Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!
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In the US right now, the health care “debate” is raging and town hall meetings being held across the country are being deliberately hijacked by those who don’t want to see reform go ahead. This tactic is discouraging but predictable. “Town Hall” meetings are not usually conducive to democratic deliberation, and they are never about dialogue.
Over the past few days an amazing conversation has unfolded on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv about what these events mean for deliberative democracy. Tom Atlee has summarized a lot of the learning from these in a long blog post which is a keeper:
I want to take a look at the dysfunctional health care debate as an opportunity for evolutionary action. Not because health care is more important than other issues, but because its current dynamics exemplify the kind of transformational potentials we will face over and over in coming years, as the multifaceted crises of our time unfold. Understanding the dynamics of this currently disturbing event may help us prepare better for each new wave of opportunity.
Go have a read: Are Disrupted Town Hall Meetings an Evolutionary Opportunity?
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Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.
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From a fictitious conversation that Dave Pollard hosted between two competing sides of his personality – the expert and the generalist – comes this gem on invitation and teaching:
Your job as an ideator is just to articulate the idea, as coherently and compellingly as possible, which is generally best done by telling a story. It’s not your job to research its plausibility, to become enough of an expert to know whether and how to make it happen. You just tell the story. Then the responsibility for implementing is left to each person to accept, or not. If the idea has wings, then people will do what they must to make sure it is implemented. No lists of who will do what by when. The experts will show up if the invitation is well-crafted and well-offered. And they’ll be open to new ideas if they sense, among the invitees, an appetite for it, a hunger. In which case, if it can be made to work, they’ll make it work.
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Thank you Euan.
Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier than thou effect that this kind of stifling aloofness has on groups of people. And Euan names the price that it takes:
- Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on.
- Many, many meetings could be done in less than half the time if there wasn’t a need to feed the ego of the chairperson or more vocal participants. How many times have things gone on way too long because someone likes the sound of his own voice?
- How many millions and millions of pounds have been spent because someone was too pumped up and full of themselves to admit that perhaps the major project they are sponsoring should be aborted?
- How many fledgling social media projects get squashed by IT departments because “professionals” have had their nose put out of joint at “amateurs” thinking they know better?
- How many bright, committed and intelligent potential senior managers have failed to step up to the mark because they couldn’t face the antler clashing and ego massaging that goes on in the boardroom?
I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:
- How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
- How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?
That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes. A little empathy, a little creative tension, a little mutual compassion for the other helps makes designs for new and difficult things easier. These questions force us to really consider whether we are more capable than someone else. It forces a conscious awareness of the choice you are making when you adopt the pompous stance.
I choose to believe that people are capable of engaging in all kinds of things, from sitting in circles (the scariest thing in the world, if you would believe some) to radically letting go of huge projects they were working on because they weren’t going anywhere.
Lately I have been making an explcit request of clients that we create design teams for events and processes that DON’T include cynics. That is not to say that we don’t need people bringing concerns and challenging questions to the work, it’s just that when you have someone in a design team that does not believe in the possibility of what you are trying to create, so much energy gets taken up catering to the unhelpful pomposity of the rightous skeptic that the design suffers and in the worst case scenario, the result is a design that just serves the status quo. I have, in the last couple of years actually “fired” a client who wanted me to help create the illusion of a participatory event but who could not allow himself to actually let a participatory event unfold. He was completely unwilling to let go of control and unwilling to trust people. He even described the people he was working with, government employees in First Nations communities, as “children that need to be shown the answer.” There is a huge cost to this kind of stance in time, trust and the ability for groups to actually hold the real fears and concerns that they have. What do you think is possible when you work with someone who considers an important policy gathering to be like a daycare?
So start with possibility and create the space for inquiry, curiosity and yes even judgement to arise. But if you start with these things, you will not be able to create creative spaces of possibility because you will get mired down in the energetics of unhelpful politics, posing and pomposity. Staying in possibility is hard, but it is the only way we get to new places. More of the same is too deceptively simple.