The Making Of,

How did we come up with the concept and the way a society or country could make and maintain peace for as long as it is committed to embracing peace within its structure?
With my background in Innovation and organizational innovation, we followed the same principles our brain is working with when solving big problems.

HOW ARE WE CREATING BRILLIANT IDEAS?
For the longest time humanity did not know how some people came up with genius ideas. It was believed those ideas are random, pop up mostly in bathrooms, and are simply a gift. Today we know that our brain and our approximately 86 million neurons and the way those cells and nerves are structured cannot “create” random ideas. Those “ideas” are in fact the result of all our past experiences and emotions, chemical signals, accompanied by small electric impulses form new connections that create a thought. So thoughts or ideas are created by combining past experiences and are supported by our unique new cortex, our frontal lob to an imaginary situation that has not yet happened. This unique ability we call imagination. We can imagine highly complex situations that could among many other things help compose a complete solution for any problem. There is a lot more to learn but this is the core of Neuro Innovation and the ability to solve massive problems. Whether it is a disruptive technology, business model or organizational restructuring.

HOW DID WE APPLY THIS TO PEACEBUILDING?
We took the five most fundamental Neuro Innovation methods, First Principal thinking, Analogous Experience Connections, Idea Confluence, and CallomBurst. Ideation Summit and applied it to the aim of solving the problem of making and maintaining peace.

FIRST PRINCIPLE THINKING
The main collection of facts related to war and peace we found were as follows:
1) More than 99% of people on earth do not want war. There is only a tiny minority of less than 1% who are willing to use war, accepting millions of deaths, to enforce their interests.
2) The logical consequence of the foundational fact must be that this tiny minority has the power and knows mechanisms to influence those who do NOT want war, to eventually agree and support that war.
3) It would now be important to understand who those people really are and what are their drivers to don’t care about losing millions of lives for realizing their interests. The key facts of power, capital, and influence indicate that those may have been the kings and other types of rulers in the past but maybe not in the present time. Rarely a president of a modern political structure such as democracy, meritocracy, or communism has such interests even it looks like they may do. They may have the power and the influence but not really the motive to instigate war. In today’s world, there are very influential and powerful people and families in the background with capital in an amount we don’t know about who may use their power, influence, and capital to instigate a war. More complex: The majority of those people have absolutely zero interest in instigating a war because it would most likely deteriorate their wealth. So we are left with a very tine group who don’t care.
4) What is the motive of that tiny group to engage in war, no matter what the outcome is? It can be a potential or already progressing loss of power or wealth. However, a healthy mind would drive people to change behavior and fight to keep their power or wealth in new, more creative ways. Another reason even though not very realistic is a pathologic defect, like psychopathy or alike, but we did not rule it out. The problem is too big and complex to not question anything. There are many other reasons but we need to keep in mind that the degree of influence to make a war happen is so high that reasons like jealousy and s forth are not really reason enough to prepare a war over years across multiple presidents to finally strike.
5) Moreover, how can this tiny minority manipulate millions who do not want the war to eventually agree to go to war? The answer is known but the mechanism itself has hardly taught anything about: PROPAGANDA. The reason why most schools and universities do not talk about the mechanism in depth is the fear that a) the government, which uses propaganda mechanisms for many other, less significant actions than war, and b) schools don’t want to get kids ideas for how they could use propaganda to steer up the rest of the school, which would be super simple. Plus, in the recent past, there was no real reason to worry about propaganda that much.
However, there are more facts to this complex problem.
6) If there are motives to war and some are even propaganda over centuries such as “war is the mother of all progress” what is the motive for peace? Asking friends and contacts it was not easy to find a spontaneous reason. Only after some discussion, did several very powerful reasons surface like the progress of the 75 years between 1945 and 2020 has brought more progress and innovation than ever before and a global war would be a massive setback for humanity.

The conclusion of this first principle thinking exercise and how to find a solution to end war creation and embrace peace came down to the following:
1) Who is that tiny minority instigating war no matter where in the world?
2) What is their motive to do that?
3) How could we identify the mechanism of influence that allows that minority to influence such a huge amount of people over and over again?
4) What can this 99% missive majority do to prevent this in the future?

ANALOGOUS EXPERIENCE CONNECTIONS
To put the findings from the first principle thinking exercises into perspective,
Who is that tiny minority instigating war no matter where in the world?
1) Looking into the history of humankind, we saw an analogy to chimpanzees. A very interesting documentary showed chimpanzees entering the territory of another group of chimpanzees in order to take much-desired fruits that are only in their territory. So they sneak in at night to take as much as they can get. The territory defender was stronger and bigger in size and fought the entrants heavily. Some got killed. Definitely a war with fatalities among animals.
2) War for resources, as basic as water had been sparking wars back to the early days of homo sapiens. The creation of borders for each society was a key to reducing the number of wars but did not eliminate them. Paired with an ever-growing level of civilization and meaningful borders, the war went effectively down. Western Europe has had peace for 75 years now and some European countries such as Switzerland, Finland, and Norway for over approximately 100 years. Societal structures, independence on one side, and dependence on certain products or services on the other side helped maintain peace.
3) A very interesting behavior to study is Aborigines in Australia. Here there are no borders, no ownership and no possession of land, water, air, natural resources, and so forth are acceptable. A model worth exploring with an open mind by all nations and organizational models.
4) After weeks of research we found a very disturbing connection between a small group of powerful leaders with psychological disorders such as Narcissism or Machiavellian. The similarities in motives, behavior, and psychodramas of initiated wars were striking. Motives include domination of a group or country all the way to world domination. The belief that a world dominated by one will be a peaceful world. Those disorders can be found in a very small number of people and some can be transferred via their DNA. That genetic dependence explains why there are complete families with such a disorder. Again also the tiny number of far less than 1% shows a match to the problem. Moreover, many of them are looked at as simply greedy, power-hungry, hostile people. Others are actually friendly try to please others to, later on, use them and make them work for them. What is a mechanism of leadership can end up as an illness? HOWEVER, the number of those pathologic disorders is tiny – a fraction of a percent even among leaders.
Analogous thinking helped at least identify a high-risk group of people who rather need psychological support than being killed.

IDEA CONFLUENCE
Idea Confluence describes a process of idea stacking based on the understanding of how the brain composes ideas based on previous experiences.
1) Some ideas from the past however seem counterintuitive but reasonably powerful. The second amendment of the US constitution which states that every citizen shall have the right to possess weapons was created by the fear that an ill-minded leader may control the entire country and the population has no way to defend itself. Even though extremely controversial discussed. The case is more than real – in the past – in the present, we live in and in the future unless we find better ways to make and maintain peace.
2) Pacifists developed many different variations of the idea that nobody should ever engage in war and even at the price of self-distraction. This model has not been very successful because powerful organizations or countries can overrun another country and the population may not even have a chance to say no. More importantly, it does not describe how to withstand propaganda which is a key to igniting a war. And on top of all unless you don’t know the structure of the aggressor it s hard to have a pacifist strategy. Now – given the current findings, pacifistic thinking is a concept to at least take into consideration.
3) Hundreds of peace organizations around the world rally for peace and against war. However political constraints and the corresponding funding situations did not allow them to make very hard and very well thought out concepts regardless of political influences. But also here we find interesting perspectives that fed our ideation process.

CALLOM BURST
When understanding the fundamental problems and challenges, allowing our thinking to get influenced by many analogous situations as humans, animals, and biological beings and finally getting inspired from other highly valuable and individual ideas. We were able to start a CallomBurst. This BlueCallom method is based on the understanding and past experience with ideation that our brain is bursting with ideas once filled with insights and inspirations. The result in our case was a set of considerations measures and structures that addresses all the findings, all the considerable situations and put in the context of the ultimate goal to make peace in a timely order and then maintain peace over the long run.

INNOVATION SUMMIT
No need to go into further details as the core of this book and its 21 chapters is the actual result created by the fifth core method: Innovation Summit.