Let’s build a better future together!
As our civilization advances, we will be more and more pressured to connect our ingenuity and creativity to our deepest human needs, the natural world, and the planet to which we all belong.
To meet these challenges, we must leverage the collective wisdom we have acquired over the millennia and combine it with art and science as sources of inspiration to design, guide, and regenerate viable, resilient, and healthy socio-technical and socio-ecological systems following first principles:
On Genesis – Encourage Diversity:
- Work with nature and nurture all life.
- Build safety in and provide opportunities for all.
- Start small, explore the edges, and value the marginal.
- Increase optionality, redundancy, and multiscale variety.
- Decentralize value creation and map potential value chains.
On Succession – Increase Resilience:
- Scale decomposition, recombination, and above all, trust.
- Generate a yield through reciprocal relationships over time.
- Value, use, and store local renewable resources and energy.
- Disintermediate information and codify common knowledge.
- Protect privacy and foster interactions through open protocols.
On Regulation – Improve Coherence:
- Focus on high situational awareness.
- Draft explicit agreements around collective intents.
- Be humble and invite people to voluntarily cooperate.
- Create sustainable infrastructure and aim for zero waste.
- Design for constant evolution and continuous sustained flow.
On Adaptation – Promote Fitness:
- Use contextual methods and technology.
- Delegate authority and distribute decision rights.
- Preserve and restore natural and cultural heritage.
- Apply self-regulation and respond positively to feedback.
- Develop human intelligence and human-sensor networks.
The stated principles have the potential to shape the way people think and behave, making it possible for socio-technical and socio-ecological systems to co-evolve and align with how all living systems thrive, and can act as a compass, an orientation device to which we can refer to while navigating the increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world we live in today.
Useful tabular data
System states/functions:
| State / Function |
Genesis | Adaptation | Regulation | Succession |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| System Property |
Diversity | Fitness | Coherence | Resilience |
| Process Pattern |
Emergence | Inference | Convergence | Divergence |
| Life Pattern |
Offspring | Relationships | Wholeness | Heterogeneity |
| Archetype | Pioneers | Weavers | Stewards | Settlers |
| Heuristics | Make things happen |
Make things balance |
Make things right |
Make things last |
| Societal Form |
Bands | Tribes | Institutions | Markets |
| Governance Mechanism |
Guidelines | Conventions | Policies | Agreements |
| Social Orientation |
Affinity | Mutuality | Reliability | Reciprocity |
| Real Opportunity |
Equality | Solidarity | Credibility | Generativity |
| Real Danger |
Deception | Polarization | Corruption | Depletion |
Substrate (material) transition mechanisms (purple):
| Mechanism | Differentiation | Speciation | Mutation | Deviation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transition | Genesis ↓ Succession |
Succession ↓ Regulation |
Regulation ↓ Adaptation |
Adaptation ↓ Genesis |
| Archetype | Switchers | Insulators | Disruptors | Reducers |
| Heuristics | Derive things |
Split things |
Change things |
Randomize things |
Constructor (social) transition mechanisms (blue):
| Mechanism | Exaptation | Selection | Migration | Recombination |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transition | Genesis ↓ Adaptation |
Adaptation ↓ Regulation |
Regulation ↓ Succession |
Succession ↓ Genesis |
| Archetype | Translators | Stressors | Spreaders | Catalysts |
| Heuristics | Repurpose things |
Choose things |
Transfer things |
Blend things |
Credits
- André Ribeiro (Author: v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, v7)
- Eduardo Piaro (Author: v7)
- Jorge Alexandre (Author: v1, v2, v6, v7)
- Helena Ramos (Author: v6, v7)
- Michelle Holliday (Creator & Author: v1, v6, v7)
- Maria Magalhães (Author: v1, v2)
- Nuno Gomes (Creator, Author & Steward: all versions)
- Vitor Pinheiro (Author: v1, v2)
Acknowledgments
The HiveFlex Compass is an original work influenced by and built on top of key contributions from several other authors throughout their lives, namely:
- TIMN Framework – David Ronfeldt.
- Biomimetics – Otto Schmitt, Janine Benyus, et al.
- Permaculture – Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, et al.
- Promise Theory – Mark Burgess and Johannes Bergstra.
- Wardley Maps – Simon Wardley, John Boyd, and Sun Tzu.
- Constructor Theory – David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto.
- Intelligent Urbanism – Christopher Charles Benninger et al.
- Capability Approach – Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.
- Thrivability – Michelle Holliday, Jean Russell, Lonny Grafman, et al.
- Disciplinary interaction types across knowledge fields – Several authors.
- Cities, scaling, and sustainability – Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, et al.
- Agile Thinking – Agile Manifesto Authors, DevOps Movement Pioneers, et al.
- Credibility Thesis – Vilhelm Aubert, Peter Ho, Ha-Joon Chang, Ilene Grabel, et al.
- Ecosystem Ecology & Services – Eugene Odum, Howard Odum, Aldo Leopold, Gretchen Daily, et al.
- Complex Adaptive Systems – Herman Haken, Yaneer Bar-Yam, James Bieri, Mirta Galesic, Dave Snowden, et al.
- Lean & ToC Thinking – Edwards Deming, Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, Eliyahu Goldratt, John Shook, Mike Rother, et al.
- Open Organizational Patterns – Christopher Alexander, A. L. Kroeber, Harrison Owen, Daniel Mezick, James Coplien, et al.
Changelog
- For all change details please refer to this page.
All releases so far:
- Monday, January 30, 2023 (version 7.1)
- Saturday, July 9, 2022 (version 7.0)
- Wednesday, May 11, 2022 (version 6.1)
- Monday, March 28, 2022 (version 6.0)
- Friday, February 11, 2022 (version 5.2)
- Monday, February 7, 2022 (version 5.1)
- Tuesday, February 1, 2022 (version 5.0)
- Wednesday, January 5, 2022 (version 4.1)
- Monday, January 3, 2022 (version 4.0)
- Friday, August 13, 2021 (version 3.0)
- Friday, December 13, 2019 (version 2.0)
- Friday, September 13, 2019 (version 1.0)
Copyright & License
©2019 – 2023 by HiveFlex, the Compass creators, and all its co-authors as a collective work. Some rights are reserved as this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
In simple terms, we let you share (copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon for any purpose) the HiveFlex Compass as long as you give us appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made (BY, Attribution), and distribute any derivative work of yours under the same license (SA, ShareAlike).
Photo credits: Claus Thoemmes.