Radical Rebalancing - Jenn Baez

so to set the stage when we talk about web3 and what we're aiming to do with this ecosystem of technologies they're huge and very visionary goals we're trying to change the world uproot the systems that are currently running our societies and in order to do this we need to be very intentional and clear about where we're at and where we're going so this is what the topics that i'll be covering today entail first of all we're going to go through why a radical rebalancing is needed then go through a few core pillars that are guiding this initiative and then we're going to culminate the discussion into a vision of a web3 enabled platform that can bring about this radical rebalancing so firstly to offer a macro orientation of where we're at essentially in modern history we've used a lot of our time energy and ingenuity to bring progress towards the economic and technological pillars of society and we haven't done the same for the social and governance pillars so because of that you have what's in front of us today where we have very powerful private sector and an inefficient public sector to some extent in orchestrating governance and the plural sector which is essentially us our communities non-profits how we relate to each other our wellness so everything else that's not the private and the public sector has been decimated all of the power that has gone towards the private sector has been taken away from our communities and ourselves and i want to make this tangible and practical in ways that this is evident in our day-to-day lives so there's a concept called third place which is essentially the locations that you frequent that are not where you live or where you work historically we had a lot more third places and a lot more activities in places like churches community centers and different organizations where you could go and interact with individuals from other socioeconomic status from other jobs that were still part of your community but not necessarily individuals that you lived or worked with and this is very important for giving us access to different perspectives so okay can you hear okay now that's a little feedback um yeah these third places were critical for giving us access to other individuals from our communities who were from different backgrounds and had different perspectives so in the absence of these touch points you see what's in front of us today with hyper polarization individuals who are doubling down on their perspectives and incapable of bridging gaps between their world views and in web3 we are not immune from these problems infiltrating our system so we need to be intentional about what our socio-cultural context is and how that's affecting what we're building um so that's essentially what radical rebalancing offers we need to rebalance the power structures and make the plural sector stronger and make our community stronger to make sure that everything can live in a bit more homeostasis in line with the natural world and there's three core pillars that are a bit more theoretical and mindset orientations that are guiding this initiative that i'll spend a few minutes going over and from the top down firstly we need to adopt a systems thinking approach so we know that a lot of the issues and solutions have been defined are interconnected if you change the concept of work and replace the corporate entities as organizing people with dowels that's going to have a lot of cascading effects how are people going to get access to insurance how are people going to get compensated how do you assign value to the time and energy somebody puts in a doubt and these issues have to be treated as such they're interconnected and we need to be intentional about the solutions we're defining with that mindset secondly synthesizing which is the concept of connecting disparate ideas and people so a lot of things are siloed right now there's a bunch of projects going on how do these ideas connect how do these solutions connect and how can we how can we be more intentional about bringing the people together that are doing similar work and lastly the bottom pillar is that it starts with the individual we have to be very mindful and recognize the power of one so one person putting in the work being enlightened understanding how things are working and being an example for the people around them is very powerful so i like to say that the individual awakening is the revolution and it cascades up to the top now looking at these three pillars a bit more closely i'm going to start with adopting a systems thinking approach this quote from henry anthrope encompasses a lot of the thinking and saying that the problems of modern man are interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary that is to say a proper solution of these problems requires information and methods which stem from many disciplines so we need to be talking to each other and we need to establish these connections and make sure that we're intentional about building solutions with the connections in mind these are some of the tools that a system thinker would adopt and implement so you can watch out for these in the discussions you're having in the projects you're evaluating to make sure that they're adopting a systems thinking approach so not disconnection interconnectedness at this point most projects have some relationship to other existing projects or some relationship to other goals that are happening outside of web3 so if you're starting a project you should have awareness of other individuals have done work in that problem and bring that into what you're doing so you're amplifying efforts not starting over to cover the second guiding principle which is synthesizing the concept of synthesizing is connecting ideas and people but it's really about developing higher order conclusions so for example in a lot of the political discourse we have today there's a left ideology and a right ideology synthesizing is the sense making process of finding the truth value in both sides and developing higher order conclusions that bring those ideas together instead of disconnecting them and it takes a lot of critical thinking and logic applied to those ideas to synthesize but that's what moves the needle forward not con not keeping things separate so in this diagram you see that new ideas are mostly created by bringing together other ideas that already existed so we're not really at a point where we're reinventing things or coming up with something that has never been thought of before humans have been around for a long time we've come up with similar problems conflict arises when people have different perspectives a lot of people have put in work to thinking about solving this so we should be building on top of that not starting over and one concrete example of two organizations i'm a big fan of we heard a lot of discussion about dowels and now that dials are scaling the issue is coming up where there is conflict arising where somebody has an opinion to go this way and someone else has an opinion to go this way well that's conflict amongst individuals there's two organizations that are doing a lot of work in resolving conflict and have a lot of methodologies and processes that could be adopted so braver angels for example is a us-based organization they have micro groups across the country that are literally bringing people together that have completely different opinions and conducting workshops debates and firstly allowing them to recognize their humanity and build community before saying like i think this i think this and that type of processes are needed in dallas and there's a lot we can learn from that search for common ground is a global one so they've done a lot of work in de-escalating violent situations across the world and managing some of the toughest conflicts that we've encountered in modern history so a lot of learnings that we can get from there the third pillar as part of the radical rebalancing initiative is this concept that the individual awakening is the revolution there's a symbiotic relationship between ourselves the communities that we embody and the environment as a whole and wisdom begins with our awareness of the self and the world outside the self it deepens with our awareness of the inherent tension between the inner eye and the outer world so you as an individual reaching your maximum potential has a net positive impact on communities and likewise communities that are nourishing and like have access to resources and communal ties is beneficial for individuals reaching their maximum potential so being cognizant of that relationship and taking that out into the world when you're doing the work is imperative for web3 and beyond at that point and here are some tangible steps that everybody can already do to bring about a radical rebalancing and just a way to orchestrate all of this work that we're doing so everyone can take some action in reducing or solving the ongoing damage of the destructive and exploitative systems we're moving away from everyone can take a look at their consumption can take a look at how they relate to work can deepen their relationships with people around them this is all things that we can do at the individual level secondly we can cooperate with building new systems so if you're here you're likely part of that activity already we're doing a lot of thinking on reimagining what's in front of us today and the hard work of bringing that to life so that would be number two and the last thing that as part of an individual that you can already do is enabling people to see with the new eyes so this is what i was referring to as being an example for the people around you if you're someone who takes wellness into account who you know prioritizes your sleep who has a good relationship and balance life you become an example for the people around you and you amplify what we want to see in society so it's really important to keep in mind that the power of one is powerful and i would like to give a shout out to this book impact networks by david um erlickman it centralizes a lot of these topics and brings it together of how we can impact networks using systems thinking and empowering the individuals and recognizing that change happens slowly but it's possible to start small if we take a step back and look at these three key pillars i want to reiterate that it's important to be intentional using these mindsets because this is something we didn't do in web 2 and we saw what happened when all of these new technologies were developed without thinking about how they relate to each other how their second third fourth order effects that could manifest because of those technologies so we need to do better we need to be more intentional more strategic um when we're developing all of these new technologies and literally changing the world so i talked a lot about the guiding principles and the pillars that are underpinning this initiative now i want to speak a little bit more conceptually about how this can transfer into a web3 application so what we envision is a synthesizer engine a place that you can go to to get an overview and transparency on first of all what's the vision like what are the goals that we're working towards so we say we want to have a future of work we want to do climate change and all of these lofty goals that we have okay so what are they at a high level it's going to be dynamic which is what the white arrows represent like things are going to change and there's going to be a feedback loop but think of somebody just entering the web3 ecosystem who has no idea what it is which is most people in the world right now we need to start meet them where they are and start somewhere where everybody can recognize what we're doing we all want to make the world a better place for the most part so i think having that in mind and being able to articulate that as a community is important so that's what the collective visioning layer would be where do we want to go and then from there we can break down the overall goals into different problems that we need to address or different solutions that we need to develop so that's what we call the planning layer so what needs to happen to bring that vision to life and lastly the execution layer which is really orchestrating human potential i've been in a lot of discussions like onboarding individuals into web3 and after they get a good understanding of what the ecosystem is it's always the question of how can i contribute one order to know where you should best contribute you need to know what's currently going on what are the gaps that need to be filled so that's exactly what we envisioned with this platform and i talked a lot about the issues that we're trying to address and what is yeah what it what is the potential that web 3 offers to address them but i want to leave this discussion with one quote that i came across recently that i think encompasses where we're at and how we can think about the issues so if you're not outraged you're not paying attention validating that there is very big interconnected issues we're solving but at the same time if you're not overwhelmed by the beauty of life you're not paying attention like the reason it's worth addressing these issues and putting in our best effort to address them is because there's a lot that life offers us offers us and there's a lot of beauty that we want to keep and life is beautiful so centering on the positive that was one quote that i wanted to end with and now this is a call to all of the strategists the synthesizers if this resonated with you as a problem that is currently here within our ecosystem and something that we can work towards and be more intentional about in being strategic and pulling the information together please reach out we would love to talk with you and then you can also stay in touch when we launch and keep up with any updates about our initiative thank you for listening and open to any comments or questions for the next five minutes [Applause] any questions for jen no all right thing oh yeah there's one um thanks uh first just want to say i love your vision and um just a question on the execution layer in terms of what does that kind of look like or is that been thought of the set of technologies that that would really center on is the semantic web and like decentralized knowledge graphs so that's something that web3 offers that web 2 didn't so right now a lot of our data is in silos and companies and organizations have knowledge graphs that define the relationship between that data and this organization but now we have the opportunity to have decentralized knowledge gaps so the protocol that we're envisioning would leverage the dkgs to bring together information from different systems but so far we've we're building partnerships now so very much in the conceptual phase open to ideas and collaboration for sure but we'll be leveraging the semantic web protocols all right any more questions there's one hi thank you so much for this talk um so in this section like you had a slide where you had a visioning uh component of it yes and i would love to get your perspective on are you imagining having landing on one like unified vision that where then we all kind of execute against or are you holding space for multiple visions of what could be and if it's a multiple version like how do you connect the dots there if they even may be intention yeah great question um one individual that has been pretty informative in framing my thinking on what issues are we trying to address is daniel schmacktenberger so he has coined the meta crisis and through a lot of work from multiple disciplines been able to articulate that most of the issues we're addressing if not all culminate in a few points so i think being able to articulate like this is the reason why we're here namely the incentive mechanism of profit maximizing is a huge one but i would envision something like how the un is able to articulate 17 sdgs that we're working towards and from there break it down into different projects that are working on addressing or bringing those goals to life it would be something like that that's dynamic but the idea is that it will be iterative and dynamic and able to be crowdsourced from the community but at least we'll have one place that we can have transparency on what's going on thank you