One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious.
In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this:
- I feel that we need to…
- My thoughts are that we should…
- I just throw this out there for consideration…
- I’m not sure but I think we…
In other words, oin our efforts to discern the collective, we very often start with a non-definitive statement about our personal relation to what might be held collectively. Very often these kinds of statements serve to keep us stuck in individual perspectives. What we end up talking about is our own perspectives on things. Instead of sensing into the whole, we are negotiating with the parts. There is no emergent sense of what we have between us.
Last week, I was working with some ha’wilh (chiefs) from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nations of the west coast of Vancouver Island. (We were in this building). Although this was a somewhat standard government consultation meeting, these ha-wiilh are quite practiced in traditional arts of deliberation. Much of the conversation during the day conformed to the above pattern, but at one point, for about a half an hour, there was a deep deliberative tone that came over the meeting. We were talking about a government policy that is aimed at protecting wild salmon, an absolutely essential animal to Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities.
When talk about the policy, the pace of the conversation slowed down and the ha’wilh entered this pattern:
- We need to support this policy. I support it.
- We have to find a way to involve the province in this. Here’s who I know on this.
- Logging in our watersheds affects these fish and our communities are affected as well. What can we do about that?
The essence of this pattern is that one waits for something to be so obvious that a dclarative statement about “we,” “us” or “our” begs to be stated. And once it is stated, it is supported with a statement about how “I” relate to that whole.
This produces a number of profound shifts in a field, and very quickly. First, it slows everything down. It is not possible to rush to conclusions about what is in the collective field. Second, it builds conidence and accountability into the speech acts. It is very, very difficult to say “we need to support this” if you are uncertain of whether we do or not. This shift takes us from random individual thoughts and speculations into a space where we need to think carefully, sense outside of our own inner voice and speak clearly what is in the middle.
This is a very abstract notion, but anyone who has driven a car or ridden a bike in traffic knows what I am talking about. When we are driving our cars together, we are actually creating traffic. Traffic is the emergent phenomenon, the thing that we can only do together. In order to create traffic that serves us, we need to be constantly sensing the field of the road. This involves figuring out what other drivers are doing, noticing the flow and engaging safely but confidently. You need to both claim space and leave space to drive safely. Anyone who offers something into the field that is too focused on the individual disturbs the field significantly. They drive like road hogs, dangerous, not fully connected to the field around them.
So the teaching of the ha’wilh is very straightforward for any form of deliberation and co-sening: quickly go to the “we.”
[tags]co-sensing, deliberation[/tags]
Photo by Wam Mosely
Fresh on the heels of a gathering I co-hosted here on Bowen Island this week, I have begun a year long research project to look at how hosting, facilitating and convening conversations can help shift people, organizations and communities to new levels of awareness, work and changemaking in their worlds.
Posts here that relate to this research project are tagged with “CoHo” which is one of things some of us are calling this initiative. It is a contraction of “Council of Hosts” which is how we gathered and constituted ourselves last week. As a Council – a term that refers more to the method of deliberation among ourselves and not to a formal structure – we identified a key need that caused us to be joined in our work. All of us present at the gathering work with people who are stuck, affected by large scale systemic forces that conspire to constrain them. Not knowing how to work within these constraints is an incredibly disempowering feeling, as is working at one level, on say resource conservation, when you are fully aware of the large scale processes unfolding around you, like climate change, over which we have no control.
In a Council we decided that as a group our purpose was jointly to look at how we can be forces of conscious evolution through hosting. For me, conscious evolution is as simple as having the experience of becoming “bigger” in terms of consciousness of forces and systems and the impact we can have on those forces and systems.
What is interesting is that despite the fact that we are small players working in a big system, and we KNOW that our effect in the world is usually small and local, there is something almost inherent in human nature that convinces us that we can have more impact than it appears. To be sure, this sentiment sometimes becomes arrogance, especially here in North America, but everywhere I have been in this world, among many different people living in wildly different circumstances, I find this pattern of optimism. Whether or not that optimism is productive, or stands a chance at worldchanging is an interesting question, but even more interesting for me is this question: if we are truly products of the global earth system, and we know that we are simply small pieces of a huge and complex living system, where does this impulse, calling or optimism come from?
There seems to be something about being human that allows us to respond to a call that is bigger that the space we occupy in the system of life on earth. I am curious about what this call means and what happens when we respond to it, and also how we come in alignment with the various fields that seem to accelerate change. In short, why does one person think he or she can make a difference, and why does that sometimes actually happen? What needs to come into alignment to make change flow?
Ultimately I am looking for patterns. For me, my inquiry for the work is to look at a number of questions:
- What are the patterns that hold us and what can we learn about those patterns about how things evolve, how changes can flow through systems?
- How do we as hosts help to create the conditions for conscious evolution within systems?
- What are the patterns for doing this work?
In terms of the work of CoHo, this inquiry underpins my existing work, and is definitely my learning edge in terms of my work as a facilitator of process with groups that seek change. I invite you, and we invite you, to join us. I’ll post more information on how to in the coming weeks.
This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond the forms of minutes, notes or summaries. In the Art of Hosting community we are currently looking at how to broaden this activity.
George and Peggy and I looked at what this starting pattern said about the processes of harvesting, including teasing apart the word itself. We started by teasing apart the basic pattern of harvest and noticed that it lives in three modes: time, media and speech acts. We immediately asked the question what would harvesting looked like if we fully harvested from these modes, to wit:
- Time modes of the past present and future. We are practiced at harvesting from what has happened, but what does it mean to harvest in the moment, and to harvest from the future? The World Cafe process lights up the practice of harvesting in the present, as we capture and map nuggets of insight. The work of the Presencing community might have some insight into how we might harvest from the future, through a process of sensing and presencing.
- Media modes include the typical text modes that we use to harvest (reports and web sites, for example) but increasingly I am personally using audio and visual representations in my own harvesting work and this week I worked with Thomas Arthur who, as a performing artist and in relationship with Ashley Cooper, is harvesting from our gathering using video to capture the patterns of how we were together. Graphic facilitation is a method that combines hosting and harvest in the present, and the commission of music, dance and other movement is a mode of harvest that, although it is strange to Western cultures, is very alive in traditional cultures. Here on the west coast of North America events are harvested through song and dance and the song and dance live to “tell the story” of an event. In the Ojibway territories of Canada, they used birch bark scrolls and petroglyphs, “abstract” wampum belts and rock paintings of images and shapes to harvest. Traditional cultures know that the full story of something cannot be told simply with language and so the harvest often lives in what western cultures might call abstract art. It is precisely this abstraction that allows for the richness of the harvest to live.
- Speech act modes are all about the way the harvest is communicated. Typically harvest takes the shape of “telling the story” and so remains in the monological mode. Harvesting can also take the form of inquiry where the harvest is a question and invitation to engage. In both modes support is needed for understanding to arise, so in a telling mode, one must have a good communications infrastructure to get the story out and understood, In an inquiry mode, one also needs a way to support the harvest of an event. Harvesting through inquiry sets up a reflective learning process with the world at large and so it demands an open, inviting and deep listening infrastructure to further the work of the gathering that produced the harvest.
- Levels of what is happening which implies that there is more going on in any given gathering than simply what can be captured in a set of notes. Levels might include, the level of work, the level of process, the level of underlying patterns.
I got really excited about these, for when you combine these modes together (in the moment video making, having children in a gathering tell the story of the future, producing a series of audio recordings that ask questions) the art of harvesting becomes liberating and alive. A menu pattern emerges in which you might select harvesting strategies to both serve the purpose of the gathering and stretch it to harvest the underlying patterns of the gathering which make for learning conversations about HOW we meet as well as what is done in any given meeting.
There are many other dynamics that might emerge from this thinking on harvesting, including how we might harvest both individually and collectively or in combination, and harvesting from an inner perspective along with an objective perspective, which leads us to an integral model of harvest.
We also spoke of how technology, taxonomy and folksonomy might conspire to extract patterns of meaning from our artifacts of conversation through “knowledge gardening“, which is work that has been alive in George’s life for many decades.
As we spoke I found that our conversation became inspiring and emergent. We initially began informally in three chairs at the end of a long day of meeting, and we moved to have dinner together in the room in which we had held a World Cafe earlier in the day. The markers and paper were still on this table, like a huge “back of a napkin” which just begged scrawl. I started mind mapping our conversation which led us to explore many branches of what was possible and still keep the emerging whole in front of us. I was so excited by what we were learning together that I found myself “sparking” for many hours afterwards. There was a breathless feeling to our talk which became so strong that we actually felt it must be in the field of the after dinner conversation among others too. We called for a late night circle with others to harvest from the conversations that happened at the end of the day. What we discovered was that the pattern of inspiration was alive in the natural cafe of dinnertime and much of what was harvested by all and then understood collectively provided the fodder we needed to integrate our experiences of two days and lead us towards a place where day three could be convergent and about the implications of our work in the world together.
And so in the spirit of inquiry about harvesting, what do you think? What is alive in you about this story? Where does it lead you?
[tags]George Por, Peggy Holman[/tags]
A picture of earth from the edge of the solar system, by Voyager 1
Carl Sagan: Relfections on a Mote of Dust
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there � on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
The picture at the top of this entry is a close up of the Voyager image of which Sagan is speaking. It was one of the last photos taken by Voyager 1 as it left the solar system in February 1990 to embark on its journey into interstellar space. The earth, a pale blue dot, appears suspended in a sunbeam which is basically solar glare on the camera lens. For a larger picture, with a lot more black nothingness surrounding our tiny, tiny home, click here. It sometimes brings tears to my eyes.