Seven Perspectives On Organised Progress

Every community inherits its own set of challenges. Our ancestors had to resolve their own and in some cases, this left us with extra work and in some cases, it enabled us to do work we previously had no control over. In modern society, each individual is empowered with access to knowledge, skills, and organisations that can help put good ideas into active service. When we have an agenda to bring the quality of life of our community to a higher level the key is to organise the project and apply it. Before we have a run of ideas, it’s important to understand the principles and perspectives that bring progress into action. The most powerful ideas are able to speak to people on many levels and here are listed some of the most valuable ones.

Universality

A progressive and empowering idea is universal. It doesn’t just apply to you and people who have had similar lives. The best ideas can be used by all to better their lives. Think of any world-changing product and notice that the majority of people have one. For better or worse, these things make it into nearly every home and if they don’t have one they probably know what it is and would have one if they could. Such things as political ideas and operational activism also have a technology of ideas that are used to implement their agendas. For example, as the coronavirus pandemic (at the time of writing)has made it necessary to prevent mass gatherings and the law protecting our right to protest peacefully has been put to test, we clearly need new ideas that can still be used in protest that negate the need to gather on mass. We could even test to see how effective mass gatherings are and then compare the effectiveness with other more modern methods like free magazines and dramatic performances.

Integrated Networks

You have most of it already. The world is full of people who want to help. We all have good ideas and are all willing to spend energy and time on making them happen. Provided we can unify the focus with a common agenda of progress, the unified capacity of a network fully exceeds the ability of one. Your clients and customers, the people who will use and benefit from your idea, are part of the network. They are a great resource not only for funding but in feedback, word of mouth communication, and ambassadorial function. How many times have you worn a T-shirt with a logo on it? In its simplest form, you’re an ambassador for that brand.

Where There’s Muck There’s Brass

It’s a Yorkshire phrase and one that speaks the truth. Muck is anything that people don’t know what to do with. Brass is another word for money. Another way of putting it is that one person’s treasure is another person’s trash. If we can find how to utilise the things people no longer want or just don’t need then we can turn an abundance of inertia into a source of income. The other way to look at it is that people want clean and tidy lives, people want nature to be clean and tidy too. As harmless as they may seem, plastics and waste products do not belong in the natural environment. The ability to reverse the polluting nature of our human activity is always progressive.

Compliment Not Compete

There are lots of people like you who have good ideas. Some of them are successful and some are hungry for success. This can feel like an Olympics with everyone trying to outperform the other. In reality, our competitors have a positive agenda just like us. They’re not into hurting, but helping. So if we treat them as such and work alongside them in ways that improve everyone it will be beneficial to everyone. If the society we operate in is a jigsaw, we can imagine holes that need to be filled. As society moves on and new technologies emerge, new holes in the market appear. We have to be able to adapt ourselves to fit the hole and not try to force other pieces out. Society itself relies on these and if we meddle with those we put at risk the whole picture.

Transparency

So you may be a magician at heart and you want to woo the crowd. This is fine but we need to be able to trust what you do. We have all heard the story about the Emperor's New Clothes and none of us wants to be the Emperor. This means that we are naturally sniffing out tricks and scams, so if you act like there’s some great magic at work then people will feel unsafe with their investments. Our society needs to know that workable, copyable, and reasonable processes are involved in the progress on offer. They need to be shown, step by step, exactly how they will use the new ideas in their own lives to bring about the needed progress and change.

Rewarding And Useful

We know that salad is good for us but most of us don’t eat enough because it doesn’t taste as nice as other things. The reward isn’t big enough to justify our whims of hunger and desire. We can put mind over matter and make sure we get our daily amounts but this is a learned habit, often enforced since childhood. Good ideas that cultures can adopt have to be rewarding as well as useful. They have to feel good to use, to think, to talk about. We clearly have different priorities and personalities that make it hard to know what each person will find rewarding but we can use statistics to know that a good deal of people will find certain things enjoyable. The concept can be pushed to try and incorporate as much of the data as possible, by reaching out to all known forms of rewarding usability.

Purpose

So what is the problem and how does your idea address it? Are you sure you are seeing the problem correctly, are you sure your idea will solve the problem without creating new ones? We need to have a clearly defined purpose and one that can be shown to improve lives for all. Sometimes we think the world should be a certain way but we are in a minority. Other times we might be emotional about something and therefore unable to rationalise the situation in an equitable way. We need to be clear and defined in what we want to achieve and why it needs to be achieved. The benefits to society as a whole need to be demonstrated in order to convey the message that you are working for the whole and not just for yourself.

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