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.
Share:
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.
Share:
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.
Share:
On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering:
What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without?
The $100,000 question! Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process. And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship.
If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group find its highest potential realized. For some groups, in some contexts this might be a very controlling kind of thing and for other groups not so much. In my expereince where there is a deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration, there is very little an individual can do to control the outcome, so getting out of the way seems the best option. Lately I’m learning a lot about working with fields of learners or people engaged in large scale and longer term change. What I’m learning is that it takes a field to hold a field, as my late friend Finn Voldtofte once said. In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention for the work. In an organizational development context this means that the core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.
And then having said all of that, I think there is an art to intuitively knowing how much or how little to “hold.”
Or is it really that the group as a whole can hold space (which seemed to be the case)? Any group?
Yes a group can hold its own space, but not any group. My hunch is that we can let go into groups like this when there is at least a minimal form of relationship in place. How much or how little is immeasureable, but you can sense whether a group has that capacity or potential if you let go of your expectations for the role of facilitator.
Why do we really need any facilitator throughout the event?
I am working a lot these days with the chaordic path, the idea that there is a way forward if we dance between chaos and order. In that respect I think the facilitator can play a valuable role in brining minimal elegant structure to chaos so that the conditions for self-organization might be met. At it’s most basic level, this structure looks like or is an invitation, a calling question that taps passions and responsibility Once passion and responsibility are tapped, the group can look after itself.
And consequently under which conditions can we dispense with it?
Most of our lives are spent without facilitators helping us be around other people. We can learn a lot from those situations. If you engage in a little appreciative inquiry project on your own life, you might remember stories about times in your life when you experienced great strides without a facilitator.and then harvest the key conditions from those stories.
What is the risk? Can this go totally wrong?
The risk is always that it won’t work, that a group won’t discover its highest potential. And although whatever happens is the only thing that could have (and that means you need to pay attention to the space to hold at the outset), if there is much at stake and the group finds itself unable to work without some form and leadership, the stake will be lost, as will the opportunity. But in complex living systems, there is no such thing as totally wrong anyway – everything that happens is food for everything else. If however you have an expectation that there is a right and a wrong result, there is always the risk that a group might acheive the wrong result.
In my experience, it pays to create the conditions in which the host team and the group itself understands this approach to complex systems and self organization. so that you are operating with a learning environment rather than a right/wrong dichotomy.
That’s the extent of my thinking this morning.
Share:
Jean-Sebastien is alive with rock balancing. He and his mates are decorating the whole campus with sculptures. He has become one of our rock balancing senseis here at the Institute and it’s very cool to see what he is learning from the practice. Today, just before our module started, he was sitting with me in the centre of the circle and he asked if here was something to knowing which kinds of edges would sit together, and as he took his mind off the task of balancing, in the act of asking the questions, the rocks he was working with came together. Very cool. It’s a strong metaphor for hosting practice too.
Our module today moved from the personal to the relational and we spent some time in appreciative interviews looking at the characteristics of conversations tat lead to shift. We used some integral quadrants to harvest the results of these conversations, and a harvest team went to work making some meaning for the group. We left them in a little chaos at lunch time, inviting them deeper into the practice of collective harvesting and we’ll see where it goes tomorrow.
This evening was a time for catching up with mates. David Stevenson is here with me, a guy I have worked with closely over the past five years with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team. He’s in my friend Tom Hurley’s module and is cracking some questions about the kinds of governance structures that serve agile organizations in living systems. Tonight we spent some time sitting on rocks overlooking the Bedford Basin and talked about what was at the living core of our work. Probably more to come on this, but the big insight today was in cracking the nature of what we have been talking about as “the fifth organizational paradigm.” We have long suspected that there is something that transcends the four organizational paradigms of circle (reflection), triangle (action), bureaucracy (resourcing) and network (informtion sharing, learning and collaborating). David has been speaking as the fifth paradigm as a living ecology where all four of these come to play, where all four exist in the service of what is alive. The fifth paradigm is the place where these four act in concert to serve the living core of an organization. I’m liking this a lot.
In closing, here is the poem I slammed out as the cafe harvest yesterday:
Time to be in it
Chris Corrigan
Time to reform, see our relations reborn
from the inside out watching repression die into clarity
wet in the eyes where
hope falls in
and old worlds shed their skins
and we sit in the raw light of the new.
This is what we’re going to do.
Hang on to each other through the chaos
of fucked up panic that plays us
like dupes into not knowing the truth
that everything we do is a choice.
I’m here to meet hearts
that choose authentic restarts.
Different is on its way, starting right now and later today
and tomorrow as we fly
from uplift to sorrow
we’re called into balance and focus,
hard work and hocus pocus where the magic meets the tragic
and challenge appears and our spines straighten
and urgency seers its invitation upon us.
Start here.
It’s getting late and the state of things
requires that sensitivity attention brings;
the precision of decision
the gift of the incision that cuts the bonds to the old –
something climbs…
These are the times.
We are served by our fear, present and here
and escaping the fantasy of skill
letting the messiness fill
the spaces that lie between us.
The flux between optimism and the cynicism that
paralyses our lives,
leaves us to foster the faster
speed of work and communicate the state of things:
listen to the planet’s song. It fills our structures
and brings along a new life that comes when we fall
into the possibility that the micro births the macro,
the large from the small.
Practice moving to courage from fear
letting go of what is no longer clear.
Back to your corners
find those of like mind and appear together
as good people, impatient but kind.
Everywhere it is time to collaborate
create and elaborate
containers of capacity that resonate.
Time to come home, switch it on
dance between poles, rest in centre,
this time of change is a mentor
teaching courage to
reach back to places where each
small effort is supported by this trembling field.
Our tools are not enough – the challenge remains:
connect to source and course through each other’s veins.
A poem harvested from participants’ reflections from a World Cafe at the Shambhala Institute for Authentice Leadership, June 2008.