The principle of non-contradiction

October 17, 2011 By

Lawrence Lessig has noticed a very important practice that is emerging from the #occupy movement. It is the principle and the practice of non-contradiction:

In this movement, we need a similar strategy. Of course a commitment to non-violence. But also a commitment to non-contradiction: We need to build and define this movement not by contradicting the loudest and clearest anger on the Right, but instead, by finding the common ground in our demands for reform.

This is a a very useful contribution to the tools that are emerging from the #occupy movement. It is edgy because in traditional social activism you are defined by what you stand against, and opposing things is the means to ending them.

But one of the implications of “we are the 99%” is that no one is more 99% than anyone else. That is a big tent, and it is powerful as long as we can practice true diversity within it. This is a massive challenge. The 99% contains every kind of person, friend and ally and loathsome enemy. That is the nature of a huge complex human community. So practicing non-contradiction is like practicing non-violence in that it requires us to be in relationship with those we do not like.

Even though I practice non violence as much as I can I bet there is a limit to that. My job as a peaceful human being is to stretch myself beyond my own limits in practicing peace. Sometimes non-violence gets tagged as “compliance” but it isn’t that really. It is a commitment to a new world and a new way of being.

It is similar with non-contradiction. There are things in the world that probably need contradicting, and I am sure there are limits to this principle in my own practice and capabilities. But for this movement, and for this new world, we need conversational space and space is opened by engagement and being non-contradictory. If you believe that we truly interdependent, then we have to work to see that one person’s racism is my problem too. That I participate in the conditions that perpetuate those things that I would otherwise stand in contradiction to.

Let’s track this modality. Election seasons, protests and events can all benefit from this practice. It is a high calling to call yourself a practitioner of non-contradiction, but is it essential to a world of interconnection, interdependence and mutual benefit.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, CoHo, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Practice Tagged With:

Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it – CNN.com

October 5, 2011 By

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.

Filed Under: BC, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, emergence, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Youth Tagged With:

Decision happening

June 18, 2011 By

Bob Stilger on “decision happening” rather than “decision making:”

I’d add to what John has written by introducing the concept of “decision happening” rather than “decision making.” It is a term I coined a decade ago and am reminded of from time to time.

Decision happening uses collective discernment to discover the decision that is happening before our very eyes. It has a very different energy than “decision making.” There is a curiosity. It has an openness and a sense of inquiry rather than a driving quickly towards a given decision. It invites the participation of spirit, non-material beings, the force of life — however one gets at the memory that there is more involved here than just humans and our human systems.

In my work I refer to enspirited leadership as the kind of leadership that invites all of us forward — intellect, emotions, spirit, hands. Decision happening relies on this sort of enspirited leadership.

I often use things like inviting people to create models with play-doh clay as one way to inquire into their lives and the decisions they are called to make. Also use nature walks, paired walks in silence where first one person, then another has their eyes closed and other guides them. I use Arawana Hayahsi’s social presencing theatre work as other pathway in.

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Insights on the nature of the times

May 23, 2011 By

I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice.  We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of  ”What time it is in the world?”  We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing.  We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging.  At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging.  I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:

 

You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world

 

When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.

 

You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second.  You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.

 

What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?

 

Responsibility and courage are individual acts.  Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.

 

Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.

We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own.  We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.

 

Our conversations touch every single other conversation.  The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity.  The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another.  In that small open space, influence takes root.  Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.

 

I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving?  No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying?  What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?

 

In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard.  The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite.  Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.

 

All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand.  You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of.  Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish.  You can find home by simply following the taste of it.

 

Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer.  Learn to listen to why people say the things they say.  To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.

 

Presence.  When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story.  And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.

 

We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing.  People are the agents for their own freedom.  But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go.  We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation.  With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new.  Honour and reverence.

 

We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.

 

Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life?  How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.

 

How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency?  We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.

 

We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity.  We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours?  Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air.  Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.

 

Like Meg says,

Notice what is going on.

Get started.

Learn as you go.

Stick together.

 

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

Circle Training, Circle Process, Circle Practicum

February 11, 2011 By

News from Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea about upcoming PeerSpirit Circle trainings, including a new advanced course.  This may be some of the finest learning you will ever do with respect to learning about and working with groups:

The PeerSpirit Circle Practicum gathers small groups of people at retreat centers for four-and-a-half days of intensive, experiential learning that blends council time with significant skill development.

via PeerSpirit : Circle Training, Circle Process, Circle Practicum.

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From Hero to Host: the Columbus Ohio story

January 28, 2011 By

Such a nice treat to come across this chronicle of friends: From Hero to Host: A story of Citizenship in Columbus OH. This an excerpt from Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s new book “Walk Out, Walk On“, due out soon.

The excerpt tells the story of how a small group of people – many of them dear friends of mine – awakened a new form of citizen leadership in Columbus Ohio using the Art of Hosting as an operating system.  You will hear stories of Phil Cass, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Matt Habash and others in that city who have been changing the way people think about health, education, food and citizenship since 2002.

Have a read and get inspired.

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Insights on shifting systems

September 27, 2010 By

Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton.  We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.

Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems.  We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.

For me, lots of good insights are coming up.  A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:

  1. The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW.  How can we deliver services differently?  How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate?  How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us?  These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up.  Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
  2. New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place.  But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old.  Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies.  While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old.  Ignoring power is naive.
  3. A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.

Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur.  That alone is not innovation.  The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level.  The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families.  Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues.  Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.

Filed Under: BC, CoHo, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, emergence, Facilitation, Leadership, Organization Tagged With:

Meg Wheatley’s 12 principles for supporting healthy community

May 25, 2010 By

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.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Being, Collaboration, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Philanthropy, World Cafe, Youth Tagged With:

Strategy, simplified

March 11, 2010 By

Jack Ricchiuto on simplifying strategy:

Every organization, and community, I work with on strategy is very relieved when I liberate them from the inane practice of traditional academic language in the process. I refuse to allow them to waste valuable time debating over the distinctions of: goal, objective, strategy, tactic, and night maneuvers. (I throw in the military reference to “night maneuvers” to inject humor into what is usually a very humorless and uninspired process – and it works.)

What do we do instead? We replace these never-agreed-upon jargon with complex words like: where, why, how, and what.

To be strategic, which is to in plain English is to say, proactive, is to talk about 4 things:

  • Where do we want to be in 20 years?
  • Why does that matter to us?
  • How do we want to get there in the next 2 years? and
  • What would be wise for us to do in the next 2 quarters (and weeks) to get there?

These simple and powerful questions give people a remarkable kind of alignment, velocity, and traction they are not used to in the process. What can I say? It works.

via jack/zen … zenext » Blog Archive » Strategy, simplified.

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