Page 169 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

Working with Insights from Krishnamurti

And at the end of 2018, when I was thinking about what next
for myself (“You have been a bit of a rolling stone, haven’t you?”),
I reached out to Rajesh and broached the idea of co-founding a
new initiative dedicated to this exploration and its application
to the problems of the contemporary world. This initiative now
has an immodest name, SOCRATUS—the academy for collective
wisdom!
The real world is messy and wicked problems are rife with stake-
3
holders who have competing interests. Wicked problems combine
moral and material complexity in equal amounts. They consist
of coupled challenges where interventions in one domain lead to
changes in another. In complex systems, the good news and the
bad news are often due to the same source—fossil fuel energy is
at the root of modern prosperity as well as pollution and climate
change.
The cornerstone of SOCRATUS is the belief that complex,
‘wicked’ problems can only be solved by minds as wicked as the
problems they seek to solve. Unfortunately, the complexity of our
mental models and their interconnections hasn’t kept pace with
the complexity of the world. We believe that’s the major source of
systemic failure. We aspire to be a modern take on Socrates’ claim
that, while he himself was incapable of wisdom, his method was
the midwife of wisdom. In keeping with the growing complexity
of the world we aspire to be the midwives of collective wisdom;
hence SOCRATUS (rather than Socrates)—using modern tools (of
data, design and visceral experiences) in combination with the tra-
ditional tools of individual wisdom (contemplation, public reason,
universal compassion).
While there are many organizations devoted to systems think-
ing and systems change, few have identified the lack of wisdom
as a stumbling block. We believe that’s a blind spot. Having said
that, we are grounded in a partnership architecture where we

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