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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My friend Adam Yukelson wrote and asked me about how I hold questions instead of goals:
I was speaking with Gabe Donnelly last night and she was sharing a conversation the two of you had last year in which you said you don’t set goals, but rather, live in a question or questions. We were both drawn to this idea, and curious how it works for you. Do these questions tend to be broad and existential? Short-term and specific? Both? Neither? Are there subsets of questions? How do you know when a new question has emerged? I’d love to hear a little more….
They tend to be both…for a while now I’ve been carying these questions with me…they are varied and they take different forms and they even come and go, but they lead me into fascinating places: Sometimes they appear as research projects, other times they are direct and specific, and sometimes they float, nebulous and seem to inform everything I do.
- What is the role of community in organizations?
- What are the essential practices of hosting that can be taught?
- How do we build relational fields between people?
- What are the ways I can express myself in song?
- How can I use body practice more in my work and life?
- What can my daughter and I do to co-create a shared learning journey?
The community question seems to be the most broad and pervasive in my work right now and I’ve held that for over a year. It helps me to see things the same way, for example, as when you buy a new car and then notice that everyone else seems to be driving the same car as you. The second and third questions relate to learning new ways to teach and communicate what people want to learn from me about hosting. The last three questions are about my life and practice as an artist and a father. I don’t have these questions written down anywhere, I just sort of hold them lightly and they focus my attention.
What are the questions you hold?
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I am helping to design an interesting gathering in June of next year that will be part of a bigger initiative to shift the values conversation around sustainability. It’s interesting for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the conscious invitation of indigenous peoples, social entreprenuers and leaders who are firmly connected to the biggest and most influential systems in our world. We’re seeing what we can do together.
The initiative is called Beyond Sustainability: Cultivating a community of leadership from a platform of reverence. After an intense and creative weekend of designing, here are some of the propositions that we cracked, and some of the architecture needed for shifting values. These propositions are offered as principles for this community od leaders. They are in development, and this is version 1.0. Please let me know what you think:
7 basic propositions for shifting values
- We must operate as a community. The era of the lone wolf is over. There are no single heroes who will bail us out of the situation we have created for ourselves. Together we must act in community, bringing the values of our ancient understanding of the village to play on a modern global stage and never forgetting that as human beings we are built to work together and not in separation of one another.
- We must operate from a platform of reverence. Collectively, many of us who have been responsible and influential in the systems that shape our world have done so divorced from the consciousness that our ancestors held for the deep connections we have for the natural world. Reverence has been a capacity of human life that has kept us accountable to each other and to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of us have shed that reverence and have dulled our sense to the awe that is inspired by a deep connection to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Reverence is our operating system, and connection is our practice.
- We need to embrace the practice of crossing boundaries. The answers to our questions lie outside ourselves, in the wisdom of community and collective intelligence In order to access this wisdom and offer ourselves fully, we are prepared to cross boundaries, to travel to unfamiliar places and be there as learners and contributors to an emerging sense of direction. The boundaries that exist between peoples, cultures and lands are artificial and constructed and they have unnecessarily divided us and deprived us of inspiration, wisdom and co-creation.
- We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long term plan, develop consensus and choose only one path forward. The hubris of this approach makes any plan subject to the political machinations of the interests embedded in dying systems. Those machinations took the last great global attempt at Kyoto and scuttled it and now we are out of time. The time for planning is over, and the time for a myriad of experiments and activities is upon us. Indeed, the future is already beginning to speak through the millions of activities, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, cultural practitioners, business leaders and teachers who are not waiting for the sanction of the whole, but who are instead addressing the challenges head on and devoting their lives to saving humanity from it’s own stubborn refusal to change. And they are also showing the way forward by sharing what they learn in novel and accessible ways.
- Our way forward is a conversation about values AND tactics. Exploring values without tactics is wishful thinking and employing tactics without values is reckless. We need to employ the tactics of hope from a platform of reverence, supported by a community of influential leaders who are connected to the systems that need to change.
- Social entrepreneurs and traditional peoples are the sources of the world views and practices we need for the world. There are people in the world whose lives are devoted to practices of accessing the sacred source of reverence, crossing boundaries, collaborating with others, seeing themselves in relation to the natural world, and sharing and giving away what they know and have acquired. These fundamental practices represent both the foundation of many traditional indigenous communities and represent new ways of doing business, governance, education and social development. We have tools that will allow us to be in deep connection with one another face to face and across oceans, and these tools amplify and make possible the practices that stem from a platform of reverence Social entrepreneurs and indigenous peoples are sources of powerful and generative world views, guides on the path, and leaders to the future of a shift in the values that underlie global systems of domination, exploitation, disconnection, violence and greed.
- As a community we seek to become a system of influence. Only by seeing and experiencing our connections to the global web of human endeavour can we truly appreciate our resourcefulness to this call. All of those involved in Beyond Sustainability are deeply embedded in powerful systems and many have channels and connections to the underlying architecture of power in its many forms. Now is the time to put those resources to work, to help hospice the old systems so that they may die gracefully, to midwife the new and to steward the nascent so that we can accelerate the emergence of a set of values that restores right relationship to the the earth and to each other.
The architecture of reverence
Reverence – a profound awe and respect – is the word we are using for the fundamental set of values that we embody. The platform of reverence is based on three fields: reverence for the earth, reverence for the other and reverence for oneself. Cultivating this reverence is the key to growing a set of values based on deep belonging, deep listening and deep presencing. It is a set of values that connects us fundamentally to the source of life and community that lies trampled by humankind’s unrestrained race to modernity. It is a set of values that is generative and is our biggest asset in helping to create and nurture the systems that will restore balance to human life on earth.
The Beyond Sustainability initiative is an invitation to explore and practice together in this cultivation of reverence, noticing what is born in doing so, and devoting ourselves to helping new ideas grow in fertile and creative ways.
Reverence for the earth – cultivating deep belonging
Human beings are prone to forgetting that we are of the earth, children of the universe, embodied and born out of the mingling of material and spirit, containers for the conscious work of the cosmos. When we forget what we know in our deepest indigenous selves, we grow too big. We engage in the suicidal pursuit of domination and exploitation of the land, air and sea, and we become inhumane in our treatment of others, creating and tolerating unimaginable suffering among all living things. This is no mere appeal to sentimental and romantic back-to-the-earth mindset. We are now acutely aware that the brutal dismemberment of human beings from the natural world has made possible our own destruction and the destruction of many other species.
Deep belonging is captured in the Ojibway word dineamaganik, “I belong to everything” or “All my relations.” It is reinforced in the Hawaiian story of the Kumulipo, in which the very pattern of the universe is imparted to the sources of the material world and the increasingly sacred story that western science tells of evolution and the interconnectedness of all things.
Our first practice therefore, is the cultivation of deep belonging, an intuitive and unshakable understanding of where we come from and who we really are, of how the land and the natural world holds us, and of the patterns of nature that flow within us when we open to them. From that place comes the source of new values and new practices.
Reverence for each other – cultivating deep listening
We rush to judgement, take things at their surface value, outsource meaning making to experts and rely on rumour and innuendo to form our opinions of one another. Human beings have a remarkable ability to refuse to see what is right before us, to hear deeply what is being deeply said, to hold each other in the highest respect and compassion. When we cut ourselves off and stuff our ears full of rationalizations, we become inoculated to the pleas of others to be heard and seen as human beings.
Deep listening makes possible aloha, the Hawaiian art of sharing breath, hishook ish tsawaak, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth awareness of interdependence, and k’e, the Navajo concept of being tied together in a weaving of relations.
Deep listening means being with others in a way that allows us to see ourselves in the other, that invites us to open to the wisdom that is held in the centre of every person, that contributes to an emergent experience of community. Traditional communities cultivate this deep listening through ceremony that makes the communities most precious wisdom available to all. We are prepared to listen in that way.
Reverence for oneself – cultivating deep presence
We cannot come to the work as spectators, bystanders or skeptical cynics. Cultivating the shift in values that we seek is work done by people who show up fully, authentically and devoted to the service of life. It is only out of deep presence that we can become teachers of one another or that we ask the questions and seek the help that we need to move our work forward in the world. Reverence for ourselves and for our preciousness is critical for being fearless and helpful in whatever way we can.
A commitment to the practice of presence means that we invite collaboration in this work from a place of deep intent, offering what we can, and asking for what we need, and not holding ourselves back out of fear or arrogance. We are a community of fully present learners AND leaders, comfortable with not knowing the way forward, but confident in our own abilities to discern and act powerfully from a place of deep and interconnected reverence.
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Myriam Laberge posted a link to a video of David Gershon talking about what it takes to take change to scale. What struck me about the video was not so much his message as what it actually is. It’s a “trailer” for a 2007 conference sponsored by the Omega Institute.
As an artful act of invitation, this is briliant. How many of us outside the movie industry consider making trailers to gatherings? Putting audio and video to work in this way is a fantastic way to get the message out, introduce people to ideas that will be bandied around at your gathering, and it becomes a great way to have people with blogs – like me! – link to your invitation.
How else are you pushing the boundaries of invitation?
UPDATE: Geoff Brown chimes in.
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From George Nemeth some a link to this post, which I repeat in full:
Today, about 35 local and regional organizations, foundations, companies and banks came together to support and actively engage the City of East Cleveland in its strategy for revitalization and transformation. No, not three, but 35. It began with an extremely simple concept, but often hard to do. We asked. We invited individuals to attend. We asked for engagement and questions. We asked for people to envision new partnerships, not based on previous relationships, but new ones. We invited individuals in a personal way to participate in a discussion.
I am not implying that “asking” by itself, is a remedy or endpoint. I think it is a constant and often gets over shadowed by the need to get the results, and not as a primary method of authentic networks, and allowing potential partners to respond in a manner that allows for dialogue, shared points of view, and connection/collaboration.
Also, I am not arguing that asking can itself turnaround our nation’s cities, but far too often, government operates without asking, without invitations, and just does. Whether in a cloak room or boardroom, under the glare of lights or behind closed doors, creating new visions for our region, demand asking, questions, challenging points of view, and ensuring that, as we create new democratic networks, that the people participate and lead. There is just no other way.