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Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results<\/a>). \u00a0There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.<\/p>\n Love and power as a complimentary system.<\/strong> Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system. \u00a0Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power. \u00a0This is polarity management <\/a> in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other. \u00a0This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both. \u00a0The approach is fundamentally Taoist!<\/p>\n Turtles all the way down. <\/strong>We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework. \u00a0A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move. \u00a0I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move. \u00a0Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining. \u00a0Adam saw it differently. \u00a0By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%. \u00a0This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process, \u00a0This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic. \u00a0You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working. \u00a0In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down<\/a>“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move. \u00a0Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems mode<\/a>l developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana. \u00a0Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.<\/p>\n