Consider this:

The capacity to jointly plan solutions for complex challenges now requires new skills.

Fifteen years ago Peter Drucker wrote, "Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation" _"Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself -- its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structures, its arts and its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world." - "We are currently living through just such a transformation."

Drucker, an internationally respected consultant and shrewd social observer was in his 80’s, and not prone to exaggeration, when he made this observation.

Drucker speaks of a social paradigm shift. Such shifts are so large and so pervasive that they are actually difficult to see even when they are upon us. Without seeing the shift itself, we are left to feel it as pain and chaos to our sense of natural order. One way of seeing this shift is found in our efforts to name it. SoCoDesign names this shift as “the death of the expert paradigm.”

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The expert paradigm was born in antiquity and forged in the Newtonian view of the world. It is from an era where it was felt that a single individual could hold the complete view of a complex reality. It is this paradigm that has shifted in the Information Age. In harmony with this shift, we are seeing "decentralization" of governance in many forms.

The parallel innovation that has enabled this shift is the advance in communication and decision support technology. This enabling technology is NOT driving the shift. The shift is driven by the emergence of complexities too great to manage by processes that we have used in the past.

Many fragmented segments of the civic community are seeing the echoes of this paradigm shift in their practices and feel that it is unique to their corner of the world. It is not. The vast shift is changing the world.

To accommodate this great upheaval in where on earth we place our hopes and faith for the future, we are seeing a birth -- or a rebirth -- of an ethos for the sanctity of the earth. Some will approach this ethos with the hopes of revisionist righteousness and others will approach the ethos with plans for building new forms of futures.

Some who sense the new paradigm will welcome the hope for the solution it will bring, and yet will still cling to the old expert paradigm for solving problems.

All will be drawn to the ethos of the local touch of the earth because its pull is an inescapable necessity of our times. It represents the simple truth upon which all complex understandings hold sway.

We will come from many compass points with many notions of what is drawing us to converge, yet we will converge painfully with the collision of our good intentions. Only when we grieve for the death of our individual view of the reality around us will we open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to the collective reality. This day is upon us.