How might we cultivate the ethics, equanimity, and egalitarianism of equity meta-governance to ensure profits serve ethical purposes, people, and the planet?
How might we cultivate equity mindsets to co-create a fair-free-flourishing-future on a healthy planet for the benefit of all?
Work-in-progress. Candor and feedback are appreciated.
How might we cultivate equity mindsets?
Equity is the humanitarian virtue of fairness, kindness and civility.
How might we disseminate the equity meme?
To Love, equity, and the pursuit of truth-seeking and transparent accountability.
Equity is about giving each of us, according to our particular needs, fair opportunities to strive and thrive to our highest potential of healthy well-being.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, mavens, and learning design architects, collaborate to cultivate equity meta-governance?
Equity meta-governance is our Ultimate Meta-process for humanity (UMH): use a guiding constellation of virtues to co-create fair rules, fair plays, fair games, fair opportunities, and fair rewards for the benefit of all, on a healthy planet.
Equity Moonshot is our Ultimate Meta-Purpose (UMP): co-design and build an equitable, regenerative, and sustainable future.
How might we use the UMH-UMP to ethically re-humanize our toxic divisive cultures of dysfunctional polarizations and regenerate Mother Earth?
Equity leaders, mentors, muses, mavens, and learning design architects open, inspire, and align our mindsets to redress our meta-crisis and solve our poly-crisis.
How might we implement the Rhodium Rule of equity meta-governance?
Be fair and kind to all people, the planet, the environment, nature, biodiversity, animals, the soil, and plants.
How might we pose complex questions to cultivate transformational learning needed for the UMH-UMP?
Read the complex questions about equity and power abuses slowly. Reflect, pause, and explore the implications of a question. Take the time to deeply contemplate the meaning of the question (including keywords and concepts). Discuss and develop a shared understanding of a question before setting the stage to co-create generative dialogues and facilitate civil discourse about equity governance.
Enjoy slow thinking to expand your understanding of the meaning of equity governance. Take micro-doses of deep learning to open your mindsets about how to launch Equity Moonshot.
Let complex questions inspire your curiosity, expand your horizons, and explore the ethics, equanimity, and egalitarianism of equity.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers cultivate equity governance to:
Build networks of social entrepreneurial hubs and innovation ecosystems for Equity Moonshot?
Provide exponential opportunities for accelerated learning about how to develop Rhodium mindsets to cultivate equity governance?
Enjoy self-reflection, deep non-responsive listening, and musing about the implications of complex questions. Non-responsive listening is paying close attention to what triggers you to respond, but without responding, to notice and understand more deeply what emotionally triggers you, and why.
“Why” questions open up new creative abilities on how to respond more effectively to complex questions. This exploratory process of questioning the question prepares you for learning journeys in communion with kindred spirits.
Explore the ethical purposes and the intra-personal and inter-personal meanings of complex questions within learning communities. Clarify the meaning of keywords in a question, such as equity (the virtue of fairness), to develop a shared understanding of the question even before responding to it.
Engage in co-creating dialogues to generate new ideas, perspectives, insights, and breakthrough understandings about the ethics of equity and the meaning of (un)fairness.
Rinse and repeat this learning process with another complex question, within and across learning communities.
How might you think, perceive, feel, and act differently about collaborating to serve the greater good and improve our prospects?
The question below enables you to embark on collaborative and transformational lifelong intergenerational learning journeys to understand how the reductionist hubris of our inhumanity and power abuses are the nemesis to the Rhodium rule, the subverter of equity governance and the saboteur of the Equity Moonshot
How might we take time for slow thinking to reflect on questions that redress the personal, professional, systemic, and political abuses of power?
How might we illuminate the shadows and dark sides of neo-terrorism to solve our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems?
Neo-terrorism is a political abuse of power and propaganda that uses indoctrination to imprison people’s minds. Neo-terrorism is the war of weaponized words with sociopathic disregard for the integrity of truth-seeking, discernment, verification, and transparent accountability.
Neo-terrorist fundamentalists create cascades of negative impacts: self-righteous fundamentalism, zero-sum games of futile debates, disinformation pandemics, cultural wars of conflicting political identities, dysfunctional polarizations, toxic divisiveness, the tyrannies of authoritarianism, plutocracy, political corruption, kleptocracy, civil strife, terrorism, and wars.
How might we seek truth with discernment, verification, and transparent accountability to build the integrity of authentic trust?
Nature is designed neither for equity nor inequity. In contrast, human systems are vastly unfair. Our corrupt political and neoliberal systems are purposely designed to exacerbate meritocracy, bestowing huge concentrations of privileged power and wealth to the elites and disadvantaging working people with vast inequities.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, end the cancel culture wars of neo-terrorism that:
Perpetrate the abuses of political power the biases, isms, prejudices, inequities, and discrimination (BIPID)?
Perpetuate the futile battles of self-righteous fundamentalists between the unwoke (the people who are unaware but they are aware) and the woke (the people think that they are aware but they are unaware)?
These questions call for developing exponential opportunities for accelerated learning to empower people to end the neo-terrorist reign of indoctrination.
How might we, the people
Enhance our awareness about how to redress the dysfunctional dynamics of immoral power that indoctrinate political and religious mindsets with fear, paranoia, hate, dysfunctional polarizations, and divisive toxicities?
Dismantle the propaganda machines of indoctrination that perpetrate and perpetuate the culture wars of identity politics?
We think that we are free, but we are imprisoned within our mindsets.
How might we, as open-minded lifelong learners:
Unlearn the indoctrinations of our mindsets?
Cultivate equity mindsets to set ourselves free from biases, isms, prejudices, and inequalities (BIPID)?
Use the virtues of equity, truth-seeking, and transparent accountability to illuminate the shadows and dark sides of politics and religion?
These questions call for building a movement of transformational change agents, who align together to cultivate fairness doctrines of equity governance.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, mobilize people to:
Disrupt the circular futility of regressive cancel-culture callers of unwokism hypocritically calling out progressive cancel-culture callers of wokism, and vice versa?
Enable domineering, competitive alpha-males hogging the limelight to develop into empowering, cooperative beta-collaboratives with guides-on-the stage and sages-on-the-side?
Why do we need a transformational change agent archetype?
Equity muses represent a heterogeneity of archetypes: jester, magician, heretic, and holy fool.
How might we become equity muses together and learn how to transform mindsets and redesign our systems to do good for the commons, humanity, the common good, the well-being of all life, and the health of the planet?
As equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, we pose complex questions to create collaborative and transformational learning experiences about launching Equity Moonshot.
How might we ask complex questions that are not being asked, not heard, or ignored?
As Socratic Sherpas, we ask questions to make us all stop and think about how to understand our wicked problems.
We advocate for Equity Moonshot by creating inquiry frameworks of complex questions. Complex questions challenge our closed-mindedness and the limitation of our implicit biases, perspectives, beliefs, and paradigms. We use these questions to challenge our leaders, gurus, marketing mavericks, and sages-on-the-sage with a candor that speaks truth to power and the abuses of power.
Complex questions expose our ethical and media illiteracies, the propaganda machine methodologies of mass indoctrinations, the social and mass media drivers of emotional manipulations that drive our dysfunctional polarizations, the radicalization of self-righteous fundamentalism, the blind loyalties to religious and political ideologies, our divisive identity politics, cancel cultures, and our lack of mindfulness, critical thinking, emotional awareness and discernment skills in truth-seeking to drain the cesspool of these wicked problems.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, co-create complex adaptive learning systems that empower people to:
Experience transformational learning processes that change our dystopian trajectory toward a practical utopia?
Collaborate and innovate on how to solve our wicked problems?
Cultivate mycelia networks of launching pads for Equity Moonshot?
Complex adaptive learning systems are designed to be self-generating, self-organizing, self-governing, and self-regenerating communities for collaborating on solving our wicked problems. These communities enable us to develop a broad array of collaborative and transformational skills. These skills are essential for developing empowerment networks of distributive leadership to cultivate equity governance.
How might we pose complex questions that matter and make a difference?
We can ask complex questions to build launching pads for the Equity Moonshot story movement of lifelong intergenerational learning.
How might we zoom in using complex questions to observe, explore, and understand the interconnectedness and interdependence of our wicked problems?
Complex questions enable us to learn how to think differently and understand what underlines our wicked problems more deeply.
Complex questions aim to pique our curiosities to learn, contribute, collaborate, cooperate, and compromise in building the consensus needed to redress the systemic influences that set our wicked problems.
How might our equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers co-create ecological inquiry frameworks of complex questions that mobilize us to:
Open, inspire, and align our mindsets to launch Equity Moonshot?
Engage in lifelong intergenerational learning journeys to cultivate the equity conference?
Cultivate consensus about how to promote fairness and reverse the pandemic of inequities?
Move beyond the perils of reductionist thinking to the liberation of complexity thinking that we need to collaborate on solving our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st century?
Complex questions include big hairy audacious questions (#BHAQs) and holistic oxytocin questions (#HOQs). The masculine–feminine spectrum of complex questions ranges along a support-nurture-challenge continuum.
How might we, as equity muse trainers, leaders, and learning designers, catalyze and mobilize people to:
BHAQs challenge our mindsets.
Overcome our misogyny against Mother Earth?
Stop consuming the planet and destroying our environment?
Build networks of launching pads for Equity Moonshot?
HOQs nurture the transformation of our mindsets
Love the pursuit of equity, transparent accountability, and the integrity of truth-seeking?
Revere, and live in harmony with nature?
Develop open-minded, truth-seeking, virtuous free-thinkers to serve the greater good?
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers:
Liberate the spirits of inquiry, mindful contemplation, and cultural humility to open minds, bodies, hearts, and souls to learning anew.
Unleash the power of asking complex questions to co-create generative dialogues that address the ethics of equity about what’s fair and what’s unfair?
Enable leaders and their executive coaches to move beyond being the handmaidens of neoliberalism and corporatocracy to becoming equity transformational agents for regeneration and sustainability?
Integrate the practices of regenerative leadership, business, economics, architecture, and education to lead the way of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Environmental Social Governance (ESG) movements?
Equity Moonshot is a lifelong learning journey without a final destination.
Equity moonshot goes beyond the superficiality and short-termism of brands driven by the reductionist pursuit of profit and power.
Profit and amoral-immoral power trump people, the planet, and the higher purpose of long-termism. Brand loyalty to short-termism is a neoliberal addiction that degrades our humanity and the health of the planet.
Equity Moonshot is the naltrexone (antidote) to our fentanyl addictions to neoliberalism.
How might we restore and update the original meaning of equity?
Equity has different contextual meanings.
In finance, equity is the money value of a property or interest in a property that exceeds claims or liens against it. Equity is also the common stock of a corporation or a risk interest or ownership right in property.
In the work environment of diversity, equity, and inclusion, equity refers to fair treatment for all people, ensuring that identity is not predictive of opportunities or outcomes. Equity takes into account the differences in individuals' circumstances and allocates the necessary resources and opportunities to reach their highest potential.
In healthcare, equity involves giving everyone fair and just opportunities to attain their highest potential of healthy well-being. This involves going upstream to prevent and redress the ethical, political, social, economic, and educational determinants of ill-health and dis-ease.
In a legal sense, equity refers to justice according to natural law or right. This form of Justice provides fair and impartial treatment of individuals or groups, without negative biases or favoritism. Such justice takes context into account by making legal judgments that do not rigidly follow the strict letter of the law.
The original meaning of equity is fairness. The 4th-century Old French word, equite, was derived from a 2nd-century Latin word for fairness.
This sacred virtue is about co-creating enabling systems that give each person, according to their particular needs, fair opportunities needed to strive and thrive to their highest potential of healthy well-being.
Regrettably, fear-mongering propaganda machines have weaponized this word to mean “equal outcomes.” Nothing could be further from the truth. This negative reframe is used to sustain the status quo of unfair advantages for the elites and unfair disadvantages for working people.
Equity is about exponentiating a diverse abundance of human capabilities and capacities to solve our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st century.
Equity is about empowering each of us, according to our unknown potential, to embark on ontological journeys of becoming open-minded, truth-seeking virtuous freethinkers together. As freethinkers, we collaborate and align our mindsets to work on Equity Moonshot.
This aspiration calls for co-creating upward spirals of cultivating virtuous mindsets, co-evolving ethical networks of distributive leadership empowerment, and building open innovation hubs and ecosystems of social entrepreneurship for the greater good.
How might we clarify the distinctions between equity and equality?
Equality is about equal pay for equal worth, equal rights to vote, and equal justice under the law. Equity is a higher virtue than equality.
Equity involves enabling families, communities, organizations, and institutions to cultivate virtuous systems for working on the Equity Moonshot quest.
And yet, we stand in the way of our equity and equality. The enemy is us. Divided, we fall, Aligned, we have a chance.
How might we ensure equity and liberty to pursue truth-seeking, transparent accountability, and justice?
This noble quest calls for developing a fairness doctrine of equity meta-governance based on the integrity of transparent accountability to seek truth.
How might we align our virtues to prevent our values from dividing us?
The ethical question below begins an exploration of understanding the internal battles of our brains.
How might the equanimity of our neocortex guided by virtues better manage our conflicts with our emotional attachments, beliefs, and biases of our value systems within our amygdala brains and the fight-flight-freeze survival responses within our reptilian brains, in response to our vulnerabilities arising from the uncertainties of overwhelming complexity, not-knowing, threats and fears?
Subtle differences in the priorities of our conflicting value systems can make us emotionally regress into self-righteous fundamentalism and set up dysfunctional polarizations. This divisive toxicity sets up the perpetual, zero-sum games of identity politics and warring factions.
How might our neocortical u a constellation of virtues to:
Leapfrog beyond our divisive impasses and short-termism arising from our conflicting value systems driven by the amygdala and reptilian brains that suspend our executive functions of long-term planning for the next seven generations?
Align together to collaborate on launching Equity Moonshot.
This discovery process of understanding the distinctions between virtues and values enables us to become more aware of how the destructive perils of reductionism, self-righteous fundamentalism, rigid identities, and the closed-mindedness of dichotomous thinking exacerbate dysfunctional tribal polarizations. Toxic divisiveness from our unregulated amygdala and reptilian brains deactivates the open-minded, consensus-building processes of collaboration, co-creativity, and compromise needed to solve our wicked problems.
How might we manage our vulnerabilities arising from the uncertainties of overwhelming complexity, not-knowing, threats, and fears to:
Overcome what triggers the reflexes of our emotional reactivity and cognitive biases?
Open our closed-mindedness of emotional biases that arise from our over-activated amygdala and reptilian brains?
Move beyond the regression to the absolutism of self-righteous fundamentalism and dichotomous, reductionist, and linear thinking?
Understand how our different priorities in value structures make our differences worse, such as escalating dysfunctional polarizations, in ways that prevent never-ending conflicts, civil strife, neo-terrorism, terrorism, and uncivil wars?
Cultivate the equanimity of our neocortical brains to self-regulate the emotional reactivity of our amygdala and reptilian brains?
Build the middle ground of shared virtues to guide us on how to align our mindsets and launch Equity Moonshot, despite the conflicts arising from our different priorities in our value systems?
Shared values do not mean that we share the same priorities in value structures. Our hierarchical differences in our priorities divide us and set the dysfunctional polarizations that divide us into warring factions.
How might we overcome our ethical illiteracies in distinguishing between individual values, such as liberty and freedom, and community virtues, such as equity and equality?
Liberty and freedom are individual values and not virtues. Freedom is the moral, amoral, and immoral: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Values are about setting hierarchies of what is most important. These hierarchies set up competitive games of oneupmanship, control, and domination.
The middle ground of consensus-building does not mean the common ground of total agreement and shared values. Middle ground means that we value our areas of agreement as much as our domains of disagreement that are uncontaminated by misinformation and disinformation. The process of creating an uncontaminated middle ground involves a rigorous process of truth-seeking, discernment, and verification that prevents our beliefs and biases from generating misinformation and disinformation
Equity and equality are community virtues to do good for the commons, humanity, the common good, the well-being of life, and the health of Mother Earth.
Consensus-building processes involve an open-minded process of understanding how to use a constellation of non-hierarchical virtues to build a middle ground where our differences in value systems do not divide us into warring factions. This calls for using a combination of virtues to address a particular context of a wicked problem.
Wicked problems are complex in that they have no single, simple, or final solutions, with no either-or answers. These problems have varying degrees of uncertainty as to whether the best solutions were used.
Wicked problems are not per se solvable, such as the power abuses related to pathological megalomania, malignant narcissism, incessant sociopathy, and autocratic authoritarianism. Power abuses are impossible to eradicate, but we can prevent and minimize their negative impacts.
The litany of wicked problems includes ineffective governance, inept stewardship, incompetent leadership, corrupt politics, the imperialism of neoliberalism, truth decay, disinformation pandemics, the demise of Mother Earth, the rapid decline in biodiversity, global warming, rising sea and poverty levels, civil strife and wars, mass immigration, food insecurities, human rights violations, extreme meritocracy with escalating inequities and much more.
This middle ground of virtues becomes a third attractor that enables us to manage conflicting polarities and move beyond dysfunctional polarizations. This calls for aligning our mindsets around virtues to collaborate on the Equity Moonshot quest, with an awareness of how our different priorities in our values may derail our moral actions to do good in service of all.
How might we:
Discern the differences between fairness and unfairness?
Decide who is involved in defining what these words mean?
Negotiate what fairness and unfairness means?
Assure fair opportunities to give all people a voice about their BIPID experience?
Advocate for the fairness of equity and redress the unfairness of BIPID?
Life is unfair, but we do not need to design our systems to make BIPID (biases, isms, prejudices, inequities, and discriminations) much worse.
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, enable people to:
Develop anti-fragile and resilient capabilities to address the unfair adversities and traumas of life?
Zoom out to the ethics, equanimity, and egalitarianism of equity?
Why do the ethics, equanimity and equalitarism of equity governance matter?
Equity is an antidote to the BIPID issues (biases, isms, prejudices and inequities, and discriminations) and the abuse of power.
A focus on sustainability and regeneration without including equity will do nothing to redress our rigged neoliberal systems that perpetrate and perpetuate inequities. These systemic failures arise from not cultivating the virtues needed to scale up collaborative and transformational learning to promote equity governance.
At global levels, neoliberalism and hyper-consumerism escalate inequities, amplify human miseries for the poor, and exacerbate environmental pollution and planetary demise. Our political systems are rigged with unfair advantages for the elites and unfair disadvantages for working people.
How might we, the people,
Strive to align our virtuous beings, thoughts, feelings, and actions within beloved learning communities of kindred spirits to launch Equity Moonshot?
Wake up to prevent the collusions of unwoke neoliberal capitalism, undermined democracies, and the corporate welfare state from escalating inequities and wrecking the planet?
These complex questions call for developing a fairness doctrine of equity meta-governance based on the integrity of transparent accountability and truth-seeking.
How might we, as equity trainers, leaders, transformational agents, and learning designers, mass mobilize the people to co-create fair rules, fair games, and fair plays needed to assure fair opportunities and fair rewards for all and the health of the planet?
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, muses, and learning designers, enable and mobilize people to:
Use a constellation of virtues to cultivate equity governance?
Deploy the ethical use of social technologies to provide exponential learning opportunities of accelerated learning about implementing equity governance?
Co-create the ethical-socio-political conditions to co-elevate the Equity Moonshot metaphor as a lead attractor for moral transformations?
Co-create a fair-free-flourishing-future on a healthy planet for the benefit of all?
Integrate East-West indigenous-modern wisdom to solve our wicked problems?
Align ethical, systemic, regenerative, ecological, complexity, and human-centered design thinking to promote planetary health and
Build open innovation hubs and social entrepreneurial ecosystems to implement equity meta-governance?
How might we, as equity muses, leaders, and learning designers,
Look deeply into the generative AI, social media, and gaming to see its dark sides and ignite the ethical sparks and virtuous light of open innovation to illuminate, preempt, and eliminate dysfunctional polarizations, divisive toxicities, and dystopian destruction that jeopardize our future?
Co-create digital platforms to set up online and in-person collaborative communities that coalesce into relational networks of complex adaptive learning ecosystems to build launching pads for Equity Moonshot?
Empower women to form coalitions of cooperative beta-leadership enterprises that serve the hearts, minds, and souls of communities in ways that enable men to evolve beyond their fragmented systems of competitive alpha-domineering enterprises that are recipes for soul-less success?
Enable families, education at all levels, religions, and leadership institutions to enact the cardinal simple rule of equity: be kind and fair to everyone?
How might we, as equity leaders, mentors, and muses, learn how to ask evocative questions that empower people to:
Cultivate equity governance for co-creating a fair-free-flourishing-future on a healthy planet?
Embark on lifelong intergenerational learning journeys to build story movements about #EquityMoonshot?
Multi-dimensionally scale in all directions (up, down, horizontal, orthogonal) to provide exponential opportunities of accelerated learning that build empowerment networks of distributive leadership for transforming our mindsets and redesigning our systems?
How might Equity Moonshot become our UMP?
This quest calls for cultivating our UMH. Equity meta-governance is a twenty-first-century systemic initiative and transformational story movement about co-creating a fair-free-flourishing-future on a healthy planet for the benefit of all, guided by regenerative and sustainability stewardship.
This trans-collaborative process uses a constellation of virtues and an overarching set of first principles and simple rules to transform our mindsets and redesign our systems based on equity governance.
These principles and rules put ethical guardrails on the moral conduct of governments, the law and public policy, corporations, businesses, journalism, media, social media, artificial intelligence, and academic, leadership, and educational enterprises.
Equity meta-governance enables the political, public, and private sectors to align together and collaborate to implement the Rhodium rule; be fair and kind to all people, the planet, the environment, nature, biodiversity, animals, the soil, and plants.
How might we launch Equity Moonshot as a transformational metaphor?
Equity Moonshot goes beyond the limits of combative war metaphors, competitive sports metaphors, and biomimicry metaphors (such as mycelia) to creative artist metaphors, such as weaving tapestries of story movements to cultivate equity governance that prevents and redresses BIPID issues: biases, isms, prejudices, inequities, discriminations.
The purpose of this metaphor is to co-create synergies between the upsides of humanity and technology that exponentially enhance our learning opportunities about how to cultivate equity meta-governance. This learning process sheds light on the blind spots of our self-centered egos, casts our smallest shadows, and illuminates our dark sides so that we can align our mindsets to solve our wicked problems.
How might we energize synergies between the ethical empowerment of virtues and digital moral enablements to catalyze seismic ethical shifts that transform mindsets and systems for the greater good?
This calls for cultivating networks of empowerment networks, virtually and locally in-person, to exponentiate opportunities for accelerated learning about cultivating equity governance.
How might we cultivate a culture of equity meta-governance, stewardship, and leadership?
The purpose of asking complex is to cultivate curiosity and creative energy about how to launch Equity Moonshot.
How might we, as equity muses and leaders, mobilize people to:
Break the political taboo and biases against promoting the fairness of equity?
Deconstruct the neoliberal prejudices that reinforce the practices of unfair meritocracy that advantage the elites, perpetrate divisive isms, and perpetuate systemic inequities against the people?
And yet, so many democracies lack integrity and fail to serve the people. The regression of democracies is afflicted with truth decay, immoral media enterprises consumed by profit motives to monopolize our attention and manipulate public opinion, divisive social media polarizations, identity politics, and culture wars.
How might we, the people, overcome our disillusionment about our deep state of corrupt political systems?
Nobody doubts that we are heading in the wrong direction. Democracies are nearly Code Red.
Corporations have no vested interest in rectifying the systemic causes of inequities at large. Corporate DEI programs are myopic, short-sighted, and naive with little evidence of significant impacts.
How might we, the people:
Resuscitate our failing democracies?
Make a difference for our grandchildren and future generations?
Bend our dystopian trajectory of inequities and planetary demise toward a better future?
Complex questions go beyond the self-centeredness of individual values, such as the meaning of liberty and freedom, to the community ethics of virtues, such as understanding the distinctions between equity and equality.
How might we shift beyond “what’s in it for me” or our tribe to “what’s in it for us all?
Our failures to ethically discern the distinctions between virtues (do good) and values (set priorities on what’s important) enable the perils of neoliberalism, the injustices of absolute libertarianism, and the tyranny of extreme political ideologies.
Imagine if the Statue of Liberty had a twin sister: the State of Equity.
Complex questions require exploration and dialogues to understand their meaning and purpose.
How might we launch the cultural memes, “Unrig the System, Vote for Fairness” and “Liberate Equity, Freedom for All.”
Complex questions enable the development of collaborative learning communities to facilitate ethical transformations. Complex questions present opportunities to explore, discover, and cultivate the wisdom of the crowd for solving our wicked problems.
How might we un-hack the propaganda machines that hack our brains and indoctrinate our mindsets with the rigid identity politics of self-righteous fundamentalism that perpetuate our culture wars of incivility, fear, hate, rage, isms, toxic divisiveness, and dysfunctional polarization?
The lay and academic headline questions (listed at the top of this page) address the same issue but from different perspectives. The second headline has jargon. Jargon captures nuanced distinctions in concepts, such as generative dialogues.
Dialogues go beyond conversations. The collaborative process of co-creating generative dialogues are deep meaningful conversations that open our mindsets to creating new ideas, insights, innovations, perspectives, and break-thorough understandings that enable the ethical transformations for co-creating a fair-free-flourishing future.
Effective questioning evokes curiosity, imagination, and creativity in taking different perspectives that expand our mindsets on how to prevent, minimize, and solve our wicked problems.
How might we move beyond the limits of individual influencers, persuaders, gurus, sages-on-the-stage, media mavericks, and cult leaders in addressing our overwhelming list of wicked problems?
This BHAQ does not diminish the role of saviors, but we cannot rely on individual heroes to save us. The hero’s journey is insufficient for solving our wicked problems. We need to mass mobilize guides-on-the-stage (such as equity muses) who enable and empower people to address these problems.
How might we build mycelia network power to scale up the mindset transformations for saving ourselves and serving the greater good?
Asking “why, how, and what” questions about complex questions opens our mindsets to the implicit biases and indoctrinations of our identities that imprison our thinking. In the most extreme forms of closed-mindedness, rigid identities perpetuate the self-righteous fundamentalism that perpetuates the futilities of culture wars.
Effective questioning helps to enhance our critical thinking and moral judgments. Asking Socratic questions enables us to cultivate the responsible use of free speech.
Questioning questions is an inquiry strategy to liberate ethical discernment in making distinctions about moral, amoral, and immoral expressions of freedom.
How might we ask questions about the positive and negative implications of the lay and academic headline questions? (listed above)
The discipline of this inquiry process generates new frames for asking more nuanced and poignant questions.
How might we:
Avoid the shortcomings of fast thinking, reductionism, and superficial knowledge that prevent us from using slow thinking to deepen our understanding of how to solve wicked problems?
Co-elevate the virtue of equity (fairness), the love of civility, truth-seeking, and transparent accountability to reverse the degeneration of our humanity and to exponentiate the ethical development of virtuous civilizations?
How can we develop networks of equity muses to create adaptive learning ecosystems that promote equity, regeneration, and sustainability?
Academic version: how might we cultivate mycelia networks of equity muses to develop complex adaptive learning ecosystems and co-elevate the virtues of equity, regeneration, and sustainability?
Equity muses are transformational agents who ask complex that enable us to understand how liberty and freedom jeopardize our future.
Equity muses are agents for scaling up collaborative and transformational learning. They create safe spaces of security and trust to lower our emotional reactivity that triggers our offensive and defensive mechanisms. Safe spaces enable us to become more open-minded about the implications of complex questions.
How can we, as equity muse trainers, leaders, and learning designers, ask the complex questions about how to:
Challenge our holy grail assumptions about what we think is right that may be incomplete and/or wrong?
Co-create the virtuous attractors that compel us to embark on ethical challenges, moral causes, and noble quests for transformational long-termism to serve the greater good and put aside the short-termism of marketing personal, professional, and corporate brands?
Cultivate mycelia networks of complex adaptive learning systems to redress the perils of hubris, reductionism, and the fear-driven radicalization of self-righteous fundamentalism?
Enjoy musing over the meaning and implications of the complex questions above.
How might we unrig systems designed for inequities?
The counter-revolutionary call for freedom against the forces of oppression was in direct response to the abuses of power: such as monarchies, colonialism, autocracy, totalitarianism, tyranny, fascism, malevolent patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. This reductionist call fails to address the distinctions and polarities between virtues and values.
In most democracies, the individual values of liberty and freedom eclipse the community virtues of equity and equality to varying degrees. This reductionist fixation on liberty and freedom sets up global systems of escalating inequities of wealth, basic needs, and opportunities.
“To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a legacy meme that is well past its expiration date. This competitive, hyper-focused, and individualistic meme atomizes civil societies and undermines the virtue of equity for co-evolving humanitarian civilizations.
The absolute libertarianism of freedom is highly problematic. Freedom is an individual value: a triple-edged sword for the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The individualist counter-reactions to the past abuses of elite powers have rebounded to give rise to a tyranny of amoral and immoral freedoms. These autocratic freedoms trump the virtue of fairness. This enables new power elites to arise and manipulate the system to dominate over and control the middle majority.
Why does the individual value of freedom divide us?
Our value systems are hierarchical structures about what we think is important. Both liberals and conservatives share similar values, but they are separated by differences in their priorities.
On the one hand, liberals place higher values on justice, fairness, and open-mindedness. On the other hand, conservatives place higher priorities on law and order, loyalty, and piety.
These differences are exploited by our political propaganda machines that radicalize and rigidify the self-righteous fundamentalism of our opposing political identities. Opposing extremists hold the middle majority hostage to dysfunctional polarizations that exponentiate our conflicts over identity politics. The propaganda machines of these extremists perpetrate and perpetuate the culture wars between the regressive unwoke and the progressive woke.
In contrast, virtues are about how to do good, without regard to our different hierarchies in value structures.
How might we, as equity muse trainers, leaders, and learning designers, empower and mobilize people to:
Use a non-hierarchical constellation of virtues to visualize a fair-free-flourishing-future?
Co-create the middle ground of collaboration, cooperation, compromise, and consensus-building to solve our wicked problems?
Cultivate the virtue of equity to guide our moral freedoms in regenerating our humanity for equity and the health of the planet?
Neoliberalism is a form of colonialism where the leaders create the rules of the games that set up unfair advantages to serve the ruling elites and unfair disadvantages that exploit the poor as indentured servants to their economic machines.
How might we reverse the tickle-up economic neoliberalism and the corporate welfare state that divorced Main Street from Wall Street?
How might we shift beyond our neoliberal equation of amoral-immoral purposes and profits over people and the planet and adopt the regenerative formula of moral purpose, people and the planet over profits?
In the land of the free, the USA is a myth. Contrary to the myth, the USA is designed to be the Divided States of America (DSA). The DSA runs amok with political corruption of its democracy, where propaganda machines of alt-facts and conspiracy theories exacerbate systemic isms, inequities, dysfunctional polarizations, divisive toxicities, and disinformation pandemics. Manifestations of these phenomena are observed in many other countries, including non-democracies.
How might the USA cultivate cultural humility to rectify its hypocritical legacies of exceptionalism?
The following framework of complex questions initiates a collaborative process of embarking on lifelong intergenerational learning journeys to work on the Equity Moonshot quest.
A. Catalyze Seismic Transformations
Complex question frameworks inspire the curiosity, imagination, and creativity to become the artists and autodidacts of our learning journeys: collaborating within learning communities that include peers, coaches, mentors, change agents, champions, and leaders.
The process involves liberating oneself from cultural indoctrinations that limit the boundaries of our mindsets and constrain the process of inquiry.
How might we question the holy grail quotes of leaders?
R. Buckminster Fuller’s naive quote about transformation grossly underestimates the ingrained megalomania and systemic intransigence of our neoliberal paradigm that is designed for inequities.
In order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.
Solution-based and transformational approaches that do not address the systemic determinants of our wicked problems are ineffective.
In our propaganda machine world of disinformation pandemics, the rise of alt-facts, false narratives, and the self-righteous rise of political fundamentalism subvert and sabotage the pursuit of equity. These pandemics arise from the leadership failures of our academic, educational, religious, and media institutions.
How might our leadership, religious, educational, and academic institutions overcome their failures to:
Rectify their ineffective pedagogies that disable our human potential of co-creating flourishing communities in service for the greater good?
Scale up, out, and down the cultivation of socio-emotional learning, the moral development of virtues, and a broad array of skills (critical thinking, media literacy, etc) as lifelong intergenerational learning processes designed to solve our wicked problems?
Redress our ethical illiteracies in discerning the moral distinctions between virtues and values?
Recommend interfaith collections of children’s books that enable the moral development of virtues?
Address how market-driven development without urban planning has had devastating impacts on making living affordable communities available?
The evocative questions (above) call for co-creating complex innovative solutions that construct a new paradigm of equity meta-governance and concurrently deconstruct the downsides and dark sides of the neoliberal world order.
How might we redress the original sin of reductionism?
Metaphorically speaking, reductionist approaches dismember the heart, body, mind, and soul of our humanity. The heart is liberty. The body is freedom. The mind is equality. The soul is equity. Without the mind and soul, the heart and body rig systems for inequities.
The hegemony of individualistic, competitive, and neoliberal perspectives decimates our capabilities and capacities to co-create thriving communities on a healthy planet.
How might we, as equity leaders, trainers, muses, and learning designers:
Adopt a trans-disciplinary approach of taking multiple perspectives holistically to manage our complex web of wicked problems?
Empower people to zoom out from self-righteous fundamentalism and reductionist thinking to explore, understand, and manage complexity?
Co-design a new paradigm based on complexity that simultaneously deconstructs the old one based on reductionism?
Deconstruct wicked problems
How might we, as equity leaders, trainers, muses, and learning designers, empower people to:
Share and learn from our personal stories and perspectives about the (un)fairness of (in)equity?
Manage the asymmetrical polarities between the individual values of liberty and freedom and the community virtues of equity and equality?
Overcome our disabilities in solving our wicked problems?
Redress the moral hypocrisies of marketing mavericks?
Adopt anti-influencer and non-influencer roles for transformational change?
Better understand the perils of short-termism?
Address the systemic confluence of disabling and negative influences that perpetrate and perpetuate our wicked problems?
De-corporatize life?
Co-construct complex innovations
How might we, as equity leaders, trainers, muses, and learning designers, empower people to:
Aspire for a better future?
Re-design our systems based on equity
Open-inspire-align mindsets to do good?
Visualize a fair-free-flourishing future?
Regenerate life and live in harmony with nature?
Assure our humanity?
Become open-minded, truth-seeking, virtuous free-thinkers collaborating to cultivate equity governance?
Launch Equity Moonshot?
If inspired by these complex questions, leave a common and please share your comment with kindred spirits to build learning communities of equity muses, trainers, leaders, champions, and learning designers.
Pay it forward to co-create upward spirals of virtuous development.
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