our wicked problems?
How might we, as equity muses and leaders, engage people to:
Open and expand our mindsets to change our perilous trajectory towards our dystopian future?
Think slowly about how to catalyze the transformational collaborations needed to orchestrate civic alignment to do good for all?
Cultivate the equity governance to enhance the virtuous light of emotional responsiveness and minimize the ego-centric shadows of emotional reactivity needed to work on Equity Moonshot quest?
How might our leadership, academic, educational and social enterprises collaborate in training trainers to:
Move beyond using linear reductionism and root cause analysis to redress the complex patterns of negative influences that cultivate the virulent weeds that enable wicked problems to thrive?
Unite equity muses and leaders to align our mindsets across and within the political-private-public sectors to work on the #EquityMoonshot quest?
This blog is used as a platform that equity muses can use to initiate and co-create generative dialogues about how to improvise and innovate in solving our wicked problems.
As Socratic Sherpas, we pose the BHAQs to guide the lifelong intergenerational learning journey for working on the Equity Moonshot quest.
