A new System of Thought is required for the modern age now unfolding all around (and among us). Problems have been growing. The present Covid-19 pandemic is unmasking those problems. SEED-SCALE gives a new way of thinking. It contains methods. It uses society-growing tools. It is grounded in values of opportunity for all people–this generation of today and future generations yet to come.
Sending people to Mars is complex mathematics and engineering. Brain surgery is exceedingly precise processes. But mobilizing people to collaborate for the well-being of all requires complex adaptive balancing of a human team nearing eight billion, with a world currency that is funny money, using information technologies always upgrading and imploding, with a planetary natural world that still remains mysterious. SEED-SCALE is a way of moving human thought into action in today’s reality of a socio-econo-info-biosphere.
The above challenge is not easy. But it is doable when approached from the community level. The community level is the level at which people can comprehend and can see the impact of their actions. SEED-SCALE provides what appears to be a universally applicable process that will grow community-fitted, and continually evolving, progress.
This part of the seed-scale.org website is like a collection of garden tools. When growing a garden, you need a variety of tools. The purpose is to intentionally grow food; you want to maximize the harvest. To encourage your garden to grow, you need the right tool at the right time. Here are tools—presented as thought ideas—to grow a just and lasting future for your community.
Humans grow as individuals. So, the human collection called communities undertakes also a growth process. Communities can be defined also houses and roads—that understanding uses engineering thinking. But people do not rise like houses. Continual self-assembly is always happening in a person’s body, all parts always reforming. This pattern of the individual emerging anew is what happens also with our collective being called ‘communities.’ Communities defined as a group of people that share something in common and have the potential of acting together (the SEED-SCALE definition) in sharing and advancing their potential are growing. For that, communities need tools to grow as a gardener needs tools to grow a garden.
The tools are each an idea pointing toward actions to be done with these ideas. SEED-SCALE is properly understood, then, as a System of Thinking. Each idea a tool; a collection of such tool/ideas then as a System of Thinking through which communities grow.
Each one of these tool/ideas is introduced with a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi. The reason Gandhi is emphasized with these ideas is to open for us all a bigger idea: each of us as a person can grow a new community. Gandhi, as noted in various SEED-SCALE writings, advanced the potential of growing people’s seeds of potential to the scale of social change. The most important aspect about Gandhi was that he was a man, a man with a lot of flaws who kept working toward how to advance the quality of life through the living of people.
Some people paint Gandhi as a god, a superhero. That misses his core message which was to be a man, living in a home of dirt. Gandhi had a lot of flaws—that is why he is a relevant example for you and me. Those who grow movements of human energy are people moving other people with perseverance (Martin Luther King Jr Nelson Mandela, etc.) SEED-SCALE systematizes ideas into tools which, when applied, can start a movement. We lift up Gandhi because insofar as any individual began this systematizing of ideas for the modern age, it was this man full of flaws and driven by stubborn perseverance.
Here are nine idea/ tools in the system of thinking that is SEED-SCALE, the process of people growing a better quality and quantity of life experiences.
In presenting these tools to grow communities, emphasis is drawn to the fact that advancing the quality of human endeavor in the present age is the most difficult challenge the human species is undertaking.
