Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
Share:
The Cynefin framework is helpful in making a distinction between the worlds of complicated problems and the worlds of complex ones. One simple distinction between these two worlds is the extent to which they can be known. In a complicated domain, the parameters of the problem can be known and several good practices can be hammered out, with largely knowable results. In the complex domain, the initial conditions are unknown and the results are unknown which is why small experiments designed to tell us more about what is going are very useful for creating emergent practice.
Financial markets are famously complex beasts. To the extent that you can manipulate them, you can externalize the unknowable parameters and create equations that tell you what will happen if you create and sell certain things. This interesting article by Ian Stewart in the Guardian is the story of an equations, the Black-Scholes equation – that is responsible for much of the large profits that derivitives traders are able to make. In the article, the author talks about how pure markets work, and how any financial models have to necessarily modify the complexity out of the market’s dynamics:
Any mathematical model of reality relies on simplifications and assumptions. The Black-Scholes equation was based on arbitrage pricing theory, in which both drift and volatility are constant. This assumption is common in financial theory, but it is often false for real markets. The equation also assumes that there are no transaction costs, no limits on short-selling and that money can always be lent and borrowed at a known, fixed, risk-free interest rate. Again, reality is often very different.
In other words, for the sake of profit, people using this equation just made stuff up that was more often probable than not and proceeded with their blindners on. They received substantial awards for this behaviour, because in our world at the moment we are addicted to knowledge. If you can show that you can make an unknowable system knowable, you will become a hero in this culture. We are so afraid of not knowing, so afraid of emergence that we are willing to bet trillions of dollars on a contrived view of reality. The consequences of this action are that fatal mistakes are amde when the true complexity of the world creates an emergent situation.
In these times, we need more honest leadership. Not leadership based on clever imaginings about how the world works, but leadership based on a collaborative approach to being in the emergent messiness of the world in every time. Of course there is a time and a place for models, but when we become addicted to them such they they take us into a complexity domain without the right thinking, we set ourselves up for catastrophic failure.
Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork. The stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere. The system is too complex to be run on error-strewn hunches and gut feelings, but current mathematical models don’t represent reality adequately. The entire system is poorly understood and dangerously unstable. The world economy desperately needs a radical overhaul and that requires more mathematics, not less. It may be rocket science, but magic it’s not.
To which I would add it probably needs a healthy dose of tolerance for emergence as well.
Share:
Just coming off an Art of Hosting with friends Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and Teresa Posakony. Something Tenneson said on our last day as we were hunkering down to do some action planning, has stayed with me. He said something like “it is easy to create actions that go off in a million different directions, but much more sensible to create actions that come from a common centre. There is something about holding that common centre together invites trust so that we can release responsibility to action conveners and known they are initiating works that comes from our common shared purpose.”
People often make the distinction between talk and action, largely in my experience as an objection to the amount of time it takes to be in conversation around complex topics. It seems that with complexity the conversation is endless and can go on forever. And almost by defintion, that is true. That can be a very frustrating experience if you consider the action – reflection process to be a linear one in which we spend time figuring out what we are going to do and then go and do it.
That approach works well in the complicated domain where everything can be known, or enough can be known that we can discern the wisest path forward. But the complex domain contains a number of features which makes that kind of linear thinking folly. First of all there is the prospect of emergence: things will happen as a result of interactions in the system which could never have been predicted and which may radically alter strategy and action. Secondly, actions undertaken in the complex domain cannot have their success or effectiveness guaranteed and therefore complex systems actually benefit from having many actions undertaken, with an ongoing developmental evaluation process as to the efficacy of these actions and the connection to the centre of action is constantly changing.
A lot of the work I do in hosting conversations is about both discerning what is our shared purpose as well as generating action that can come from that shared purpose. And, with the smart clients I have, we repeat that cycle over and over as they continue to operate in a changing and complex world. It creates strategy that represents a fine line between reacting and hedging your bets on some pretty good ideas. Conversation and time and a wicked question helps us to check into and explore a deeper core purpose that can lie at the centre of ideas for action. I have been lately calling this a generative core: an idea at the centre that is so powerful and compelling that it alone can inspire interesting and creative ideas. There is an energy to a generative core that is inviting, and that seems to make people WANT to be in conversation and relationship with it. There is a quality to the questions that lie in the generative core that open ourselves in exciting ways to new possibilities. Good conversation can help to illuminate this core purpose
Action planning from this place means coming up with good ideas and designing what David Snowden and others have called “safe-fail probes” which allows us to begin small. In the Berkana Institute we call this approach “start anywhere and follow it somewhere” indicating that this kind of action creates its own momentum over time and therefore needs to be shaped and carefully watched. Action that arises from agenerative core can be borne in conversation, and should be developmentally evaluated in conversation. Conversation becomes a key tool in designing, evaluating and making meaning of what is going on. And while actions and probes are being designed, tested and implemented, at the same time we have to pay attention to what we are learning about our core purpose, because that is always changing too.
This is not easy to understand, especially in a world where proceeding in an orderly direction from point A to point B is a desirable and seemingly sensible thing to do. But understanding the nature of complexity is important for action planning, because it can actually unleash the kinds of ideas that otherwise seem to never come to the surface. And it can make a community or organization powerfully resilient to shifts and changes that require retooling without stopping. It seems like a long investment of time to be in conversations that slow things down, but I invite slowing down to go fast, because the speed at which activities and ideas can be implemented on the other side of a well centred and well bounded discernment process can be breathtaking.
Share:
A brilliant post from Field work, football and Tiki Taka @ Dance of Unity:
Their style of play is known as Tiki Taka, commonly spelled tiqui–taca in Spanish. In Wikipedia is it shortly described as “A style of play characterised by short passing and movement, working the ball through various channels, and maintaining possession.” With Tiki Taka the ball is continuously passed between team members in a way that the whole team operates as one intelligent field, rather than sum total of talented individuals.
Share:
My friend Tom Atlee has been a remarkable documented of the lessons from the #Occupy movement. Since I was at Wall Street two months ago I have continued to be astonished at the creativity, leadership and communication styles emerging from the movement.
Today though, Tom has a long post on perhaps the most astonishing event yet. Following the well publicized pepper spraying of students at UC Davis, a remarkable non-violent action took place to de-escalate the situation. Take the time to read the whole post and watch the full video. It is moving, inspiring and possible ground breaking in the way police and protestors can be invited to work together to keep peace. It is the essence of real time chaotic action.