the bucket brigade, a collaborative publishing project

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If the world is truly more connected and complex than ever before, how do businesses prosper in an even greater competitive climate?

If governments around the world are entering an age of austerity, how do our leaders understand the full systemic implications of the difficult choices they’re making?

And how do we, as citizens, understand this new world well enough to elect responsible leaders, make better decisions for ourselves, and leave our children an even better future than we inherited?

If the biggest challenges of the 21st century demand collaborative solutions, how do we rally participation beyond ideological borders?

Our mission is to solve the world’s most massively complex problems. To do so, we’ll need to build a network of 21st century problem solvers – professionals armed with a common understanding of how to comprehend, communicate, and confront complex challenges. Our first step is to spread a foundational literacy of how to examine complex problems. In a book that is currently being researched and written, we’ll offer you the ability to make sense of the most complex challenges in your personal and professional life. Once armed with that knowledge, we’ll invite you to join our network of problem solvers.

It isn’t so much that complexity is a part of our everyday lives, it’s that every part of our daily life is the result of complexity. That we, ourselves, are born of complexity, shaped by complexity, and interact with a world that is inexorably growing more complex.

Yet, most of us lack even a general understanding of exactly what complexity is. But more than ever before we’re concerned with connecting the dots in our lives: from the food we eat, to the price of a gallon of gas, to changing global temperatures, to the domino effects of a speculative housing bubble.

It’s time that we intimately acquaint ourselves with complexity, to pursue a foundational literacy in complexity and systems thinking –

Systems literacy combines conceptual knowledge (knowledge of system properties and behaviors) and reasoning skills (the ability to locate situations in wider contexts, see multiple levels of perspective within a system, trace complex interrelationships, look for endogenous or “within system” influences, be aware of changing behavior over time, and recognize recurring patterns that exist within a wide variety of systems.

- Linda Booth Sweeney, The Time for Systems Literacy is Now!

Complexity studies have led to new interdisciplinary discoveries in physics, finance, biology, and computer science with the work of The Santa Fe Institute and its brethren. And systems thinking has already helped to spark a revolution inside boardrooms among the Fortune 500, lead by Peter Senge’s classic, The Fifth Discipline.

But now the lessons of complexity and systems thinking demand to be democratized.

In fact, in early 2010, The MacArthur Foundation announced a grant of nearly one million dollars to pursue systems thinking curriculum development at the middle school level here in the U.S.. Systems thinking is so critical to understanding our modern world that it is seen as a fundamental literacy to be developed in our children.

When we’re practiced in complexity and systems thinking, we begin to see past what H.L. Mencken called, the “simple, easy to understand, wrong answers” of complex problems. We begin to see patterns in our everyday lives, to diagnose the multiple causes to the conflicts before us, and to demand more from our leaders than bumper sticker slogans.

More than 200 colleagues have helped raise over $18,000 towards producing the book. And over 100 of my supporters are now a part of what I call the Editorial Board, testing the mettle of my ideas and contributing their own. This isn’t a book written by committee – it’s a product designed, developed, and ultimately distributed by a think-tank of the smartest people I know.

Additional links:

• Follow all of the backers of the Bucket Brigade on Twitter by following this Twitter List.
• Visit the original Kickstarter project page.
• See what others are saying about The Bucket Brigade.