I’m working on an article suggesting how we need to rethink the whole notion of competition.

In the “good ol’ days” when “building community” wasn’t even in people’s vocabulary, competition was revered as a sacred right and good for the whole. One of the clearest indicators of failure and irresponsibility was to be “non-competitive” as a business, non-profit, or institution. Eat or be eaten: one of the hallmarks of the reptilian brain.

So does competition continue to be an unquestioned value when we’re building community? Does it get defined any differently in a context where community has become more important collectively than zero-sum self-interest and the assumption that one’s gain can only occur at the cost of another’s loss?

Love to hear your thoughts and other questions … stay tuned.

Postscript: here is a brief article on breakthrough considerations: Rethinking Competition in a Local Living Networked Economy

Back this week at the Highlander Center in the Knoxville TN region, the training center MLK used to organize and energize the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s. I’m training a group of the country’s brightest and most talented sustainability leaders in high engagement leadership.

People are amazingly invigorated by the notion that leaders must engage communities in the common consciousness of their strengths. After practicing this, one of the people in the group reflected that even a short time practicing a collective obsession with strengths “makes you feel like you just want to get going” in the direction of your vision.

This is the power of a strengths-focus. It’s why there is absolutely no power in conversations about problems, needs, faults, disappointments, deficiencies, and weaknesses - if our intention is to create new connections and the possibilities of a future different from the past.

Spent time this week with good friend and national economic development guru, Ed Morrison, whose model and mine completely align in principles, practices, and power. I love his languaging in work with communities around the country. He uses 4 incredibly simple and powerful questions to focus and engage people in what we call “strategic doing”:

1. What could we do together?
2. What should we do together?
3. What will we do together?
4. What can we learn together?

They are the functional opposite of questions that prevent community and economic devcelopment:

What studies and committees should we form?
What will other people do for us?
What are we lacking?
What kind of permission can we get for what we might do?

In the yogic traditions and practices, there are seven primary energy centers in the space of the body. When they are activated and aligned, we experience wholeness in mind, body, and spirit.

My model for designing our lives is centered around 7 time chakras, all related to how we define our desired future. They are what we envision: the next 20 years out, the next 2 years, 2 quarters, 2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, and 2 hours. When our sense of each time chakra aligns with clarity, our life becomes whole.

So, wholeness is when our dream 20 years out for ourselves and our world is reflected in what we want as possible 2 years from now, 2 quarters, 2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, and 2 hours from now. What we do in the next two hours will perfectly reflect the principles and qualities of our dynamic vision of 20 years from now.

Will we see the demise and extinction of unions in this next decade? There are two arguments in favor of their sustainability: the greed of business owners and shareholders and the memetic transfer of victimhood from one generation’s social DNA to the next. There is a third bit of sociology in support, and that’s the fraternal protectiveness of peers who refuse to do their jobs.

These are not good reasons to sustain an institution like unions. And unions are not designed to make any significant impact on the root causes of these reasons. If they continue, they should invest their talent, time, and dues in impacting the root causes of these reasons, and not pretend impact.

Wal-mart is, perhaps uncharacteristically engaged in the green space, installing …

… close to 5,300 solar panels at its Apple Valley distribution center in California – that’s enough to power 175 homes. The array is Wal-Mart’s largest solar installation and will provide roughly 20 percent of the power for the 1.3 million square foot distribution center, topping out around 1 megawatt.

It speaks to the whole question of believability when incredibly non-green companies do green things. Twenty years ago when I started in the environmental space, no dignified environmental non-profit would take literally a dime from an “evil corporation.” Now companies with initial green efforts are accused of disingenuine “green-washing.”

Pragmatically, it’s hard to generalize. If an environmental-violating company has people who happen to be passionate about the environment - and this is obviously possible - and they see how green efforts like this one can serve all 3 bottom lines … think of the possibilities.

Architecture in the Oughties saw LEED design enter the stage and continues to find its place in the memetic ecology of building. Over the decade, there has been a positive trend of thinking about “sustainability” not just at the unit level and more at the systemic community/neighborhood level. Once again, energy considerations evoke more wholistic than monodial thinking. Small became the new big as people begin to think about shrinking their living carbon footprints.

So what will this new decade see? Look for trends in new materials and material uses, perhaps biomimicry-inspired. Look for creatives ways of balancing the design dichotomies of personal-communal.

Let’s hope that we can escape industrial age approaches to commercial, industrial, and retail building. Let’s hope that principles like localization that lead to mixed-use rationalize and inspire the industrial age centralization principles where big seeks to get bigger.

It can be a decade where we raise brand new questions about more systemic approaches to architecture. This will mean the possibility of more common and bold vision among sponsors and professionals in deals and projects - far beyond the replicative timidity of past decades.

It can be a great decade in architecture.

Spent the day doing Strategic Doing 365 with one of the oldest and most innovative intentional cooperative communities in the country. They did a fabulous job at their 20 and 2 year visions/dreams and 2 quarter strategic actions and questions.

They are another community done with trying to come up with change-resistance and learning-disabled plans, and instead create their future through 365 days a year of strategic doing and learning. They get that vision and strategy are subject to unpredictable and unplannable new ideas, new insights, and new innovations that could come from the core or peripheries of communities. They get that the whole process also needs to be inclusive rather than centrally controlled, if it is to be rich, dynamic, and scalable.

It is exciting to see communities committed to reinventing how they approach mission, vision, values, strategy, growth, brand and community. It is amazing to see how hungry communities are for conversations that focus on assets not needs, dreams not problems, engagement not control, and learning not discussion. Only when more communities experience this transformation will we see transformation on larger scales.

Dixie Sommers, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, recites a list of the 10 occupations that the BLS expects will provide the greatest number of new jobs over the next decade. These include:

1. Registered nurses
2. Home health aides
3. Customer service representatives
4. Food preparation and serving workers
5. Personal and home care aides
6. Retail salespersons
7. Office clerks
8. Accountants
9. Nursing aides, orderlies and attendants
10. Postsecondary teachers

Six of the top seven fastest-growing occupations are low-skill, low-wage jobs.

This raises an incredible array of questions.

How do we create new enterprises and entrepreneurs in these sectors so that they can professionalize these jobs for richer career and earnings potentials? How do we grow other sectors that create options for people with more experience, education, and expertise? Can we grow any economy on local or global scales through an imbalance of service over product jobs? Can the world economies be more creative than focusing on health care to baby boomers - inspired by a vision of the world we want when baby boomers are no longer the dominant driver of new jobs?

How did I go my whole life so far never having been inside any of the famous secret societies like the clubs of Elks, Moose, and other hunted beasts? This week I talked about economic development with a room full of people at one of these clubs in the rural Mid-West.

I learned that some of these traditionally men-only venues have given to the inclusion of women, some to their sustainability and some to their extinction. At this club, the medieval hierarchy remains strong, with a women holding the chief officer title, “Exalted Ruler.” Apparently this title and all of the anthropoligical artifacts continue in the era of Web 2.0. Think: the dynamics of a dying lodge of 5 people circled around an Exalted Ruled, who by the way works 3rd shift on the dock with you and is one of your Facebook friends. I’m not sure how the secret passwords, handshakes, and rituals still hold up.

The future question is whether these will continue as non-transparent, membership-only community service and philanthropy institutions. Or will they see extinction as we see the emergence of  opposite design models like giving circles which are more porous, inclusive, and very transparent networks of focused giving, sans initiation rites, unless you call wine and cheese parties forms of social hazing.

I think there is room in the social ecology for diversity. Why not have the options of secret societies and open source giving networks doing the same good for the community? If either secrecy and transparency make it easier for people to practice shared generosity, why not have both options for birds of different feathers?