This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. “We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:


So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.
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.
Action comes from a accepting offers. When an offer comes to you you can accept it or block it. Blocking it kills the action. Accepting it moves it forward. When we are working in complexity, waiting for the failsafe plan leads to inaction because there are more blocks than acceptances. In contast diving into a safe fail mindset means committing to action and refining it as you go.
This is the essence of improvisation: accept, commit, develop, offer. A simple four stage cycle for action planning
I see it all the time, where cultivated and well-raised people stumble in the wild land of chaos and open space. Whether it is the tourist in the forest who complains against the mud or the leader in an organization, community or country (like Egypt) who clings to the illusion of confidence and control and who cannot make friends with the wild and the chaotic.
Thoreau:
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
Are you friends with the wild within you? Do you cultivate that characteristic as a mould against the uncertain future? How do you prepare to welcome surprises of all kinds?
[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.