In my experience I've found that the greatest impediment to growth is rarely technical, or even financial, it is organizational. Can you imagine if our bodies did the same amount of in-fighting, politicing, and power-grabbing as we do in our jobs and communities? I can, its called cancer. Under a microscope, i think it would look a lot like what we are doing to each other at the cultural and species level.

I read somewhere that the greatest challenge of our time is learning how to work together. Why is it that we have been presented a false choice between being cruel-heartless corporate type, or irrational-irresponsible dirty hippie? Another way to put it is, why have so many who have abandoned capitalism and corporations also abandoned things like: planning, commitment, clear-decisions, follow-through, and self-evaluation? Why do non-profit organizations have the reputation of being run so poorly?

I recently attended a talk by Alan Shalloway who claimed that there are identical principles at work behind several of software engineering's best practices. He went on to describe how it is possible to dig through your programming experience and discover that, whenever there was an error, one of these principles had been ignored or violated, and that by learning to work with them, its possible to write software programs that are resilient to change.

I believe there are identical organizing principles, only different in there level of scale, that are at work behind our functioning and dysfunctioning organizations. I've found that these principles are difficult to talk about directly, its much easier to describe their form where they appear in the physical. The trouble is, that their forms vary, and this leads to a lot of our confusion and in-fighting. Many people mistake one particular form as the absolute truth. Wars have been fought over this. I witness many small battles each day.

Luckily, however, these principles have an observable pattern in form. Through study of existing organ-izations, at all-levels up to this point (quantum, atomic, molecular, cellular, organism, ecosystem, continent, planet, solar system, galaxy, universe), we can come to know these organizing principles well enough, to apply them to something new - something entirely foreign to human-life on this planet: large scale peace. Perhaps even in time to save all the levels that have supported our lives up to and including this moment.

Organizing is hard, but not harder, I imagine, than the first time winter turned into spring, or water leaped into steam. Its just now our turn.