Social Networking for Resilience
Building Communities of Shared Interest and Shared Mission
 
The role of social networks in national security, homeland defense and resilience is now a hot topic in the United States and in the European Union. A key issue that is fast emerging is the question of how best to harness the power of social networks to support national security strategy. Should these networks be top down designed and managed, or should they be organically "grown" from the bottom up as self-organizing, self-actualizing networks?

We propose that the answer is a combination of the two basic aproaches. A well-organized central source for funding and policy coordination is initially needed to help facilitate and catalyze the prototype social network until it reaches its self-actualization threshold and becomes sustainble.

This approach requires a focused capital investment in the Social Community Blueprint Development as a series of tailored workshops focused on the identification and recruitment of the multi-stakeholder collaborative. The selected stakeholders should then receive training and coaching at the individual level in Adaptive Intelligence and Resilient Mind leadership models and behaviors that foster whole system sensing and complex problem orientation.

In conjunction with individual leadership coaching, the larger collaborative should be trained and supported by traniners and facilitators trained in Open Space Social Technologies (U Porcess) proven to facilitate collective intelligence and rapid cycle prototyping for complex problem solving. This ongoing facilitation of collective intelligence and multi-stakeholder alignment provides the basis for the larger social network to emerge organically, but in a more sustainable, high performance manner.
Many of the risk and opportunity challenges faced by humanity at present can be classified as "systemic" in nature. These dynamic, complex, interdependent risk challenges transcend nation state boundaries and eclipse cultural barriers. These systemic challenges are now interacting on a planetary biospheric level. In other words, we are all affected by these complex problems at the species level of impact.

Some of the challenges are so contentious and deep rooted that they now require an unprecendented level of cooperation, information sharing and collaboration to emerge novel solutions not previously considered. The good of the many no longer requires the genius of the few, as in the past approaches to complex problem solving, but now requires the genius of the many.

This proposed paradigm shift can be thought as the embrace of collective intelligence that is methodically harnessed and harvested for social good through Open Space Social Technologies such as the U Process developed by Otto Scharmer at MIT. Multi-stakeholder complex problem solving approaches featuring collective intelligence leveraging to tap the inspired genius of the group points to a provocative scale-effect not previously thought possible.

Applying new Resilient Mind, Adaptive Intelligence leadership models and open space social technologies to the design of distributed social networks hosted on highly interactive, robust technology platforms offers an intriguing model for building adaptive capacity at-scale across all of the systemic risk domains. The host technology platforms need to be resilient, secure and assure privacy and anonymous participation where requested to ensure stakeholder confidence building and open space engagement.

Architecting the solution innovation is not sufficient, we will need novel social engineering at-scale powered and sustained by emerging social networking tools and methodologies to reliably implement the solutions. Particpants in the resilience Communities of Shared Mission will need to be trained in Adpative Intelligence / Resilient Mind leadership training at the individual level and in Open Space Social Technologies at the grou,p, or collective intelligence level. 

As an example, powerful, self-actualizing social networks in support of Communities of Shared Mission could be methodically established across all of the currently identified 18 critical infrastructure sectors in the U.S. and could be used as the basis for emerging novel approaches to information sharing and collaboration that the current information sharing approaches are lacking. On the larger scale of application, similar social networks could be established across systemic risk domains to tackle the world's biggest challenges.
Fostering Innovation and Collaboration at-scale in resilience capacity building