When I came up with the caption on the slide in the photo above I was thinking about organisations but it occurred to me tonight that it applies at least as much to us as individuals.

I have just finished Jamie Smart’s excellent book Clarity in which, to paraphrase the whole book, he contrasts “outside in” thinking – where we allow ourselves to be steered by what we perceive as the “real world” outside ourselves – with “inside out” thinking – where we realise that our experience of the world is 100% conditioned by our thinking. We see the world through our own filters and this leads to being buffeted by increasingly complex influences rather than accessing our own innate wisdom and achieving clarity.

In the last chapters of the book he talks of collective clarity, societies where enough people see the world this way working together more effectively to cope with our increasing challenges. This is what I was getting at in the chapters “We all need to grow up”, “The ultimate in democracy” and “Evolution on steroids” in my book.

In order for us to make the most of the networked world, that we are beginning to get to grips with, each of the nodes in the network, each of the cells in the organism, have to be healthy, fully functioning, and clear about their purpose. This takes real work that we are only beginning to understand.