Final Interview: The future of humanity is at the kitchen sink...

Final Interview: The future of humanity is at the kitchen sink...

INTERVIEW 3 - Jean Robertson, Founder, The Living Room Context
Story of Business Innovation: Write at least 300 words about the innovation itself. Please answer the following questions:
• WHAT is the innovation?
• HOW did the innovation emerge?
• WHO was involved in the creation of the innovation? What did they do?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the innovation?

The Living Room Context is a self-educating, self-organizing network for experientially learning a new way of thinking. In the words of founder, Jean Robertson, “The future of human evolution is at the kitchen sink. If we can do it there, we can do it everywhere.”

The Living Room Context (LRC) is one aspect of Robertson’s vision for bringing about “Humanity 3.0”. The LRC is a learning community of people using a new way of thinking to explore how to act and live in a radically new collaborative culture.

The innovation is a clear definition of the two juxtaposed human operating systems: the Coercive Circle and the Collaborative Circle. Robertson explained: “The core (of this enterprise) is understanding from systems theory that a system has leverage points, and that the leverage points in human systems tend to be the assumptions – the world view that is driving the system. So at the heart of each of those circles, I’ve reduced it down to three core assumptions. They appear to be enough – along with certain dynamics – to actually generate the whole larger map of the complexity that we see. They are enough of an explanatory principle to explain why coercion works the way that it does, and also where the leverage for change is in that system would lie.”

Each system has powerful levers for driving the performance of the system. For the Coercive Circle, the three levers are inculcation of guilt and blame, the moral sense of wrongness. Robertson calls it “installing the guilt buttons.” Once the Guilt Button is installed, then the second lever is the division of the world into dualistic patterns: right/wrong, good/bad, and so forth. The third lever is establishing external authority as the arbiter of right and wrong. For Robertson, the Coercive Circle is the foundation of 10,000 years of human history and the root of the problems that humans are facing.


The Collaborative Circle


The Coercive Circle

The Collaborative Circle describes the view of the creative, life-long, explorative learner. This explorative dynamic is the first of the Collaborative Circle Levers. The second lever is the learner’s trust of self and the universe. Finally, the Collaborative Circle is based on a systems way of understanding

The definitions of the Collaborative and Coercive Circles form the core intellectual property on which the Living Room Context is founded. The Living Room Context is a collection of activities including workshops, seminars, and other educational events, as well as shared living quarters for some participants. The overall goal is to purposefully explore collaborative personal and social change and cultivate the skills needed to live in a collaborative, learning society.

Robertson views the Living Room Context and her core intellectual property in the tradition of Open Source Software: a knowledge kernel that she publishes and makes freely available to the world. As this knowledge kernel deepens and grows, she expects to spawn many businesses (consulting and training organizations, for example). She also expects it will become the core operating system for already existent businesses that have reached the limits of the coercive operating system.

Impact of innovation: Write at least 250 words about the impact of the innovation:
• WHAT was the impact of the innovation? What people or organizations were affected?
• WHAT were the short-term effects? What were the long-term effects?
• WHAT observable evidence suggests that this impact has occurred?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the impact?


Robertson views The Living Room Context as very much in the Research and Development mode. As such, the impacts are by and large personal and anecdotal. Still she points to a number of indicators of success. For example, she is in contact with people who were exposed to the first LRC workshops nearly 10 years ago, and the ideas “have a stickiness” that keeps people from those early days connected to the movement.

Furthermore, the ideas continue to generate positive response from a diverse population. Robertson explained: “The two circles are powerful way to talk about the core conceptual thing in a way that people recognize. It brings out from them ‘let me tell you about my coercive experience.’ … I overlay the two circles and show how they interact… For the last 10,000 years it’s been mostly coercive with these benign cysts on the body politic that have had no effect whatever. They’ve gravitated together and grown so they’re equal circles that overlap. The overlap shows that you can’t get to one from the thinking of the other. When people get that from the map, there is a relief. People understand there is something to learn here. (They say) ‘Its not that I’m failing at being non judgmental; I have things to learn.’”

Finally, Robertson offered herself as a living example of the impact of the Living Room Context. “The biggest success is that if I weren’t living in what I now call Humanity 3.0 Consciousness with other people, I would live by myself. And I’m living with other people, and I like it.”

Motivation and Purpose: Write at least 250 words about the motivation, purpose or inspiration behind the innovation.
• HOW did the original idea come about?
• WHAT was the motivation or purpose for doing the innovation?
• Does the innovation relate to a sense of mission, purpose or meaning? If so, HOW?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best illustrate the motivation behind the innovation?


Robertson’s innovation came about as a result of a twenty-plus year search for ways to build community, as well as a deep understanding of systems thinking. This search included living on two continents, two marriages, and a couple of business ventures.

“What I’ve been doing all my life,” she explained, “is trying to figure out why human beings seem to think rather poorly together, and how we can do it better. I wanted to understand how societies turn dumb. I was looking at Why is my family dysfunctional? Why are families in general, apparently, dysfunctional? And then I discovered that businesses and governments seem to be dysfunctional as well.”

This search for community came into focus during a two-year period when Robertson was part of a small community that cared for a dying friend and family member. “In that time, the three of us were co-creating that space (caring for their friend) – that I actually experienced it. This is the thing that I’ve been pointing at and trying to experience. This is it actually happening, and we all knew it. That was the point at which we talked about ‘something needs to go on from this.’”

Immediately after the friend’s death, Robertson developed her core intellectual property and invited over a dozen people to a weekend retreat to explore the ideas. She found that by this time, “the readiness that was different than in the 80s or 90s. In the 80s,” she said, “the ideas were all out there. We had even purchased a whole quarter section of land to create an intentional community on. But we didn’t know how to do it yet. And the same thing happened in business in the 90s. We just weren’t ready.”

Headline: If your story were published on a front page of a local newspaper, what headline, or title, would you give it?

The future of humanity is at the kitchen sink

Interviewers Story: Tell us your story. Write at least 200 words about your experience:
• Why were you interested in interviewing this person?
• What did you learn or how were you inspired from the interview?
• What was the best quote you heard during the interview?
• What did you find most interesting about the story?


I first met Robertson about 3 months before this interview. My daughter had introduced me to her and some of her ideas and it was at that first meeting that Robertson first told me that she believed that “The future of human evolution is at the kitchen sink. If we can do it there, we can do it everywhere.” I was intrigued by that idea, and it seemed to rhyme with my own ideas that way we operate our businesses is critical to the success of the human race in the coming decades.

But the connection to Robertson’s ideas became more personal as I experienced first-hand how my daughter’s use of these ideas enabled her (young adult daughter) and I (middle-aged father) to relate in better and more productive ways. Anything that helps improve communication across generations is worth further exploration.

I was particularly impressed with Robertson’s commitment to embody Humanity 3.0. Although she is a highly intelligent and conceptual thinker, this is not an abstract, academic exercise. She has created a Petrie dish to live and work in, and uses it to develop and share her ideas. This came into focus for me when she said: “I could only further develop my kind of thinking, to think the way I do today, by actually being in such a group of people. So it was one of those bootstrap things – you had to get it going to see what would happen to the thinking and the interactions.”