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,

A friend sent me a piece called “There has to be a Big Crises” by Michael Kane about what it will take for Americans (and I would say Canadians too) to wake up to Peak Oil. The article paints a disparaging picture about the ability of North American leadership to wake up to the creeping decline – James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” – before it’s too late.

Having spent the past two weeks in the States, and the better part of next week there too, I agree that the signs are not good. In Maui the radio is filled with ads for loan companies and car dealerships aiming to finance or sell you the “sharpest looking trucks and SUV’s on this Island.” Even as Americans are dying for hegemony in the Middle East, as the country bankrupts itself for a war to secure oil, conservation seems the last thing on the minds of the mainstream. The American way of life keeps chugging along, hastening the decline rather than seeking to stave it off.

So perhaps it will take a crises to change minds, but if that’s the case, I don’t like America’s chances at the moment. Katrina was a wake up call, if ever there was one, for how America might handle a big crises, and it didn’t fare too well. One of the big things that was missing was an active community sector that was able to take care of itself. The centralization of FEMA, the States and the local government was a bottle neck for action, and eventually the stories of real help and coping came from people that took it into their own hands to steal buses, distribute food care for children and tend to the sick and elderly.

That was in contrast to the way in which parts of Sri Lanka survived the tsunami last year. In two talks (mp3s at audiodharma.org), Joanna Macy told the story of Sarvodaya, a Buddhist organization that cultivates a spiritual practice of giving and community building called Sharmadana. The lessons learned from how Sarvodaya dealt with the tsunami include the fact that biggest way they had prepared was simply but cultivating these practices over years and years of work. When the tsunami struck, they simply went to work as usual, able to cope with the massive demands on organizers because of their training and practice.

I have spoken with David Korten and others about this, and all agree that practice of community is the thing that will mitigate the inevitable emergency. As facilitators this can become our prime responsibility. After Katrina hit, Peggy Holman, Tom Atlee, Mark Jones and I convened a series of conversations with leaders in the dialogue and deliberation community to see what could be done about helping people in the Gulf Coast implement wise action. Since then, a larger group of people have done all kinds of work down there, using conversation cafes, appreciative inquiry and other processes to bring the community into a space where it can participate in rebuilding its own future.

America in particular has a grand tradition of helping in community. Traditionally Americans helped each other out when times were hard, raised barns together, shared food with one another, created great institutions of philanthropy, charity and care. But in the last century these quaint customs were sacrificed as the country became more urbanized and as a result, there is a loss of knowledge about what it’s like to live in community. Suburbs and exurbs and car and consumer culture do not contribute to this community. Mega churches and gated communities are examples of a “turning in” to help, not “turning out” to lend a hand. The fragmented and insular nature of American (and Canadian) urban and suburban life is the Achilles heel of dealing with crises that the leadership says is coming.

So let’s not wish for this crises before its time, and let’s not expect the leadership to be prepared. Anyone who works in community, be they helpers, facilitators, or others has a treasure to offer, and that is to seed and practice the art of community now. Whether you invite people to come together to build something, play music, feed people, improve things or just talk and muse upon things, these practices are the key to communities surviving. Cultivate intimate connections and community locally RIGHT NOW and then let us turn together to face the crises. By then, as the Sarvodaya teachers tell us, we’ll be able to handle it.