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September 6, 2003 By Uncategorized

Thanks to both Dave Pollard and Jim McGee, I spent some considerable time musing over Donella Meadows’ paper on “Places to Intervene in a System.”

The paper takes a systems theory approach to identifying leverage points for creating change. In her language, the ten places, in increasing order of scale are as follows:

9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Material stocks and flows.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).
3. The power of self-organization.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
0. The power to transcend paradigms.

These may seem somewhat cryptic, by Meadows explains them in very clear language and with numerous examples. Dave Pollard has done a top notch job on summarizing the paper in “layman’s terms” and provides some of his own examples.

For me, as someone who works in complex systems like communities, I’m especially interested in the last four, from the power of self-organization to the power to transcend paradigms. Check out her thoughts on changing the paradigm or the mindset:

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you come yourself, loudly, with assurance, from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

Systems folks would say one way to change a paradigm is to model a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.

As powerful as that thought is, Meadows saves the best for last. Her thoughts on transcending paradigms:

It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing.

People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it a basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose one that will help achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe (or put in the name of your favorite deity here) and do his, her, its will, which is a lot better informed than your will.

It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

I think Open Space Technology may just be the fastest way to work these leverage points in a system, but I have to do more thinking about that. So I am adding this paper to the Deeper Open Space Wiki for further discussion and consideration. Feel free to join me there.

Herb Joe on poor weak human beings

September 4, 2003 By First Nations 2 Comments

Harrison Hot Springs, BC.

Spent the day in a meeting at Seabird Island First Nation, a large community which is part of the Sto:lo Nation located in the upper Fraser Valley about 150 kms east of Vancouver. I was working with a group who was in some internal conflict, and I was very privileged to be working with Herb and Helen Joe, two respected Sto:lo Elders and traditional teachers.

Herb told a very interesting story today. It was part of the Sto:lo creation story and it had to do with the destiny of human beings.

In the story, the Creator makes the earth and then creates all the creatures of the earth, including the winged animals that fly, the four-leggeds that run on the land, the animals that crawl across the earth and the animals that swim. Each of these animals were created perfectly.

When all these animals were created, the Creator looked around and noticed that something was missing. So humans were created. To do this, the Creator took a little bit from each animal and rolled it up into what Herb called “poor, weak, human beings.” The reason we are poor and weak is that we can do lots of things, but none of it well. We can fly a little, but we fall heavily to earth. We can run, but not as fast as a deer or a cougar. We crawl, but beetles and spiders can stick to the ceiling. And we swim, but nothing like a salmon. In short we struggle.

Herb finished the story by saying that it is our destiny to struggle because by struggling we learn and that is what we are put on earth to do.

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September 3, 2003 By Uncategorized

Flattered to have been listed today as one of Dave Pollard’s favourite Canadian blogs. Thanks Dave. Now go read his stuff…it’s great.

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September 3, 2003 By Uncategorized

One of the tenets of tae kwon do is “Indomitable Spirit” The practice of a martial art makes use of that spirit to sustain survival under life threatening circumstances.

Indomitable spirit marks the small and almost forgotten community of Brainerd, Kansas on the American Great Plains. Offering an almost ethnographic example of indomitable spirit in the life of a community, Time, Place and Memory on the Prairie Plains looks at how a small settlement has sustained itself through waves of change.

Although most of the town’s landmarks have long since been abandoned or demolished, they exist as powerfully in the memories of these Brainerdites as if they had just visited them yesterday, despite the fact that few photographic records exist of these structures aside from those included in this study. The memories of a Brainerd gone by have become so strongly embedded in these residents’ present-day conceptions of the community that the current townscape exists in a sort of time/space limbo — the past is always present.

Like a community quilt, the memories of the Brainerdites I encountered patch the fragmented townscape together, keeping it alive in the face of both the elements and the forces of economic and demographic change. A Prairie Plains townscape may, indeed, be more durable than even the landscape from which it was forged.

This is one of those stories where the learning keeps coming.

Thanks to consumptive.org for the link

Compassion and mutuality

September 2, 2003 By Being

The other day Michael Herman and were talking about compassion and mutuality. The idea is that mutuality is making someone appear as real to you as you appear to yourself.

Naturally this means understanding that the person sitting across the room from you at this moment is full of an inner life that is as rich as yours. Confidence, self-esteem, confusion, love, pain, grief, celebration – all of these things are known to them too.

It sounds so trite on one hand, but it is incredibly powerful the more I dig into this thought. So often we see others as “punching bags” able to absorb hurt that we project without any internal effect. And yet, we know damn well how it feels to be cursed at (or smiled at for that matter).

To say that someone appears as real to you as you appear to yourself is to understand that when we think of ourselves we rarely think about our bodies. As Douglas and Catherine Harding would say, we don�t even know we have a head. We don�t see our back…we only see a small percentage of the body that other’s see. What makes us real to ourselves in our inner lives of thoughts emotions and sensations. With practice it is possible to sense that every other person in the world also has this inner life, despite that fact that we usually only perceive them as bodies.

* * *

In a related move, Euan Semple at The Obvious? points me to The Global Rich List, which tells me that in an average year I am about the 50,000,000th richest person in the world, which puts me in the top 0.836 percentile.

I have a lot of work to do to understand compassionate relations when 5,949,632,435 are poorer than me. Five billion is a number I can’t even conceive of, but it does put minor aches and pains in context.