Transformative Governance for the Future. Navigating Profound Transitions

Humanity is in transition. Our organisations, our innovation ecosystems are in transition. The whole planet is in transition. Welcome to our Anthropocene era.

But the truth is that in general humans don’t like changes. We see the clouds, sometimes very black ones, but it is not usually until the storm bursts heavily on us that we react and run to find a safe shelter.

We face continuous processes of change at different levels: a change of position within the company, a family sickness, the deployment of a new digital system. We could give hundreds of examples of small or bigger switches that alter our lives. In general, fear prevents us from being brave and acting on time. We prefer to stay in the comfort zone to confront the things that do not work, or we perceive that are evolving in the wrong direction.

On a wider scope, we’ve recent examples of these ‘heavy storms’ that threaten our established socio, economic, political, health, educational, financial status quo: a recent world-wide pandemic, climate change with more frequent droughts, heavy floods, or wildfires; water scarcity; plastic pollution; wider social unbalances with two deep financial crises in less than 20 years. We find specific intersections of time and space in which many lives, companies, projects, ecosystems are at stake.

But the new thing is that all that these changes are anthropogenic in great measure.
We are generating them.
Carl Sagan at the end of his marvellous TV series Cosmos asked: Who speaks in the name of the planet?

Now we need to have the courage to recognise that we, humans, are the agents of such changes, for bad or for good. Our choice is for good, for a new common good. We need shared visions about this goal; we need new generations of social, digital and environmental innovators and entrepreneurs, committed to boost collaborations; we need to create new transformative governance, based in new methodologies, tools and services to respond to these changes. Briefly, we urgently need a global and personal wake up to generate real transformations of our societies, our artificial systems and our natural ecosystems for which we are responsible.

The trigger is: if we can envision positive changes and win-win situations, let’s try! Let’s try together by adding our ‘one drop in the ocean’ to a co-dreamt better world.