#radicalness

Channel your unique radicalness at #radicalwomenbkm through July 22! Visit before the exhibition’s close and discover pioneering artistic practices by 123 Latina and Latin American women artists. On your next visit, be sure to share your pics using #mybkm. 

Declare Your Radicalness

an excerpt from Umair Haque's fantastic post to the HBR Blog Network:

So here's my tiny manifesto for bigger, better, badder ideas.

Seek the roots. If it's at times of megafailure that human organization needs radical ideas and thinkers, then to become one, seek the deeper roots of crisis. Humdrum collapses and workaday crashes can be solved by pruning the shoots — but historic crises, Great Resets, in Richard Florida's terms, require paradigm shifts: sets of ideas that challenge yesterday's cherished assumptions and beliefs. Like, for example, that the apex of human prosperity is churning out more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now.

Reorient the branches. If it's a new paradigm you want to pioneer, once you've drafted a new set of assumptions and beliefs, how will they be brought to life? Radical ideas need equally radical vehicles for real-world acceleration; you probably wouldn't ask McDonald's to be the official restaurant of the Olympics — and if you did, let's be honest: you'd be a bit of a laughingstock. In stark contrast, Clemens' big idea of a world without borders is a radical reorientation of the way many of us think about prosperity.

Reimagine fruition. What's the point of your radical new idea — in human terms? How concisely can you express it? The apex of human prosperity isn't merely more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now — but wiser, fitter, smarter, closer, tougher. Kickstarter reimagined fruition: it's not just earning a few bucks from a stock, but seeing the projects you find inspirational and meaningful come to life. My favourite example, though, is punk: a musical form that ear-splittingly shattered the leisure-suited conventions of the spread-collared bourgeoisie — that gave voice to the marginalized, powerless, and their dissatisfaction.

Seed the system. For an idea to be radical in human terms, it's got to seed a system, nurture a thriving jungle of human interaction — not just sell a product or pump up a bottom line, all in the monochrome realm of the incremental. Consider Romer's idea of charter cities: it makes new systems possible — new sets of interactions between nations, that make entirely new kinds of institutions probable.

Stomp out the status-quo. Declare your radicalness!