Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project blog has a fascinating thought piece on how scarcity thinking affects even the nonprofit world.

In short abundance means thinking that the pie is big enough and growing, so that if everyone works together, all will benefit. Scarcity thinking means that one considers the pie to be fixed or shrinking, and therefore, I have to get what I want from somebody else, and cooperation becomes just a game to obtain benefits at the expense of others.

Through a number of citations, so you have to read the full article, she explains the above very well, then comes to the meaty question of whether the cooperaton-based social web, can survive in an organization based on scarcity thinking?

So the article stresses the important role of consciousness as it relates to the usage of distributed networks.

here are the questions she poses:

“* Is it possible for an organization to operate in a culture of scarcity and still embrace social media and Web 2.0? My guess is that they can’t, except in the most superficial ways. It will either be shift to abundance thinking and really harness the power of social media or stay in scarcity thinking and make ineffective use of social media. I doubt that it’s possible to really get collective knowledge and information sharing going when a scarcity mentality says that there isn’t enough time, resources, energy, etc. to really make it happen. And I think that there’s just a fundamental mismatch there that permeates organizational culture in ways I’m only dimly perceiving right now.

* Are many of these “perceived” barriers to knowledge sharing a result of scarcity thinking? Are these really barriers? Or is it just that we’re missing solutions because we’re so focused on “lack-of” thinking?

* How would our ability to find new solutions to implementing social media and knowledge sharing within organizations be changed if we shifted to an abundance mentality?

* What are the larger impacts of scarcity thinking on nonprofits? How do we miss possible collective solutions to problems because we’re so focused on preserving our own piece of the pie? How do we miss the larger picture of the best ways to address our organization’s social cause when we are in scarcity mode? I keep thinking about Begging for Change and about how so many of the problems that Eggers points out are really rooted in scarcity thinking. What’s even more bothersome is that this scarcity thinking seems to move down the food chain into how clients are treated, which in many cases further deepens client dependence on nonprofits.

* What organizational and individual changes would we have to take to move from scarcity thinking to an abundance mentality?”