Collective Acceleration both refers to a phenomenon and a community of practice.
Every day, you might hear people saying something like, “The world is falling apart,” or ‘’Nothing is working like it is supposed to.’’ People are expressing their sense of overwhelm and anxiety about the future. Many leaders are experiencing grief, hopelessness, and dismay.
The world is experiencing a time in which many things are moving at an accelerated pace. Rarely is there such disruption on a global scale — and this moment of disruption is resulting in multiple upheavals, including global pandemics, war, climate disasters, mass migration, and technological advances including artificial intelligence. The experiences are destabilizing across societies and nations because they appear to distort time and space.
And yet, now there is an opening. In times of acceleration, chaos, and great challenge, there’s a possibility to accelerate life-affirming visions and ways of being toward thriving.
"Collective Acceleration has granted us space and permission to feel, give voice to and explore the questions and guidance fueled by the deepest wisdom emerging within us and the biggest hopes and desires for the future. In a time that can feel fraught and overwhelming, this space is alive with the abundance of all that can be, if we move towards it together."
In an effort to respond to the significant challenges and opportunities of our time, “Collective Acceleration” is the name given to a loosely networked community engaged in inquiry and action together. Linking more than 3,000 leaders and rooted in the philosophy and elements of mutual stewardship, Collective Acceleration represents a focused effort to ‘’give it everything we’ve got’’ in a historic and generational moment that calls for greater shared leadership.
In 2020 amidst the global pandemic, a group of spirited leaders, storytellers, organizers, poets, healers, and artists came together virtually on a regular basis to explore what might be possible in that moment.
Over the past few years, the Collective Acceleration community of practice has grown as people seek to take on the collective responsibility of working toward a sustainable, thriving future for our communities and future generations. Together, we grow our capacity to leap toward interdependent thriving as the world experiences an era of unprecedented change.
“Five years ago, a friend invited me to participate in a 15-week-long workshop series on seven generations set to begin in January 2020. I am glad I accepted the invitation. From the first moment I participated in the Collective Acceleration space, I felt completely at home—at home within and at home with the larger community as we practice together and remember our way of being. To be reminded that wholeness is our way of being and we are part of the long arc, mending past, present and future, is truly a gift and a blessing. This is what really draws me to this practice. I feel deeply grateful to be in this space where we are remembering our indigenous ways of being. Yes, we are part of a much bigger universe, ever unfolding.”
"My longing to become a good ancestor in these times of fracture and collapse drew me to Collective Acceleration. From seeing how I can interrupt my habits that do not serve me or our community, to envisioning a more interdependent future together, Collective Acceleration has been an important source of learning, practicing, and community building."
There remain many unknowns about what the many impacts of this time of acceleration will be. We are uncertain how the tide will turn — toward continued fracture and collapse, or toward the possibility of greater wholeness and thriving. Our collective capacity to live more fully into interdependence is consequential in the here and now.
As the phenomenon of collective acceleration unfolds, community, tribal, and governmental leaders are searching for ways to move beyond the habitual constraints that get stuck in analysis and critique. These habits inhibit creativity, strategy, and collaborative governance. Leaders are instead searching for ways that expand the collective health and wellbeing of their communities.
As it happens, critical junctures of opportunity can emerge from conditions of crisis and discord.
The multitude of events happening all at once in collective acceleration create openings where interdependence can emerge. People can organically move toward the opening — to build community, solve problems, and tend to each other’s wellbeing in ways that previously felt far out of reach. This holds the possibility for thriving, if only we could leap toward realizing that possibility.
“Leaders across the US - and the sovereign nations that exist within those same borders - face pressure tests as they navigate fractures and violence, yet teeming with opportunities to rewire and modernize our communities, government systems, and leadership paradigms.Collective Acceleration is a principled response to this phenomenon calling for leaders to step into a stance of governance and mutual stewardship. We have the opportunity to meet this critical moment with the fullness of a bright future horizon.”
Collective acceleration is a phenomenon that was created by many things, some of it human and some of it by forces of nature. Across history, human choices and behaviors have created conditions for the acceleration of events and acceleration of the ways in which, for example, technology would proliferate, how ideas might spread, and how systems might either adapt or become obsolete. For example, climate change is the result, still unfolding, of an accumulation of actions that have fundamentally altered the course of nature — such that nature itself has taken the cue, and is accelerating in its own evolution. As all of that is occurring, we are also engaged in things together as peoples. The acceleration continues, irrespective of whether we actively and purposefully participate in it or not. We can think of the pathways of acceleration as a slipstream: like a fish that can jet along the current with little need for propulsion, or a butterfly that can swiftly ride a current of air with minimal flapping of its wings.
The opportunity before us is not because things are coming together, but because they are falling apart. We are at a moment where everything feels like it is shape-shifting in ways and at a speed we cannot fully comprehend, and it is both a danger and an opportunity at the same time. As people and communities suffer in this moment of falling apart, it is urgent, critical and proximate upon us to not allow their hard work and sacrifice to go in vain. This is a moment in which if we do not take action, then our peoples will not see themselves to the other side. So, we interrupt hesitation and cultivate discernment around sensing opportunities that move us toward purpose, and identifying the critical junctures that enable opportunity to arise, and how we can most fruitfully and swiftly move into those junctures.
The long arc of our many generations of peoples is broken in many places, and therefore requires mending amidst acceleration. This moment of collective acceleration — when everything is falling apart around us — may actually serve to propel us toward an emergent worldview that is less fractured, that enables us to re-member our wholeness. This is the horizon of intactness that we continually move toward, while cultivating intactness in the day-to-day ways of being in the present. In this world we are moving toward, one people’s thriving is not based on another’s people’s suffering. Conflict and ruptures still arise, but we remain intact. The interdependence of diverse peoples, beings, and places is complex, and still requires us to practice adaptability and move through difficulty, but we remain intact in relationship to one another. As we come to know and embrace our role in moving toward thriving, we grow our intactness.
The arc of justice that many transformational leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, have spoken of, indeed bends towards justice — but it is not something that moves on its own. The arc is ours to create and live into. From the Indigenous perspective, the arc exists within the context of seven generations — the seven generations that came before us, and the seven generations that follow us — a span of about 150 years in each direction. Instead of a predestined trend line, we can think of and experience the future as the story that descendants live in, in which they describe how ancestors imagined it and then made it true. And while justice is moral, it is a hollow victory if not accompanied by thriving. A seven generations arc exists because of the intentionality of each generation to tend to current conditions while working toward more fruitful futures, passing that responsibility and the wisdom of experience from one generation to another.The bend toward a just thriving is dreamt and cultivated, fought for and worked for. As the current generation, we are stewards sitting at the midpoint of the arc of seven generations, making choices that shape the bend of the arc.
We all have a responsibility to each other and the places that we come from, with the understanding that we are not the first and will not be the last. Kuleana is both a sacred responsibility, and a privilege of being in relationship to the peoples, beings, and places to whom we belong. Mutual stewardship grows from the ties we have to each other, which reflect our interconnectedness and our role in the past, present, and future of our peoples, beings, and place. It grows from observing the ways of nature and of the universe, and moving in alignment with those rhythms. As the current generation, our kuleana is to mutually steward the unseen and unhealed with care, reaching back to the past while persistently creating the through-line to the future. Mutual stewardship includes making the choices and necessary leaps toward greater possibility for future generations.
If you’re seeking to deepen your understanding of collective acceleration, Norma Wong’s upcoming book, “When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse," will be released on November 5, 2024.
This guide from Collective Acceleration blends storytelling, poetry, and wisdom drawn from decades of insight at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism to explore how to co-create new worlds from one in crisis. The book explains collective acceleration in more depth, and calls us toward the possibility of living our interdependence and wholeness even in times of polarization and turbulence.
Pre-order the book here.
“You have to leap into it. You have to grab it as it moves past you or moves toward you, even as it begins to move away from you. Before it moves away from you there will be other phenomena: the opportunity will move across you many times. It is baiting you. It is baiting the part of you that has a possibility of something bigger, the best part of what it is that you are.”