The Firm: “Come Alive!”

Once Upon a Time in high school (shout out to Claremore, Oklahoma), I dreamed of starting and operating an engineering firm that existed to bring to life the ideas and inventions in your treasured journals and visions.

This firm is a risk-taking partner for anyone without the resource to design and produce their innovations.

Our core understanding is that this world is beautiful because of myriad creative expressions — the lower the barriers to creation, the more wholesome and peaceful our world is because we are meant to create, share, celebrate and love.

So…

Imagine the plumbing in your home. Taps, faucets, water heaters, showers, toilets… maybe a garden hose… water gets piped in and channeled where you need it.

Sometimes the flow is messed up.

Have you ever tried washing your hands, the dishes, or taking a shower with low-pressure? It takes considerably more time to do the thing — it may feel like painfully more time.

Painful, frustrating because time is a limited resource. (Re: frustrations, I’m not here to talk about attachment and emotional peace but we can take that fork if you fancy.) If you wake up late, you may even skip your shower because you don’t have time. It becomes a luxury.

Energy for Creating Stuff

Bringing to life inventions, ideas, businesses, policies, what-have-you — these things take the act, art, process of creation. This demands a kind of energy: creative energy.

Potential – Your par-baked, somewhat researched idea might be high in potential creative energy, but not yet active if it is sitting in stasis, suspended in tension of un-expression.

Active – The kinetic energy of creation in motion. The work is underway: talking, exchanging, testing, sharing, making, etc.

Latent – The creative energy not yet awakened in you, your neighbor, your child. This well of creative energy is infinite but remarkably under-supported. We lack intentional social and economic programs that understand the inherent limitless creative potential in everyone and operate to invest and support the development of our individual and shared creative agency. Both a shame on status quo and an invitation to what’s next.

Creative Plumbing — Systems Flow

With creation framed as energy, we can think of the pipes for the plumbing of new inventions and innovations.

Water pressure: how well are new concepts flowing from source to/through the pages of your diary, pitch decks for investment, US Patent and Trademark Office, the market shelves and virtual stores?

I’ll save my thesis on systems and flow dynamics of creative energy for another time (if you are curious; ask me questions, send me ideas for what this might look like), but you can see that, with metaphor, we can imagine interventions like the firm as critical to keeping the heart of our creative energy economy pumping with higher pressure.

Civic Body

Our collective health is best framed as a body — we do not exist as an island; as we share roads and water and energy and air and soil and all manner of infrastructure and resource, so we share stewardship of this civic ecosystem — a civic body.

A body cannot thrive if all the nutrients and oxygen go to select places, organs, organizations. In the civic body, creative energy must be cycled to/from all corners of our economy, neighborhoods, sectors, etc.

Short Sight

It is short sighted to see the world as win-lose. See @simonsinek re: the Infinite Game. Ask me questions.

Recognizing that potential energy is limitless in all of us and applying what we learn from Simon and Jame Carse on infinite games, we see it is necessary to invest far and wide in developing the creative agency of people and places.

Creative Agency

• What is it and what does it look like to develop?
  • Creative agency is the ability, impetus, awareness of how to nurture dreams and bring creation to life. Necessarily, it is also the access to resources, tools, platforms to do so.
  • We develop it by ensuring the infrastructure is in place and by showing and encouraging others.
• What is its relation to labor?
  • Labor is power. Electricity to the home; ATP for the body. It is the input needed to power the civic body. How we organize and direct this power determines what thrives, what atrophies.
• What is its relation to civics?
  • Civics is the home, the body mentioned above. Being a citizen is stewardship of the civic body, tending to the health of the heart and all organs.

Vulnerabilities of the Civic Body

Labor Management

We are particularly vulnerable to viruses or parasites that influence how labor is expressed, where this power is directed. Co-opting our system to serve some narrative of minds that fail to comprehend the importance of a healthy civic body.

Outsiders

Similarly, viruses designed to trick our white blood cells into attacking parts of ourselves serve to weaken the civic body/the collective strength, resolve, and even the ability to see/understand. This [us vs. them] virus is useful to those who want to take advantage of our assets. By convincing our body to attack itself, to see parts of us as outsiders, we are made weak, kept busy, and distracted from the resource extraction (self-serving theft/accumulation of control) happening all around us.

???

What else?

Where do we go from here?

Civic health for maximal creative agency and flow of creative energy.

How do we get there?

Together, in action — consistently seeking ways to keep the creative energy of our civic body alive and generative; flowing, opening channels for conversion of latent energy to a dance of potential and active energies.