Ecosynomics — The Study of Negative Deviance — An Alternate Framing

In Ecosynomics, we study negative deviance: what makes groups not extraordinary, not high vibrancy.  We started to answer that question by describing what makes high vibrancy groups extraordinary.  We have found lots of them, and spent quite a bit of time with a few of them.  We now have a pretty good idea of what makes them different from low vibrancy groups: high vibrancy groups seem to start with an assumption of abundance, and answer the big questions (what we have, who decides, what criteria, what rules for interacting) very differently than do the low vibrancy groups that seem to start with an assumption of scarcity.

We began to realize that these “high vibrancy” groups are NOT extraordinary.  They are actually normal people, living life like people want to, all of the time.  This realization flipped the question for us.  It is not, why are some groups extraordinary, rather why are so many groups not experiencing being normal humans.  Normal humans are not collapsed and disengaged: they are present and engaged.  From this perspective, we began to ask, how many low vibrancy groups are there?

We find that there are over 200 million low vibrancy groups with these characteristics — people are either not engaged or actively disengaged, wishing they had not attended the meeting, with less energy to do anything, especially not with “those people,” less creative, inspired, and motivated, having learned nothing and shared nothing of their deeper potential.  A 2013 global Gallup poll supports this.

What makes this huge percentage of groups experience low vibrancy compared to the normal high-vibrancy of the 200,000 groups we know of?  Since we find that everyone prefers higher vibrancy experiences to lower, and they prefer better outcomes, people seem to experience low vibrancy groups most of the time, because they do not see the choice in the agreements.  Once they see the choice, they make different agreements.

We are finding and documenting human anomalies, groups not being human, groups not experiencing the benefits of being engaged Homo lumens.  We invite you to join us in finding and describing these anomalies, in order to shift these groups to the experience and outcomes they actually prefer.  If you are interested in joining us, please contact me.