There are real problems to address immediately: catastrophic environmental change; depleting non-renewable energy; the terror and counter-terror of political, economic, religious, and military forces; failed states; massively corrupt and destructive leadership and media.
What can be done? We have ever-more effective technologies for augmenting knowledge gathering, analysis, synthesis, action. However, what about augmenting the perceiver, the experiencer, the knower, the actor? Everything is shaped by the first-person experiencer: so to make knowing and acting effective, one needs to clarify first person experience. We are the lens: clarify the lens.
This is the one contribution I think needs to be made to the question of what we can do to improve the improvement process, to augment augmentation: provide a discipline and process of augmenting the subject, the knower, the doer, making it transparent.
Secondly, I think there are known ways of doing this, that both have gone through years of practice and experimentation, and have modern embodiments that speak to our time and situation. The Buddhist psychology and practice of mind, for example, is sophisticated, well-documented, effective, 2500 years old, and right to the point: it's not future rocket science, it's already clearly laid out. It's a crime to not make use of it.
It is not the only tradition that provides this, but it is available. The key is that that level of self-examination and knowledge is necessary. One attempt to bring such depth practice to the contemporary world is the work of the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership and its annual summer face-to-face programs: it presents how to create a container for working with personal and group motivation and command.
A particular language and process of working with first-person and group attention, that has been offered there as well as on its own, is the "U", developed by Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, and others (cf http://www.presence.net).
I propose that the U process is particulary well suited to acting as a methodology and practice for technical communities of practice, especially those engaged in saving the world. The U provides a path to bringing subjective element and bias into explicit view, letting attention relax into presence, and allowing to come the future. Presencing grows the future, the next thing. Basically, the U is about developing the presencing of groups and organizations, through explicit practices of "sensing, presencing, realizing".
This is what augmenting augmentation needs. Without it, improved vehicles are still flying blind. With it, our role in the co-emergence of planetary reality is recognized as intrinsic in both theory and practice.
This is what I want to do: be part of an awake team saving the planet - full time. There's plenty of excess money around. Could it be rounded up to fund people getting together, both online but also very critically face-to-face, and then also to work together on getting this process repeated with other groups, so that all of us can more effectively and awakely face and solve the hard problems?
I can think of no better or more necessary way to improve improvement, and to care.
Contexts:
Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory
Siberian Meltdown
Douglas Engelbart and Bootstrapping
Autopoiesis
