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  1. Institutions and the Future of Collaboration: Notes from the Field Thursday, October 08, 2009

    Josh McManus is one of CreateHere’s co-founders and Creative Strategists. He’s on the road for a month-long trip abroad through the Marshall Memorial Fellowship, and sent us this dispatch from a train in Belgium.

    Today marked my fourth day in Brussels, Belgium and already, this trip is offering some profound food for thought. My personal and professional experiences here have been woven through with what I recognize to be (sleep- and sweet-tea-deprived though I may be) some exciting, unexpected truths. It’s exhilarating to witness what we all hope for back home: there’s a growing hunger among the world’s progressive thinkers to find new modalities of living and doing business.

    But we don’t learn significant lessons in silos, and this lesson, like many, started with time on my feet. After a redeye flight from Washington, we soaked up Brussels’ architectural and cultural heritage. The city is rich: natural Art Noveau swirls and streamline Art Deco curvatures; cookie-like waffles and sweetly effervescent Trappist beers. There’s a sense that history, order, and progress are combined here, that intersectionality isn’t a bi-product of organic growth: it’s a goal.

    A large portion of the city’s landscape is dedicated to highly fortified (and somewhat antiseptic) facilities where bureaucracy reigns. The EU and NATO are stark backdrops for a bustling ex-patriot community, and interestingly, an underground creative scene. It’s an exercise in compare, contrast.

    Our first night in the city happened to coincide with Nuit Blanche, a celebration of creativity across much of the city center. From fire dancers to rogue art booths to large public dances, over eighty individuals and groups animated public spaces in innovative ways well through the wee hours. It was electric, with citizens and tourists laughing, dancing, learning the night away.

    Twenty-four hours later, I found myself in briefings and frank conversations at NATO. A Cold War relic with an uninspiring early ‘80s aesthetic, the place lacks vision. Often times, it seemed from presentations that they’d forgotten their initial purpose: bright people seemed overwhelmed by, but chained to, a bureaucratic inertia. Furthermore, the organizational mission has creeped to a place where climate control is qualified as a North Atlantic security issue.

    At this point you might be asking, Josh, what’s with the stream of conscious dispatch? EU bureaucracy and Belgian Waffles… Is it just the jetlag talking?

    It’s not random at all, though. NATO and Nuit Blanche are great examples of what Clay Shirky calls a transition as significant, paradigmatically, as Gutenberg’s printing press. That transition is from institution (often entrenched and bureaucratic) to collaboration (platforms for solving issues of shared concern)...

    The organizers of Nuit Blanche looked at Brussels, full of people and places, as a series of assets. They set up a framework to bring disparate groups together, to perform and celebrate.

    This led the community to see their places in new ways.

    Parks, once for strolling, came to be for dancing and twirling fire.

    Museums, once for hushed contemplation, emerged as places for hundreds to salsa and tango to the rhythm of live quartets.

    City squares, once for simple transit, opened up to reggae DJ’s in pop-up campers and buses and hundreds of diverse dancers.

    On the other hand, NATO works together towards an irrelevant mission: security against a singular, known, and predictable enemy. There’s been no cataloging of assets, nor discussion of the world that the members want to live in twenty-five years down the road. Moreover, there’s no evidence of questioning core competencies and opportunities.

    Frankly, NATO is stuck in a perpetuity crisis that is plaguing governmental, non-profit and for-profit organizations around the world. For examples of this phenomena, look at our social security system, symphonies across the country (minus LA perhaps…) and corporate stalwarts like General Motors. These institutions have become slaves to sunk costs, legacy systems, and un-adaptive behaviors.

    Yet, all is not lost. There is surely a need for a central command and deployment system for entities that seek peace through combined society just as there is a demand to celebrate creativity on the streets of cities worldwide. The task at hand is to embrace a sense of urgency in transforming existing platforms and building anew for the challenges and opportunities of the next one hundred years. No small task… but the future of the world just might depend on it.

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