Day two at Shambhala

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.