Peter F. Drucker is one of my favorite classic business-wisdom sources.  I was reminded of him when I saw a LinkedIn article posted by Izabela Lundberg, which included a quote of his.  “The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.”  Another quote, “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” by Alan Curtis Kay, 1971 at an early Palo Alto Research Center meeting.  (Also attributed to Peter F. Drucker and Dandridge M. Cole.)    

The future is formed every day by billions of people.  They WILL to arise in the morning and go about their daily activities.  Some do not.  Change begs an intuitive question, “Is it better to make history, or to create the future?”  You can make history without an intention, but you cannot create a positive future without an intention.  

Compare the recent U.S. elections and putting the other party in office in the following metaphor.  You get a clean pair of socks out of your drawer and put them on.  As you put one of them on, you notice a hole in one sock.  You remove them both and put them on the other foot.  The hole is still there.  What does that change?  Nothing.  Same hole different foot.  Same flawed democratic process, different party.  

Very early Posts, here, related that significant social change usually does not occur without some social, political or economic/financial crisis.  When times are prosperous there is even greater resistance to social change because “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  Yet, when crises occur, there usually is no preparation, no forethought, no planning and no vision for creating positive changes from the crises.  That situation now exists across most of the United States.  The polls on the national news the night before elections cited that 78% of Americans did not think their country was in a good condition.  A vast swath of the American public KNOWS that “something” is not right and they have a sense of impending crises.  They do not know what it is exactly, but they are not comfortable with how the country is doing, and where it is going.  

It is comforting to project that one day many hundreds of local community Social Sustainability Design Teams will exist to provide an ongoing, continuing process for assessing the social, political and economic/financial situations, and developing designs for relevant social, political and economic/financial policies and laws.  They will provide the capacity to respond to “change” promptly using a sustaining intention already in place, and a methodology for sustaining any democracy.