A new action paradigm? Are men taking over?

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

These are the words of Ernest Hemmingway. Hemmingway is famous for his notoriously masculine nature and a view of life as most fulfilling with a gun in the hand. And this reasoning seems to echo today where metro sexuality is giving in to ‘retro sexuality’ and authenticity as the new black. Let me give you a couple of examples from my own life.

We established /KL7 because we had grown tired of working in a ‘symbolic economy’ of communication, graphical design and branding. I recently published an article arguing that ‘the new pragmatism’ focusing on action and taking a constructive optimist stance offered a new style for politicians instead of spin and political jargon. A couple of days later I was invited to a workshop (in the DARE2 network) with Mark Stevenson, founder of the League of Pragmatic Optimists, which second principle states:

Chapters meet to help people do, not just talk. (Or to put it another way, if you’re a mouth on legs you probably won’t be invited back)

Then a couple of days later good friends of mine in SocialSquare invited for a re-launch of their consultancy burying social media and communication in the name of concrete action.

At a societal level we are witnessing technocrat governments in Greece and Italy bypassing democracy and Nudge units in UK and US just trying out various direct ways to achieve better civic mindedness without much classical motivational campaigning. Just like our project for The Danish Road Directorate.

And I could go on. So my question for you is: Are we slowly leaving a feminine, consensus seeking, democratic, communicative paradigm epitomized by social media and its mantras of dialogue and conversations. And heading towards a more masculine, action oriented, iterative, and risk taking approach to value creation, public governance and politics? And if so, is it just another fad or a real reaction to imminent threats?

Back to real work. I’m out.