Shall We Begin?

Michael Sillion
Aug 23, 2017 · 9 min read

This is an awesome question that becomes legendary to ask in the right circumstance, like when Daenerys Targaryen asks it in the latest season of Game Of Thrones.

Since under those circumstances the answer is always yes!

So it begins!

For me it begun this last week. My journey to west coast US, first to visit some friends in the Bay Area and do a series conversations about the Future and then onward to the main quest of this trip. Something I have been planning for 17 years to do. To watch a Total Solar Eclipse. (Probably when I first heard the song Eclipse by my one of my favourite band Apoptygma Berzerk and started exploring how to actually see a total eclipse).

And the I way did it, was way beyond my wildest imagination. We did it deep in a national park deep in the middle of Oregon at large festival of art, music, yoga, rave and science. It was of course very inspired by Burning Man with the added Musical stages, vendors, food courts, all types of mindful activities and science - The Oregon Eclipse Party.

Well, for me, it actually began a little earlier this year with a series of weeks, that has all been some of the best weeks in my life, that has all been culminating up until now. First it was the life transforming Burning Man Week in Stockholm with all it’s self-organized workshops on TEAL, leadership and transforming society that then ended in a big party during the Burning Man European Leadership Summit. Then it was time for a week in Sundsvall for the Nordic FUTURE days where I met some new and very exciting friends like Ray Podder (check out his post ROI — Return On Intentions) and Gregory Wendt. 2 Weeks filled with insights and talks about how we transform society and civilization for real. The Love Is Real. Meeting many old and new friends. So many people all feeling, thinking, talking about and ready to build this new world.

Michael Sillion & Ray Podder & Fyodor

Then it was time for the Gothenburg Science Festival and the Katapult Future Fest in Oslo. Both hosting new perspective and even more people all talking about the same thing: How do we do this? How do we build TRUST? How do we innovation a new society on a systemic level? Then I am suddenly in June and I’m in Trondheim for the Starmus festival meeting up with Bert-Ola once again and this time we have prototyped a new way of doing Open Crowd Innovation to solve local challenges for smaller cities in the Östersund region, with all participants meeting up in Trondheim to sum up the work and the model to do it with. And here in Trondheim we get served a traditional conference with a lot of one way panels and Keynotes. It doesn’t matter since they are all asking the big important questions to a very large crowd.

Then I had my 5th time participating in the Almedalen week this summer in Visby, Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Also a week filled with meeting many new contacts and talking on societal change and value creation on at least a few of the 4400 open and free events during this week. Here Innovizion Arena stands out and of course Peter Stordalen’s amazing talk.

And now alas it was time to begin. I am now having my 6th life transforming week in less than 6th month in San Francisco and in Oakland.

Happy New World

Both meeting Fyodor and Ray once again to check in on where we are at creating this brave new world and also meeting a very cool bunch of change-makes under Alison’s and James Hanusa’s roof, kicked me off to watch the sky turn dark in the middle of day with somewhere between 40k-70k other people from over 50 countries around the world, all gathered to do this together in the middle of nowhere.

It was a spectacular festival and I experience awe-striking nature both on the road trip up and down from SF. To say the least, this changes once again how I and many experience the world going into the future. So much hope, joy and love in one place. A culmination without end as we gathered in 1Nation Earth Camp on Monday morning to start the ceremony and celebration.

Shall we begin? — Daenerys Targaryen

We celebrated that the time has finally come, to cast out the olden world of thinking and doing things. A world with a colonial mindset of extraction of value, profit first and the monetisation of everything. And give birth to a brave new world. A world built on a new way of seeing things that connects back to some original human values to live by. Collaboration and cooperation. Love, understanding, unity and empathy.

A new type of leadership. A more science based understanding and awareness of how we work as human beings. With all the biases that work against us more than we like to recognise or are even aware of. With Flow-states and Mindfulness. With curiosity and silliness.

The Total Solar Eclipse — Photo: Get Tiny Photography

A new Conscious Awareness

On my way to the US I also finished the transforming book “How Emotions Are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett that totally redefines how we see that our brains and emotions work towards what is now popular in both science and inspirational content. Especially how fear works. Fear is not triggered in our brains. Nor does reside inside the amygdalae or the “reptile brain”. Fear like all emotions are learned and constructed in our brains by us as a response to a certain feeling.

More life changing stuff please!

And I got it. Because then I literally stumble in on Stu Hameroff’s lecture at the festival on his advanced 40 year research on the Neurons and Consciousness. Bam! It blew my mind away. Finally someone who can explain my feelings we really do have Free Will and a working theory on how it can work.

Stu Hameroff and Captain FUTURE

Has we begun?

Have we? Many of us have. I am meeting people all over the world that are in different bubbles and in different walks of life, all asking the same questions.

  • How do we create a systemic change in society?
  • How do we take the holistic view on how this really works in a complex world?
  • How do we ask the complex questions?
  • How do we ask the silly questions?
  • How do we play society together?
  • How do we create a just, sustainable, and flourishing world?

-

And my own part in this?

The Crossroads of D’ Milky Way

We are the Captains of Spaceship Earth

I’m here to make Planet Earth the best place to live and visit in “D’ Milky Way Galaxy” — Before the first intergalactic visitors get here. (And we have a lot of work to do before that).

Together with some change-makers from the Nordics and all over world I joined up with creating a new holistic and system-aware Society, Organizations and “Crew members” of Spaceship Earth, our only home in D’ Milky Way Galaxy.

There are a lot of people doing incredible work building a better society all over the world. Still we have a pretty fucked up world today in many aspects. One of the key things to do here is start addressing our challenges on a systemic level. For all the great work that is being done out there on Planet Earth, many of them it’s just treating the symptoms of a society with a wrong mindset on how we create lasting value and change in our communities and civilization as a whole. When we start connecting the dots and map up value creation and destruction and the flow of actions and transactions between all stakeholders, we will get a much better picture of how we do this.

This also means we have to create a common quest and narration for humanity and Planet Earth. Here the 17 Global Goals are a great starting point to get us there. And it is truly is like Indy Johar says: We have to start asking the really complex questions if we are to have an answer for them. And we need to ask the really silly questions as well -
We need to get a lot more creative to solve our quests and we get creativity by climbing Mount Silly.

Check out Indy Johar’s post: 10 Provocations for the Next 10 years of Social Innovation.

The Magical Forest

My Quest(ions)

1) What values should we live after here on Planet Earth and possibly on the Moon and Mars soon?
2) What new roles and leadership are needed to take us there?
3) How do we ramp up the science on all aspects of being alive on a rock going around the sun in 30 kilometers per second?
4) How can we share all we got without destroying it for all people and life to come?

5) How many seashells must we all collect before we die to get a win and enter the high score hall of fame of this game?
6) Do we have any extra lives? (Now I’m starting to get silly)
7) Is there a rainbow to be found at the end of all the gold we have collected?

I call myself Captain Future — alas we all have to become responsible crew members and captains of Spaceship Earth. How do we do that?

8) I read and listen to many hours of podcast, audiobooks, youtube videos, articles on how we do this.
9) I started my own podcast called The Captain Future Show (Or Framtidspodden when I do it in Swedish) as well as the corresponding YouTube channel and my Facebook videos around this.
10) I do this as part of my journaling and and you should too.

11) I joined the global Evolutionary Leadership Community and teamed up with the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership in the Bay Area to study myself and train others in Evolutionary Leadership Competencies such as Ontological Design, Systems Being, and Emotions & Generative Language and other vital knowledge and related tools that help us create a more just, sustainable and flourishing future.
12)
I started my own company called Sillion Valley to explore and prototype in how I can make living doing all this.

13) I started journeying with many change-makers on the #ImpactJourney initiative.
14) I will attend the #ulab MOOC once again this year to learn even more to be holistic hacker of our reality.
15) I teamed up with Bert-Ola Bergstrand to workshops around all this. Foremost in Sweden but we want to take it anywhere.
16) I travel to events to co-create the future and meet even more crew members all over the world.

17) I will join and host the Nordic Impact Week in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Yucaipa in October during SoCap.
18) I will ask more complex and silly questions

-

Last but not the Least Quest(ions):

What more can I do?
What are you doing?
What do you want to do?

What is the difference between a European and an American swal… Change-Maker and/or Rebel?
Did the Moon, Nom-nom on the Sun?
And when is the intergalactic tourists coming here, for realz?

<->

So shall we begin?
Shall we begin creating this future we want, today?

/I am Lord Sillion — Captain Future
I will help you navigate and co-create this amazing future 🚀❤️🌎

Sensemakers and Village Elders

As I concluded a workshop today on Impact measurement for the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership it all came together to me. What we lack is this “Village Elders” in our modern western societies, organizations, cities, families and companies. Someone who can carry a vision, set a narration, make sense of what we are doing, co-ordinate collaboration, communicate and build bridges with the others and to feel and “measure” our value creation and impact.

We have so much work to be done and we all need all the help we can get with this. So we need to redefine and train this new type of Sensemakers, Leaders(Captains) and Crew of Spaceship Earth.

-

The last speech from one of the Village Elders before Eclipse you can listen to here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwcK3TY-VYU

The ceremony and ritual by the Village Elders

)

Michael Sillion

Written by

is Captain Future with the mission to make us all become crew members of SPACESHIP EARTH. We are the #FutureNavigators

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade