Apropos of the fact that Tim Merry, Monica Nissen and I are hosting a module on the Art of Intergernational Hosting at this year’s Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Action, comes this quote from Jack Ricchiuto:
Every aging generation questions whether the generation coming of age has what it takes to learn into maturity as defined by the aging generation. Easy for each to think it knows better than the other. The fact is that they will always know more together than they could in isolation or competition. Hierarchy has the relevance of fossils. In an age of wisdom, life is a circle and we dare to be peers.
We dare to be peers indeed.
Finally settling into Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. My partner has been hoarding it since it arrived a couple of months ago.
In the opening chapters, Block takes inspiration from the likes of John McKnight, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander and others to crate some basic patterns for collective transformation. These are beautiful and quite in line with the work I do and the things we teach through the Art of Hosting. In fact, I’ll probably add this list to our workshop workbook.
Here is the list, with my thoughts attached.
From John McKnight:
- Focus on gifts. Look at what people are willing to offer rather than what people are in need of.
- Associational life. There is great power in the associations that people form to come together to do good work
- Power in our hands. Who do you think is going to change things? In doing Open Space action planning, I sometimes make reference to the fact that there will not be an angel that parachutes in and saves us. It’s up to us to find the way to make things work.
From Werner Erhard:
- The power of language. What we say about things and people makes a huge difference. Speaking and listening (and therefore conversations) is the basis of changing things.
- The power of context. Contexts are the worldviews which we employ to see things. Powerful contexts enable powerful transformation. For example, in First Nations the context of self-government vs. Indian Act government represents a powerful context for community development.
- The power of possibility. Once a possibility is declared, it comes into being and with skillful invitation, work can organize around it.
From Robert Putnam:
- Work with bridging social capital. Social capital is the relatedness between citizens We express this through bonding social captial, which helps us find others like us, andbridging social capital which helps us find relations across groups. Bridging social capital is the holy grail that takes us from insular groups, to true communities.
From Christopher Alexander:
- Work with aliveness and wholeness. One of my favourite ways to think about work that changes minds is to ask “How does a forest change a mind?” How do you react in a forest? How does it happen so suddenly? Why do old growth forests leave a permanent mark on us? How can we transform minds like a forest does?
- Transformation as unfolding. What is known by the whole of a group or community cannot be exposed all at once. You have to journey to the centre of it, one small step at a time. As you go, you harvest more and more of it, and as it becomes visible, it accelerates the collective consciousness of itself.
From Peter Koestenbaum:
- Appreciating paradox. Paradoxes help us to see the creative tension that lies in complexity. Chaos and Order, Individual and collective, being and doing, work and relationships…all of these contribute to our understanding of the kinds of questions that take us to collective transformation.
- Choosing freedom and accountability. Freedom is not an escape from accountability. “the willigness to care for the whole occurs when we are confronted with our freedom, and when we choose to accepts and act on that freedom.”
- Accountability and committment. What I, and Harrison Owen, calls “passion and responsibility.” Don’t just ask what is important, ask what people are willing to do to make it come to pass.
- Learning from one another. Co-learning rather than experts preaching to students is the way to build the capacity for collective transformation.
- Bias towards the future. We leave the past where it is and focus on now, and the conditions that are arising to produce the futures we want.
- How we engage matters. Or, as we were fond of saying at VIATT, the system is the conversation. How we relate to each other in every instance IS the system.
From David Bornstein:
- Small scale, slow growth. Big things begin from very small ideas. Cultivating the Art of Calling, whereby we learn to issue and embody invitations, and find the people to work with who will bring these into being, is the key practice here.
From Allan Cohen:
- Emergent design. Everything is in flux, and constantly adapting. Ask why the organization hasn’t been moving naturally in the direction that it desires and convene conversations on what you discover. Feed those back to the whole and the course corrects. Cohen also says that he CAN herd cats…by tilting the floor. Deeper contexts often have more leverage.
I realize that I have just provide a precis of Peter’s first chapter, but it is such a cogent summary of all of these ideas, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to add thoughts and links to his synthesis.
Jon Husband has been threatening to write his book on Wirearchy for as long as I’ve known him, and I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime, he is posting what could well be a chapter from it in two parts over at his blog in a post he calls Perspectives on Designing and Managing Knowledge Work.
(This is me nudging him to get it done so I can add it to my list of books by friends…:-) )
In a synchronous moment, also today George Por, a mutual friend of Jon and I published a nice set of thoughts about collective intellegence and spaces in organizations for the new to emerge.
It’s so interesting to be relationship with people thinking so deeply about organization.
I’ve suggested that in networks we come together around a purpose and objectives, and then begin to discover appropriate skills sets and motivations amongst members of a given network .. after which we begin to negotiate what we are going to do and why, who’s going to do what,how and by when, and then make this strategic information available, in full view, to all who are participating in the conversations, exchanges of information and the actual work (which often consists of pointing each other to pertinent just-in-time information that will make achieving the negotiated objectives easier or more efficient).
The more I am working with relationships as the essential element with organizational sturctures that work, the more I am coming to realize that the glue that binds structures together is intimacy, friendship and respect. Maturana and Bunnell in their paper on love in organizations note:
There is something peculiar about human beings: We are loving animals. I know that we kill each other and do all those horrible things, but if you lookat any story of corporate transformation where everything begins to go well, innovations appear, and people are happy to be there, you will see that it is a story of love. Most problems in companies are not solved through competition, not through fighting, not through authority. They are solved through the only emotion that expands intelligent behavior. They are solved through the only emotion that expands creativity, as in this emotion there is freedom for creativity. This emotion is love. Love expands intelligence and enables creativity. Love returns autonomy and, as it returns autonomy, it returns responsibility and the experience of freedom.
When we treat each other well, we are capable of being intellegent, creative and free together. When we don;t treat each other well, intellegence, creativity and freedom eludes us. How much traditional organizational development includes love on the menu?
Certainly Jon has been noticing all of this for a long time as an OD practitioner working with the architecture of organizations and communities. His own charting of the shift from hierarchy to wirearchy might be summed up by the watching autonomous individuals be finally recognized as the real part of any organization. As technology advances our ability to work closer together, we find more and more ways to simply operate as companies of friends, making agreements based on the accountability of the heart.
This is not soft stuff I am talking about here. Working this way is what makes major transformations possible in all kinds of fields and sectors. As long as we have energy tied up in defending our small territories and personal fifedoms, we don;t have a full suite of assets to apply to meeting the challenges facing our organizations, communities and world. Being at peace with friends, working side by side with shared purpose, openness and autonomy is what will enable us to become more intellegent than we have ever been, and will provide us with the tools to meet challenges that seem insurmountable any other way.
My friend Eric Lillius perodically sends me cool bits and pieces. I hadn’t seen this yet though: The Web 2.0 Conversation Prisim.
More at PR 2.0.