Best practice vs experimentation

This blog post is inspired by a conversation I had with Peter Merry the other day – we were discussing the relative merits of sharing good practice versus experimentation on the path to the new era… and went on to cover online versus physical and global versus local.

Understanding this to be a polarity to be managed rather than a problem to be solved, the best approach seems to be to explore the up-sides and down-sides of both options. As synchronicity would have it, the day I started writing this blog, a colleague of mine told me about the Cynefin framework, which exactly situates this topic in the field of complexity management.

What if the best practice is experimentation?
In their book ‘A simpler way’, Meg Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers say: “Experimentation doesn’t use up possibilities; it creates more. More information, more experiences, more insights. We have limited the world, but it remains wide open to us.

“Many of us have created lives and organisations that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. We don’t need to experiment to find what works; we just need to find the answer. So we look to other organisations, or to experts, or to reports. We are dedicated detectives, tracking down solutions, attempting to pin them on ourselves and our organisations.”

Why do we look around at solutions that are already out there, rather than learning how to experiment?

How experiments lead to bifurcations

This is a very special time to be contemplating this question. The picture (it comes from Peter’s slide show on evolutionary leadership – he attributes the diagram to Ervin Lazlo) situates us at an epochal bifurcation. All those little lines you see at the base of each steps are experiments. Each time, certain experiments succeed, take root and spread, bringing civilisation to its next level of complexity. When I first saw this slide, I was filled with delight because I understood that as long as we are experimenting, we are playing our part in evolution.

But how do we learn how to experiment, if the most we ever do is try out other people’s best practices? One down-side of trying to apply other people’s solutions is that we end up wasting a load of time trying to adjust their solutions to our context. Funnily enough, it’s often only by doing that that we discover what our true context is in the first place! That’s when we realise how out of touch we often are, in our organisations, with the reality we are operating in.

When we experiment inside an organisation to find our own solutions, we are sensing into our own situation, our own context, our own meaning, our own purpose, with our own people. It’s a great way to create ownership.

I’ve been learning about a new governance approach, called Holacracy, which uses practices like integrative decision-making and dynamic steering, where we explicitly state we’re not after the best solution, only a workable one. This allows us to stay agile. We want to keep changing and developing and probing and sensing and acting and sensing and acting, as we go along, as we discover how our inventions mesh with messy reality. To my mind, if there’s a good practice, it’s that.

Reframing good practice as success stories

And yet, we intuitively know that it’s important to learn from the experience of others, too. Peter asked a great question: What’s the relationship between stories of the past and stories of the future? Framing good practice as ‘story’ helps, because it connects us to that deeply human, ‘tribal’ part of us that honours the wisdom of the elders. It also reminds us of an important and empowering assumption that we need to adopt in these times of terrifying and exhilarating change: the fact that everything we need to survive and thrive is already there… AND there is a current and unfolding context in which everything that is already there comes together. Viewed from this perspective, good practice is seen not as a blueprint, but as a story that we can then take with us into our ‘presencing’ of our current context and situation.

Stories around the virtual camp fire

One thing stories do is draw us in around the camp fire. They create contact, they inspire us and give us energy – the energy of possibility, which recently won the US elections and will – if anything will – carry us over the threshold of impending disaster and into the future.

In the global era, this sharing of stories is also very much related to the use of an online space. Many of us who are engaged in large-scale, non-local change initiatives are grappling with how to make on-line environments work for collaboration, helping us find people with similar experience, working in similar fields across the planet. If we think that sharing best and good practices won’t be as effective as our own experimentation, why do we need to use online environments? What is the purpose of any kind of global interconnection? Why even bother to do that? If it’s all really about synchronicity, knowing that if you put out an intention to do something and then look, you will find the people you need to find, simply because of the interconnectivity that’s part of the physics of the universe. So we have to be really clear about the purpose of any on-line environment we invest in. If it really isn’t contributing, then why waste resources, when nobody’s going to use it?

In my own experience, the people I’m meeting online are sufficiently rare that I don’t meet them in my local space – developed individuals that you don’t find on every street corner. For a small community that’s spread globally, meeting online is very important. But it’s not necessarily going to be as useful for others who are focusing on their local environments. However, in this age of transition – we hope – to a sustainable global society, each of those local environments needs, at some level, to be connected to other local environments. The 1% of people who actively contribute to and benefit from the growing global knowledge ecology are scattered across the planet, and they feed what they are learning into their local communities in ways that those communities can utilise. So it’s not necessarily about mass participation in on-line environments, it’s about spreading it around so that it can be drip fed, hydroponically, down into the local communities all over the place.

The dance between global and local

… And the local communities ultimately have to create their own material, because that’s what they will take ownership of in their local context. Solutions can’t be rolled out as templates. And yet templates, too, are needed – but for processes, rather than content. An example of very useful and virally spreadable templates for change are the different methodologies for having the large-scale conversations needed to generate collective ideas for experimentation in local communities. As more and more groups experimenting around the same theme find each other (usually online) and compare notes, we can see patterns in the content they are generating. An example where the urgency of climate change, peak oil and social fragmentation means it makes sense to share good practice is sustainable cities: of all the work that’s been done in urban environments throughout the world, what seem to be the top seven pillars for sustainability in cities?

AND each group must dive into its own inquiry and work out what it has to do.  Perhaps the ideal approach is to do start ‘at home’, with your own situation, and then look at what others have done, and ask: How do our results feed into the  global body of knowledge in this field? How do our findings relate to that? When we look at what others have done, do we see any blind spots in our own approach (or in theirs)? Part of what this does is help light up things we don’t know that we don’t know. It’s a delicate balance. If we just do our own local thing, we fail to acknowledge all the resources that are already there somewhere else and we risk getting into blind spots. But trying to force a template through from top down is how you fail to get ownership, and your solutions will be neither emergent nor context specific.

The magic of ownership

Once a community takes ownership of its solutions, people start to have the confidence to open up to solutions from elsewhere – they go ‘Hey, that’s great! Grab it, we own this too!’ But you’ve got to start from your own base.

This is a real edge to keep exploring – this interface between the global ‘knowledge field’ and local, context-specific ownership, and how those two can best interface with each other.

Where good practice is concerned, we don’t want a ‘knowledge database’ crammed with templates. Rather, we need a blog of stories, so we don’t forget that these are experiences in the past. That way we are less likely to fall into the trap of ‘this is how it worked here, so therefore it’s a template for how to do it elsewhere.’

 

Harvesting essential conversations: an evolutionary perspective

Dedicated to the global community of practitioners of the art of hosting conversations that matter.

This blog post sprang from a conversation between George Pór, Matthieu Kleinschmager and Helen Titchen Beeth in Brussels in September 2008. The conversation was prompted by our shared passion for capturing the essence of conversations that we have participated in so that they can have a longer life and a greater impact than just the fading memories and flip-chart sheets of the original participants.

Understanding that many of the ills in the world have arisen as a result of the conversations that should have been had but weren’t, there is a growing interest in the art of hosting conversations that matter. In today’s globalised world, where impacts and consequences of all kinds can spread rapidly across the planet for good or ill, there is a sense of urgency about how to capture the essence of our most important conversations so that they can be more widely dispersed. Like beneficial seeds – that can be sown in hearts and minds hundreds and thousands of miles away from the place of the original conversation and weeks and months and years away from its time – the fruits of our collective inquiry into questions of relevance to human thriving should be spread far and wide.

Ripples and interference patterns

Every time we share our view of a conversation after the event, it is
as if we are throwing a pebble into the pond of human culture. The
ripples move away in all directions, not stopping in the boundless
noosphere until they encounter ripples from other conversations. It is
in the beautiful resultant interference patterns that arise when
different conversations meet and connect that the next level of
conversation is born. This is the source of emergence, where new connections are made.

There is nothing quite so wonderful as participating in a conversation that changes us. The very fact that we are different when leave is a form of harvesting that has a huge impact. Because we are changed, our subsequent words and deeds are different than they would have been if we had not had the conversation. So this is a harvesting that practitioners of intentional conversation attend to: how to create the container in which we can be metabolised and transformed together.

But that’s not enough. It’s not just the fact of talking together – it’s the fact that we’re talking about something that matters to us, about something that exists in the world in some way. If we want to change our societies, if we want to unleash human potential beyond our destructiveness and survive the next 50 years, if we want to open up the prospect of another 100 000 years of human flourishing on planet earth, then we need to learn how to connect up our conversations and move into wise action inspired by our new-found collective clarity, rather than just let them turn to dust and fall through the floor-boards.

Heartfelt call from the future in need of us
What would it be like to live in a future in which our conversations are connected? Where all our social institutions – schools, business, government, even the military – were designed to enable and facilitate the emergence of the best in each of us, individually and collectively, designed for the blossoming of human and social potential? That’s not such a far-out fantasy. The ancient Greeks had that kind of society, so it’s clearly a potential that’s deeply embedded in the human psyche. It’s true that they didn’t bother much about their women or their slaves, but today we are living at a new turning of the spiral and we are wise enough now not to leave people out of our connected conversations.

Matthieu

If we step into that future, in our mind’s eye, and look back towards today to see the trajectory that brought us there, we can see that these connected conversations can happen because most of us are powerfully equipped with  a deep – not just intellectual – knowledge of an integral way of relating to self, others and technology. We have the tools to cultivate and disseminate our personal and collective knowledge gardens… and gardening in this future society has become an attitude not only to the natural world, but to the built world and the virtual world as well. In that world, the work of the knowledge gardener is seen as sacred, because it is serving our communities and serving evolution.

At the heart of the work that will bring us to this future society is our work on harvesting meaningful conversations. Already, through the internet in particular, we can see what happens as ever more conversations are joined, as the community of engaged and active virtual conversationalists create and straddle an ever-growing multiplicity of conversations rippling out across space and time. What is the ultimate purpose of all the conversations we are having? What if we were all having different manifestations of the same conversation? What is the deeper pattern that we are trying to surface?

An evolutionary perspective
This is where the evolutionary perspective links in. Even if we don’t believe that evolution has any ultimate stage or goal, it nevertheless moves in a clear direction. In the case of the evolution of the social world, we can see – particularly if we take a giant step back so that we can see the sweep of social history since our earliest days as homo sapiens on this planet – that it is moving towards ever greater complexity and compassion. So the type of society that is asking us to help it come into being is a vision – not a purpose – a future possibility that we feel attracted to. What if the pattern that connects all our conversations is this question: “What is the future that attracts us?” And what if our ongoing inquiry around variations of this question – and the action we engage in as a result – is the way in which we are co-creating that future already, now?

It is useful to remember that evolution is the way things get done around here. It’s that simple. It’s not something we have to aspire to. It’s the way things happen and have always happened. It’s the way the big bang developed into the beacon of human consciousness. We might not be the only conscious beings in the universe, but the fact that we are conscious is a rare and precious thing. And what’s happening now is completely changing the evolutionary game: we are now conscious of our consciousness. So all of a sudden we are conscious of evolution, we are conscious that what is evolving is our consciousness itself, and a small percentage of humanity has now reached a stage where it is intentionally engaged in the conscious pursuit of the evolution of consciousness.

So it’s important to keep this perspective in mind: evolution is happening anyway, but now humanity is volitionally involved. And from now on, the only way that evolution is going to happen on planet Earth is if we say “Hey, let’s do this!”

The urge to inquire

It will not have escaped you that there is a paradox here. Evolution is happening anyway, but it won’t happen unless we engage in it. So what is this about? As we awaken as individuals to an awareness of our own consciousness, it seems that we are also becoming aware of the evolutionary urge awakening as us. As we now intentionally engage – through practices of all kinds – in our own conscious evolution, we are drawn by an irresistible urge to sit in circles and inquire together. I see this particularly strongly in the community of practitioners of the art of hosting meaningful conversations. Not only do we convene conversations for others who wish to do things better in their lives, we also sit together to inquire into what it is we are doing as we do this. This is intentional learning and evolving. We have understood that our social world, and its entanglement with its natural surround, has reached such complexity that a single mind, however powerful, cannot hope to make sense of it. Although we don’t have a collective sensing organ or a collective brain, we are nevertheless drawn together to do this collective learning which enables us to know things together. Seeking ways to enable our entire species to know things and learn things. That’s the pursuit that we’re in now.

In many ways, the central task of our journey to learn how to connect our conversations is to build a collective sensory organ. The collective sensory organ that we are becoming is a soft system – another name for it would be our collective knowledge ecosystem. This ecosystem does not reside in the hardware alone – so it’s not about computers or software or data. Rather, it consists of at least three complementary and overlapping networks – a network of people (friends, colleagues, members of our community); a network of knowledge (all the ideas and inspirations we are generating in our conversations); and lastly, the network of tools, software, processes, protocols, tags, taxonomies, folksonomies, etc. that support the other two. This sensory organ is guided by our intention and our attention, individually and collectively, and includes all the tools and processes we use to guide, capture, organise, portray and share our conversations.

What I have described above is a description of the external dimension of this collective sensory organ – what it might look like from the outside, where we might find it and what physical evidence we might find that it exists. But being part of this collective sensory organ also has an inner dimension – what it feels like as a person to be participating in this organ. In my personal experience, we must come to this work empty of our own thought and personal agenda if we are to be fully available to serve as the eyes, ears, lips, tongue and epiglottis – and heart and lungs  – of the collective and the mysterious ‘middle’ that is seeking to emerge through us. And when we are moved to speak, it is perfectly possible that we won’t remember what we have said – certainly not well enough to repeat it.

The universe speaking to itself
Herein lies part of the importance of having people harvesting what others are saying. And in this perspective, we might even venture to say that the role of harvesters is to capture the messages of the universe as they are spoken through others. It also helps us to answer the question “what is worth harvesting and what not?” In the end, it comes down to this: What is the place I am talking from? If I am talking from a personal place of ego, then the chances are that what I am saying is not worth harvesting – at least not from the evolutionary perspective. But if the place I am in allows the universe to talk through me, then this is definitely worth harvesting.

Which brings us to a most promising question: What is the capacity that we need to develop as harvesters to sense where the pearls are coming from?

George

The most obvious answer to this question brings us right into another of the practices of hosting great conversations – a focus of much fruitful inquiry in its own right: This is precisely why we hold the space. The deepest practice of space holders is to be in that space of sensing the universe. Together we build the field – this is the universal gravy that we’re all lumps in, and together good conversation hosts can make it really strong. It’s a kind of collective satsang. Rather than going and sitting at the feet of the enlightened guru who gives off a vibrational frequency that everyone else is then entrained and elevated by, in a good conversation the source of the field is not at the centre, it’s at the periphery. The space holders are creating a container around – a field throughout – and people are then invited into that field, where they will themselves naturally aligning with that field, with each other, increasing the likelihood that the universe will feel invited into the conversation and have something meaningful to say.

This is how the three practices and disciplines – holding space, hosting and harvesting – are unified. What do we harvest? The universe as it speaks through people. In order to do that, we must be in alignment with the universe. Many members of the global hosting community explicitly engage in practices which help to get into that space – all different ways, some physical, some cognitive – of deepening:

• warrior of the heart
• action learning
• deepening questions
• presencing
• systemic constellations
• tarot…

These are the practices I am aware of – there are bound to be plenty more. Please add to the list by commenting on this blog.

Intention and attention are key

Helen

Throughout the hosting process – through the calling, the inviting, the preparation and design, the hosting and the harvesting – intention and attention are key. At the very highest level – and it’s so good to be quite conscious and explicit about this, at least within the core team hosting any process – the intention is to capture – no, to be – the wisdom of the universe. Let’s be bold here in restating this: the intention behind the art of hosting essential conversations is, for the duration of the conversation, to be the wisdom of the universe. Outrageously pretentious? Hardly. Because what could it ever be, if not us? It’s not something that is happening out there, it’s something we are co-creating together on the evolutionary edge. It is we who are enacting it. As for our attention, there are two sides to this: where are we attending from? and what are we attending to? Again, at the highest level, where we are attending from is that space of total alignment, and what we are attending to is that space of total alignment. So it’s the universe attending from itself to itself.

This might all sound very daunting and inaccessible, but the good news is that as we are learning how to create this field, and how to hold it, it’s probably true that everybody can learn. And so the next stage of this inquiry might be: what are the conditions that must be in place in order for this level of harvesting and space holding to happen? What simple practices will most rapidly spread this capacity to the largest number of human groups and communities, so that so that the wisdom of the universe can be embodied by the whole?

 

Warriors of the heart

I just tried something new. For the four days immediately before moving house, I took off – out of time – to be with friends in an authentic collective exploration of what it means to be a warrior of the heart in today’s world.

There were 24 of us – folks from Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, USA, Canada -  led by Bob Wing and Toke Møller – practicing sword training in the aikido tradition and the art of meaningul conversation. Some of us were beginners at one or other of these arts, and some were sensei already – true masters. We were a truly multigenerational gathering, from 13 to 60-something… And the children were omnipresent…

As is often the case when this particular extended family gets together, the place was one of the participants. Our gathering was hosted at the Kingsmill (Koningsmolen) in Eliksem-Landen (Belgium) – it’s maiden voyage as an evolutionary learning centre since coming into the stewardship of Lieven Callewaert and Judith Heezen.

Koningsmolen - Eliksem

I wonder whether I will ever be able to articulate everything I learned.

• The warrior soul is not warlike – rather, it is dedicated. It is dedicated to seeking clarity and cutting away that which is not authentic. It is rooted in love and reverence for the earth and all things on it and does not waver from its heart’s course.

• The soul families to which we belong are quite vast. As an individual steps into a collectively-held field of intent, he or she can quite literally be transformed. During these four days I witnessed the collective midwifing the birth of warrior souls.

• Battle is where you harvest your practice. During our time together, Toke mused that the highest that a human being can aspire to is to become a practitioner of something. Each of the people present was a practitioner of something. I learned that I can apprentice myself to each person I meet. It’s good to have so many sensei’s. Who are you, and what is your practice?

• I realise that I am no longer interested in individual work. Although my practice to hone my warriorship might happen in solitude when I am at home, I am constantly called to the collective. It is the large collective fields that nourish and intrigue me, that really give me something to sense.

together we are strong

• We were honoured to have among us tarot master Ulrik Golodnoff, whose cards made visible for us that which was holding us, supporting us, shaping us and challenging us. Learning to read tarot like Ulrik has become a real ambition for me.

Ulrik reads the future of the warriors of the heart

• As a woman, I was struck by the wonderful quality of the men at this gathering. Watching them tune into their essence as men, and the way they were together, amongst themselves, made me contemplate starting a harem…

I can see myself re-editing this blog as gifts bubble up from my subconscious. But now, I must return to unpacking my boxes. You can see my photos here, and Justin’s photos here.

 

The Both/And of Leading Change in Living Systems

This is another of those essays that slipped out of me unexpectedly while responding to a message on a list serve. In this case, the message was from Dr Don Beck, venerable guardian of the Spiral Dynamics integral pattern. It stirred up some interest, so I thought of publishing it here, too… With thanks to Russ Volckmann of the Integral Leadership Review for the title!

We are faced with a growing list of models designed to guide us in leading change in living systems. Too often we espouse one model or another and skirmish with ‘the competition’ in our conversations, failing to draw on their collective potential. In this essay I would like to explore the ways in which we can individually and collectively engage in the transformations that can move the organisations and communities to which we belong towards a dynamic and sustainable future.

There are a number of angles I’d like to comment from, coming out of my own personal experience of various approaches to change. I cannot claim to speak from any great theoretical wisdom, only as a curious pioneer with my sleeves rolled up who is writing as a way of clarifying my own thinking. After all, if we are to explore the process of change we need to find ways of integrating divergent perspectives.

Living systems

Don Beck often referred to his work using Spiral Dynamics integral to foster change (examples can be found in Integral Leadership Review – articles by Elza Maalouf, Rafi Nasser and others) as “integral design engineering”. I can’t help wondering whether “engineering” is the best metaphor for that work or for what needs to happen in the world. There is a danger of looking mechanistically at living systems and “doing to them” from the outside. Such efforts are not going to work for long— and the engineering metaphor does not do justice to the richness and sensitivity of Don’s and others’ work!

I am greatly helped by the following list of ‘properties’ of living systems (I’ll be revisiting some of these as I go along):

(1)    A living system only accepts its own solutions (we only support those things we are a part of creating).
(2)    A living system only pays attention to that which is meaningful to it (here and now).
(3)    In nature a living system participates in the development of its neighbour (an isolated system is doomed).
(4)    Nature and all of nature, including ourselves is in constant change (without ‘change management’).
(5)    Nature seeks diversity – new relations open up to new possibilities (not survival of the fittest).
(6)    ‘Tinkering’ opens up to what is possible here and now – nature is not intent on finding perfect solutions.
(7)    A living system cannot be steered or controlled – they can only be teased, nudged, titillated.
(8)    A system changes (identity) when its perception of itself changes.
(9)    All the answers do not exist ‘out there’ – we must (sometimes) experiment to find out what works.
(10)    Who we are together is always different and more than who we are alone (possibility of emergence).
(11)    We (human beings) are capable of self-organising – given the right conditions.
(12)    Self-organisation shifts to a higher order.
(These principles were formulated for me by the ‘Art of Hosting’ community)

What I understand of Don Beck’s work in Palestine shows clearly that he understands and incorporates these principles.

Diversity Rules – Especially if it Interacts!

It is also fair to say, I think, that an understanding of Spiral Dynamics integral – or any model, for that matter – on its own (as if it were possible to separate this out from the living minds in which such understanding is embedded!) is not enough. So all the other development and change models that have been developed over the years can be very beneficial. For example, I often use Theory U (Otto Scharmer) as a guideline when I work to give me an insight into where I might be in a process and what might be the next step, what I might have overlooked or forgotten and, most importantly, what attitudes of consciousness might be most helpful for me to adopt to move things on.

I am part of a small-but-growing community of change agents inside the EU Commission, where we are experimenting with systemic change. The Commission is a huge and rambling bureaucracy with real and valuable work to do in the world, but like all large public administrations, it is hampered (and knows it) by it’s internal organization into departments (silos) which tend to seal themselves off from each other and compete rather than cooperate. We are playing with different ways to lure people into collaborating more in their work and into entering the necessary degree of authentic relationship with people elsewhere in the system (in other silos) who hold other, crucial parts of the picture. In this connection I see how true it is that “a system changes when its perception of itself changes”. The community is also exercising (and exploring) collective leadership as one of the principles of sustainable change.

In fractal terms, I see the same tendency towards ’silo thinking’ sometimes in the various communities of interest I belong to. These communities are drawn together by their fascination and passion for their field of interest and practice. They often have a tendency to compete with other communities—and to look at ways in which their model or approach is better or more effective than the others. A conversation about Theory U (or any other approach) inside, say, the Spiral Dynamics integral community, could go in that direction, but I would prefer to raise another kind of question:

What is it that Theory U contributes to the field of human flourishing that wouldn’t be there without it? I ask the same question about Spiral Dynamics integral, Chaordic design principles (Dee Hock), the art of hosting meaningful conversations, other developmental models (Kegan, Torbert & Cook-Greuter, Laske), Wilber’s Integral theory, Tarot as a presencing tool, Holacracy as a model of governance, systemic constellations as a tool for systemic insight and transformation, and so on. Each of these discoveries/inventions/insights adds something. And not one of them stands up on its own. Which reminds me that “in nature a living system participates in the development of its neighbor (an isolated system is doomed).”

To give an example, one of my current fascinations is how the different developmental theories fit together. I am acquainted with four or five of them, and have studied a couple in some depth. I experience the truth in each of them, so I can’t say one is better than another—and yet they are all different and I assume they each serve particularly well in particular contexts. One thing that SDi does that none of the others appear to do, for example, is to map social currents so elegantly. The other models seem to me to be applicable to individuals alone. And yet, if I assume that all these models are different maps of the same territory, there are some complexities in each that mean I cannot map one model onto another without discrepancies.

For example, if I take Laske’s scale of social-emotional development (based on Kegan’s, with the refinement that he clearly and cleanly separates out social emotional development from cognitive development), I find I can’t just overlay it onto the SDi spiral, because somehow it seems to run perpendicular to it (which doesn’t make Laske horizontal where SDi is vertical). Laske’s different stages, like Kegan’s, look at how the individual constructs his/her reality, and where the focus is at each stage. Adult development starts at stage 2 (adolescent), which is very much about gratification of one’s own needs with an instrumental view of others as pawns to be manipulated. It moves to stage 3, with full ’socialization’ into the social norms—whatever ‘games’ the society at large happens to be playing. At this stage, conformity is key. Stage 4 brings individuation, when a person moves away from the conventional mindset to find his/her own voice and values, and one’s own integrity must be preserved at all costs. Stage 5 (Laske and Kegan venture no further) is where we begin to deconstruct ourselves, understanding, among other things, that we are not our values, but beings with the capacity to generate value systems. Our focus moves towards transparency and insight into that which is and the ways in which our own inner constructs distort that.

My reason for laying all this out is to verify my understanding of how this system fits with the spiral. As I see it, the key lies in stage 3 (conventional), because a person can be completely identified with the social norm at any place on the spiral. I have seen this in my travels around Europe. You can be ’stage 3′ in Greece, which is predominantly Blue—or in Sweden, which is as Green as you get. You can be identified with the counterculture as well as the culture. The point is that you are immersed (unaware) in a cultural surround. That is just one example of the way that the different models, when studied in relation to each other, can really add value (and I’m not claiming that SDi is valid only for social groups!!!)

Working Intentionally to Change Systems

Now we come to the work of changing systems (”Living systems cannot be steered or controlled – they can only be teased, nudged, titillated”). I make an assumption here that most readers are pretty interested in systemic change, one way and another. Personally, I cannot resist playing with it, whether or not it does any good. But I’ve watched ‘management’ try to steer and control the living system I am embedded in and the system just doesn’t want to play, thus leaving everybody feeling pretty frustrated and disempowered. Why is this? Because we only support those things we are a part of creating. That’s not because we’re stubborn or stupid; it’s because change needs to make sense to us.  It needs to be meaningful to us (here and now). Leaders with long-term vision can influence a system in a wise direction only if they are part of the system. Really part of the system! When you are working on a system from outside (and don’t see yourself as part of the system – this is a pitfall for many consultants), you can provide environmental stimuli, but you cannot determine how the system will respond to those stimuli.

In these circumstances, teaching Spiral Dynamics, the Integral model, Theory U or anything else makes no sense. They are just more models you’re trying to sell me (I’ve tried). What does seem to work is a chaordic approach (See the Birth of the Chaordic Age, by Dee Hock). The word ‘chaord’ comes from merging ‘chaos’ and ‘order’, and describes the interface between these two forces of nature where living systems reside. (As compared with the interface between order and control, which is where traditional ‘management’ tends to reside!) The chaordic approach starts by identifying/responding to a need that is sensed in the system. Some place of pain or discomfort (yes, the ‘beta‘ phase—the change conditions model used in Spiral Dynamics is a very valid description of the territory). Those who make the first move to address the need (the ‘early adapters’) come together to find a solution. Until they find a clear sense of collective purpose, nothing will move. But regular meeting to explore the situation in search of solutions will deepen the relationships in the group and help it to clarify the principles that will govern how they pursue their purpose. A cohesive group with strong trust and a clear sense of collective purpose can move mountains. In this context, the practices of circle, Bohmian dialogue and action learning in conjunction with the movement down the left side of the U will help. Once the purpose and principles are clear, new people tend to be drawn into the group. The process experienced so far then needs another iteration. Each time new people come in, they need to go through the process of gaining clarity of purpose and buying into the principles (or adapting them). All this is in aid of understanding and engagement. We are building a living system that is creating its own solutions—concepts, organisational structures, products and even practices come later, almost as a by-product of the functioning living system.

The Journey round the U

Once this new living system—which is growing up inside the environment of, and as a generative response to, the dysfunctions in the old living system—starts engaging more actively with the surrounding system and encountering resistance (that can threaten its existence if it triggers the old system’s immune system), that is when it will need—and be motivated—to learn new models and approaches (SDi among them) to wisely navigate the much more complex and entrenched (because successful in addressing the dysfunctions it was created to solve) older system. At this stage it is very useful to have very detailed models of adult development and very exquisite active listening skills in order to engage with key stakeholders in the larger system. And, too, this is the stage at which we start moving up the right side of the U, prototyping in the new system.

If the new system is doing well and achieving results that the surrounding, senior system wants, more and more people will be drawn to join the new system. It is important to keep iterating the process of achieving collective clarity about the purpose of the system and its principles as it grows, while constantly sensing (presencing) into the needs in the environment and realigning purpose when necessary. The alignment with the larger environment is crucial in order to institutionalize the new ways of doing business in a sustainable way.

All this is, of course, simply the sum of my own experience of working in the complex, multicultural, multilingual bureaucratic hierarchical system where I operate. I am aware that I am assuming that my perceptions are scalable and transferable to other systems, and you will all be able to sense from your own experience whether that is the case. Those of you who have read my review of Peter Merry’s (still unpublished) ‘Evolutionary Leadership‘ in the January 2008 issue of the Integral Leadership Review might recognize the ‘imaginal cell scenario‘ of systemic change in what I have described here.

Within the context of the small system (in my own case this is the small but growing community of change agents in the EU commission), I have found that it is important to attend to the deepening and development of the individual members of the group and of the community itself. While it is advisable to greet the larger system as we find it— everybody is entitled to be wherever they are on the spiral—it is important, as a newly emergent system evolving out of the older one, to maximize our chances of survival by building our individual and collective capacity for deep insight, flexibility and wise action. We do this through collective practices—like learning to ask challenging questions (action learning is a great way to do this), presencing, systemic constellations, silence, circle practice, Bohmian dialogue, and the study of models—so that the group knows what each individual member knows and all members learn from each other and continually then take their collective practices to new levels. The diversity of backgrounds and contexts of the members makes it possible to bring the collective learning, wisdom and practices of the group to bear in the many different contexts in which the individual members habitually operate.

Evolutionary Leadership & Collective Leadership

This intentional work has to be set in a broader context of all the other movements emerging on the planet today, in particular the peer-to-peer movement in all its manifestations (which are being beautifully mapped by Michel Bauwens and his Foundation for Peer-to-Peer alternatives).

But this web of innovation and generative change is bubbling up spontaneously all over the planet without anybody engineering, coordinating or orchestrating it. It smells very much like evolution to me as we see it manifesting in the lower, collective quadrants. Synchronicity is at work everywhere in this brew. For example, the following quote (from a paper by the Tellus Institute) literally popped into my mailbox as I was writing this, sent me by soul-brother Mushin (a fellow community-straddler): “A specific type of leadership is emerging that is developing the authority and resources to convene and maintain the dialogues for developing shared visions and perspectives. Movement diplomats work to complement civil society’s paid staff, charismatic visionaries, influential philanthropists, community organizers, and organizational heads. Trained and supported directly by organizations or communities, these diplomats are charged with the task of building systemic coalitions. They translate the rhetoric of different factions, foster communication and find common ground. They provoke learning in their own organizations in addition to reaching out to form alliances. This new evolution in leadership includes core competencies of facilitation, strategic dialogue, systems thinking, and familiarity with future scenarios and the requirements of a sustainable world.” I can add to that list of capabilities: knowledge of many different models (including those I have referred to above), a wide network of deep and generative relationships with other such practitioners and diplomats, and an understanding of what kinds of interventions are most appropriate for what circumstances.

I’ll close with a quote from John Heron over on the p2p foundation’s forum in a discussion on ‘Hierarchy in peer-to-peer’: “Hierarchy here is the creative leadership which seeks to promote the values of autonomy and co-operation in a peer to peer association. Such leadership, as in the free software movement, is exercised in two ways. First, by the one or more people who take initiatives to set up such an association. And second, once the association is up and running, as spontaneous rotating leadership among the peers, when anyone takes initiatives that further enhance the autonomy and co-operation of other participating members.

“This also mirrored in the action research method of co-operative inquiry. Someone launches an inquiry, co-opts participating co-inquirers, and initiates them into the methodology. Once they have internalized it, a genuine peer inquiry is under way with different members at different times taking spontaneous leadership initiatives which raise key issues for peer decision-making and thereby take the inquiry in fruitful directions.“

… and beyond?

But it goes deeper than this. In my experience, it is no longer just about networks of individuals or groups of networks. Evolution is marching on in ways that aren’t showing up on all the radars. I do not yet have any evidence that it has been picked up by Ken Wilber and the integral crew, for example, though it may be one of the phenomena now emerging at SDi turquoise and beyond – at the collective level at least: “So human evolution has something to do with human consciousness awakening first to itself, then to its own evolution and to a recognition and finally an embodied experience of the ways in which we are organically part of a larger whole. As we enter this new stage of individual/collective awakening, individuals are being increasingly called to practice the new life-form composed of groups of individuated individuals merging their collective intelligence as the circle being.” (From Why the Next Buddha will be a Collective. ).

And of course, to create the conditions for these ‘circle beings’ to emerge, many of the practices I have mentioned throughout this essay are wickedly effective…

 

Vicious circle to virtuous circle – collective development spiral

Working with some colleagues the other day in an action learning session, we stumbled on a very powerful insight into why many organisations function the way they do and how that functioning can be released into something quite transformational.

Action learning is a small-group process which has one simple rule: no one may make any statement unless it is in response to a question. Commonly, this way of working brings to light many of the group’s (and individual members’) unexamined assumptions. This was the first time that most of the members of the group had experienced this format, and the problem we were inquiring into had to do with the EU Commission’s annual strategic planning and programming (SPP) cycle. Having spent the better part of an hour unpacking this thorny organisational issue, it was time to distil our collective learnings from the process. One colleague said “I learned that we have an awful lot of assumptions, and that assumptions lead to expectations, which lead to frustration“. When I formulated this on paper as the SPP cycle 1.0, the group exploded into laughter. We had hit the nail on the head.

So what would happen if, instead of just blindly following the chain reaction of assumptions to expectations to frustration ad nauseam, we were to reverse the flow and replace our statements with questions? So when we’re sitting with frustration, rather than re-engage in the cycle, we acknowledge the frustration: “I’m frustrated. That means that I have some expectation that has not been met. What is that expectation? And what assumption of mine is that expectation based on?”

This looks very much like the work we do in our action learning sets. Only instead of doing it in secret, off in a corner somewhere where no one can witness, we do it together, as a collective discipline. This shared inquiry makes it possible to transform the vicious cycle of ‘organisational life 1.0′, step by step.

As we learn, as individuals, to become aware of our frustration and express it, we can begin to recognise the role played by our own expectations and understand that these flow from our own unexamined assumptions about reality. This helps us take responsibility for our own feelings, which is nothing if not empowering. When we do this with others – in our work or private environment – the different elements of the cycle can begin to metamorphose. The assumptions underlying our expectations, when made explicit, give way to clear purpose. The unexamined expectations which used to fuel our frustration, when openly articulated can lead to clear agreements (about our roles, our outcomes, our behaviours). And working together transparently in this way quickly results in mutual trust. Which, as a way of living and working, is so much more pleasant, healthy and balanced that no one in their right minds would not hang out there if given the choice. What’s more, all the organisational bottom lines like performance, accountability, transparency, efficiency and effectiveness escalate off the scale as well.

When this new way of doing business becomes internalised and automatic among a group of people, it will tend to spread virally as the individual members sow the seeds of the new behaviours of questioning assumptions and expectations in the other arenas of their life and work. The conditions are then ripe for ‘organisational life 2.0′ to begin to emerge. Whatever the content of the work to be done, whatever the scale of the challenge, the surest way to wise action is through collective clarity achieved by inquiring together into the question that best holds the essence of the purpose to be served.

I shared this model with a friend of mine, and he saw in it the inner dimensions of the ‘forming, storming, norming, performing‘ model of team development, which describes the behaviour of the team from the outside. However it may be, there are three dimensions that I find particularly important.

• Unearthing and shedding light on previously unconscious expectations and assumptions is the royal road to personal development. That to which one was previously subject becomes an object in awareness, something that we can see and therefore act on.

• In our increasingly complex and interdependent world, we cannot afford to keep blindly following the vicious circle down into conflict, exploitation and bloodshed. Once we move into collective inquiry, the social technologies of collaboration abound that can help us move to wise action at any scale, from local to global. The first step is to help the individuals to shift.

• The art form at the root and core of all these transformations is the wicked question. When people start practicing action learning, the first thing they discover is that questioning is an art the usefulness of which they had overlooked. In action learning, the leader is the person who can ask the best questions.

The Art of Wicked Questions

 

Grass roots collaboration – invisible integral

I just found out about Transitions – a grass-roots model adopted to respond to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change. I am particularly impressed that their website is a wiki. What first caught my attention was the fact that they used Open Space Technology to host their annual conference. Not coincidentally, from the same source, I learned of a gathering of cultural creatives to be held in France, also to be hosted in Open Space format.

Across the Atlantic, the Food and Society movement, sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation, also held its 2008 conference using Open Space – among other techniques gathered under the banner of the art of hosting meaningful conversations. This was a very big gathering (600+ participants), bringing together people from the whole spectrum of food and society – as the name suggests. Since some of my friends were involved in the design and facilitation of the event, I followed with some interest and was impressed by the depth and breadth of the insights that emerged from the collective alchemy as these participative processes metabolised and presenced the system present in the room.

Collective intelligence at work

These are just three examples of mushrooming grass-roots practices that I read as symptomatic of the integral, peer-to-peer age that is emerging on our planet today. It is rare in ‘conventional’ integral circles (meaning communities gathering around the work of Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute) for this kind of thing to be recognised as ‘integral’, because there is no explicit reference to ‘AQAL’ (all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all stages), and I yet I believe that it is an integral phenomenon, whether it is ‘officially’ recognised as such or not.

In my experience, these events tend to cover all the bases simply by dint of being participative and inclusive, so that what comes out of them is multi-quadrant, multi-level, multi-perspectival and yet integrated. But it’s hard to appreciate just how much this is the case if you’re looking in from the outside. It isn’t until you experience them from the inside that you really grok how integral they are – without any particular individual or group deliberately holding any integral consciousness or design. That’s how integral can truly be said to be an emergent phenomenon in the world (in my book): because nobody’s orchestrating it.

Something that doesn’t get enough attention (if any) in integral circles is the whole field of collective intelligence and collective consciousness (it tends to get dismissed as ‘GREEN’). A few individuals with strongly developed consciousness coming together to ‘hold a field’ (it’s the same phenomenon as darshan, I guess) can catalyze a ‘normal’ group to work at a heightened level of awareness quite systematically, in my experience. That’s part of the prototyping we’re playing with (unofficially, I need not add ) inside the EU Commission – where there is a growing demand for these participative approaches, because they are so much more effective than the usual bureaucratic shenanigans.

 

The cards never lie…

On the evening of the third day of our women moving the edge retreat, Maria and Sarah did a tarot reading on the collective question that had emerged from the centre of our circle during the previous days.

The pattern they chose for the spread was the Celtic Cross, where the central card, represenging what is at the heart of the matter, is crossed by what stands in our way. The horizontal line represents time; the vertical line represents consciousness.

The question: What is the next level of women’s leadership connected to source?

Celtic cross

Central card: What is at the heart of the matter

The tower

The next level of women’s leadership connected to source is breaking out of every structure, every paradigm, every thought form that we’ve known. This is going to be like a divine intervention – the lightning rod that comes through.

This is fundamental change, and it’s shocking. It’s painful, it’s frightening. You don’t have a choice of staying in the tower. You’re evicted.

The old concepts of masculine and feminine as we have known them are shrugged off. From the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, from the in to the out, change. It’s absolutely radical.

Transversal card: what is the barrier to that happening?

Seven of swords reversed

Seven of Swords

The right way up, we call this card the nightmare of perfection. You take care of every little detail, and you have to make sure that everything is perfectly right.

The fact that it’s reversed in this spread means that what’s blocking us is that we’re always looking at the bigger picture! We want to get it all perfectly in the big picture, it’s all very conceptual, it’s all up here in the head: we’ve got to figure it all out, and then it’s going to be OK.

That’s blocking us. Because we’re too ‘up there’ in the conceptual realm. We’ve got to ground it. We don’t know how it’s going to be, but let’s just do it.

Actually, we don’t have the choice, given that the central card is the tower. So the more we are sitting with our heads up somebody’s plough… It’s falling to bits, you guys! Let’s be real, we’re in disintegration.

Upper card: What is visible

Eight of pentacles

Eight of Pentacles

This is the apprentice card.

One way of seeing this is that we are making a new contract. We are starting to learn practices and we are apprenticing to learning a new way.

What the apprentice does is the same thing, over and over and over. It looks really mundane, but that’s how you slip through into the mystery.

It’s the archer who becomes the arrow. It’s not about getting the bulls eye, it’s the act that lets the mystery come through. It’s practice, practice, practice… prototyping – and NOT waiting!

Lower card: What is coming to our consciousness

The Emperor

The Emperor

This is the masculine. This is the king.

So what’s coming into our consciousness is, perhaps, how the masculine worldview is so deeply ingrained in us – that’s one way of reading the card.

But the other interpretation is about creating order. So it’s not about throwing out the masculine, but  about creating a new order. Because that’s what the Emperor does.

We do need form. But we have to create from source. It’s not going to look like the tower. It’s going to be completely different. We’re not going to sit down and design it: it’s just going to come through.

We’re realising – It’s not just about us feeling and loving and being nice to one another. It’s like: “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It’s creating more form. The form and structure are there, but it’s what it serves that makes the difference… It’s going to be new, it’s not like the hierarchy.

This new level  of women’s leadership connected to source is going to have form. It actually does something. There’s a masculine energy. It’s very clear and manifest. It’s out of the fundamental shift represented by the Tower that the form will come through.

Card to the left: what we need to leave behind

Judgement

Judgement

We are stepping into a new life. We’re already in a new life!

We’ve been waiting for the judgement call. We’ve been waiting to be awoken to our new lives. There are still a lot of people in this world that feel that they are waiting to step into a new life that somebody else will have made for them. There are a lot of people talking about how bad things are. “It’s really bad, and we need the new life… Someone has to do something about it… “

And that new life is already here! We’re in this time! This time has arrived and we need to let go of waiting for someone to call us into it.

We have to call ourselves into the new life. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

Card to the right: what is the near future we are stepping into

Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune

The wheel is turning. Get out of the way, it’s happening anyway.

We are the right people in the right place at the right time. Things are lining up. This is like the slot machine, about to hit the jackpot.

The next level, in terms of our breaking out of that tower into collective feminine leadership, is that all of us have got to be awake to the alignment. So if you’re not aligned, get the hell out of it! And go find the alignment.

Because that’s what we do: when we find that collective space together, we align with source. That’s what’s going to happen. And we will also know our alignment. It will be more visible. We won’t have to think “Am I? Aren’t I?” It’ll just be there.

This is the culmination of the practice we see in the eight of pentacles. This, we know we must do.

Adding the numerical values of all the cards in the spread, we get the hidden message, the river below the river: Forty-one

We start with the One: is the Magician. The new beginning. Pooling all the tools that we have to create magic. It’s a masculine energy, it initiates, it moves forward to the Four: the Emperor, which is giving form; creating the container in which things can happen. And then you add 4+1 to get 5, which is the Heirophant – or perhaps, in this case, the High Priestesses – it’s the new level of wisdom. In Greek, it means ‘to make the sacred visible’. He is the wisdom holder. He brings through and sheds light on the sacred.

It’s interesting to see all these masculine archetypes here. Part of what we have talked about in this women’s circle is the fact that we have mastered the models (thinking here, in particular, of cutting edge models like Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, U Theory, systemic constellations, the adult development models of Kegan, Cook-Greuter, etc). We understand how to do that, just the way the men do. And now we are remembering what so many of us have forgotten, during these long years in a world steeped in the masculine perspectives, that other bit, about connecting through our bodies to source. We do come through a masculine lens, no matter how much we’d like to think that we don’t. But the feminine is not some sit-around, wishy-washy do-nothing. She is a sassy chick – there is oomph to this! You get out there, talk through the bullshit and get it done! That’s part of what’s being shown to us.

In Greek mythology, you’ve got Heracles. Everybody thinks of Hercules as the big strong guy. In the feminine goddess history, ‘Heracles’ means ‘the one that does what Hera tells him’. Hera, in the masculine mythology, is the nagging wife of Zeus. But Hera is the feminine. So the masculine that does the bidding of the feminine is very powerful. We are talking about source. It’s for us to come through in a very clear way. It’s not about becoming something that we are not. It is time for us to come forward with this presence that we are holding.

We can see how we have been initiating (Magician) and bringing together the skills that we have in order to hold space – create the container (Emperor) in which all of these things can happen in order to shed light on the sacred.

Piece of advice – To help us step into this new level of leadership.

Three of Wands, reversed

Wands are creative energy. Three is a number that brings things together to really move forward and manifest in one direction. This is reversed, so we read this card as: “Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket”. There’s going to be many creative forms of the feminine coming from source that can be manifested in the coming time. The tailor-made, off-the-shelf version is not going to work here. It’s going to be different, and that’s fine. There are going to be many different levels and layers to how it needs to be offered. So let’s not try to centralise it, trademark it! Open Source! Because this is a reversed card, it means that sometimes the creativity can get diminished, because it’s not pulled together.

When we get a piece of advice that is reversed, we pick another one until we get one that’s not reversed. Sometimes this tells us the journey we may have to go on.  So we picked another card, to see how we can heal the reversal.

Ten of Pentacles, reversed

In order to reverse that Three of Wands and get that creativity lined up, we are going to have to be extremely untraditional. We’re going to have to not do what the family has always done before, we’re going to have to be extremely different. However, it’s still reversed. Because it’s reversed, it means we’re not going to manifest the level of karma/potential that we can.

King of Pentacles

This guy is the personal level of the Emperor. He’s the manager. The one that creates order again, but on the personal level. There is a very strong message that’s coming through here, that the masculine really has to do its work. But doing its work gives form to the feminine. This is what we’ve been sensing during these days. We need to have form for the feminine to emerge in our world. For the source to be spoken – to be made explicit. Giving it language, having a model, inviting a gathering…

 

Women Moving the Edge – Day 4

Stone as talking piece

On our last morning, Judy, Nina and I meditated as we had done every morning and it seemed that all of history’s witches and priestesses were with us, holding our circle. As I review our time together, seeing the weaving patterns and recurring cycles, I see how we have been adding all our stories to the cauldron. All the stories from the past, that were invoked in us by the centre, and by each other’s stories. And all our longings, called forth by our own and each other’s stories. All ingredients into the potent potion brewing in the middle. At moments of collective resonance, when the circle being came into focus for a spell, one of us would dive into the cauldron and bring back an insight, a call from the future. What we have been weaving here during these days is of inestimable, unfathomable importance for mankind and our beloved Gaia.

Feather as talking piece

Source is here.
Magic is here.
The oracle is here.

This is what we have hidden,
kept safe through the era of man and machine,
through the years of scientific discovery.
After the divergence is come the time of convergence.
Now it is time to rediscover
What of all that we buried is still real,
in the light of all that has been learned.
There is no longer any danger here:
Nothing that is real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.

The oracle is here.
Magic is here.
Source is here.

BIG talking piece

I wrote in my journal: “It is time I lived life by my own rhythms – moment by moment. There is nothing that stops this any more. The old is dying and there is room already for us to bring in elements of the new. But this time, there need be no repression or denial, no punishment of the old order. Every piece must be turned over and examined, sensed fro mall angles and allowed to find its pace in the new order. Let us dismiss nothing from our awareness that arises there until we have reflected upon it with collective wisdom.”

There is so much still to be said about all that emerged during this gathering. One thing that became clear for us – that Ria has been exploring already for some time – Source and Spirit are not one. And Source is where the feminine connection lies. The question kept coming back again and again – How do we allow source to manifest through us?

Black egg as talking piece

Something came through Lisette on the last day which blew me away. I captured her words exactly:

I’m not
somewhere
else. I’m in your
body. Live me, Be me
as I am. I am this glow. Feel me
I am always there.
Allow
me
to
be
there.
Allow me to show you the way. Allow me to teach you
there’s always a next step and live me by taking that next
step. I am right here. I guard you, I support you, I live in you.
It’s not big deal. I’m just life. Don’t make it too holy! It happens
anyway. I’ll find my way. I’ll have my way with you! I always do.

Holding each other in silence

Ria’s blogging is here. My and Nina’s photos are here.

 

Women Moving the Edge – Day 3

Sunrise over Flemish Brabant

The sun rose redly this morning on ice in the moat and frost on the grass. Yesterday we sank through layers of archetypal woman – the fear, the pain, the anger, the joy and the power. We moved our bodies, we lay around in soft heaps of intimate communing comfort, daring to go that much further together moment by moment, driven on by our curiosity, by our determination not to be held back. Towards dinner we ended up in an excavation of our sexual power and mystery that had us screaming with laughter and weeping with fury and punching pillows in turns.

I have been impressed by all the shared patterns and archetypes that have come through, but I feel a tension between the immediacy of our bodies, with all the SUBJECTIVITY that brings, and the broader arena that women need to move out into if we are to contain and support our menfolk and work in partnership to set our world onto a sustainable path for all its children and species.

Essence of sister-heap

There have been glimpses, but we keep sinking back into the womblike depths of the domestic perspectives. Individually, these are powerful and active women. Collectively, we are still retreating into our harem and wallowing in introspection rather than using our bodies as the collective sensing organ they have the potential to be. Ria is steering us purposefully in that direction, but the field keeps collapsing.

I’m starting to discern one of the edges we are working on here. It’s coming from the stories that the women are telling. Nancy spoke of her dream of buying a bicycle that didn’t fit her and not being able to take it back. Ursula spoke of the split between her power of choice in her home life and her sense of powerlessness in her work life – and the dawning understanding of where her choice there lay. Anne-Marie talked of the choice she made to entrust her newborn baby into the frightened hands of her husband. This was the metaphor that we took to most strongly: we are the priestesses of humanity’s meanings and deep purposes, what keeps us connected to the earth and our physical reality. We cannot just wash our hands of what the men do, fold our arms, shake our heads, turn our backs and stay at home. Our habit of doing this is what has allowed the disconnect to become so strong that it will take a lot of undoing. And that, now, is our task.

Ria the uncompromising!

Sarah and Maria arrived half way through our morning and were absorbed effortlessly into our circle. There is a breathing in and out, an oscillation between seeing and sensing, between looking far outside and sinking deep inside to the enormity of knowing that is accessible to us through our bodies. Oh, how we have forgotten how to do this! Oh, how glad I am that Ria is here to remind us that we KNOW, if only we tune in to that place in us that knows. Ria is awesome. I hadn’t realised quite how thoroughly she has divested her body of the scarring and armouring that so many of us carry deep within us. She had us all sensing with our vaginas, in ways that had me cross-eyed with concentration – while for her it was now second nature. A walking advertisement for emotional body work!

Nina and Ursula evoked Kali in her many-armed form, and we also called in the thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara with the eyes in his hands to see the need in the world. There is a huge disconnect in our world, with so much action going on fed by disembodied concepts without ever any real, visceral checking into what meshes with reality, what is sustainable and what has true heart and meaning. We women have not been doing our job, insofar as we have withdrawn from the world of men into the domestic sphere.

Maria brought in Greek Delphi and the Pythian oracle. She told the story of her visit with Sarah to that place, to all the male structures and systems that had been built around… the rock where the oracle spoke (in metaphors which were more often than not misunderstood – oh how we need to learn to be explicit!) and the cave where she went to hear the answer to men’s questions.

Maria the Wise and Funny

Maria reminded us that we have not lost that which we cherish – we have hidden it! It is still there. We are waiting to bring it out again when it’s safe. And soon, soon it will be. So now is the time to relearn that which we have forgotten in these long years of retreat and withdrawal. And to incorporate and embrace the education, the models, the intellectual power that we women have also stepped into, the masculine realm of concepts and constructs. We can build bridges in a way our men can’t, because we have something they don’t: that bodily knowing, that power to grow and manifest the seeds they plant in us. It is not clear to me whether this capacity is genetic or can be cultivated. All brothers reading this – please feel free to share your perspective on this!

The many armed Buddha

We keep moving from the deep past out into the far future. We revisit our grandmothers, our mothers, the passing of the generations. That is part of the woman. In telling our stories, we are weaving a story in this gathering of where we as women need to go from here, back into the world. We returned to Delphi to hear the story of how Apollo killed the python that protected the stone from which the Oracle spoke. And the python had been male – that part of masculinity that protects and holds space for the feminine. Gradually, a clarity is emerging around the need to send the call out into the world to that masculine, that so many of us – both men and women – are hungry to hear and answer. Before the gathering even convened, we had been talking about the split that had occurred in women – between the domestic and interior and the ‘emancipated’ agentic woman. And here there came, all unexpected, into our circle, the split in the masculine. Always we see the isomorphy of this living system that we are. If the feminine is split, then so will the masculine be. It didn’t occur to us to look, but it was given to us to see.

After dinner, Maria and Sara read the tarot for our question. (That will be a separate blog entry). It was uncanny, of course, as all true magic is. It reminded me strongly that in this world of men-in-suits and machinery, magic is still real.

 

Women Moving the Edge – Day 2

Here are some impressions from my journal, jotted during our gathering. It is an impressionistic and rather disjointed glimpse, snatched in breaks – in between managing multimedia down- and uploading. Our time together deserves rich and textured, multifaceted harvesting. There will be more structured offerings to follow.

Arrival

Once everybody arrived on the first afternoon, we sat, ten women together, sharing our personal edges and exploring our collective one. A bundle of polarities and paradoxes came out. As if we were stuck in the middle. It was a good start. Aquarian energy coming in. A good, warm space, with a satisfying depth of circle conversation and plenty of insights. And with it, for me, a headache that stayed all night, insinuating into my dreams. I was fully prepared to lose the next day to one of my habitual migraines. Thank the goddess, by morning it had dissipated.

The second morning, already over breakfast the ancestors came to call. The women in the forefront, of course. What our mothers did to us, all inadvertently. All these privileged women sitting around the table, the voice came in: it’s not just about being a woman. There are so many other factors. Is the feminine perspective really where we need to be putting our attention right now? And yet, what about the huge majority of that 50% of humanity – our sisters – who are in thrall to their womanhood. Breathing through the noise of the tragic, violent and unequal world created by our subjection, our missing perspective?

The omnipresent middle

Back in our circle, Ria, on behalf of the ‘facilitators’, surrendered leadership to the collective. There would be no more facilitation. Only holding. The structure would come from the talking pieces, the centre and the bell. Looking back, I’m not sure anybody really took that on board. It certainly didn’t result in instant chaos, like it did the first time we pulled that trick. Instead, no sooner than we began, up came all the pain, individual and collective. Heavy and juicy. Why do we carry it? What happens if we drop it? Through what, if not through that, can we connect to ourselves, our bodies, our fluids and our feelings, our ebbings and our flowings?

Anne-Marie reminded us, like a bombshell in our beautiful introspection: Don Beck is opening the circle with five hundred Palestinians today. THAT brought me alive. A flood of ecstasy and urgency and power through my capillaries. My hair on end. The indomitability of life that can bring these forces together…

Unstructured time

It’s interesting what a break can do. We always seem to know when the natural hiatus arrives. We drifted back after a spell around the coffee and biscuits of trying to lead or design what would come next. Nah! Couldn’t be done. We all felt it. When the last of us finally gave up, we were all back in our room together. We didn’t even get back into circle. Some music, some dancing. Some cuddling. Luxuriating in this spontaneous, honeyed silence, interspersed with the occasional chuckle or sigh. Drawing, writing.

It is becoming very apparent, as we gently sink our sensing toes into this third gathering of women on the edge, that we are building on the two that went before. The ‘We’ has been much quicker in the birthing, and the questions born out of the previous gatherings have flowed straight in to the centre, into the present from the past. A major inquiry in the first gathering had been “what is it that we are holding back, and why?” What is this holding back? Since the second gathering, another question has been mingling in with this: What if it’s not always holding back that we’re doing? What if it’s about timing? What if we must sense what the world is ready for, moment by moment by moment?

Coven

The word ‘witches’ has come up, and doesn’t seem to want to go away. And the continual nagging intuition of timing has suddenly quickened in me. We are the generation of witches who will not be burned for our witching. So perhaps, after all, the time is now.

To be continued…