Early Visions | Bay Area 2020: An Infinite Game | The "regional metamorphosis" meme emerges in 2006

This section describes the remarkable potential for a profound regional transformation that exists for those of us who call the Bay Area our home.

Just as Silicon Valley provided the container that brought us into the Information Age, so the Bay Area watershed can play that special role in accelerating our movement into an age of wholeness—an age where the well-being of all of life is valued and contributed to.

Just as Silicon Valley provided the special conditions that generated unparalleled new technology-based entrepreneurial energies, so our greater Bay Area can unleash the huge entrepreneurial opportunities implicit in the pursuit of wholeness throughout all of our organizational domains (e.g., industry, governance, education, health, media). The purpose of this section is —

1. To shine a revealing light on this incredibly attractive opportunity, especially as it exists within and among Bay Area organizations,
   
   
2. To support those pioneering organizational leaders and "entrepreneurs for wholeness" who will expand our definition of success in a way that facilitates our great evolutionary shift from finite to infinite games;
   
   
3. So that our Bay Area watershed's organizations are supported in their metamorphosis to life forms that are consciously growing their capacities to contribute to the well-being of life in the Bay Area and beyond.

We believe the simplistic picture below reflects the global situation we currently share as a species. The purpose of this section is to describe how our Bay Area can play a leadership role in shifting from Path B to Path A—and generate new true wealth (well-being for all life) in the process.



We are at a critical juncture as a species.


We CAN choose Path A.


This section is a generative initiative designed to help catalyze that shift.



Path A projects our destiny as a species if we choose to develop the capacity to make the shift from "finite to infinite games" as a standard for our organizing forms.

Path B projects our fate as a species if we continue to maintain our organizations as finite games.

Technology alone will not get us to Path A. In spite of the super-abundance of technological breakthroughs produced over the last 50 years, the Information Age has not slowed our slide down Path B's slippery slope.

Our economic well-being as a region, country and species is totally dependent on the well-being of all of life on this planet. We're all in this together. We will either evolve together or devolve together.

The shift to Path A will involve countless synergy-seeking generative initiatives drawing from four broad, distinct, interdependent and ever-evolving "Design Domains:"

• Technological Design — The design of our things, including our built environment—physical and virtual.
  
  
• Environmental Design — The design of our relationships with and our agreements concerning, the rest of nature.
  
  
• Social Design — The design of our purposeful relationships and agreements with each other (families, organizations, communities, regions, nations, etc.).
  
  
• Transformational Design — The design of our approaches to learning, growing and evolving as individuals and as social organisms.

An entrepreneurial renaissance in design can fuel our great shift from Path B to Path A. The beginnings in this renaissance in design can already be seen if you know where and how to look. Synergy-seeking approaches drawing from all four Design Domains can spawn entrepreneurial initiatives that move our region toward wholeness.

This section represents FireHawk and Bill Veltrop's commitment to explore and actualize the unlimited potential for wholeness that exists throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Here is how they picture this movement unfolding —

1. Cast an appreciative net for generative initiatives and "infinite players," especially within or among Bay Area organizations. Engaging with these players and initiatives in ways that are appreciative and value-adding will lay the foundation for everything that follows.
   
   
2. Work with committed leaders in helping to evolve prototype "greenhouses" for connecting and developing these players in ways that accelerate the seeding, growing and propagation of generative initiatives throughout our region.
   
   
3. Help weave a web of support for and among emerging "greenhouses," so that they collectively promote and support growing an irreversible Bay Area Watershed movement toward wholeness. As this region demonstrates the potential for synergy among its diverse greenhouses, this movement will become irreversible.

This section is intended to help all of us live our way into and through a 14-year odyssey—"an impossible dream" for birthing a region-wide infinite game, so that our children's children get to dream their "impossible dreams."

NOTE:

Contact Bill Veltrop if, after reading these early imaginings, you want to explore specific ways you might promote and support generative initiatives within or among the organization(s) you serve.