Learning from the metaphors of living systems

Phil Cubeta poses a set of very good questions about the language we use to think about organizational worlds.  He challenges us to see the living systems view with these questions:

Questions

• When we adopt the language of social enterprise, or social investing, or a social capital markets do we embrace  metaphors more sterile than those of the fox, loam, carrion, the crop, and the harvest?
• What is lost when our master metaphors are commercial?
• Can we engineer solutions to our ills, or can we only be cured?
• Might the cure be organic, from within, from sources that lie deep in literary and philosophical traditions, rather than those, or along with those, from business? For, of course, farming too is a challenging business.
• Is it the MBA, the prophet, the poet, or the farmer from whom you draw most hope?
• The MBA, the prophet, poet, or farmer – who best feeds your moral imagination?

via Gift Hub: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

And for inspiration he uses Wendel Berry’s beautiful poem The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.