Jim McGee points to a great post from Jevon McDonald on the price of silence in organizations, and what to do about it. Opening up communications starts from the bottom:
A change in the prevailing culture of an established organization cannot come from the very top-down approach that is being reevaluated. It must come from people, like Harry in our previous story, who will lead by example. Facilitators and early adopters are key to the success of personal publishing in your organization. By bringing key figures into the picture, such as Presidents, Vice Presidents, and prominent people within departments, on board early on, the real need for openness and communication will be understood by the rest of the involved community.
Our new focus must move from the problem to the person. Much like Harry, we must empower people (or allow them to empower themselves) at all levels of our organization. By recognizing the power of discourse, we can encourage all levels within the hierarchy to speak freely. When �“Breaking the ice�” becomes a cultural norm, a powerful new way of working emerges. No longer are we stuck in a world where we can�’t act creatively.
Creating a space where this kind of interaction can take place becomes a high priority. The problem with this type of change is that a Memorandum regarding a corporate cultural change would be the antithesis of itself. We must foster this change carefully, in a safe and comfortable space for everyone.
This is one of the reasons I love using Open Space Technology within organizations or in communities where there are people who have been traditionally disenfranchised by the power structure. Open Space opens up the agenda for passion from everyone involved in the enterprise and creates conditions where new ideas which challenge the conventions can be put forward in a constructive manner. Having leadership on board means that change can be created from the seeds that live in everyone who want to improve the present and seek a better future.
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Howard Rheingold blogs Wes Boyd, the founder of Moveon.org who recently spoke about the power of self-organization:
We got involved in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and that’s where our big growth happened. People were disturbed about the rush to war. When the political establishment is not addressing people’s concerns, that is when the Net can afford a way for those people to come together. A little more than a year ago, we said that we’d done petitions and lobbying congress — should we try advertising? We asked for $35,000 for an ad in the NYT. In 48 hours, $400,000 came in. We ran an ad about ‘let the inspections work.’
Then the war happened. During that period, our list grow to around 1.3 million — it tripled during the run-up to the war. All these people came together originally around an issue. We wanted to know if they were interested about other issues. We asked how people felt about the budget and tax cuts, and we did an ad about a school in Oregon that had a blood drive to raise funds. While leaders in Washington were used to getting a few dozen comments about media consolidation issues. People were passing email petititions aroung the Internet about the proposed FCC rule changes that would allow even greater consolidation of media ownership, so we raised the issue and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in days, so we very actively engaged in issues, helped citizens meet with members of Congress and Senators, who were very surprised at the numbers of citizens who were coming in to talk about FCC rules, which had previously been followed by small numbers of media owners and policy wonks. We ran an ad featuring Rupert Murdoch about media consolidation. We enabled hundreds of thousands of communications to Congress, which responded.
The Internet is a powerful tool for connecting people who are trying to live in truth, self-organize campaigns and connections to express that truth and crack holes in the armour of complicity that surrounds the status quo.
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Moving up a nice set of thoughts from my comments. Dave said:
Democratic growth may lie somewhere between the enlightened individual (ie “the truth if known is not the truth”) and the solid political framework, say the constitution. Some where in our ability to open our myths to their own energies, not to end the myth, but to accept it as myth…truth’s origin..turtles all the way down so to speak.
The need for solid political systems, stability if you will, begs the pattern to transcend the solid/comprehensible vs. fluid/transformational.
Dave…feel free to contribute observations like that anytime. I’ve been really taken by the notion of truth, and how we generate it and how we agree upon it. Springing out of Ken Wilber’s map of the world, the ideas Dave is throwing out live within the subjective and inter-subjective realms. In other words we’re talking about truths that arise from our lives as individuals, driven by intention, and our lives as subject negotiating a set of relationships with others.
In the realm of the individual, our truth emerges as integrity, sincerity and trustworthiness. This is the subjective truth that underlies our individual acts of intention that make up the basis of “living in truth” I think. These are the things that cause us to be “good.” In the realm of the collective, this truth, in intersubjective space emerges as cultural fit, mutual understanding and rightness…a shared sense of justice, a story codified in things like constitutions, laws and cultural norms.
These are both stories; stories we tell ourselves about what is true and what is good. Notably this kind of truth completely excludes the notion of “objective truth,” in other words, that which can be measured without participating in its execution. How do I know I have four apples? I count them.
This is notable because the subjective truths, the good and the true (in Wilber’s terms) are truths that only exist if you participate in them. You must generate that intentional truth that refuses to participate in a totalitarian regime. You must get into conversation with people to understand how things fit culturally, what the law should say and so on. The very nature of these truths is active, participatory and dynamic.
To simply sit back and accept the measured approach (pun intended) is to give up responsibility for the truth, and to become complicit in the system that generates that truth from outside of its subjects. In other words, a totalitarian regime, to whatever degree, rests its truth and power in the objective and in objective sides of things: it determins the social order and it regulate behaviour. It has no interest in the lively world of personal intention and shared and living culture. Giving in to this is suicide for the soul. The way out, as Jefferson, Gandhi, Havel and others have pointed out, is to activate the subjective and intersubjective truths.
In other words, freedom and power works on a use it or lose it basis. One cannot have freedom simply by buying the message that one has it. The system that tells you you have power is exactly the system that has disempowered you. One must do more than simply accept the fact that one lives in a democracy. One must activate the truth.
And activating it, in whatever social structure, be it society, community or organization, animates power with the truth of subjects, and leads to a world that is open to the fresh and liberating breath of living in truth. It brings creativity and individuality to collective activity and illuminates dark monochrome structures and ideas, which, in totalitarian regimes, blanket the spirit and cloud out the light.
Too airy? Perhaps, but I am more and more convinced of that fact that colonization is actually the gobbling up of subjective and intersubjective reality by those that wield the tools of measurement, observation and metrics. The deep effect of losing the richness and life of the subjective world, is an oppression that runs so far down that people may not even be aware of its effects. The fact that liberation has come to mean control over the ways in which societies are governed and measured proves this to a point. If we simply take over the objective world, without activating the subjective, we are only prolonging the struggle, instead of winning the war.
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My dear friend John Engle is an Open Space facilitator living and working in Haiti. I just found out that he has a blog (oh joy!) and he blogs from Haiti about the recent unrest there, and how nothing is ever as simple as it seems:
Merline and I do live, witnessing the violence of grinding poverty: hungry people on one’s path so often, children living on the streets, people who are seriously ill but have no money for treatment or pain relievers. The violence that is making the news right now stems from the grinding violence of poverty, which usually doesn’t make the news.
And, in the midst of it all, our lives are full with friends and rich moments. The construction of Kent and Shelly’s house was recently completed. Our neighbor Rosias, oversaw the construction of a simple, well-built house on Merline’s and my land. We decided it was a moment to celebrate. And what fun we had. Fried plantain covered with picklees (spicy coleslaw), chicken, rice and beans, cake, wine, rhum punch, soda and beer…not to mention chocolate cake. We sang and danced and pretended to be possessed by ‘lwa’ spirits, and then to be converted and possessed by the holy spirit. The jokes and laughter flowed as freely as the big bottle of red wine.
There is a time to be sad. There is a time to be joyful.
When I think of John and Merline all I can see is their smiling faces, and all I can think of is song.
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Saskatchewan was fantastic, and I’ll write more about it soon. In addition to working with some amazing First Nations and Metis youth in Prince Albert and Saskatoon, I had a nice dinner with fellow blogger and Hockey Pundit Jordon Cooper, chatting over the NHL, Christianity and politics.
The moment I got home though, and started catching up on my reading, I got gobsmacked by Michael Herman who has just posted something on markets that resonates:
…since we know that profit, per se, is not essential to life, we can say this another way. we can say that if markets and their movements are consistent with the flow of life, and ‘profit’ in itself is not essential to life, then there must be other reasons for our being in markets. life reasons. we can’t get past the ‘profit’ unless we get underneath it to those needs whose satisfaction *is* essential to life. food, shelter, hope, future, direction, support. and if we can see and satisfy those life reasons for entering markets, real needs for living, then i think the interim ‘need’ for profit begins to dissolve.
also worth noting, markets are not only based on private ownership… they are also based on public space. no space, no market. without a commons, then we can only have me crossing over to your territory to deal. or you crossing to mine. if there is no other trading space, there may be the sense that there are no other traders, and no alternative to the prices that we quote to each other.
without some other trading space, real physical trading space or at least mindspace wherein other trading/pricing alternative choices can be plausibly imagined and analyzed, then there may be not movement between us… there is always the chance of deadlock or dominance. have you ever been in a marketplace where the seller tried to convince you that his/her product was the only option, tried to keep you from considering others? i think we naturally recoil from those who would limit our access to the rest of the ‘market’ that we know is out there.
we need big markets, open spaces, and commons because they provide the mental juice that lubricates our individual dealings, they mediate life in the same way parks and streets and meeting halls mediate our living together in physical spaces.
Reading this immediately brought to mind a quote from (who else?) Vaclav Havel, out of a short essay he published in the most recent issue of The Walrus. The essay is called “The Culture of Enterprise” and it aligns nicely with Michael’s writing and something I posted a few weeks ago on the nature of my business activities:
…it’s worth stressing that entrepreneurship is above all about the creation of values, not about the accumulation of wealth. Of course material gain – profit – is the force that drives the market economy, but it should be understood to a far greater extent as an essential instrument of human creativity, not as an end in itself. By far the best way for an entrepreneur to support culture is by shaping the culture of his or her own enterprise, its quality and its significance. The human and social measures of success, common sense, humility before the mysteries of nature and the world, consideration for future generations, a well-developed conscience – all of these things have to enter into the creation of the culture of entrepreneurship.
Amen to that.