Apparently the ability to forecast this viral behaviour would be of great interest to ‘sociologists and marketeers, among others‘.  Sociologists, marketeers and others (I’m assuming ‘others’ is an academic euphemism for PR sociopaths) are always trying to identify ‘The Influencers’.

Even though The Influencers sounds like a 1960′s TV series about spies with special powers (or was that The Champions?), PR executives claim that influencers actually do exist and describe them as that mysterious group of people who have the special power of being able to influence other people.

Although it would be intriguing to explore why most modern PR methods are based on the plots of 1960′s TV shows, we can only the imagine the feverish excitement as PR lackeys identify the host influencers who will facilitate the spread of their latest viral campaign.

The purpose of these viral campaigns is invariably the promotion of pointless consumer goods that no-one really needs or the ongoing deification of some manufactured idol who is quite good at lip syncing and who also enjoys a bit of elective surgery.

Luckily for PR machines everywhere, influencer and influenza are derived from the same Medieval Latin etymology of īnfluentia, (so called from the belief that epidemics were due to the influence of the stars).

So to fully leverage the influence of the stars, hip and happening PR gurus are now designing their campaigns using epidemiological tools developed to analyse the spread of biological viruses, such as H1N1 swine influenza. The fundamental purpose of these campaigns is to use the stars to influence those unfortunate and ignorant herds of humans who don’t even know what they are missing.

As humans, we tend to make sense of things by comparing them with other things that we already know. We make most of our decisions in a novel situation by matching new patterns with older patterns that we have already experienced, so we often end up making analogies to make sense.

However, as we know from working in the Dreamwork Space, any analogy is only as good as the context it is being used in. For example, the comedian Frankie Boyle uses Sarah Palin’s pit bull analogy to show what can happen when we take an analogy too far.

‘I’m like a pitbull, I’m tenacious.’ Yeah, that’s good.
‘I’m like a pitbull, if you leave me in the room with a child I’ll kill them’. Not so good.
‘I’m like a pitbull, if I take a really strong hold of your arm, the only way to get me to release my grip is to stick a finger up my a*se!’ A metaphor too far.

And believe me, Frankie Boyle is one person who knows about taking things too far! The lesson is, keep the analogy short, but so often in management, we take an analogy and allow it to become reality. So we end up thinking of organisations as machines with predictable and controllable behaviours. Or our brains as computers that just store data and regularly need to be rebooted and upgraded. Or relationships that are like binary ones and zeroes, either existing or not existing, instead of displaying the whole range of human interaction between two human beings.

As Dave Briggs, played by Robert Powell, remarks in the wonderful Detectives, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but teach it to fish and it will neither a borrower or a lender be’.

1. Your dreams will find your dreams.
2. You create the dream that dreams you.
3. What happens inside, happens outside.
4. If you have a why, you will always find a how.
5. You are dreaming right now.
6. A symbol without a space is like a bull without a china shop.
7. If you want to know who you are, look at what you are doing.
8. All need is unrequited love for the self.
9. If we never listen to the truths of others, we will never hear our own truths.
10. Meaning is what really matters.
11. Our dreams and stories don’t always give us the endings we expect, but they always give us the endings that we need.
12. The closer you get to the edge, the more you realise that there is no edge.
13. The best story always wins.
14. Own your own dreams.
15. Change your myth. Change your reality.
16. If you want to know about dreaming, ask your dream. In a dream.
17. Creativity and play are serious survival strategies.
18. Our shared spaces connect our private myths and our public dreams.
19. Other people are the best mirrors we have.
20. Show others how to dream their own dream, rather than forcing them to be in your dreams.
21. Your dreams need space. Walk in a wild place and listen to your heart sing.
22. The most successful organisations are the ones that dream.
23. Your future arrives one dream at a time.
24. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you.

When we dream, our millions of years of evolution meet the minutiae of our every day lives. We have evolved into dreaming creatures, organisms that don’t just have the experience of one lifetime, but have the distilled awareness of past generations and know of the possibilities of future ones. Working with our dreams is not merely an airy fairy self indulgence, but a spiritual adventure of great cultural significance to us all. Our myths and legends abundantly express that our unconscious awareness has access to wisdom that is usually unavailable to the conscious mind.

Only our unconscious really knows what our conscious strives to know. Our dreams are answering questions that we don’t even know that we are asking, and remembering all that we have consciously filtered and forgotten. This is what Sufi mystics termed anamnesis, the end of forgetting who we really are. When we dream, our fragmented identities connect to a more fundamental awareness and we begin to truly understand the mystery that we are trying to unravel.

Solving the mystery of who you are, who you have been and who you will be cannot be accomplished as a detached observer, evaluating your situation from a distance. Stepping fully into your dreams is the only real way to meet the person who you dream of being and to truly live your dreams you really have to be in them. Your dreams are not some vague things that may or may never happen. They are happening right now as you read these words and you can choose to immerse yourself in them or try to keep hiding from them.

And if you try to hide from your dreams, they will keep searching for you until you truly find your own self and can at last speak your own clear truths. As your dreams discover you, you begin to realise that you are not just living ‘the’ dream, whatever that might currently be. You are living and breathing your dream, the one unique, big dream that only you can dream. This dream is not just something that is happening to you, you are happening to the dream.

Remembering how to dream is as simple as becoming aware of the space and time that we unconsciously create. Our dreams take us to the edge of the known and unknown and illuminate all our realisable possibilities and potentials. They eloquently celebrate our individual uniqueness in a wider celebration of our universal awareness. Dreams invite us to step into our true power which can be scary. And magnificent. They honestly show us our beauty, our love and our truth. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you, waiting to be dreamed. Be your dreams now.

Most business analysts attempt to predict the future by analysing past patterns and extrapolating them in to a state of favourable future conditions. However, past experience shows us that this approach doesn’t always work. Although historic patterns do tend to repeat, our constant search for newness often invites the unpredicted into our lives. Rather than arriving in a long awaited and neatly packaged parcel, the future usually arrives in our current reality in the form of sudden flashes of insight and unexpected fragments of opportunity.

In planning for the future, the unexpected is usually associated with unpleasant surprises. When the unforeseen inevitably occurs, we repeatedly try to ignore it. If it’s not in the plan, it can’t exist. Rather than exploring these unanticipated opportunities, we retreat back into the comfortable past, waiting for the future to arrive and set us free. But the more we try to hold on to the old, the more that fragments of the future begin to appear unexpectedly in our lives.

We first become aware of the future in our dreams. Our unconscious awareness beams out from us in time as well as space and usually begins to sense the future before we become consciously aware of it. Like our dreams, the future arrives in seemingly disconnected fragments that we usually filter out because they seem to make little sense to us. We hear these fragments all around us in snatches of conversation, and see them in signs that we are not allowing ourselves to notice yet. As Henry David Thoreau observed, ‘Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven’.

These flashes often illuminate surprising insights and all of a sudden we see what is new. Our insight may appear to be a stroke of absolute genius, but usually all we have done is to notice something that we have been unconsciously aware of for sometime. It may seem to have happened suddenly, but like most overnight sensations, it has probably been knocking on the door of our conscious awareness for years. Although our inventive genius may seem like a solitary pursuit, its success usually depends on how many conversations we are engaged in and truly listening to what we are saying and hearing.

The more conversations we are in, then the more connected we will be. And the more connected we are with ourselves and others, the more easily we will be able to connect all the fragments of the future that are continually arriving in our lives. All these fragments are fundamentally connected, and they all reflect what our future looks like. By connecting the fragments that have most meaning for us, it can be surprisingly easy to release ourselves and create the future that we want to be in.

Organisations often seek to control human behaviour by imposing some form of culture. This imposed culture is declared on mouse mats, screensavers, exhibition banners and employee contracts. The organisational culture is declared as a series of values and visions and a mission statement, usually involving extensive use of the words ‘passion’ or ‘passionate’.  Values and visions are often elicited by a facilitator during a dreary offsite at an airport hotel somewhere, and the mission statement may have been authored by some wacky poet-in-residence or thought up by the CEO’s wife.

Although missions, visions and values are generally ignored by employees, it is because they are largely irrelevant, rather than dereliction of duty. The only time they really care about values is at appraisal time, when part of their compensation depends on how well they ‘have lived the values’. Beyond the synthetic boundaries of the imposed culture is the real culture in the collective memory that lives outside the corporate brain in the collective identities, values and beliefs reflected from the individual intentions, needs and views.

Culture is the group memory that enables individuals to integrate with the collective, the future to connect to the past, the incorporation of new knowledge with old wisdom, and the unknown to speak to the known. This memory is not manufactured but emerges, like a dream, from a vast numbers of interconnected neuronal complexes playing in concert.  Like our dreams, our real organisational cultures are dynamic stories of self 0rganising connections between our individual identities, values and beliefs.

Rather than being just some asset sheets and incorporation certificates, our organisations are dynamic patterns of autopoetic connections between the participants. For all its material wealth, an organisation is a human achievement; it is the expression of individual aspiration working together to discover a bigger dream. As that bigger dream is explored, structures begin to form, not from annual reports and HR manuals, but from the reflection of collective meaning, purpose and awareness.

The structures that begin to emerge are not bounded by more limitations and regulations. Instead we see communities coalescing around their collective dreaming, and gathering the unstoppable momentum of dreams whose time has come. From start ups in garages in Silicon Valley to boffins in sheds in the Cotswolds, collective dreaming brings us a mythic consciousness that goes beyond the higher consciousness of reason and factual knowledge. It is not usually a single technology or one brilliant individual that makes the difference; the most successful organisations are the ones that dream.

Our expansive dream landscapes reflect our yearning for extensive wilderness places where we can travel under our own power into the unknown and unseen. We need new places to discover. Not so we can conquer territory and own the land, but because exploring a new place helps us to discover new things about our own inner landscapes. Spacious wildernesses reflect our own mysteries, giving us space to dream and new opportunities to explore.

In many corporate environments, the unknown self is a stagnant marsh to be drained, rather than an ever flowing river that irrigates and sustains the psychic landscape. The unknown can seem scary and unfamiliar territory, full of lurking threats and unpredictable behaviours. We are warned ‘It’s a jungle out there’ and so instead of exploring, observing and discovering, we attempt to eliminate all mystery. Logging our behaviour in surveillance databases has the same outcome as logging in the Amazon basin. Something beautiful and valuable is destroyed and the unseen and unknown simply moves elsewhere.

Rather than true wilderness that makes our wild hearts rise, we end up with sanitised nature reserves and plastic theme parks that try to recreate that mysterious experience. Albert Einstein observed that ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed’.

With out the presence of mystery, we would feel no need to search. A recurring theme in many of our dreams is the search. We make these dream journeys not to reach a final and predetermined destination, but to create a heroic space where we can continue to discover ourselves.  For an inquisitive, pattern forming, opportunistic organism such as a human being, what makes search engines such as Google so attractive is not that they organise all the world’s information, but that they help power our own journeys of self discovery.

We often attribute our lack of freedom and choice to external influences such as lack of money or opportunity, not realising that the necessary resources are usually readily available within ourselves, in our own inner dreamscapes. Once we begin exploring ourselves, adventures, discoveries and surprises soon follow. And the most surprising discovery is usually finding our true self. To quote T.S. Eliot ‘We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time’.

Although this may seem rewarding and flattering to you, the real truth is that it is usually the space that you have created that people are attracted to rather than just you. This might be your own attractive qualities or something attractive you are creating the space with. However, what they really want are your possibilities, your potential for themselves and they invade your space because they want the space where their own magic can happen.

Space invaders often couldn’t care less about you and your attractor; usually that is the first thing that they want to get rid off when they enter your space. This happens time and time again when organisations merge and acquire each other. A group of people has created an attractive thing and another company acquires that group so they can own the space. Usually they end up with all the tangible assets, all the processes and procedures and the fragments of meaning, but somewhere along the line they just lose the space that attracted them in the first place. This is where mergers and acquisitions nearly always go wrong.

An obvious answer is to encourage potential space invaders to create their own spaces, rather than trying to take control of your unique spaces. However, the one thing that everyone is inexorably drawn towards and then almost invariably runs away from is an authentic glimpse into themselves and where they find meaning. Anything so they don’t have to confront their own fears, brilliance, magnificence, and power. Rather than sharing our myths, beating our drums, and painting our hunts, it can be easier to hide behind PowerPoint platitudes and defensively conceal our real selves.

But one of the great things about dreaming space is that it is elastic space. Our dreams are boundless and only limited by the Hubble constant of our ever expanding awareness. Our imaginations are abundant but we often try to police them and control them by inappropriate intellectual property initiatives. Much more effort is put into locking down our DRMs than opening up our dreams.

There is always space to create new dreaming space, but it takes courage to stop desiring the special spaces that others create and to step into the unknown and uncertainty of creating your own dreams. And as others are attracted into your spaces, the most valuable thing you can do is to show them how to create their own magic, rather than trying to lock them into yours. And remember, it’s always about the space that you or your object creates, and never really about you or your object.

However, as we do this our unconscious awareness has no rigid scripts; it is very improvisational in nature. As we blend our current experience with more ancient wisdoms we make it up as we go along, playing out our family of contextual identities into our surroundings. What seem like trivial social interactions are deeper projections and reflections of who we are and who we could be. We fill the spaces around us with unconscious cues and clues as we try to connect with each other, and so establish contact with our deeper selves.

Our dreaming awareness knows that the best way to for us to connect is to continually create space and possibilities for each other. This is what we all do, every night in our dreams as we act out different characters and meet all sorts of people who seem to hold some sort of unspoken meaning for us. We project our identities into the spaces we create and this unconscious dialogue enables us to converse with undiscovered parts of the self.

In our waking realities, we often do the opposite. Instead of creating space and possibilities for each other, we tend to close each other down. By blocking offers from others, we end up blocking valuable offers from our own selves. The more space that we create for others, the more of ourselves we can see. Rather than blocking someone else, no matter how antagonistic they might seem, it makes much more sense to open up to them and see what they have to offer us.

Opening up to others and hearing what they have to offer us often means letting go of our preconceptions. The more we let go of who we think they are, the more we notice about who they really are. And the more we notice about them, the more we become aware of ourselves. This often gives voice to our unconscious awareness and opens us up to talents and understandings we didn’t even know we had. In our dreams, we let go, notice more and use everything we encounter, and the more we do this in our waking lives, the more connected we become.

Without connection, there is no reflection, and other people are the best mirrors we have. And if we want to influence someone, the best way to persuade them is to reflect their dreams. By creating space for them to dream and to connect with those dreams, we make them a dream offer that is almost impossible to refuse.