Getting to Maybe

• The book “Getting to Maybe” is about acting deliberately and intentionally in a complex, uncertain world
• Title riffs on the certitudes of a very popular management book about negotiations called “Getting to Yes”.
• Word "maybe" combines two ideas and holds them in tension
  • MAY—possibility, what might be, the essence of Intentionality as a vision of ' what could happen, if only ...
  • BE—state of being, the way things are, presence, reality . ..

• Examples studied revealed an archetypal narrative:
  • Some active, caring person becomes increasingly distressed by some problem (HIV/AIDS), injustice (racism) or situation (gang violence)
  • That person decides that something must be done
  • The impossibility of things staying as they are gives birth to the possibility of change
  • Realize a need to fully understand the situation and the system that is the source of their discontent

• In terms of Cynefin Framework, person (‘social innovator”) begins the journey in the Aporetic/Confused domain
  • Chapter 3: "Stand Still”
    • Look at where they are, who they are, where they might find allies and what scope of change is needed
    • In so doing, encounter the entrenched powers that benefit from and hold in place the existing system—the very system they want to change
      
• Move to either Complicated or Clear domain
  • Chapter 4: “Powerful Strangers"
    • Discover, reframe and unlock critical relationships and resources
      • Experts in the Complicated
      • Highly experienced pragmatic workers in the Clear

• Move to the Complex domain with powerful strangers
  • Chapter 4: “Let It Find You”
  • Social innovators find themselves in flow, in sync with others, moving rapidly forward in unexpected and unpredictable, even previously unimaginable ways
  • They thought they were looking for something and suddenly find that it has found them
  • "Maybe" suddenly has the feel of "will be" or must be
    • A sense of “going viral”, fast feedback loops

• It does not unfold smoothly. Dominating paradigm persists as described in Flexuous Curves
  • Chapter 6: “Social Innovation is Cold Heaven”
  • New barriers emerge
  • Threatened powers fight back, for they too see what may be coming, and they don't like it
  • Resistance is aroused
  • Things start falling apart
  • The premise that things will likely get worse before they get better becomes fact, not theory
  • Doubt surfaces, grows, overwhelms—well, almost
  • Social innovator has descended unsuspecting into "cold heaven"

• Then, sometimes at the darkest moment, Adjacent Possible arrives
  • Chapter 7: "Hope and History rhyme"
  • What seemed like a local, personal social quest suddenly connects with larger forces
  • It turns out that the timing is right, the moment has come, not through planning, not through rational goal setting, not through careful management and forceful control, but by being at the right place at the right time: a historical moment made conscious and intentional by the prepared mind
  • Intentionality joins possibility joins historical forces and becomes, in the words of poet Seamus Heaney, "the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term