Hi everybody!

The past few days in Central America have been a wonderful invitation to really reflect on what we might learn from the coronavirus pandemic. In my neck of the woods, the health and economic crises are about to unfold, and there is a strange sense of "urgent stillness", in which many change-makers have had their usual "in-person" approaches stripped away, yet are eager to support.

I realized a couple of days ago that it is precisely in this kind of situation that social action rooted in compassion is uniquely fit to contribute. We are in a situation in which effective action is needed at lightning speed to save lives as the spread of the virus follows its exponential curve. Compassion is the only answer because of way in which the speed of love lubricates the often rusty hinges of collaboration. In essence, compassion enables what I would call hyper-collaboration.

The link between "inner" skills like compassion and "outer" approaches to leadership and change has been consumed most of my time over the past two years, and I´d love to take this chance to share some thoughts to see if they resonate with you, and whether there are any insights that you would like to add.

With a few noble friends we have created an organization called Mobius, based on the analogy of the mobius strip, in which our inner and outer worlds are inseparable. We have been supporting leaders who are building a more prosperous, sustainable and resilient world with strategies that intertwine inner skills and outer tools for change management and innovation. We are working on projects with companies, schools and government in ways that have taught us a lot about how the mobius analogy works in practice.

We find that there are at least 9 inner skills that can me cultivated with specific practices, and which enable particular leadership and change management strategies. It seems that these inner skills emerged in the evolution of our species and emerge in the development of a person today in a fairly predictable order. Furthermore, the more of these skills a person integrates, the more capable he or she is of managing change in complex situations. This little table gives you a sense of the way we see it.

Inner skills -> Outer leadership and change management tools

Self care -> Individual wellbeing
Appreciation -> Team and tribe building
Courage -> Taking risks with high rewards
Commitment -> Structures to create stability and scalability
Observation -> Lean Startup (experimental innovation)
Empathy -> Design Thinking (user centered design)
Equanimity -> Theory U boosted by spiral dynamics
Compassion -> Hyper-colaboration at the speed of love
Surrender -> Emergence from the non-dual perspective

Experimental innovation has created all kinds of useful technology, empathy is supporting consensus building and inclusion, equanimity enables a systemic approach to integrate other approaches, but it is only when a person who has abundance in one form of capital is able to collaborate at the speed of love with strangers who have abundance in other forms of capital, that new solutions emerge at an exponential speed. This kind of hypercollaboration is what is needed in an epidemic and its what service space is really good at :)

I´m not really sure what hypercollaboration needs to look like to help reduce suffering in this pandemic, but a few ideas are rapidly coming to life under the name CO-VIDA, a play on word since "vida" in spanish means life. The basic idea is that if we can inspire a wave of giftivism, then perhaps the resulting hypercollaboration can prevent a lot of the suffereing that is about to happen.

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas :) Sending you love from the tropics!