Evolutionary Nexus as an infrastructure for transition managers

This message started out as an email reply to Erik Mathijs' blog post on the Art of Hosting Transtions, and when I finished writing it, I realized that more people maybe interested in it, so decided to post it here.

Dear Erik,

This is just a quick note to acknowledge how much I appreciated both the content of your blog entry and the fact you bring to Nexus the topic of transition management as “an evolutionary way of steering and of creating the conditions for societal renewal to occur.” That’s the very core of what made me dream up Nexus in the first place, and I always hoped that it will help me and others connecting with people able and willing to act on the complexity involved with societal level transformation. Big thank you for strengthening my hope!

> An arena is an open, multi-actor network that contains representatives of government, firms, societal organizations, knowledge institutes and intermediaries.

That is, indeed, essential to raise the collective intelligence of the larger social field. (That’s why I am such a big fan of the Scharmer brand of Presencing that does that pretty well.) Would you be interested in A. academic collaboration on issues in scaling up the CI of transition managers, and/or B. using Nexus as an infrastructure of enabling collaboration in and across transition arenas?

Regarding B, you asked, “how to host these arenas? How can the Art of Hosting contribute to such large-scale change processes?” The principles and practices of AoH scales well, as demonstrated in the Columbus healthcare project, as long as it is about hosting conversations. If and when what is at stake is managing actual transitions to the new system and the complexity associated with it, AoH needs to be coupled with appropriate electronic tools, such as an advanced, Drupal-based collaboration platform that we run Nexus on, and the arts of hosting online communities.

I feel inspired by your enthusiasm for both improving the infrastructure (the tools) and exploring the arts. I will be in the US 3-9 April but after my return let’s roll up our sleeves and do it.

With appreciation,

george

P.S. The first time I heard the expression "transition management" (in 1996) was in a different but neighbouring context.