Why ask Big Hairy Audacious Questions (#BHAQs) about our perilous trajectory toward a fragile and inequitable future?

Take your time for slow thinking and muse over the Big Hairy Audacious Questions (BHAQs) about Equity Moonshot.

How might we:

• Hack the deep root causes that propel us on our perilous trajectory toward a fragile and inequitable future??
• Co-design and build an equitable, regenerative and sustainable future to benefit all?

Equity is a social and community virtue. Equity is about giving each person fair opportunities to reach their highest levels of healthy well-being and to develop their virtues for the greater good of all.

The purpose of asking BHAQs is to co-create generative dialogues about how we can collaborate on mission impossible.

• Is there any quest more important than Equity Moonshot?

This quest spotlights the need to ask cascades of BHAQs about how we can co-create a fair, free and flourishing future for the benefit of all.

Begin your learning journey with one BHAQ.

• Which one of the following BHAQs in this blog inspires you to talk and discuss. Share your reasons for why this BHAQ is important to you.

Explain what this BHAQ means to you and help others to understand your perspective better. Invite others to share what the BHAQ means to them before engaging in generative dialogues.

• Better still, what about creating your own BHAQ?

Begin your inquiry and discovery process with one BHAQ in communion with other explorers. And then pick another question. Rinse and repeat. This learner-centered approach enables us to create our own learning journeys, stories and outcomes within collaborative communities.

1. Why ask BHAQs?

Our most powerful strategy for launching Equity Moonshot is to ask BHAQs about how we act for the greater good of all.

It is better to ask the right questions and not know the answers that it is to answer the wrong questions with the right answers. It takes courage and vulnerability to ask BHAQs that challenge our leadership mindsets about how we can use equity, empowerment and transparent accountability to address our complex web of self-inflicted "wicked" problems in the 21st century, such as human rights abuses, isms, inequities and more.

"Wicked" refer to complex problems that have no ends nor final solutions. All solutions for wicked problems have unintended consequences. A solution may increase or decrease the magnitude and/or risks of current and future problems. The application of linear, dichotomous, reductionist thinking simply makes wicked problems worse.

This modified quote, adapted from Claude Levi-Strauss, emphasizes the importance of wise men and women in asking evocative questions about wicked problems

The wise do not give the right answers, they pose the right questions.

• Why does public ignorance about the distinctions between equality (such as the individual value of equal votes) and equity (such as the social virtue of fair opportunities for all) serve the royal, plutocratic and neoliberal elites?
• Will monarchies, plutocracies and corporatocracies relinquish their vast extractions of wealth from common people to cultivate the prosperity for all?

BHAQs make us stop, self-reflect and inquire with an open mind in ways that compel us to think slowly, speak out anew and engage in generative dialogues in the co-creative spirit of thinking and doing.

Thinking anew without effective doing, and doing anew without effective thinking are both ineffective for different reasons. Doers without deep thinking make wicked problems far worse than deep thinkers without doing. We need BHAQs to co-create synergies between thinkers and doers.

Equity muses are change agents who ask wise questions. They do not mansplain, womansplain nor provide unsolicited advice. They only provide advice when requested to do so for a specific issue after understanding the context of a particular situation.

BHAQs challenge our implicit assumptions, biases, beliefs and value systems in communion with others about how we can use virtues more effectively. This learning process also calls for asking questions about what BHAQs mean even before trying to answer them, for example.

• What are the implicit assumptions, biases, beliefs, virtues and values embedded in the BHAQ itself?.

We need comprehensive frameworks of divergent BHAQs (described below) to explore, discover and identify the deep root causes of wicked problems. This framework sets a improvisation stage for those who seek to co-create generative dialogues about how to understand about the nature of wicked problems.

Using a constellation of guiding virtues and simple rules (operating principles), equity muses use ecological frameworks of BHAQs to expand our awareness and gain new insights and breakthrough understandings in how we can improve our strategies and skills in solving wicked problems.

2. Why ask BHAQs to clarify what the fairness of equity means?

Equity has different meanings in business, law and civil society: a limitation of the English language. This creates unnecessary confusion and unclear thinking. Here, this word refers to the systemic doctrine of equity governance.

The spirit of equity engenders reciprocity of enabling all people to reach their highest potential who in turn co-create more enriching opportunities for others to do the same. This virtuous upward spiral of learning is about how we can cultivate equity governance as a lifelong intergenerational process.

Equity muses ask people and leaders BHAQs about the ethics of fairness.

• Why is equity more important than equality?
• Why are virtues more valuable than values?
• Why is politics more unfair than nature?

We can use our responses to these evocative questions to collaborate more effectively on solving our wicked problems.

Equity governance refers the ethical process of how we systemically operationalize fairness and create fair opportunities for all. This inclusive and egalitarian system of shared decision-making and sense-making sets up partnering processes within and across the political, private and public sectors. This collaborative process is essential for scaling up our resilient and anti-fragile capabilities and capacities to navigate through our turbulent seas of uncertainty and our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st-century.

The learning process about inequities begins with sharing our own personal and professional stories in response to this question. Unfairness and fairness are opposite sides of the same coin.

• What does (un)fairness mean to you?

3. Why become an equity muse?

Equity muses are mindset sherpas who ask big hairy audacious questions (BHAQs) about our fragile, perilous future and what we can do about it. Everyone can play a part and make a contribution.

Equity muses are a particular kind of change agent who collaborate with thought leaders, leaders, influencers, executive coaches, educators and change management champions to build living Equity Moonshot story movements about how to redress the unfairness of inequities and to promote the fairness of equity.

The #UniteEquityMuse change agent movement is about using BHAQs to help us develop broad-based trans-disciplinary collaboration across all sectors, networks, communities and organizations and take on the EquityMoonshot quest.

4. Why ask BHAQs about wicked problems?

Wicked problems have no ends nor final solutions. Wicked problems include ineffective governance, inept stewardship, incompetent leadership, political corruption, global warming and the lack of pandemic preparedness, to name a few. To work on these problems, we need to cultivate emergent adaptive learning, agility and ingenuity guided by complexity, systems and human-centered design thinking.

How might equity muses enable people to iteratively learn from experience to:

• Test, refine, change, improve or abandon new strategies and complex innovations for working on our wicked problems?
• Co-create social innovation and entrepreneurship enterprises needed to transform the process of how to solve our wicked problems?
• Move beyond the constraints of paradigms and linear diffusion models to dynamic, adaptive and emergent frameworks and exponential transformations needed to launch Equity Moonshot?

The #UniteEquityMuses change agent movement uses BHAQs as launching pads to initiate lifelong intergenerational learning journeys about how we can collaborate on this Equity Moonshot quest.

5. Why is mission impossible failing?

Reductionism is the original sin: breaking things and systems apart from their inter-connectedness and failing to zoom out and understand their complex interdependencies.

Reductionism artificially gives the illusion of simplifying, reducing and controlling complexity. The myopic illusion of reductionism works at the closed subsystem level of solving complicated problems, such as fixing a broken car. This approach is counter-productive in addressing the interconnectedness of complex problems, such as reversing global warming.

• How might we overcome our naive reductionist perspectives that are destroy our capabilities and capacities to manage our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems?

The complexities of interdependent systems cannot be controlled. We can only manage and navigate our ways through these complexities, for better or for worse.

• Why do the divisive constructs of neoliberalism, the holy grail of the free market without transparent accountability, the blind faith in absolute freedom and free speech without respect for truth-seeking fail to serve humanity and the health of the planet?

These divisive constructs divide us into competitive win-lose divisions of "us-versus-them" mindsets. The competitiveness rips and tears collaboration apart. This lack of collaboration impairs our long-term abilities to survive, strive and thrive as cohesive, flourishing societies and communities.

The separative and individualistic divisiveness of the Declaration of Independence and its meme, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, defies the social cohesiveness of the "Declaration of Interdependence" and its meme, to Love, truth-seeking and the pursuit of equity.

The meme of independence paid lip service to the virtue of equality and failed to redress the power abuse dynamics and prevented the ascendancy of this virtue. In contrast, the meme of interdependence embraces equity, inclusion and diversity to ethically use empowerment to prevent the abuse of power.

• How might we create the epigenetic cultural influences to transform our selfish gene of short-termism into an altruistic gene of long-termism?

The reductionism of separation de-humanizes people and atomizes humanity into isolated cults of individualism and warring tribes of competing groupthink: us versus them. This fragmentation corrodes the holistic integrity of our political, economic, social, educational and health systems needed to respond effectively to BHAQs.

How might we the people align together, despite our differences, to:

• Overcome our pessimism and "lost hope" of averting our dystopian future?
• Lift the veil of our ignorance about the deep root causes that perpetuate our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems?

The #UniteEquityMuses movement use our different perspectives to make a difference. This aim of this inquiry process is to challenge our antiquated paradigms of governance, stewardship and leadership.

• Why do unquestionable leaders avoid answering BHAQs about what perpetrates isms, unfair advantages, systemic inequities and what perpetuates corrupt political, legal, economic, educational and social systems?

#EquityMoonshot highlights the challenges of how we struggle to collaborate across our political-legal-economic-social-educational-health systems. Such collaboration is essential to ethically operationalize any constitution or declaration, such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• How might we close the rhetoric-action hypocrisy gap and deliver on our visionary aspirations?

These quests involve zooming out to envision a practical utopia and zooming in to mitigate against a dystopian destiny by working within and across all sectors.

• How might we, as equity muses and leaders navigate our #MotherEarthShip toward #EquityMoonshot?

This quest calls for co-designing and co-evolving lifelong intergenerational learning platforms and meta-verses in service of we, the people, our educators, our change agents, our champions, our thought leadership ambassadors and our leaders for the greater good.

6. Why zoom-out-in-out-in to address wicked problems?

We need to develop a common understanding about why we need to ecologically zoom-out-in-out-in within learning communities. This inquiry, exploratory and discovery process enables us to learn how to observe, understand and address wicked problems from different perspectives: an agile process that prevent us from getting mired down in fixed positions. Such collaborative learning creates the middle ground to partner and work together across the political spectrum and across all sectors and their interdependent systems.

• How might kindred spirits of leadership development, educational and coaching institutions co-develop communities of equity muses to facilitate collaborative learning needed to launch Equity Moonshot?

Next learning opportunity

The follow-up blog outlines a framework of ecological #BHAQs to launch Equity Moonshot.

An ecological framework of inquiry

1. Metaphysical inquiry: learn from the mystical Now of Being and Reality
2. Meta-level: cultivate equity governance, muses and leadership mindsets
3. Macro-level: develop equity stewardship and distributive leadership
4. Meso-level: build learning networks of networks (organizations, communities, etc)
5. Micro-level: co-create generative dialogues and deep inter-being collaboration
6. Nano-level: facilitate intra-being awareness, growth and development