Does this sound like you? 

Creative Decisions aims to help people seeking to build and manage creative, energetic collaborations that benefit communities, businesses, and ecosystems.  Aims could include:

• a healthy community
• a sustainable business
• a science park
• a transformed local economy
• a collaborative learning network
• a restored stream network, estuary or lake ecosystem
• a catchment with sustainable management of water
• a revitalised urban precinct
• a sustainable farm - or farming sector
• a product development process that is market led
• a society tuned in to the idea and practicability of a sustainable world

You are a leader inspired by these kinds of aims, and you yourself are likely to be inspirational.  You want people to act together, to collaborate, and work to achieve a common mission.  It may be an urban development and communities undergoing change.  Moving forward requires the community to coalesce around a coherent vision and plan. The local council wants efficient processes to achieve change, and a responsive community.  The community wants amenities, a healthy environment, local employment opportunities, and honest consultation.  External parties, who may include developers or transport agencies, want process efficiencies, buy-in to development options, and certainty.  A solution depends on a shared understanding of complex issues, increased trust, and a sense of collaboration. 

If this sounds like you, you need hypergovernance. While hypergovernance is a general concept, our ideas about it are coloured by our interest in advancing sustainability: 

What is hypergovernance?

• A means of ensuring directed, collaborative effort, linking people with diverse outlooks, needs, and priorities 
• Based on overarching values or principles that act as reference points
• The values are recognised as universal within the larger, diverse community
• Health, well-being and sustainability lie at the heart of these values
• It is a pervasive and recursive approach, being applicable to systems, components of systems, and components of these components, and so on.
• We all understand it, it is simple and easy to communicate, and it works like an "invisble hand" 

Why is it needed?

• A shared concept of effective cross-cultural governance is needed for all of us to work effectively together in societies that are increasingly multicultural
• The essentials of such governance are poorly understood
• All around we see a lack of accountability
• Corporate best practice in governance is inadequate, and often focused around the narrow interests of the company
• Top level management consultancies have failed to prevent abuses by their clients
• There is a need to move beyond gestures to make real progress toward sustainability
• Global warming is one of many pressing issues that can only be addressed by hypergovernance

How is it achieved?

• By adopting a shared concept of sustainability
• By developing a common sustainability language that permeates our discussions about important issues
• By using a simple values model that appeals deeply to our sense of integrity
• By embedding the shared values in our consciousness
• By measuring health, wellbeing, and sustainability in the most comprehensive, holistic sense.

• By providing much greater transparency in business and organisational management.

What are the benefits?

• Increased trust
• A foundation for a new, sustainable, 21^st century economy
• Good leadership, with followers
• Improved efficiency and performance
• Reduced risk in social and economic transactions
• A basis for networking and finding the people we want to work with
• Joined-up, collaborating local and international communities
• A basis for certification and respected "badges of trustworthiness"
• A means for making real progress on the big issues that presently confound us

Effectively, hypergovernance is the overall result of applying a simple set of tools that facilitate collaborative action directed at the shared goals of the community.  We are especially interested when those goals are health, well-being and sustainability. 

The business of Creative Decisions can be summarised as "Innovation, Change, and Transformation" to achieve sustainable development.  Hypergovernance is at the heart of our toolkit.  It is based on our NZ2100 model for sustainability and our KiwiGrow approach.