Bill Moyers and I agree completely on this-

“But there is an antidote, on our website BillMoyers.com. We will link you to a vision of hope. Check it out. Sara Robinson, a senior editor of Alternet.org, has written an essay entitled “New Rules for Radicals: Ten Ways to Spark Change in a Post-Occupy World.” My hunch is you’ll cease to weep over our sinking ship of state, and start working to repair it.”

We should all print out Sara Robinson‘s great article and keep in it our pockets. Nurturing innovators and great thinkers as long as we can is the way to cultivate great change. This is what we need to succeed (just a great point out of 10, go read them all).

7. Find and nurture innovators.

We’re building a lot of new stuff very fast right now. New politics, new media, new cities, a new economic paradigms, a new relationship with the planet — it’s daunting. We need new answers much faster than we’re able to generate them.

There are people in our midst who are really good at this stuff, and times like this tend to be good ones for them. In more stable times, these folks are often pushed to the side: they often look and talk goofy, they have weird ideas, they don’t fit in, and nobody really gets what they’re talking about a lot of the time. Also: trailing in their wake you’ll find quite a few successes, along with a few stunning failures — the sure sign of somebody who’s comfortable taking a lot of risks, and not afraid of bombing out.

Genius comes in all ages, genders and colors. It’s the old Boomer codger who’s got a thousand tricks up his sleeve, and forgotten more than you’ll ever know. It’s the young kid who’s never been told it can’t be done, so she just went ahead and figured out how to do it. I’ve seen world-changing political innovation come from farmworker organizers in Phoenix, women’s activists in Atlanta and rural organizers from Montana and Oregon. There are often no markings on the package it comes in that give you a clue as to what’s going on inside, so you have to drop your biases, and look closely.

We need to seek out these folks and put their amazing brains to work. To do their best work, they need time and space to think. The basic necessities of life. Really good and worthy problems to solve. Permission to let their minds wander, unfettered and free. Permission to fail spectacularly. And then fail again. And again, over and over, because really complicated problems usually require outrageous quantities of failure before success is achieved. The process takes time, patience, and faith; this is what innovation runs on.