#HoloChats: Responsibility
We tend to come to the word “responsibility” with some baggage. Maybe the word weighs heavily — I take responsibility as a burden. Or I take pride in being responsible for my family or business. To see responsibility afresh, to invite a shift in perspective on responsibility, I find it useful to think of it in reverse order: the ability to respond. So, can we approach something with a curious interest about how we are able to respond?
We may also like to pretend that we can reduce and simplify our understanding of the world in order to make our responsibilities clear. Our decisions easy to make. However, most of the time, our responsibilities — our ability to respond — lives in complex tensions.
We can try to limit our responsibility. Or we can can try to increase our ability to respond. And increasing that ability to respond necessarily means increasing our internal complexity — our internal maps of the dynamics of the world — so that we can more adeptly respond.
If we step into the questions and internalize the complexity of the world, we need better tools and models to support that awareness. We can look toward tools like polarity management for guidance in living into the tensions between our values as we take responsibility. Let us live into the questions we have about being able to respond.
For Holochats this week, let’s explore:
- Philosophically, what is responsibility? If we break it into Response and Ability, what does that convey? What ethical framework is any responsibility working within? If responding is always relational, to whom are we responsible? Who decides, and why?
- For a business, how do we negotiate between responsibilities to our customers, investors, and staff? What about to our context and future, or past? Is the decision-making process transparent when responsibilities collide? Who shoulders the responsibility, and how do we relate to it (for example, embrace it or treat it like a risk to be mitigated)?
- Technically, how are responsibilities hard-coded into the tools we use? What options do the tools enable? How, as tool creators, do we relate to our ability to create and also limit opportunities? Are there implicit worldviews or ethical frameworks that we can examine in our choices?
The Holo organization feels a responsibility to our ecosystem: our team, our suppliers and providers, our contributors, and the context in which we operate.
- We seek to demonstrate a high level of responsibility in a new area of finance and technology. We believe we have found an conscientious mix that pushes the field toward appropriate regulation and workable banking.
- We dance in the tension between implementing what is possible today — as things are now— and pushing those possibilities toward the forms that we feel better serve the world.
- We have lived into the tension between a functional and productive initial core organization and launching an evolving distributed cooperative ecosystem.
Explore responsibility with us.
We invite you into our community, #HoloChats, a distributed conversation! Each of our weekly topics include philosophical inquiry into the nature of the theme as well as business and technical applications around the theme.
Collectively, our wisdom together can emerge.
To participate, include #Holochats and #theme tags.
Holochats are distributed explorations of themes with several steps:
- A blog post stating the #theme for the week posing questions, creating shared context, and considerations up for debate. (This one!)
- An interview around the theme {and we encourage you to do so as well!}
- You join in with your own blog, video, and links (new or pre-existing) using the tags #holochats and #theme to be included in the distributed dialogue!
- Each week we can collect together the juicy evolution of responses to the theme and share back through the tags, re-post on our medium, and share our favorite insights.
We hope you join in! This is about distributed awareness and growing our collective intelligence together!
Post your own interviews, blog posts, and other content with the #Holochats #Responsibility tags so we can learn from and with you!
Everything is linked for this week by #HoloChats #Responsibility.
