#29: What Is Humanity’s Highest Potential and How Can We Achieve It?

System change is a huge opportunity for humanity and business. System Change Investor posts range from the detail level (e.g. SCI mechanics) to the big picture. This one addresses the highest level – humanity reaching our fullest potential.

Sustainability versus Highest Potential

Sustainability can be defined in different ways. At times, it means surviving but not thriving. Other times, it means both. Highest potential means the highest level of thriving and sustainability. Humanity’s highest potential should only be considered collectively. Considering individual well-being apart from the larger systems that contain humans (reductionism) is the root cause of essentially all major challenges facing humanity.

The human body (a frame of reference we’re all familiar with) can be used to envision the highest potential of humanity. Focusing on the well-being of individuals is like focusing on the well-being of individual cells in the body. From the cell’s perspective, death of a cell might seem terrible. But we care about the health of the overall body. Death of old cells supports this, so we’re happy about it.

This does not mean that individuals are not important or the death of a human is irrelevant. Each life is important and should be protected. The point here is to show that there ultimately is no individual well-being apart from whole system well-being. To reach our fullest potential, individually and collectively, we must elevate our thinking to the well-being of the whole system (Earth/nature and its sub-element human society).

Global System Change Framework

The GSC framework uses the laws of nature to envision sustainable, highest potential human society. These laws have controlled all life and living systems for 3.8 billion years, and will continue to do so, regardless of what humans think, say or do. They will completely determine the survival and prosperity of humanity. These common, essential qualities of living systems provide an objective reality frame of reference for human society.

In a healthy human body, forest or other natural system, the parts operate in harmony to achieve optimal system well-being. From our current reductionistic, separatist level of thinking, this might seem impossible for humanity. But it only describes what happens in our own bodies and what has been happening on Earth for billions of years. We are nature, and therefore have the potential to operate at this high level.

One way to envision this is to imagine Earth as if humanity never existed. In nature, we’d see nearly infinite levels of sophistication, coordination and widespread prosperity. Now imagine we add humanity and keep these same high levels. This is humanity operating at our highest potential.

The three-part GSC framework first defines sustainable society using the laws of nature. Intially, this might only mean surviving, not reaching our highest potential. Currently we are grossly violating the laws of nature, as shown by rapidly growing environmental, social, economic and political problems. We are far from the level needed to even survive on Earth. Once we reach this level, we can continue to improve, possibly reaching our fullest potential.

The second part of the GSC framework shows the systemic changes needed to achieve sustainable (i.e. nature-compliant) society. The third part shows the actions required to bring about these changes.

System Change Content versus Process

GSC provides an objective reality framework for guiding human sustainability and system change. This clarified sustainable society and the means to achieve it could be called system change content. System change process refers to the many strategies required to bring about the content. Process work involves forming and managing collaborative system change efforts, using storytelling to inspire and change mindsets, and effectively addressing vested interest opposition to system change.

SCI provides a critical process for driving system change. Flawed, unintentionally destructive economic and political systems inevitably will change through voluntary or involuntary means (probably soon given rapidly growing problems).

SCI engages the powerful corporate and financial sectors in system change, in part by showing the many financial and other benefits of proactive system change. A main goal is to strongly incentivize these sectors to collaborate with the rest of society for the purpose of driving beneficial, minimally disruptive economic and societal evolution into sustainable forms.

Sustainability often focuses on the negative – the tremendous challenges we face, the disruption they already are causing, and how this likely will get rapidly worse. To inspire change, we also must focus on the positive. System change is a huge opportunity for humanity and business. Comparing humanity to nature shows that we can be vastly more prosperous individually and collectively than we are now. A main goal of GSC and SCI is to help humanity reach our highest potential.

For more information, visit our website SystemChangeInvesting.com or contact us at info@SystemChangeInvesting.com