This week we go back to the lab. In a time of shifting consciousness and overwhelmingly endless chaos, it is time we considered what our true power is. The power of our human stories, close ties, and stories told over fireplaces. Our integration, and how ability to be plausibly wrong too while maintaining a sense of the collective. The collective being the synching of our hearts and minds, till we have the aha-moment, happening not just to some of us, but to all of us. And if we quest to achieve this, over and over again, failing and trying again, one question, one experiment, at a time, then we will truly have served our ultimate purpose: coherence.

This season, the Waka Power Labs comes back as a place for innovators to build camaraderie. It is a place for which consciousness goes beyond the virtual tools: AI and the rest. A place to rest, while provoking a school based off the beat model in which we can commune together. At the same time, it is a place where we turn our swords to threshing hooks and our shields to plows to cultivate nuance, and build together something of our own.

Regenerative Pollination has been one way in which communities are built and momentum is sustained. Some of the top pollinators include Seeds of Tao and Living Labs established in various communities to amplify change. The role of the living labs, or labs is to engineer change. Often, when change is unattended to, it atrophies. In a fast paced environment, as now is: integrating change to communities can feel overwhelming, and performative. With new metrics pushing the lines of what is possible, and optimization models calling for faster and better integrated outcomes, the sense of community thinking and shared discoveries is often lost.

This loss reduces coherence as the system becomes too loaded with pressure. Or the chaos of optimization. Agentic AI models, which we are all embracing, are more likely to reduce the concept of community and meetings are more likely to be reduced to faster notes and drafts. Similarly, solutions are likely to be microwaved and shipped, without the in put of the communities they serve. In such a space, we get products, and lose the soul. Thus, the current struggle is the battle for the soul of community: people, and their consciousness. Consciousness is how we feel, and consider the world around us. In no small scale must we feel productive, and must we feel relevant, even as we do the work that connects to our communities.

Yet, this concept is gradually challenged by alienating ecosystem: a Tech Anthropocene. You must have noted this in in the dystopian looking designs of the modern urban space: buildings without souls, and rooms without color or soul. The grey scale colors and the emphasis for minimalism, and the stripping away of the soul is just but a subtle reflection of this separation, a reductivism of our multilayered society to frictionless singularity. The separation of the soul from substance: the end result, dull and redundant results.

Organizations, like ours, Waka Africa, are crafted to optimize on issues of human nature, climate and human mental wellness, and both have embraced a touch of tech for good experimentation. Yet, even in doing so, we realize that human-centered concepts such as mental health is beyond agentic experimentations, or the pure embrace of AI. That without integrating the human community and self within the ecosystem, what we are creating may simply lack meaning. This has become a turning point of how not to create, or the first principles thinking of community as the core resource. The native wisdom and the sociological bonds of relevance of the person within the community account for their sense of purpose and wellness. Unfortunately, no quick-fix mental program that isolates itself from this truism can resolve this. So, it has become quite clear that people’s sustained source of happiness can only be rooted when their consciousness is stirred, their spirits stimulated and their hands involved in the act of change. They must co-create it, to appreciate it. Meaning making and meaning giving has to involve the human person.

From this perspective, any sphere, which serves the development and fulfilment of the human person has the challenge of co-creating. Even in doing so, metrics may not be the primary concern but the transformation of individuals to become the persons who are in sync with nature, if we are to have sustainable ecosystems. The synthesis of ecosystems, thereby, must go beyond calculations of Waka Gram carbon calculators, novel as they may be, to asking the daunting yet foundational question: Is serving the community, are they fulfilled? Does this uplift the human spirit? Does this expand the human consciousness? In this regard, we are resuming the lab to ask questions of human consciousness. We want to blend the philosophical with the work itself, and we are keen on maintaining the very rooting of community centered-ness.

Hopefully, in the Waka Power Lab, a new season of courage, and critical thinking will be welcome phase of cocreation, with experts, thinkers, and primary thinkers, as coherence can only be built when we bring our collective consciousness together. One conversation at a time.