Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia
I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using Newtonian physics (and clocks), and also there is much uncertainly in the world, which he calls “clouds:” unpredictable possibility, structure on the edge of chaos and order.
My mind got busy and I started thinking about how peering into the sky, one can see this all the time. The sun, stars, moon and planets that we see in the sky can be predicted and clocked. The clouds that move across them are full of potential and beauty and complexity and there is no way we can account for or predict the specific form of any of them.
And then I began to notcie the sky itself – clear, transparent, irrelevent to both the objects and the clouds and yet the medium in which both exist, and I began to think that this is a good model for thinking about facilitation. As facilitators we hold space for both order and chaos to play at the same time. We are barely noticable when we are working well, and when people gaze into our container they see only the play of clouds or the precise edges of stars and moon, and forget that they are also looking at the sky itself.
Facilitating as sky means opening THAT big and inviting both clouds and sun to play with one another and to admit the possibility for amazing and astonishing beauty to arise from their coexistence. It is the essence of holding space in chaordic process.
It’s no surprise to me that people are usually afraid of self-organizing behaviour. This video of typical traffic on a street in India shows why self-organization can be scary.
But the other thing to also notice is how well it works. In the comments on the video, someone remarks that 230 people a day die on Indian roads. But in a population of 1 billion people, this has to be close to or lower than the rate in Canada. And considering what this video shows – the near misses and cars driving the worng way and pedestrians weave through traffic, that’s remarkable.
At WorldChanging you will find a link to an amazing site of visualizations of complex networks.
What is especially interesting to me about these maps is how many of them are actually
hierarchical. Many of these maps show complex relationships, but they do so in a flattened way. For example, this diagram (at right) is a radial representation of an organizational map from 1924. On the face of it it looks radically different, but in fact it is a relatively well formed hierarchy with single reporting relationships and only a cursory acknowledgment of horizontal organizational structure in management.
Non-hierarchical, emergent systems are represented well on the site, with this example of a neuron map of a worm brain being really fascinating.
Some of the maps at the site capture complexity in another dimension by creating living maps that change with your focus, like this map of del.icio.us links that you can customize for your own bookmarks.
Finally there are flow chart systems like the ones on world government that seek to understand complex systemic processes
I’m reposting this list holus bolus from Peter Levine’s blog. It’s an excellent summary of what we can expect from volunteer networks, and very top of mind for me at the moment:
1) Volunteers will plan and run meetings and conferences, even doing hard, detailed work on invitation lists, agendas, and menus. But they will not reliably write up the results of meetings for public distribution. After a meeting, writing feels like a chore, and there’s usually no specific deadline. Therefore, many meetings leave no tangible public record.2) Volunteers will write grant proposals, because proposals are plans that determine the work that will actually be done later on. However, they will not do the other work involved required to obtain grants, such as identifying potential funders. If they have their own contacts with foundations, most won’t share them.3) Volunteers will handle pleasant human interactions, but will avoid difficult relationships.
4) Volunteers may provide regular, written information under their own names and control, but few will contribute in a sustained way to collective writing projects. That problem can be overcome with scale but is serious in small networks.
5) Volunteers will generate wonderful ideas but are much less likely to implement them.
Tags: networks, volunteering, learning
Submitted for your consideration, as they used to say on The Twilight Zone…
I am a newcomer to the notion of “morphogenetic fields” – basically fields that contain information whereby social or biological structures take shape (see more at Wikipedia)- but whether they exist or not I’m keenly aware of something like that happening in working with groups.
Yesterday I was working with a small group and we saw something happen that surprised me. The field within which we are working is philanthropy and we are designing a program that will help Aboriginal non-profits develop capacity. This work is supported by foundations and other funding and has a great deal of goodwill associated with it. Our work has taken us into designing a program that is based on sharing, free exchange of materials and learning and funding. Our language is full of the language of gifting, sharing and capacity building.
The participants in our design consultation groups were given an honorarium for being in attendance, and yesterday several of those participants donated their honorarium to one organization that provides meals to homeless folks. The gesture was out of the blue, and had no connection to what we were talking about when the first person volunteered their money. That made me curious about where the volition for doing so had sprung from.
I think that as a facilitator, a lot had to do with how we were shaping space, or shaping the field. The conversations throughout the day were about this very thing, and then to have the behaviour manifest so clearly and so out of the blue made me wonder about the power of shaping space, awakening moments, and working with morphogenetic fields. Several folks have been commenting here recently about this idea of shaping space and awakening moments. Here is a concrete example of how doing so creates emergent phenomena like the sudden donation of $500 to a mobile soup kitchen.
Categories: facilitation, gift, morphogenetic+fields,