How I'm attempting to "solve" the metacrisis

Climate/finance/geopolitical/etc crises are way too big for one person to fix. So what the hell am I doing?

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Now on to this week’s issue.

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A friend of mine asked me the other day: How are you orienting to the Metacrisis? 

Holy cow, what a question. 

That’s what I want to talk about today. How I’m orienting to the MetaCrisis. And then I’d love to hear from you how you’re working with it. 

First, let’s define the Metacrisis. 

According to philosopher Terry Patten:

“(The meta-crisis is) a single phenomenon. We may be thinking of it as an ecological crisis. We may be thinking of it as a psychological or spiritual crisis. We may be thinking of it as a cultural crisis and a breakdown of community, family, etc. We may be thinking of it as a crisis of government and economics and finance. And, it is all of these things. But, it’s not reducible to any one of them. That’s why it’s a meta-crisis.”

To truly understand the scale of what we’re talking about, I suggest reading my friend Kyle Kowalski’s The Meta Crisis 101 or watching this amazing video of Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens unpacking it at length. 

Suffice it to say, the metacrisis is the intersection of the ecological, geopolitical, spiritual, technological, financial, and other crises our world faces at the moment; however, it is irreducible to any one of those things because they are all interdependent.

When I consider what I am responsible for and how I might make even the tiniest dent in beginning to resolve the metacrisis, I honestly want to bury my head in the sand. And when my friend, executive coach Derek Haswell, asked me how I was engaging with it, my first reaction was to do just that. “Ah, it’s so big, what the hell can I do?” 

But that’s a cop out. 

Regardless of how we got here, the fact remains that the metacrisis is not going to resolve itself, and there is nobody else to resolve it except us. That means me, you, and every subsequent generation that manages to survive on planet Earth. 

Which is why I’m glad for friends who bring it up and pressure me to engage thoughtfully in the biggest Work of our time. 

So what am I doing? 

Islands of Coherence

My instinct, when faced with a complex, global problem is to immediately limit myself to global solutions. Any solution that isn’t thinking at the same scale as the problem is worthless, I tell myself. 

But that’s not true. 

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine said (HT Derek on finding this one): 

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

He was talking about chemistry. But it seems to me that his theory applies to the human experience as well. 

It describes the dynamics I see daily while working with leaders, in which a shift in the leader ripples out to change an entire company and industry. 

It describes the way that a single organization that makes meaning out of chaos automatically shifts the way other organizations around it behave as well. This happens on a micro scale with inter-office politics, and on a global scale with organizations like OpenAI. 

And it describes the way a single individual, operating from a different level of coherence, can spark a nationwide movement that stems less from organizational chops and more from their way of being. Think Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, or in a different way, Donald Trump. Indeed, often organizational chops are irrelevant in the face of a strong enough level of coherence.

When you look for islands of coherence, you can see them at the beginning of all systemic change. You can observe little pockets where things work differently. Better, in some way that entices people to spread coherence from within the chaotic system. 

As far as I can see right now, creating islands of coherence is the opportunity for each individual to work with the metacrisis. To create their own island of coherence – a pocket of space, however large, in which things work differently – and create the conditions for that coherence to be shared. 

Reminds me of Seth Godin’s thinking, actually, about how to get your ideas to spread.

So that’s what I’m doing. 

How does one do that? 

There are three steps in creating an island of coherence that might have a positive impact on the complex clusterfuck in which we find ourselves. 

1. Work toward inner coherence

2. Follow your own path faithfully and generously

3. Package intentionally

Work toward inner coherence

One thing I’ve learned in leadership and coaching: Whatever unconscious beliefs or mental patterns a CEO is running, they will reliably be projected onto their organization. 

If the CEO subconsciously feels like an imposter, the company will become a place in which everyone presents their most polished self, leaving authenticity at the door. If the CEO unconsciously resists anger, the company will avoid truly dealing with the most contentious issues, leaving them to fester into resentments and worse.

Whatever your internal baggage, you are always, without fail, projecting it onto your world. So the foundational work required to create your own island of coherence begins by doing the work necessary to let go of your internal baggage. Because if you don’t, whatever you create will simply perpetuate that baggage at greater and greater scale (which is why I hope like hell, against mounting evidence, that the folks creating AI are deeply conscious people). 

I’ve covered the journey of inner work from many different angles (links), so I won’t rehash it here. But suffice it to say, it’s a matter of moving progressively more of your sense of self from the world of subject (“you” or the one who’s looking) to the world of object (“something” or the thing looked at). And then letting go.

One of the primary challenges to creating islands of coherence is that the creator must create from within the complex, chaotic system. And so we are inevitably influenced by that system, in ways both conscious and unconscious. Working toward inner coherence is the process by which you become aware of those influences, and discard them.

This is a lifelong journey. But it’s a foundational responsibility for anyone who wants to be a force for good at any scale, lest they unconsciously scale their psychological shit. 

Follow your own path, faithfully and generously

Once you’ve done enough inner work to become reasonably clear, you’ll find that, absent all the fear and striving, you can hear a quiet, small voice inside. That voice, not influenced by the society in which you live or the expectations of others, will call you to your Work in the world. 

So step two to engaging in the metacrisis, as far as I can tell, is to follow that call. 

I’ve written about the process of developing a relationship with your vocation before—I’ll refer you to this piece if you want to dive in—but for the purposes of our conversation today, suffice it to say that the voice usually doesn’t give you a finished picture of everything you should do to solve a problem. Rather, it gestures gently in a direction that feels true, even if you do not yet have the logic to describe how. 

For me, following my path involves checking in with my still, quiet voice every day and asking what wants to come through me today. And then, whatever comes up, I bring all my skills and resources to bear in doing that work as well as I possibly can. Sometimes I’m given a particular piece to write that day. Sometimes I’m given a vague sense that I should focus on building one part of Inside-Out. And sometimes I’m given a sense that I should take a break. Whatever comes up, my logical mind will immediately pick it apart, but I’ve learned to let those arguments go and simply trust myself to know the next right thing. 

This way of living has been called “through me” consciousness. And to truly follow your path, you must “let go of the life [you] have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for [you],” as Joseph Campbell famously said. 

In other words, it requires faith. 

I’ve never met a founder who has done the work to develop a relationship with their vocation, and then faithfully builds from this place, that doesn’t also have as their primary goal helping others. There are no selfish conscious entrepreneurs. As a rule, those who have done this work are generous, and the islands of coherence they create are as well. 

My inspiration for this approach came from Michael Singer’s amazing autobiography The Surrender Experiment, which I recommend to all my clients. Through me, surrendering has led to the creation of an unusual executive coaching firm, a company dedicated to advancing racial equity in entrepreneurship, and a hell of a lot of writing. 

Those creations didn’t come from an inner need to prove myself (unlike some of my previous creations). They are simply the most faithful execution of the Work that Life asked me to do. 

Of course, your path will be different. 

But it seems to me that one cannot be internally coherent, much less create islands of coherence, if one is not following one’s vocation. 

Package intentionally

The thing about living within your own coherence is that it feels risky. Naturally so, given that it involves bucking the complex, chaotic system in which we live. 

I think about the amount of bravery, faith, and frankly pain that was required for me to let go of the person I thought I was and allow myself to live congruently. I know how fucking hard it is to do. 

But it’s necessary to build inner congruence to have even a shot at addressing the larger chaotic system that is the metacrisis.

And it’s also, probably, not enough. 

During my years in business, I’ve seen that even the most stable islands of coherence (or startups) will wither and die, overwhelmed by the chaotic complex ecosystem in which they live unless they enable their ideas to spread. 

That’s where marketing becomes so important. 

When I was scaling VNN, I lost count of the number of people who met me and said, “oh, you’re the ESPN.com-for-high-school guy.” More than what we did, that little slogan stuck in people’s minds, and they’d tell friends. Similarly, Inside-Out was just me and a few clients until we began talking about it as “executive coaching by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.” From that point, coaches began joining, and top 1% clients followed. The same island of coherence (at least in the case of Inside-Out; VNN was unfortunately in some ways a bunch of my insecurities writ large) but marketed more intentionally.

If we want our islands of coherence to make an impact, we must package them simply and coherently, enabling them to spread inside the chaotic system like a benevolent virus. 

But will that be enough? 

A part of me still feels that I must think bigger, operate at the policy, systemic, or governmental level. And at some point those changes will absolutely be needed. 

But I know two things: 

First, the voice urging me to engage at a bigger level, right now, stems from fear and ego. I can feel it. And fear and ego are the way we got into this mess. If at some point I’m called from some other place, that may be different. 

And second, doing big things well starts by doing small things well. If I want to make an enormous change in the world, first I must change myself, and then I can spread that change to others.

The Work, whatever island of coherence is yours to build, when it’s true and authentic and forwarding the solution to this complex situation, it’s built from the (cough) inside out. 

A work in progress 

I’m fortunate to have thoughtful friends to press me to think about these topics deeply. Because otherwise, in the face of the deluge of negativity I hear from the world every day, it’s way too easy to simply check out. To indulge in one of Buddhism’s Three Poisons – greed, hatred, or delusion – and inadvertently exacerbate the crisis in an effort to fix it. 

But I’m still figuring this shit out. 

It’s a messy, complex problem, and I reserve the right to change my mind completely if new evidence presents itself. If I run across an island of coherence that resonates more deeply than the one I’ve outlined above.

In fact, I’d welcome it. 

So I ask you, how are you engaging in the metacrisis? 

Send me a reply or post in the comments. I’ll share the responses in a later post for all our benefits. 

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