A lot of my responses are in fact to the ideas brought in by Nanne, who seems to have a sixth sense about the Commission... or have you worked there? (;-))

 "Unfortunately the roots of this go down to the bureaucratic structure of the Commission, which is in dire need of reform. We need more integrative, comprehensive policy drives and the idea of sustainability should be promoted to that end"

I must say, as someone who has to live and breathe every day in this bureaucratic hive, I'm always rather astonished at how much we have managed to achieve. So let's have some compassion for the flesh and blood men and women who actually keep this bloody structure in place through their collective inability to think something different. We are like one of those party games where everyone lies on everybody else and then they take away the chairs... At the current level of complexity, traditional command and control structures cease to perform well. I talk to a lot of people in the Commission every day and we just cannot see any other way of doing business. ... yet. I just sent an article on holacracy to my Director General as holiday reading.

Emil, you say "Key issue is vision. After that leadership and boldness in implementation." Right on. But the vision ain't gonna be generated by individuals, not this time. Too complex. More likely it will be held by the collective/community. And in order to get there, we're going to need a different kind of leader, and we haven't found them yet. We need a "natural" hierarchy where each higher level is truly more developed in terms of cognitive capacity and socio-emotional flexibility/resilience and wisdom. Not to mention humility. At the moment, there is understandably still a certain amount of old-world self-concern and vanity in the works, to be soothed and reassured, and conquered with competence and diplomacy.

Nanne, you say "Spiral Dynamics' seems in secular terms a bit reductionist in its discussion of memes". There's an awful lot more to spiral dynamics than just its 8 memes, but that's not a conversation to start here. And I, too, would rather live in Nanne's "maddingly rich, fluid world with a plethora of ideas and motivations coming to us from all directions and interacting with and also shaping our biological drives". All these models are absolutely useful, but they are indeed reductionist if not used to inform an ever broader and higher perspective. No ungrokkable Buddhist language is needed. The new organisational discourse will have to be languaged "emergently" by the collective as it dreams itself into the new paradigm.

Nanne, I'm really glad you said this: "What I would like to see for the Commission is simply a flatter organisation with more cross-cutting working groups and fewer 'directorates general'. I am rather enthusiastic about the ability for groups to accomplish transformative thinking (a 'level up', if you will) if they are organised ad hoc, but around certain principles. The tremendous human potential in the Commission could be put to much better work in that way."

I once asked myself the question "is it possible to grow a chaordic operation inside a command-and-control bureaucracy in such a way that it can still do its day-to-day work?" A small group of individual "Imaginal cells" inside and outside the Commission is starting to explore what's possible. I sense an openness, but we can't redesign this puppy beforehand. It's an emergent story and we have to make it up as we go along.

Somewhere in this long conversation, someone mentioned "questions that matter" and linked to World Café. We are looking at introducing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter into the Commission next year. Also, work is already afoot to support the formation of knowledge networks and cross-cutting communities of practice. Always building on what is already there and taking it to the next level. Softly and gently, sustainably and FOR REAL. With conversation "callers", hosts and facilitators conversant with the various components of the integral model and supported in their own development by a personal (and hopefully even group) practice - whatever it takes... to create a field that is strong enough to act as an attractor to all that "tremendous human potential" in the Commission, to dare to dream another way of doing business that will support the projects of visionaries like Emil.

And then taking we can start taking those hosting skills out into the field. Emil you seem to know some people we should be talking to. I don't have many contacts inside the transport and energy DG, but I'm sure we could find some in short measure to start up a conversation along the lines you are suggesting.

RG said "come on let's get this done"... So what's first? Or what's next?