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.
A bench at Killarney Lake near my home on Bowen Island
Recent cool stuff
- Pulse: a book on the coming age of machines inspired by living systems. The whole book is being published by RSS.
- The Evolutionary LIfe Newsletter. March edition.
- Life with Thomas: a two part video about sustainable living at the Dancing Rabbit ecovillage.
- World cafe image bank.
- Good quote from Viv: ““Knowledge is knowing you’re on a one-way street; wisdom is looking both ways anyway.”
- Why I let my 9 year old ride the subway alone. On fostering independence in children and bucking the American climate of fear…
- …and nicely paired with Bill McKibben’s exhortation towards dependence.
- Josh Waitzkin on chess, taichi and learning.
- A real cool series of videos about The World Cafe, prepared from the European World Cafe gathering in 2007.
Photo of the rock wall at Window Rock, on the Navajo Nation, where I was visiting and working last month.
Links that I have come across recently:
- A comprehensive list of theories about how we think, feel and behave.
- From Vision in Action, a long piece by Elisabet Sahtouris on a Tentative Model for a Living Universe – parts one and two. Thanks to Dave Pollard.
- Otto Scarmer on The Blind Spot of Leadership.
- Jordon Cooper prints his list of useful (and mostly free) tools for Windows machines.
- Peter Merry’s blog. This is my friend Tim’s brother. Helen Titchen-Beeth is also on Gaia. Plenty of good reading at both.
- More Samurai wisdom: the Hagakure
- Kurt Hahn’s writings, via Michael Herman, who writes more here.
- Dustin Rivers explains Skwxwu7mesh leadership.
- A really good guide to formal consensus decision making. My own method for decision making follows this map, although I rarely have call to use a process this formal. Still, it’s a great redux. Another hit from Pollard.
- Dave Snowdon on archetypes and stereotypes.
- Crystal glass water music
- Indivisible oneness: a gorgeous essay by Evelyn Rodriguez
- Rheingold on the coming age of cooperation
- Go fill your ears with music: The mammoth list of mp3 blogs
- The Grand Plan to get the US onto to solar energy.
- Some fine organizational tools for non-profits and philanthropic endeavours
- An amazing conversation on the collective Buddha
Michael Herman sends along a great find to the OSLIST. It’s an interview with Paul Stamets on the lives of mushrooms.
Jensen: In your book you say that animals are more closely related to fungi than they are to plants or protozoa or bacteria.
Stamets: Yes. For example, we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; so do fungi. One of the big differences between animals and fungi is that animals have their stomachs on the inside. About 600 million years ago, the branch of fungi leading to animals evolved to capture nutrients by surrounding their food with cellular sacs – essentially primitive stomachs. As these organisms evolved, they developed outer layers of cells – skins, basically – to prevent moisture loss and as a barrier against infection. Their stomachs were confined within the skin. These were the earliest animals.
Mycelia took a different evolutionary path, going underground and forming a network of interwoven chains of cells, a vast food web upon which life flourished. These fungi paved the way for plants and animals. They munched rocks, producing enzymes and acids that could pull out calcium, magnesium, iron, and other minerals. In the process they converted rocks into usable foods for other species. And they still do this, of course.
Fungi are fundamental to life on earth. They are ancient, they are widespread, and they have formed partnerships with many other species.
In his post to the list, Michael asks: “are we mushrooming?” It does indeed seem like a fundamental organizing pattern for the communities of people involved in the work of opening space. Taking rock hard surfaces, creating food by chipping away at them, opening spaces, surging towards activity and doing so in partnership with many others.
The interview continues:
Jensen: Of course this raises the question of boundaries: Is that tomato-fungus-virus one entity or three? Where does one organism stop and the other begin?
Stamets: Well, humans aren’t just one organism. We are composites. Scientists label species as separate so we can communicate easily about the variety we see in nature. We need to be able to look at a tree and say it’s a Douglas fir and look at a mammal and say it’s a harbor seal. But, indeed, I speak to you as a unified composite of microbes. I guess you could say I am the “elected voice” of a microbial community. This is the way of life on our planet. It is all based on complex symbiotic relationships.
It is interesting to think about the way we put boundaries around things. We choose completely arbitrary criteria for understanding “us” and “them.” And this isn’t a spritual, inner kind of oneness; Stamets is talking about a measurable, concrete reality in the external world. Our structures and organizations are not what we think they are. Do you customers have a place on your organizational chart? Do your clients figure in your decision-making processes? What are the boundaries we have chosen for our enterprises?
And on a bigger scale, the way mushrooms organize themselves is part of our evolutionary inheritance as well:
I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s “natural Internet.” I’ve gotten some flak for this, but recently scientists in Great Britain have published papers about the “architecture” of a mycelium – how it’s organized. They focused on the nodes of crossing, which are the branchings that allow the mycelium, when there is a breakage or an infection, to choose an alternate route and regrow. There’s no one specific point on the network that can shut the whole operation down. These nodes of crossing, those scientists found, conform to the same mathematical optimization curves that computer scientists have developed to optimize the Internet. Or, rather, I should say that the Internet conforms to the same optimization curves as the mycelium, since the mycelium came first.
We live in a world in which this kind of organizational structure is optimal. We are not the only ones who have discovered how to do this, in fact we are late to the party. Time to reflect on the teachings our elders have for us – the networks of mushrooms and micro-organisms upon which we depend for our own lives.
Photo by Ella’s Dad