Of Guilds and Constellations: The Cygnus Ventures Eleven
Grey Swan Guild’s incubator hatches eleven shiny, valuable endeavors & it’s just getting started in 2023. Come participate with our enterprising wedges.
“The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps — we must step up the stairs” — Vance Havner.
Authored by: Sean Moffitt, Founder, Grey Swan Guild and MD, Cygnus Ventures
It’s been nearly three years since our hatchling of a Guild started up in the midst of the biggest life disruption this world had faced since World War II. The seeds of the global thinktank and do-tank Grey Swan Guild were spawned by the massive levels of uncertainty, reframing of the world and future scenarios development of COVID-19 now over 1,000 days ago.
People often forget this could have all gone sideways fast. COVID represented a crisis unto itself but also loosened up the rivets across a full range of society’s assumptions and gearworks. From a crisis came a benevolent opportunity. How could some of the sharpest minds across complexity, futures thinking, innovation, leadership, policy, research, science, strategy and a number of other domains come together and make better sense of the world, and what could be next? The Grey Swan Guild was thus born.
Four Stages of Guild-Dom
The last three years has seen thousands of impressive people and our collective group together go through four demarcated growth phases in time and energy:
- The Start & the Global Community (less than 300 people) — for the first nine months, we invited passionate people sidelined by a global pandemic to contribute their talents to help us all process what was happening around us. Reports, POV perspectives, events and a professional pandemic global network and support group of sorts was formed.
- The Ambition & The Global Movement (300–1,500 people) — 2021 represented a 5X expansion of the community as we globalized and formalized what many of us thought had strong legs and magical launching pads, and the tug of war between competing aspirations on what this guild could be began. Through baking and circling we became a global movement.
- The Experiments & Global Entity (1,500–7,000 people) — in 2022, we expanded to nearly 100 countries, 5Xed ourselves again and planted a wide number of crops — some flourished, some died — but in the process, we got a good read on what the world and members wanted. The guild became a lab of 20–30 experiments as we tried to split the atom on making sense of the world.
- The Ventures & Global Organization (7,000–15,000 people) — in 2023, we are starting to leverage our foundation and demonstrate our ability to generate instruments of value, better than those offered by the incumbents, the intermediaries and the establishment. We still have a modicom of all the good stuff that attracted people to the Guild, but now with some important new flavours. This post is about our fourth stage — the Ventures Stage.
The Swan-like and Guild Roots
Some people can get easily (or perhaps a better word) conveniently confused on what our mission and values represents. as we add things to our roster of initiatives, these have remained steady since the very start.
Our Mission:
TED spreads ideas. WEF shapes agendas. NPR creates informed publics. SXSW helps creative people achieve goals. We have our own simple valuable mission.
In everything we do our mission still guides and galvanizes us: “we make sense of the world’s biggest challenges and next Grey Swans (e.g. futures, wild cards, scenarios and possibilities)”. Simple. Now we may do it for more stakeholders, and across more offerings, but this common thread has held firm and attracted people to us. Our Cygnus Ventures will be no different.
Our Values:
Our values haven’t wavered either. Our Guild is: collaborative, purposeful, curious and aspirational. Values are like great art. They can be subjective but we kinda know them when we see them (and in the rare cases when we don’t see them). As we have expanded, these words have been strong guardrails for what we have experimented and played with. Cygnus Ventures will be no different.
Delivery Vehicles:
Like many groups that come together, the way we translate our mission and values to others may vary over time. It certainly has with us. Just as Amazon has morphed from books to commerce to media to web services to hardware to energy to transport to health care (if they hadn’t their business would be in a lot of trouble, given many of the new divisions are generating more profit than those that were originals).
We’ve also expanded our roster:
- Content & Publications — through explorations and widened perspectives through: reports, long form content, news wraps, video, podcasts and research reports
- Events & Experiences — through 11 types of events from monthly Town Halls and New Member Regattas, to periodic Atelier workshops and Salon conversations, to mega Premiere (advance research) and Marquee events (large multi-hour events).
- Intelligence & Foresight — minting fresh evidence-based perspectives on the world, through: quarterly waves of research called Weathervanes, a global network of Sensemakers and our future publishing group and primary research effort.
- Global Community & Network — building connections between members via: thriving international expansion effort, getting-to-know each other Open Forums and local city captains.
- Training & Learning — our fifth plank of our platform introduced by more recently introducing our monthly craft building series and soon-to be Guild Masterclasses (see below).
- Experiments & Ventures — our now sixth plank of delivery, satiating member’s hunger for rainmaking and bootstrapping via eleven ventures of varying commercial, educational, societal and intelligence value.
Cygnus Ventures — Incubating Value, Commercial Potential & Caliber of Offering
The aspirations of our Guild has almost mirrored the ups, downs and vagaries of the pandemic that birthed us. Fairly consistently, as founder, operating chief and chief dishwasher, I have had to respond to the loudening drum of feedback over the last 18 months:
- value for time — 75% of our members see even more attraction to, and participation with our Guild, if it was creating sustained value to its craft and its members. People could get paid too.
- talent leading to commercialization — we have enormous pools of senior level talent (70% of our Guild are director level-or-above), there is a fervent belief this genius reservoir could create on-demand value for others not just the Guild. People could get on the ground floor of something great too.
- open discussions are fine, but let’s have a “caliber” offering too — in our Guild activities, we let some of our mess show for the sake of community building, good vibes and fun, we have pods of all-star people that are organizing groups where mere fun and just good enough isn’t good enough, we want global best offerings that take a backseat to no one. People could be recognized for their world beating talent too.
Enter Cygnus Ventures.
Cygnus Ventures — 11 Hatchlings Get Birthed
We are pulsing out eleven different ventures our top members have deemed “extraordinary value” over a 24 month period of time, started in April 2022 and with the last one launching at the March 2024. Amongst 50+ venture concepts served up, these eleven have been voted on by our front row of members as very high potential.
The advance call to action is — we would love your participation and help. read more at the bottom of this message.
We’re declaring March “Cygnus Ventures Month” in the Guild. We will give each of these ventures their day in the sun over the next three weeks with new ways to learn and participate about each.
Here is our listing of ventures in the chronology they have launched:
- Craft Building Event Series — Learning Has No Finish Line — Launched April, 2022 with monthly surface explorations and Oct 2023 deep dives
- Cygnus Sprints — On-Demand Solutions for our Complex Sped up World (Alt-Consultancy & Advisory) — Launched October 2022
- Futuregazing — Building Better Futures By Young People, For Young People — Launching Cohort A March, 2023
- The GSG Network of Podcasts — Big Questions, Deeper Meaning, Undiscovered Patterns, Open Possibilities, Leading Minds, Better Futures — Launching Uncertainty Podcast March 2023, followed by four others — Liminal, Craft, GSG New Hour, Futures
- Weathervanes Research & Intelligence — Hindsight. Insight. Foresight. Crosssight. Together — Launching April 21st, 2023 as a commercial venture with report Post-Pandemica with 4x annual reports thereafter
- Cygnus Publishing — Making Better Sense of the World with Each Page — Launching First Book “Uncertainty: The Playbook” May, 2023
- Cygnus Speakers & Thought Leaders — World Class Wisdom in Action (Talent Bureau) — Launching first cohort of speakers May 2023
- Radar Collection — Minimizing the Surprise of the Near-, Mid- and Far-Futures (Foresights Foundry) Launching First Edition “The Biocene Report” and Trend Bank 300 June 2023
- Guild Masterclasses — The Leading Curriculum for Change Agents, Visionaries and Planners Beta Launching October 2023
- The Compass & Compendium — The Rosetta Stone for Intelligence, Planning, Change & Impact (Knowledge & Decision Operating System) — Launching Compass Platform, Systems Map and first Stage Compendium January 2024
- The Gallery of Thoughts — Get the Big Picture of the World (Design & Visualization Group), Launching Platform & Store March, 2024
Grab an oar, Become a CYGNUS VENTURIST
If you are:
- Accountable
- Action-driven
- Adaptable
- Ambitious
- Astute and Aware
We want you to help alchemize our eleven ventures into beacons of caliber, hope, intelligence and value.
Let’s build something valuable together as a “wedge”*. *A wedge: is a team of committed professionals, also the name for the V-formation swans make when they are flying.
Apply and let’s chat: https://forms.gle/rm3LqVkykwcQSn317
CYGNUS VENTURES
Eleven ventures of great potential value for eleven different motivations. Join us. Partner with us. We are the post-modern guild hatching thisg people value to the world and making better sense of it ion the process.
Visit our Cygnus Ventures page for more details and to get involved.
GREY SWAN GUILD
Have a look at our full 2023 Craft-Building Series (and our soon to be launched premium Masterclasses).
https://greyswanguild.medium.com/the-2023-grey-swan-guild-craft-building-series-3d37e8c00b3c
Next Craft Building Event #54 — Kinesthetics, Physical Learning, Embodiment & Muscle Memory
Come join us on March 21st for a different type of knowledge and learning experience: Click here.
https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:7016863464153395201/
Grey Swan Guild — Improving Our Craft Together
We are the Guild whose mission it to make sense of the world and next Grey Swans. In 2023, we don’t just want to think about the unimaginable but we want to make the unimaginable happen.
In the interim, here’s what you can do in the Guild:
Learn: https://www.greyswanguild.org/
Read: https://greyswanguild.medium.com/
Attend: https://www.greyswanguild.org/calendar
Become an Official Guild Member: https://bit.ly/gsgsmemberform
Go Deeper: https://bit.ly/lofsenseform
Join a Venture: https://bit.ly/gsgventures
Participate in 2023 Guild events & projects: https://bit.ly/gsgparticipationregister2023
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Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work.
