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
From my friend Roq Garreau:
“Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people would never admit to their visions for fear of being thought impractical or unrealistic. They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience of the world that they can only stand to explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine, they are needed too. Vision does need to be balanced with skepticism. We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe that it is possible for the world to envision its way to a sustainable future. Vision without action is useless, but action without vision does not know where to go or how to go there. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate action. More than that, vision when widely shared and firmly kept in sight brings into being new systems. We mean that literally. Within the physical limits of space, time, material and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new behaviour, new knowledge and new technology, but eventually new social institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings. A sustainable world can never come into being if it cannot be envisioned. The vision must be built up from the contribution of many people before it is complete and compelling.”
— Meadows, Donnella H., Dennis L. Meadows and Jørgen Randers
I’ve had great occaision to think about this quote this week. Roq actually sent this to me and the mayor of the island we live on. Our mayor, Bob Turner, is a guy who is pretty committed to vision, to sustainability and to participation. Yesterday Bob and I were discussing the possibility of a group of us on Bowen Island co-hosting an ongoing “vision collaboratory” which would simply be a place in which Bowen Islanders would be allowed to dream and share good ideas free from the constraints of action plans, resources and even possibility. We could harvest from these conversations using a wiki, Google Earth and other tools to create a simple but powerful ideas bank.
Why would this be important? Because many people want to participate in the life and future of their community, but they don’t want to devote large amounts of time to the formal process, or they don’t have the large amounts of money that allow them to buy and develop parts of the island. Also, there is something incredibly valuable about unfettered dreaming. A vision of 100 years has the luxury of not needing to be perfect and can often provide inspiration and solid ideas for those working on shorter timeframes with more constraints.
And so it looks like that is one project about to take shape here on Bowen Island.
But this vision quote struck me on other levels too, arising out of the experience I had last week in Denver, Colorado where I went to open space at the Placematters 06 conference. I was surrounded by visionary planners and practitioners, including people like Lyman Orton, the founder of the Orton Family Foundation, Tim Erickson from e-democracy.org and folks who run all kinds of mapping projects, visualization tools and instant sketchup kinds of things to help others envision a sustainable world.
I’m inspired to put these tools to work here in my local community, and maybe we’ll learn something about that that can be shared with other people in other communities.
Practice visioning – be sustainable and creative.
[tags]sustainability, placematters06, vision, mapping[/tags]
I was in a conversation this morning with people who work in a big systemic field: early childhood education. It is one of those fields that is rife with research telling us what all the problems are. We have more information than we could ever use about childhood obesity, drug addiction, abuse, longitudinal studies on literacy and employment, links between diet and capacity, intergenerational issues of dependence and parenting…this list goes on. We know everything about every problem but one.
The one problem we don’t know about is how to solve all of these problems.
My suspicion – and this will not be a huge surprise – is that the answer to that one lies in a couple of key things. First, we need each other. No one person can solve that one. Second, we need to learn how to converse in a way that is generative and not destructive. We need to take the opportunities of our time together in conversation to be deliberate about making things better, and not get too wrapped up in the shadow side of our work even though we can see our heart in the shadow sometimes, and it draws us there very easily.
In truth, I’m not interested in answering the question of how do we solve this biggest problem from the outside. I think the best we can do is to get inside it and start practising, start to find ways to bring to life the integration we sense is needed.
[tags]shadow, problem solving[/tags]
Photo by .serena.
For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns.
Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing it and invites you to join us. Please take some time to poke around there and draw some inspiration from the amazing resources and content that has been assembled.
And if you are interested in exploring this pattern more deeply, there are several opportunities to do so in upcoming trainings, including one here on Bowen Island BC in a couple of weeks.
[tags]art of hosting[/tags]
Rare that I completely reproduce a full post from someone else’s blog, but Doug Germann did a masterful job today of capturing the terror of dialogue:
There is deadly risk in dialogue. We are imperiled. If we are born in conversation, we die there, too. We die when we leave it; we die when we meet another, for we cannot long remain other, and yet we must. Both people must be willing to let shields down, the shields which keep us inside our images of ourselves. Our plans may not be accepted, they might be tossed aside, worthless. We might be tossed aside worthless. Our very being might be killed and it is not for sure that someone new will rise from the ashes, or that if such a one does we will want it. We might not recognize ourselves, indeed we might not survive in any form. This is why we hold back, not willing to lose who we are. We are afraid we die. This is why we argue for our position. Yet this is our test of faith: we put forth what reality beyond truth we see, not knowing whether it will bear any fruit. Have we done good or ill we cannot know. Ours is but to offer, trembling to offer. This is a test of faith for despite our past experience that something better arises from the ashes of dialogue, we can never be sure about this time. We risk it all.
So if you do not wish to risk, I will understand. I will not hold it against you. Great courage is not mine, either. I shrink from dialogue. I shrink from revealing myself and from receiving your revealings. I fear that I may have to give up myself and my pet plans and my comfortable ways of living. I may have to learn something new, change my way of working and living, meet new people, become a new person myself.
There is risk here: what else goes with it? A responsibility not just to accept what the others say and go along, but to meet what they say, to throw my offering into the mix, see where the similarities and dissimilarities and correlates are. How are we related, how are our ideas and our dreams related? Perhaps tonight the conversations will turn away from what I think will work into something else: it is my duty to listen; it is also my duty to share my vision; then it is my duty to bend so we can weave a new pattern. There might be a better form. I wrote that like I do not believe those words, but indeed there might be a clue to a fuller measure beyond this half measure, there might be indeed something grandly better. Prepare to be surprised.
It’s a near impossible task to describe to someone what will happen in a skillfully conducted dialogue where the participants agree to stray from their well manicured positions and enter into a world of complexity and difficulty that produces emergent learning. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of your perspective shifting and new insights streaming in. But it is scary, and we do well as facilitators when we remember that the best work is done when people agree to take themselves to that edge. We can meet them there, carefully and with compassion and invite that next step. So can we be that big?