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Writer's pictureRichard Lipscombe

Think different and find yourself a hive....

Updated: Feb 12, 2020


Newminimalists promote trust in unconventional you.



Honeycomb hive

The drivers of change in 2020 are many including AI, big data, on demand services, youthful enthusiasm for equal outcomes, etc. Standing as a bulwark against this mounting wave of change stands a consensual Elite who have run the world for the past 100 years.


In the Vietnam War the US Military was controlled by a typical bureaucratic hierarchy which lacked the strategic flexibility it needed to meet the challenge it faced from the Vietcong. This military force was built for a war against a top-down commanded military presence like the USSR. If the US had faced an opponent modelled on the USSR communist model then it surely would have had much more success. Indeed the USSR would later go on to fail in Afghanistan for around 10 years before they withdrew. The US took up that challenge and they are still fighting a war against tribes in the hills of an alien land. Both the US and USSR military relied upon a technocratic bureaucracy model to organise the war effort by two very different models of government. In fact both the US and the USSR faced adversaries who had very different models of government; however, both were resistance fighters who were determined to change their tribal [Afghanistan] or emergent [Vietnam] culture.


The Vietcong and the Afghanistan fighters used a common model of organisation that looks like a honeycomb hive [see photo]. They both used semi-autonomous cells to organise the fight against the might of the US and USSR who fought as a homogeneous whole with a top-down command and control structure. Of course the honeycomb hive is not strictly the result of all the bees in the hive acting as semi-autonomous actors because they work to an established pattern that we recognise as it forms all around the world. So the reason I use the honeycomb example is that it is a structure of cells that link together to support the whole. This is a model for semi-autonomous organisations [with unique forms of bottom-up leadership] that I imagine as overlapping circles. Inside each circle is just the right number of workers together with a queen bee which overlaps with another circle wherein a completely different worker is ordained as a queen and so on and so on. These workers and queens are allocated to their circles on the basis of talent and merit.


We are headed towards a new world of work where the individual is more important than the group; and, the incompetence of those who settle for "one think" will be replaced by the competence of those with talent who "think different".


Richard


Newminimalism is a "state of mind" I call minimal-you. Imagine that you could discover your unique version of minimal-you. Further imagine that you can do that in just ten days. Well the truth is that you can do that if you do the following three things.

First, eliminate collective wants. Second, automate individual habits. Third, recreate personal beliefs. You can do it, but, you will need to be dedicated and disciplined to make it happen. For more on moving out of the slow lane in life go to minimal-you.com

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