BFNet as a Platform for Change

BFNow Self-Study Module 6 - Exploration 5

[This is part of BFNow Self-Study Module 6: How Change Works. For more about the overall Self-Study program, please look at About BFNow Self-Study and BFNow Self-Study Orientation.]

Let me encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

In the previous explorations, I’ve described the potential for direct cultural change via an innovate-implement-communicate strategy on the part of co-evolvers. Up to now, I’ve mostly been talking about co-evolvers working individually. What’s missing to make the strategy really effective? Connection and mutual support to amplify our impact on the evolution of the culture.

In the Bright Future Initiative, we do that through the Bright Future Network (BFNet). So far, BFNet is made up of the 360+ graduates of the original Bright Future Now online course (BFNow). We use the shorthand of “BFN” to refer to the overall system and culture that includes both BFNow and BFNet.

As I update this in July 2025 from the BFNow original, we’re in the process of creating a new pathway into BFNet and will also be upgrading the network. We call this new phase BFN 2.0. This exploration builds on what we’ve already done while it looks forward to BFNet 2.0.

What is BFNet? It’s a territory (of course!). It requires multiple maps to give it a reasonably good description and even then, the maps will be incomplete.

It’s also a work-in-progress, an evolving complex adaptive system, so these maps are bound to be provisional.

In this exploration, I’d like to take a high-level view and introduce you to a variety of ways of thinking about what it is and where it’s headed.

Maps for BFNet I find helpful include:

• a community

• an organism

• a learning environment

• a lab

• an incubator

• a platform

• a strategy

BFNet as a community

Being a co-evolver all by yourself is hard. It’s lonely, you probably won’t be as effective as you could be and it’s just not much fun. Doing it in a community with other co-evolvers is so much better.

BFNet is such a community – a community of purpose and practice for co-evolvers. The shared journey through BFNow created a common ground of shared understandings and practices. In the network, we continue to communicate with each other and share activities. In times of crisis (like the start of Covid), we make sense of what’s happen together. Some of us work together on teams. Others are together in Common Interest/Inquiry Groups.

We are known and know each other – not every person in the network but enough. We recognize each other as community members and we support each other. It’s like the feeling that developed in each cohort, only extended in scope and time.

BFNet as an organism

We know ourselves to be a complex adaptive system – a living, dynamic, evolving community, where everyone is involved by choice. We are interconnected yet with autonomy. We use and adapt structures where it suits us but they don’t define us. We have emergent properties that add magic to our culture. We’re unpredictable, with surprises emerging all the time.

BFNet as an ongoing learning environment

People in the network offer educational programs for each other and have brought in outside specialists on topics of interest. For all of this, BFNet acts as a supportive container. In BFN 2.0 we plan to expand on this by using the network as the basis for creating educational programs for the public.

BFNet as a lab for new culture

Innovating and then embodying new cultural patterns requires experimentation and practice. BFNet gives us a place to explore new patterns for everything from personal practices to new ways of working together – and to do so with others who share the BFN common ground.

BFNet 1.0 represents an early stage in manifesting this kind of living laboratory. We plan to make this a much stronger and more central part of BFNet 2.0.

BFNet as an incubator

Some innovations take the form of projects or even new ventures. Some may emerge out of the BFNet living lab or some may arrive through individual inspiration and commitment. Whatever their source, the network is there to enable us to support each other in the early phases of the new project. Mitra Martin, who developed the Buddy Program, describes the experience like this: “Incubating a startup in the Bright Future Network is like being a young tree in an old-growth forest. There’s potency, wildness, wisdom, grace, and just really rich and nourishing soil.”

BFNet as a platform

Weaving these threads together, I find it helpful to think of BFNet as a platform.

Some of the most successful organizations to emerge in the past few decades – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft – are all providers of a “platform,” by which I mean infrastructure that allows others to create and distribute content and more specific services.

Regardless of what you think about these companies, the platform business model has clearly been a success, at least in conventional terms. I suspect that one of the main reasons for this is because platforms create ecosystems and evolve with them as complex adaptive systems. From my perspective, they are part of a shift away from a centralized, self-contained model (think traditional car companies, including their dealer networks) to a more distributed and web-like model (even if the companies themselves are internally hierarchical). It’s a transitional phase but useful to see the direction things are moving.

BFNet 2.0 is designed to be a platform for co-evolvers – an ecosystem in which we can flourish.

In this model, most of the cultural change coming from the network will be via the efforts of many, many small groups and individuals. In that way, we, as members, can contribute to cultural change across the whole growing edge of culture and be quick to adapt to new opportunities. And we can do so with the support of BFNet as it provides the cultural, organizational and digital infrastructure – the nourishing habitat – for our efforts.

BFNet as a strategy

Overall, BFNet is designed to enable co-evolvers to be more successful at influencing culture. One of my early inspirations for this kind of support was the Mondragon Cooperatives in northern Spain. In the 1950s they created a support system that enabled 80% of their new cooperatives to succeed. It’s still working. In contrast, about 50% of small businesses in the US fail in the first five years. Can we, in a more general sense and with a new BFN understanding of “success,” do the same thing for co-evolvers and their endeavors? Can we help each other focus our efforts in the most fruitful areas? Can we collectively achieve more impact than we could in isolation? Can we accelerate the emergences of the Planetary Era. BFNet 2.0 is designed to help us answer yes.

Experiential

• What are your hopes for what BFNet 2.0 will enable you to do and/or become?

• What are your hopes for what BFNet 2.0 can do and/or become?

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 6: How Change Works Overview page.]