Dream Infection

iPhone screen broken,
it fell and I laughed,
remembering how fragile life is.

We all have dreams, most are bounded by greed, hatred and delusion. Yet those rare dream to advance sustainable human well-being are truly precious for our common future.

In this way, ChangeFusion’s purpose is to bridge the gap between such meaningful dreams and emerging reality. We do this by facilitating a regenerative space where compassion, capacity and market intersect.

A regenerative space is where the right people and organizations are being attracted, cultivated and partnered in realizing their mutual dreams to bring about new desirable reality through the use of new technologies, novel perspectives and the creative utilization of resources in addressing social and environmental challenges. We called this outcome ‘social innovation’. Such purposeful novelty can be social technologies, innovation projects as well as social enterprises.

ChangeFusion could not create such future-shifting solutions by ourselves. We will never be able to acquire the necessary vast amount of knowledge, technologies and resources. Instead, we focuses on attracting and building relationship that brings the right players together in such a way that they co-create social innovations that will alter the future in various crucial areas. It is the cultivated relationship that unlock the flow of appropriate knowledge, technologies and resources into the challenges at hand.

This means that we redirect our attention from creating things, products or projects into building relationship or, primarily, from the management of objects and resources into the facilitation of regenerative ‘empty space’ where trust, synergy and partnership emerge while self-importance and arrogance are discarded.

Within this emptiness, there lies a bridge to infinite possibility.

Emptiness is neither sheer nothingness nor energy-less. In fact, it is precisely the empty vessel that holds various elements from the relationship together, providing them with necessary space, energy flow and foster their creative synthesis.

The essence of our character is humility.

Only through humility; i.e. the genuine appreciation of our limitation, can we sincerely respect the values and uniqueness of all people, relationship and elements involved in the design of the solution. This humble attitude helps us, with our best attempt, to directly see reality as it is, free from attachment to the lens of any intellectual discipline, perspective or interest. To see first and know later.

It is impossible to rapidly gain insights and facilitate partnership without a deep sense of respect. The absence of such swift acquisition of insights and mutual will to collaborate will disrupt the spontaneous flow of emerging novel solutions. Therefore, by way of humility, respect and suspended intellectualization; our core-competence lies in the ability to be an empty vessel for co-creation.

ChangeFusion views the networks of relationship as the living fabric of time that vigorously unites past, present and future. Relationship is the subtle layer within the socio-economic evolution both at the global or organizational scale. We must sense its nodes, incentives, connections, interactions, changing environment as well as its hidden rules and assumptions in order to effectively co-design its changes with impact, sustainability and scalability.

Turning our attention from ‘things’ to ‘relationship’ is by no mean compromising the concreteness of results, on the contrary, we can measure precisely the advancement of relationship building and the performance of the emerging partnership.

Weaving this living fabric of time mindfully is nothing less than constructing our common future consciously.

The story of ChangeFusion and our future will simply always be about attracting, cultivating and partnering those with compassionate aspirations to create a better future.

And we are but the floating bridge of dreams.

Sunit Shrestha, founder,
November, 2009.

I was really depressed listening to an ex-biz person who was lecturing many prominent people on the demise of social enterprises in Thailand… and I could not really counter his argument as there is no chance to even speak.

His argument goes

(1) In his long life, there aren’t any Thai social enterprise that make profit.

(2) Social enterprise investment, therefore, will only result in net loss, big or small.

(3) In the past, Thai SME and EXIM banks, among many other institutions, gave massive loans to social enterprises, they turn out to be total NPL, he is also a board of one of such institution, dealing with such mess he didn’t even want to touch about it.

(4) Even those successful social enterprise cases around the world are so unique that they aren’t even replicable into Thai or any other country context.

I hope I could just forget about these massive attacks on social enterprise, but I really can’t, I’m both too emotionally related to the issue, and the person sits on various boards that we will run into in trying to spread social enterprise movement in Thailand.

In fact, I found his argument quite challenging and important to be addressed with properly, so such narrow minded and confusing argument will not see the light of days, ever again.

This, of course, might be just a definition problem, where wrong definition leads to so many errors. But the person actually understood basic definition and still made those claims.

We’re thinking about writing a newspaper article on this or come up with short paper on this. We really need help on finding solid data to disprove those arguments; such as performance data on Thai social enterprises, replicable success models globally, exact amount of loan given to social enterprises from these big Thai financial institutions (or more precisely how they are not giving out any loan). If you have some, please share it with me and anyone who believe in social enterprise in Thailand. If you want to co-write about this, or create an informal event to talk about this (with solid data), let’s do it.

Of course, I’m not a total fanatic about social enterprise, it will not solve all the world problems, but it is important issue and should not to be dismissed so easily.

SUNIT

ChangeFusion could not create future-shifting solutions by ourselves. We will never be able to acquire the necessary vast amount of knowledge, technologies and resources.

Instead, we focus on attracting and building relationships required to bring the right players together in such a way that they co-create social innovations that will shift the future in various crucial areas. It is the cultivated relationship that unlock the flow of appropriate knowledge, technologies and resources into the challenges at hand.

This means that we redirect our attention from ‘creating things’ into ‘building relationships’ or, in essence, from the management of ‘objects and resources’ into the facilitation of fertile ‘empty space’ where trust and partnerships emerge.  Within this emptiness, lies great potentiality.

ChangeFusion views the network of relationships as the living fabric of time that vigorously unites past, present and future. Relationship is the subtle layer within the socio-economic evolution whether in the global or organizational scale, we must sense its nodes, incentives, connections and interactions as well as its hidden rules or norms in order to effectively design the its changes.

Turning our attention from ‘things’ to ‘relationship’ is by no mean compromising the concreteness of results, in fact, we can measure precisely the advancement of relationship building and the continuous progress of the emerging partnerships.

Weaving this living fabric mindfully and providing it with conducive space is nothing less than creating a conscious future.

\\\this is a part of my writing on ChangeFusion methodology.

The other day, one of liberal think-tank social enterprise we’re supporting was asking “How is Think Tank and typical research houses different?”

My personal answer, surely not comprehensive, was

“Think tank usually has specific ‘perspective’ while research houses don’t, so research houses are replaceable while think tank might not.”

At least that’s what I thought in term of how think-tank social enterprise must creates sustainable competitive advantage through their unique perspective or face oblivion.