“Who would want to be a plain old ordinary fiduciary when they can be a superfiduciary?”

Superfiduciary Self-Discovery Days and DesignShops for community building

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IN DEVELOPMENT

idiagramming the financial system

Evergreencore.org is in conversation with Marshall Clemens, Matt Taylor and the EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University about a proposed collaboration on the facilitating, hosting and curating of a Superfiduciary Self-Discovery Day leading to a series of Superfiduciary Community-Building DesignShops.

Marshall Clemens is the founder of Idiagram, and developer of a new interactive digital map of our contemporary financial system designed to reveal the form and function of that system and its connection to the real economy.

Matt Taylor is the inventor of the Matt Taylor Method for holding DesignShops within NavCenters to effectively and efficiently unleash collaboration on co-creating solutions to complex problems.

EdLab is a research, design, and development unit at Teachers College, Columbia University. EdLab envisions and pilots knowledge projects for a fundamentally different education sector that is attuned to the emerging post-industrial, information-based world.

One of the multiple projects currently under way in the EdLab is a project to curate Matt Taylor’s unique method for unleashing collaboration to co-create solutions to complex problems involving parties with diverse and often competing interests, featuring one-day Discovery Days for planning three-day DesignShops with uniquely constructed and purposely configured NavCenters.

Our idea is to apply the Matt Taylor method to the Worthy Problem of putting income security back into our retirement system by constructively de-constructing and reconstructing the form and function of our financial system to fit the unique powers and purposes of pension plans as fiduciary stewards of society’s aggregated reservoirs of retirement savings.

The brilliant mapping work of financial systems cartographer Marshall Clemens –  using a proprietary digital data imaging system he calls Idiagramming – gives us a powerful place to start with a uniquely accurate visualization of the intellectual, interpersonal, monetary and physical “circuitry” that is our contemporary financial system as it now is and currently operates, to make decisions for society about which possibilities for future prosperity can, should and will be made to happen through enterprise.

Our ambition at evergreencore.org is to build on the clarity of Marshall’s maps to spotlight the role of pensions in this system as it now is, and then to ask,

Is this the best that we can be?

The contemplated Discovery Day will bring 30-40 of the top thought-leaders in rethinking the powers and purposes of pensions and the role of retirement in modern society, drawn from both the pension industry and civil society change advocacy, to plan the agenda of a three-day DesignShop that can be repeated multiple times, in multiple locations, over an indefinite period of time, in order to include all individuals in fiduciary roles at pension funds — and also their peers and colleagues in university endowments and endowed foundations — in this radical, in the Latin sense of “going to the root”, rethinking of their rights and  responsibilities as financial fiduciaries of a shared financial future for their beneficiaries and benefactors that is also the shared physical future for all of us.

We see this Discovery Day proceeding in three primary phases,

  1. beginning with an exploration of Marshall’s map
  2. leading to an exploration of the fitness-for-purpose of current practices
  3. ending with the design of a three-day program for exploring future possibilities, including the possibility of pensions self-identifying as superfiduciaries, and as superfiduciaries going evergreen in their investing.