Whether you call them wicked, complex, intractable, or just plain broken, our society is facing many tough issues. We can't sit back and hope for the best. It's up to us to work through the complexity and create thoughtful, sustainable solutions. We are Kumu — a small startup and an ambitious community changing the world one connection at a time. And this is our manifesto. Interested? Sign up at http://kumu.io

2. Whether you call them wicked, complex, intractable, or
just plain broken, our society is facing many tough
issues. We can't sit back and hope for the best. It's up
to us to work through the complexity and create
thoughtful, sustainable solutions.

3. We are Kumu — a small startup and an ambitious
community changing the world one connection at a time.
And this is our manifesto.

4. Shit’s broken.
Health care, taxes, our financial and political systems —
not only are they broken, many of our attempts to solve
these problems have only made things worse. And
that's just here in the US. Look to the developing world
and you’ll find countries that still lack basic human
rights and are plagued with disease, corruption, and
violence.
Enough is enough!
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more
dangerous way of making decisions than by
putting those decisions in the hands of people
who pay no price for being wrong.
- Thomas Sowell

5. We’re all responsible.
Through the people we’ve elected, to the votes we never
cast, to the ways we raise our children, spend our
money, and even the daily gossip and events we give
our attention to — we are all responsible.
Everything’s connected and every action or inaction
influences the system in indirect ways we can hardly
imagine.
Pointing fingers gets us nowhere. It’s time to change the
way we approach these challenges and take
responsibility for fixing the system.
The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Winston Churchill

6. All hope is not lost. Yet.
We can fix things by coming together and solving these
issues as a community. We can start moving forward
again by taking a holistic, cross-discipline approach
involving the entire community — the problem solvers,
the influencers, the artists, the young and the old, those
in office and those on the streets. Our power to solve
comes from the diversity of views we’re able to build
from.
But you're going to have to take the lead. The guys in
charge clearly aren’t going to fix things for us.
There is too much bad news to justify
complacency. There is too much good
news to justify despair.
- Donella Meadows
Optimism is a strategy for making a better
future. Because unless you believe that the
future can be better, you are unlikely to
step up and take responsibility for making
it so.
- Noam Chomsky

7. Complexity is killing us.
Complexity allows companies making billions of dollars
in profits to pay lower tax rates than you do. Complexity
allows your pension fund to invest in mortgages worth
pennies on the dollar. Complexity allows governments
to shut down over childish disagreements. Compexity is
an excuse that allows us to say sorry, my hands are tied.
Enough!
The problems we face are already complex. Adding
complicated solutions and regulations on top of them
only makes matters worse and gives us a false sense of
progress.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and
more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a
lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
- EF Schumacher
They say the world has become too complex for
simple answers. They are wrong.
- Ronald Regan

8. More is not the answer.
We're obsessed with more. More growth. More
productivity. More money. More laws. More homes.
More lanes. More cars.
There's more to life than productivity and progress. It’s
far too easy to be consumed by the daily pressures of
more. We need to work smarter, not harder. We need
the space to pause and reflect, to find the creative
solutions to the problems in front of us.
More is the easy answer. And it's never sustaintable.
What might less look like?
Is it possible to be happy with this life?
Did you enjoy your story?
- A Story for Tomorrow

9. Start with simple.
Complicated solutions have a tendency to waste money
and only create more problems. Simple, thoughtful
solutions that cut through complexity are the only way
we’re going to move forward.
But simplicity doesn’t come easy. To get there, we first
must embrace the complex world we live in to see
through the chaos and develop simple, elegant
solutions.
A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it
work. You have to start over with a working
simple system.
- Gall’s Law
The more you step back and embrace
complexity, the better chance you have of
finding simple answers..
- Eric Berlow

10. Mistakes mean we’re learning.
It's alright to make mistakes. Aim for progress, not
perfection. Always be looking to learn, iterate and
refine.
That said, small mistakes are better than big ones, and
you’re best off avoiding people that make a lot of them.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth,
and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is
at least an increase in knowledge if he knows
what it is not.
- CG Jung

11. Your fly is down.
(Guaranteed somebody out there owes us a beer.)
Honestly though — we’re bombarded by sad and
serious issues. Remember to laugh loud and often. It'll
keep you motivated, make you more attractive, and
even help you live longer.
Seriously.
Laughter is the shortest distance between two
people.
- Victor Borge
Laughter is America's most important export.
- Walt Disney

12. Knowledge isn’t enough.
Everyone knows how to quit smoking and lose weight,
yet lung cancer and obesity remain epidemic. What
gives?
Although knowledge makes things possible, knowing
how to do something doesn’t get it done. Once we have
the solution we need a steady source of incentives and
inspiration to follow through with it.
Show them it's possible. Show them it's worth it. And
you'll be well on your way to influencing lasting change.
I have been impressed with the urgency of
doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.
- Leonardo da Vinci

13. Real solutions require sacrifice.
We can't keep rotating who's in charge and hoping this time is
different. If we're serious about making progress, we need to
fix the system itself.
That means starting over from scratch if the current system is
too dysfunctional to be fixed.
That means supporting solutions we don't fully agree with,
because the risk of doing nothing is far more dangerous.
That means giving up some benefits, possibly losing our jobs,
or even watching whole industries disappear.
And that's all fine!
But we must account for these unintended consequences with
a healthy support system to get people back on their feet.
Doing nothing is far too costly.
A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything
cannot be untied.
- Henri Frederic Amiel

14. Irrational behavior is a myth.
Each of us live within our own reality, shaped by the
choices we’ve made and the events we’ve experienced
from the day we were born.
Our decisions and behaviors are driven by incentives
which come in many forms. Some are immediate while
others are long-term. Some are selfish while others are
selfless. Some are easy to spot while others are elusive.
Calling a behavior “irrational” only means you’ve failed
to fully understand the realities and incentives at hand.
Incentives are the only way we're going to make any
progress. If we don't use them wisely they're doomed to
come back and haunt us.
An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny
object with astonishing power to change a
situation.
- Steven Levitt

15. Competition is healthy.
We can disagree and work independently while still
striving to solve the same problem. Competition is fun,
keeps us from getting lazy, and creates resilience
through diversity and redundancy. The more paths to
success the better chance of actually reaching it.
This belief is at the heart of why projects within Kumu
are owned by individuals, instead of trying to build up a
monolithic, agreed upon truth.
Differences in opinion are a gift — embrace them!
It is my conviction that if we joined together to
localize on a global scale, we could bring about
tremendous and lasting positive change.
- Helena Norberg-Hodge
What if design could be the opposite of conflict?
Not by ignoring it, but by feeding off it. A way to
incorporate and integrate differences & not
through compromise or by choosing sides, but
by tying conflicting interests into a Gordian knot
of new ideas.
- Bjarke Ingles

16. Yes we can.
We know that change takes time — that the toughest
issues can take decades to overcome.
In the end it’s about having the humility to know we
don’t have all the answers, that we may not succeed in
our efforts, but that we’re damn well going to try.
Together we’ll overcome this mess, but it won't be
overnight and it sure as hell won't be easy.
Because the people who are crazy enough to
think they can change the world, are the ones
who do.
- Apple, 1997

17. Join us.

18. Kumu is a web-based platform that gives influencers the
tools to track, visualize and leverage relationships to
overcome their toughest obstacles.
!
Learn more at http://kumu.io
!
Say hi @kumupowered