The feat of The Burning Man

Burning Man – Serpent Mother
originally uploaded by loupiote

I associate Labour Day weekend with the Burning Man Project. The most stunning feature of this week-long bacchanalia for the senses is a sense of abundance. No money or any kind of commercial, for profit exchange takes place there. If you need something, all you have to do is ask, and most people freely share what they’ve got.

Powerful partnerships get formed when efforts of a single individual are not equal to the task. People get together to realize ambitious creative projects – produce an opera, build a temple or provide 24-hour entertainment to a crowd of jaded 20-somethings. The Burning Man event is a successful social experiment. It demonstrates the power of a new type of human organization that works best in highly complex environments. (For doubters – just picture the logistics of creating a town in the middle of the desert where 38,000 can stay for over 10 days and leave no traces of their presence once the party is over.) MegaTasks – like health care, regional competitiveness and sustainable economic development appear so daunting because of the complex linkages among people, organizations and issues that need to be addressed.

The MaRS Market Research Information Specialist, Helen Kula, has a habit of sending out intriguing articles, sort of brain candy that really gets the cerebral kernel of MaRS going. Last week, she treated us to the Resilience Report, The Megacommunity Manifesto by Booz Allen Hamilton. The authors describe a megacommunity as “a three-sector intersection (Corporations, Government and Non-profits), or a public sphere… that come together because their common interest compels them to work together, even though they might not see or describe their mutual problem in the same way”. The underlying control-free structure of a megacommunity is the cornerstone of its success. Leaders of the participating organizations recognize that a very real interconnectedness of their operating environments compounds the risks for each of them separately. That interconnectedness can be converted from a liability into an asset through a network of effective partnerships. (The Cilion deal is a prime example of the effective public, corporate and civic intersection.)

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