Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, in the early decades of the 21st Century, the inhabitants of a beautiful blue planet were suffering.

That was when today’s wave of 1.2 billion climate refugees began, as streams of humans and animals escaping the rising seas started trickling towards higher ground, forced to leave behind their ancestral land and what gave them their livelihood. The time when millions died due to extreme weather conditions, and 100s of millions of people got displaced due to water shortage. That was also the time when 100,000s soldiers and civilians, including women and children, perished in the wars on the Eastern edge of Europe, in the Middle East, and in Africa.

Those numbers are not just numbers but human beings like you and me who had dreams… dreams squashed by manufactured disasters. They were our not-so-distant ancestors, parents, and grandparents who agonized about the world they left for us.

The obscene wealth inequalities accentuated their hardship, the opulent life of the super-rich while millions of people toiled in soulless workplaces in what a famous anthropologist of those years called “bullshit jobs” — employment without personal meaning and dignity. No wonder that most employees whose livelihood was tied to wage slavery were “disengaged” from work, to use a management euphemism of that epoch for “couldn’t care less.” The worst was the reigning hopelessness. Moloch somehow managed to etch into peoples’ minds: THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE!

Yet, Life was not defeated. First, students woke up in 1968, and their graffiti appeared on the walls of the Establishment:

Soon, those slogans got plastered over with placards of consumerism. The yearning expressed in the graffiti went underground and grew mycelia. Videos, movement websites, and other exhibits in the “Early Decades” halls of the 21st Century History Museum show that 50–60 years later, many of those yearnings resurfaced in new generations. Those exhibits witness the emergence of such social movements as AI for Good, bioregionalism, community-based co-creation of health, decentralized science, eco-villages, food commons, open source everything, regenerative agriculture and finance, transformative education, workplace democracy, and more…

Those early decades were the worst and best times at once. A breakthrough into a never-dreamt of prosperity and fairness for all and a breakdown into barbarism were dancing on a knife’s edge. That was the backdrop on which a group of brave players of an AI-assisted discovery game called THREE MOUNTAINS came together and ventured into the unknown.

They didn’t know where the game would lead. They only knew that if the breakthrough had any chance, they needed to develop new capabilities individually and together and do it fast. They were heartened by a hunch that what they seek may be also seeking them.

Off the main hall of the “Early Decades” exhibition in the 21st Century History Museum, there is a screening room where you can watch the story of the THREE MOUNTAINS. The words you’ve just read were of the film’s narrator, which continues with what follows.

Happened in the Command School

A pivotal episode of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card plays in the Command School of the International Fleet. Ender Wiggins, a child prodigy of video games, destroys a fleet of starships attacking the Earth. Only after the end of the “game” does he learn that it was not a simulation but a real space battle that his fleet won, and they saved the Earth.

That story inspired the meta-plot of the THREE MOUNTAINS AI-assisted discovery expedition, in which players are invited to participate in an adventure “game.” The stake of this expedition game couldn’t be higher. It’s about developing the individual and collective capabilities necessary to facilitate an AI-assisted transition to humanity’s Phase Shift into a world that works for all.

In this time between worlds, there are many manifestos, utopian descriptions of a desired future, as well as apocalyptic scenarios trying to prepare us for the dreadful Collapse.

We don’t know what is on the other side of the Phase Shift and, even less so, what it takes to get there. But we know that we can’t get there with the same level of consciousness and capabilities that caused the mess that we are in. That’s why the THREE MOUNTAINS is designed as a developmental adventure.

With ironic sincerity

With an ironic sincerity that echoes through the THREE MOUNTAINS discovery expedition, this is not about a slow-motion (r)evolution for civilizational renewal — it’s the heart of that (r)evolution or at least a consequential fragment of it. Yet, within its playful guise as a game, it rescues us from the clutches of self-seriousness. Its ethos remains earnest, yet its status as “merely” a game offers the perfect vantage point, a touch of irony that shields us from exaggerated zeal and unwarranted self-assurance.

The players’ genuine yearning to ascend these mountains, simultaneously seeking to acquire or refine the skills they need for success, intertwines seamlessly with the irony that there’s no ultimate pinnacle — because the terrain is constantly shifting. These elements are woven into each other, forming a tapestry of sincerity entwined with playful irony.

The absence of a fixed, predefined summit liberates us from the flawed pursuit of a one-size-fits-all solution to the enigma of the paths to the Phase Shift. Instead, the game allows its players’ collective intelligence and sagacity to craft the guideposts toward that shift.

Call it ironic sincerity or sincere irony, perhaps even “informed naivety,” as Hanzi Freinacht articulates — a fusion of acknowledging the seeming impossibility of your beliefs while persisting with them because they nudge things in the right direction.

In the face of the prevailing “no alternative” doctrine of capitalist realism, the Phase Shift for humanity, championed by an AI-enhanced game, might seem naive. Yet, it draws from the collective sovereignty experienced by explorers as they ascend the third mountain — the PLANETARY Plateau.

It’s more than just a game; it’s not a dress rehearsal — it’s a bona fide developmental odyssey beckoning those primed or merely curious to embark upon it.

learning expedition organizational change model introduced by George Pór in various business, academic, and governmental client systems.

The discovery expedition is a proven process technology of action-oriented, collaborative questing. The meaning of this potent meme includes a generative metaphor, a scalable model of joint inquiry, and an evolutionary myth.

The expedition as a metaphor

Our discovery expedition is a metaphor for a community of explorers ascending mountains of capability development. More specifically, it indicates an AI-assisted form of peer-to-peer personal development, not unlike what happens in a Transformative Community of Practice. This metaphor also refers to the ensemble of processes by which the expedition community augments its collective intelligence and wisdom.

A family of “expedition” metaphors

The “discovery expedition” metaphor of collaborative action inquiry draws on a family of related metaphors. They can be brought into play in response to the needs of the gameplay. Each comes with a set of game assets that can power up the players.

Basecamps are periodic, real-time gatherings of the entire Expedition community, where members and teams report on salient findings, swap stories, plot trajectories for the successive peaks to climb, and get coached by human and AI sherpas.

Scouting parties are small, special-focus learning partnerships self-organized by the players to jointly address a questing challenge, e.g., scouting out an unknown territory on behalf of the Expedition community and reporting back on their findings.

Sherpas are a team of human and AI guides and facilitators. They are available to players on demand, in addition to performing several system-initiated tasks.

Expeditionlog  is a jointly maintained repository of the players’ shared memory implemented in electronic media.

The expedition as a model

More than just a flowery metaphor, LE is also a model of collaborative inquiry and action, a dynamic system with three dimensions of tangible outcomes.

Learning outcome: Breakthroughs in individual and collective capabilities, including the meta-capabilities of collaborative learning and meaning-making, shared attention, and distributed cognition.

Research outcome: New contributions to advancing the evolution of knowledge pertinent to AI-assisted personal development, collective sovereignty, and civilizational transformation.

Development outcomes: Tangible knowledge products, such as, for example, new (categories of) game assets, educational materials, checklists, and practices worth replicating.

These three dimensions of outcome are closely related and highly synergistic. In a sense, these are the kinds of results that emerge “naturally” in most well-designed action research. The advantage of the discovery expedition model is to make us more conscious of these types of outcomes and their potential cross-impact.

In the organizational in-house version of this action research, the general direction of the research and development outcomes can be aligned with the organization’s mission and contribute to crowdsourced innovation.

The expedition as a myth

In its mythical scope, the THREE MOUNTAINS discovery expedition connects the players’ lifelong learning journey with the journey of their communities and organizations and humanity’s ongoing, evolutionary learning journey itself. Our source of inspiration for the mythical dimension of the THREE MOUNTAINS is The Power of Myth by Joseph Cambell. His thoughts on the functions of myth seem to fit the “discovery expedition” as well.

“A function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to, is the pedagogical function of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.” — J. Campbell

AI is the first technology that makes us ask what it is to be human as it becomes increasingly ingrained in our culture and daily lives. Rather than joining the philosophical debate, our expedition allows its members to discover their responses to that question.

“To see life as a poem and yourself participating in the poem is what myth does for you…. a vocabulary in the form not of words but of acts and adventures, which connotes something transcendent of the action here, so that you always feel in accord with the universal being.” — J. Campbell

That is the quality of user experience, which we strive to enable with the THREE MOUNTAINS adventure game.

Gameplay: going up the Mountains

The discovery expedition game will play out in the mountains of PRESENCE Peak, SOVEREIGNTY Summit, and PLANETARY Plateau.

The quests and challenges on the journey toward PRESENCE Peak are focused on upgrading the players’ Sentience and Intelligence qualities. For some, that journey may amount to a life-changing upgrade if they choose to engage in its transformative deep practices. The latter will include communing with and absorbing actionable insights from nature, dialectical thought forms, contemplative practices, differentiated fields of listening, navigating moral/emotional dilemmas, and enacting integral and shared mindfulness in the Sentience Basecamp, where all the players gather. Some of them will use what they are learning as leverage for their professional development. Others will experience it as psycho-spiritual self-initiation. For yet others, it can mean both.

PRESENCE Peak is a high mountain in the game world. Many tried to climb to its top; few succeeded. The top is dressed in almost permanent clouds of fears, hopes, and unintegrated shadows, and ignorance. Those who climbed that far are not yet done with this mountain. If they manage to trek through and rise above the cloud layer, a majestic panorama of snow-white fields is waiting for them. Their prize is the exquisite experience of pure Presence, beyond time and space.

When climbing to the SOVEREIGNTY Summit, the sensing challenges of the PRESENCE Peak are coupled with a stronger focus on accurate meaning-making, analysis, omni-positive choice-making and other aspects of Agency.

On this leg of the journey, players grow competence in AI whispering and collaborative AI prompting, holding multiple perspectives, situational awareness, discernment or relevance realization, symmathesy (transcontextual mutual learning, à la Nora Bateson), AI-assisted discourse analysis, cultivating developmental relationships, combinatorial innovation, and more. The quests here, just as in the previous mountain, will involve the players’ discovery of ways to address their real-life challenges and opportunities. To succeed, the players must remove every barrier to effective collaboration and befriend complexity. The prize is the joy and never-before-experienced level of individual and collective sovereignty.

On the last leg of the journey, those who successfully completed the first two can embark on the most exacting one — scaling the heights of the PLANETARY Plateau, where they can find a crucial clue to humanity’s Phase Shift. It won’t be easy to get there. Players will have to bring into play the best of their talents enhanced in the PERSONAL Peak and SOVEREIGNTY Summit mountains and grow new ones. For example, in cross-team collaboration supported by boundary objects and stigmergic collective intelligence. They will also have to bring into play their different modalities of knowing, in a concerted way, for compound outcomes.

Their ultimate challenge will be learning to activate their wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) of human and AI agents at increasing scale. When they meet it, the clue to humanity’s Phase Shift reveals itself.

Itineraries and zip-lining above valleys

Where to start the expedition and in which order to take the mountains? The recommended sequence is from PRESENCE to SOVEREIGNTY to PLANETARY. That’s because sovereignty, let alone wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) at a planetary scale, cannot be achieved without being grounded in personal presence. The CHI at the scale of communities and organizations is also a condition for the planetary CHI of human and AI agents.

However, this recommended itinerary doesn’t make the game linear, unfolding in pre-defined sequences. For example, there might be explorers who would want to join the expedition only for the journey to PRESENCE Peak. Nevertheless, even they will be better prepared to reach some degree of sovereignty if they meet certain challenges on the presence journey pertinent to it.

There will be on-demand editions of the game used within interested sponsoring organizations that may want it to be focused on the SOVEREIGNTY Summit. In that case, personal presence challenge sets, mission-critical to sovereignty, will be built in the scaling of the Summit.

During the expedition, the explorers will encounter suspense and plenty of surprises. One of them will be certain paths ending at the launch station of a zip line with a cable above scenic valleys but with the location of the other end unknown to the players.

Zip lining can also be chosen as a means of transport by those explorers who have accomplished certain tasks and are now ready to move to another place within the same or on another mountain. That move will be subject to an assessment by the AI Sherpa.

Cycles and Generativity

Cycle 1 of this project, initiated by Future HOW, Center of Action Research for Regenerative Futures, consisted of developing its concept as action research and its core innovation idea, CHI: meaning-aligned and wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence of human and AI agents in (networks of) teams, communities, and organizations. This phase was supported by a mini-grant from Algovera AI, a cooperative developing decentralized AI.

Building on and improving that concept in Cycle 2, we had two Orientation workshops focused on the what and how of its implementation. The idea to design the action research as a serious game grew out of these workshops. They were delivered in partnership with RADAR DAO, a collective of 300+ futurists and innovators.

Cycle 3 is the game design cycle that we’re collaborating on with River DAO, “an organization designed to accelerate the transition to a generative society on a thriving planet.” The story of the THREE MOUNTAINS AI-assisted discovery game, presented here, is the beginning of Cycle 3.

Cyclicity is one of the process characteristics of Future HOW’s Generative Action Research (GAR) that serves as the discovery expedition’s methodology framework. The four distinctive qualities that make GAR generative are self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating.

In the context of our research, the self-sustaining quality means that we balance change and continuity in its social field including both horizontal development (talents, skills) and vertical development (value systems, worldviews, complexity absorption).

The research is self-improving because it is designed to continually improve individual and collective effectiveness through A) the action/assessment/feedback/learning loops and B) learning to generate new capabilities in response to emergent situations.

It is also self-evolving, i.e. designed to grow into more inclusive stages of consciousness with each new cycle.

It becomes self-propagating when it embodies its core innovation idea — meaning-aligned and wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence of human and AI agents — in a way that inspires others to awaken new possibilities in their organizations and communities.

In future Cycles, the game will self-propagate by its newer versions responding to various needs they can serve in such societal contexts as industries, geographies, and age groups.

The embeddedness of the discovery expedition in our partner organizations and those various contexts helps couple the algorithmic knowledge with human insights about the situation.

The game’s self-propagation will also be facilitated by its implementation in various media, e.g. blockchain, transmedia storytelling, and academic teaching/learning environments of transformative education..

Where do we go from here? How about Cycle 4, Cycle 5, Cycle n? We don’t know because the emergent nature of GAR implies that the plan for each subsequent cycle flows out from the reflection about the previous one. However, a logical sequence following the game design in Cycle 3 would be the prototyping of the THREE MOUNTAINS discovery expedition game as a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) in Cycle 4. Only then would it have a chance to self-propagate by letting its Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence model and practices be replicated in the specialized context of other organizations.

Invitation

Apart from the initial mini-grant supporting Cycle 1, this work has so far been self-funded by a very small team. To go further, we need help. Questions and feedback will be helpful. Support from any sponsoring organization or grantmaker with a broad enough vision for putting AI in service of human and societal flourishing would be much appreciated.

We also welcome Expressions of Interest in collaboration from:

Video editors and video makers

Scriptwriters and story weavers

Game designers and UX designers

Fundraisers and grant writers

Aspiring AI whisperers and AI shamans

Send your message to george.por@gmail.com.