Douglas Rushkoff has a useful article on the Occupy movement. I am actually loath indulge in much analysis over what is happening in New York and now elsewhere, because the events defy analysis, especially from a traditional lens. But in this article, Rushkoff points to some of the things that are happening and why they matter for organizing large social conversations on the pressing issues of our day.
To be fair, the reason why some mainstream news journalists and many of the audiences they serve see the Occupy Wall Street protests as incoherent is because the press and the public are themselves. It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.
Let’s be clear. Many traditionalists and establishment people are pointing to the form of these protests and dismissing them. It’s as if the protestors have a responsibility to come up with a list of demands in order to be taken seriously. Or it’s as if they are not to be believed until they create a reductionist analysis of the problems.
After Copenhagen I had a clear idea that mainstream ways of organizing the conversation on the biggest issues of our time were outdated. The conference model is a waste of time, money and talent. Diplomacy is too constrained by 19th century notions of statehood to be useful. What needs to happen is a sea change, a worldwide open space in which voices and questions can float freely, and actions can arise that address things in completely novel and emergent ways. If the form of this movement is mind boggling, don’t ask the protesters to change for you. You will never understand it unless you change your way of thinking about how we create solution.
via Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it – CNN.com.
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It’s been a week since I was in New York City visiting the camp in Zuccotti Park (renamed Liberty Park) where the Occupy Wall Street movement was in full swing.
I was struck mostly by their process, but also by the earnest and deliberate attention that these people, young and old are giving to the chance they have to open discourse on the big issues of wealth disparity and social equity in America.
When I was there earlier in the week they were engaging in a participatory process to create their demands. It was as much about defining why they were there as anything else. But the fact is that many people are gathered there and supporting the occupation for various reasons. Mostly it is to draw attention to the vast disparities of wealth in the United States and the effect that is having especially on the poor and otherwise marginalized. There was a lot of conversation going on there last week within the group as well as between the group and the Wall Street workers. Surprising amount of joint discerning about what is really going on in America.
What is interesting about the movement there is that they eschew leaders of any kind. This is a traditional anarchist approach, and it’s being put into practice quite deliberately. There are many facilitators who are helping the group to decide themselves on what to say and do and so far the group has been very clear about non-violence and is even actively discouraging vandalism. I was in one meeting of the outreach team who were reporting on the controversial debate taking place about whether to mark subway maps with the local of the protest. in general, the group there wants to be very careful not to give the police any reason whatsoever to become violent with them. So they are staying away from anything that might be construed as violence or damage and are instead focusing on powerful speech, using their first amendment rights to talk about and explore what they stand for and what the issues are. There is no presence of the Black Bloc or other masked militants who have brought the wrath of the police state reigning down on protests here in Canada in recent years.
And there is is no clear single agenda, because the totality of the problems facing the USA cannot be summarized with a pithy statement of demands. They are not hijackers and they are not holding anything ransom. They are trying to figure out how to discuss and actively represent the malaise and serious economic, social and political issues going on in the USA systemically and accurately. So much of this analysis and practice lies outside of the mainstream of American thought and debate that it is hard to say it all without seeming crazy. But the USA is coming apart in fundamental ways – even the Wall Street folks don’t dispute the fundamental economic analysis – and standing for possibilities is hard, hard work right now.
It is inspiring to watch them in General Assembly, where twice a day they work through an agenda of decisions using “the people’s mic” as their amplification system. The police have banned megaphones of any kind and so they speak to the crowd by repeating what the speaker has just said. This has the double effect of ensuring everyone can hear as well as bringing a quiet shared tone to everything. It is slow and orderly discourse. When the general Assembly isn’t meeting, the place runs in a big general Open Space – type gathering. Anyone who wants to call a session calls out “mic check!” and everyone within hearing distance repeats the phrase. When enough people are paying attention, an announcement is made, a time and place chosen and the group goes back to work. It is beautiful to watch.
All people are going to have to challenge themselves to reach across divides if there is any hope of finding solutions to the current and looming crises. At Wall Street many protesters and many bankers were willing to do just that and many many conversations are happening there between suits and sleeping bags. Very little anger at all. They set the bar high for civil discourse despite looking scruffy.
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Two dear friends, Ashley Cooper and Juanita Brown, are up to some world-changing mischief together in the mountains of North Carolina. They are going deep into hosting intergenerational conversations. Here’s why, from Juanita:
I have always been fascinated by large-scale systems change and what might enable whole societies to shift into more life-affirming patterns. Over the years I had the great good fortune to have older corporate and community leaders take me under their professional and personal wings as I engaged with this work.
I began to think abut the challenges we face at every level of system today. I realized that there is a huge untapped large-scale social change potential in the wisdom, experience, and perspective of younger leaders as well as children. I began to ask myself: How can we honor and use the unique contributions and gifts that reside in all of us, as a single generation, alive and awake together–whatever our age or stage of life?
Read about what they’re up to together: Wiser Together: Partnering Across Generations.
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I’m at a Casey Family Programs conference in Seattle that is looking at applying science to early learning in kids. The people here are learning about brain science and the results of early adverse childhood experiences and what the science can tell us about how we should react in the policy sphere to create healthy kids, families and societies.
The keynote is by Jack Shonkoff, who is a leading brain researcher in this field and who has been sharing some of the basics of what we know about brain science, relationships and healthy societies. Here are some of his key points:
Experiences build brain architecture. What happens is that neural circuits develop to reinforce behaviours, emotions, motor skills and so on. Babies brains build a basic architecture by forming synapses and then a more complex architecture develops on top of that. For the first three year of life, babies’ brains form 700 synapses a second. Genes provide the template for this work, but experiences turn the genes on and off. So early life experiences are built into our bodies, encoded in our brains – for better or for worse. To promote healthy brian architecture you need language rich environments, supportive relationships and “serve and return” interactions with adults are the three things that promote health brain architecture. Prolonged stress and reduced exposure to supportive relationships – in other words, what are known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – create the conditions for heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases that are a result of disrupted development of organ systems.
Toxic stress derails healthy development. In babies, stress is alleviated by contact with a caring adult. If a child is exposed to stress in large amounts, the brain loses the ability to turn off the stress responses, and the stress becomes toxic. Nurturing, stable and engaging environments are the antidote to stress. It’s interesting that in North America we don’t treat stress with much compassion – “get over it” is a common response. In the USA especially, a hyper individualistic culture diminishes the importance of stress.
Some positive stress is a good thing however – what we call in the facilitation world “The Groan Zone” which helps learning and helps healthy development. There is always stress associated with learning new things or doing things for the first time. In healthy development, adults help kids with this kind of stress and the kids learn strategies for dealing with stress, which amps up the heart rate and blodd pressure and then reduces it. Supportive relationships help children to learn adaptive and coping skills.
Tolerable stress is serious and temporary – death of a family member, natural disasters, war and violence, an experience of extreme despair and other things that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. This kind of stress is also buffered by supportive relationships. Families, extended families, friends, neighbours, supported programs need to step in and provide the buffering that reduces stress to baseline levels.
Toxic stress however is prolonged activation of the stress response in the absence of protective relationships. This includes living alone in violence, or with adults that neglect children or who are unable to care for children because the are sick or depressed. If you don’t have access to caring adults, the stress becomes toxic and the stress system is built into your brain architecture, placing hardship on your organs, your nervous system and your hormones. This is the kind of stress that leads to long term health and development issues.
Neglect can be as powerful as abuse. It doesn’t matter to the baby’s brain whether your lack of relationships come from neglect or abuse. It has the same effect on the brain, and it keeps the stress levels high. Seven hundred synapses a second don’t care what an adult is doing if there are no compassionate relationships. Reducing stress by reducing the numbers and severity of adverse early childhood experiences results in better outcomes. This doesn’t mean that we have to solve poverty and subsistence abuse overnight before we get better outcomes – it means we need to make policy decisions that ask the question about whether we are supporting healthy and supportive relationships. In other words, the social safety net needs to work both at the systemic level to reduce inequalities, and at the acute level to create spaces where people can learn and experience healthy supportive relationships at every age.
I’ve been listening here thinking about the implications for this in organizations and communities. To sacrifice relationships at the alter of work or learning is to not only inhibit the sustainability of what is going on, but also creates the conditions for unhealthy families, groups, communities and organizations.
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I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what I heard:
1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating? Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design. Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness. Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?
2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done. We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love. What is it you can’t NOT do? Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances. Are we working on the issues that people really care about?
3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.
4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots. Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract. If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation. If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted. Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well. What if your became the mentors to adults? What if clients directed our services?
5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting. That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere. Who is surprising you with their leadership?
6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy. Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented. Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed. Who is already changing the way services are provided? Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed? What gives us energy in our work?
7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us. Rather, the angel is all of us together.” Experts can’t do it, folks. They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us. It has to be.
8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.” How do we act when that happens? Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?
9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh. But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure? Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.
10. Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?
11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next. Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates. The time for apologizing for relationship building is over. We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.
12. Generosity, forgiveness and love. These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work. If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness. This is NOT soft and cuddly work. Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact. Love and power are connected. One is not possible without the other. Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening. Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable. But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?
We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!). But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.