I’ve just finished reading the Transition Handbook. Reading it has changed me. I’ve known about the transition movement for some time – I’ve been hearing Peter Merry talk about his experiences in the early days of Transition City Den Haag. We’ve been talking about transition countries – even Transition Planet. Now I know better what the fuss is about, and I’m all fired up!

The Transition Initiative is definitely a product of our times. To quote Richard Heinberg “If the 20th century was one of unprecedented growth in nearly every significant parameter (population, energy use, per capita consumption levels, etc.), the present century promises to be one characterised by declines in nearly all of those same categories, along with catastrophic weather events and drowning coastlines”.

The Transition Initiative is concerned with the transition to a post-fossil fuel society, based on the necessity of change forced by the twin premises of peak oil and climate change. Heinberg again: “Fossil fuel depletion might be seen as a good thing, given the horrific environmental costs of using those fuels. But our societal dependencies on oil, coal and gas constitute an enormous collective vulnerability, since there are no ready substitutes capable of fully replicating their services.

Fossil fuel addiction

Thus, as fossil fuels go into decline, we will see a century of contraction in consumption levels that could cause the global economy to implode, undermining the survival prospects for the next generation. Unless we wean ourselves from these fuels proactively, societal support systems will crash just as the global climate gets pushed past a tipping point beyond which there will be nothing humans can do to avert worst-case impacts including sharply rising sea levels and devastated crops. Depletion and climate issues converge to make a deliberate, cooperative transition away from fossil fuels the centrepiece of our human survival strategy for the remainder of the 21st century.”

When I stop to think about everything in our society that depends on fossil fuels, I get a runaway list that takes my breath away and leaves me in despair. So it’s not OK to stop there, after delivery of the bad news. That just leaves us feeling overwhelmed and fatalistic. What the Transition approach does is hitch onto the terrifying reasons for change a vision of the future which is not only well within our grasp but also extremely uplifting and compelling, because – no matter how you look at it – it is so much better than what we have now.

Resilience and relocalisation

Using local materials – cob building

Central to the Transition approach is the concept of ‘resilience’ – the ability of a system, from individuals to whole communities, to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shocks from the outside. Founder Rob Hopkins insists that as we move to cut carbon emissions, we must give equal importance to rebuilding the resilience of our communities. If we fail to do so, we will cook our goose anyway. The degree of oil dependency of economic globalisation – irrespective of the injustice and environmental destruction it has caused – means that we have no choice now but to move towards more localised, energy-efficient and productive living arrangements. What becomes clear from the Transition Handbook is what fun that’s going to be!

Visions of how we could be living

Imagine communities where homes are made from local materials, set in edible landscapes, grown according to permaculture principles and capitalising on local varieties of fruit and vegetables. Intensive organic gardening techniques, carpentry, nutrition and cooking, composting and using local building materials are part of the standard educational curriculum and many pupils and students run their own enterprises in service of their community. Local currencies, backed by the national currency and by locally-produced energy and food production, keep wealth in the community. Healthcare is about wellness and education, the population lives a healthier lifestyle, with more exercise and better diet (less processed food); doctors prescribe (and procure) locally-sourced medicines. Energy efficiency and retrofitting, domestic solar panels and wind turbines and other locally appropriate energy sources feed locally-owned and managed minigrids that supplement the national grid and keep the community energetically independent.

Edible landscape

There are a host of reasons why relocalising the economy is both desirable and inevitable. They are all set out in the Transition Handbook and they all make sense. Much more sense than our current trade relations in many cases. As a convinced European, I squirmed to read that “In 2004, the UK imported 17.2 million kilos of chocolate-covered waffles and wafers and exported 17.6 million kilos; we imported 10.2 million kilos of milk and cream by weight, from France, and exported 9.9 million.” All the difference that such transactions make in the world is to burn the fossil fuels and pump carbon into the air – oh, and have lorry drivers sitting in one position for 12-15 hours a day away from their families… and enrich the middle man… and inflate the trade figures and the GNP. When I get back to work at the European Commission after my holiday, I’m going to start asking some serious questions!

Honouring our humanity: Storytelling and addiction strategies

Local currency

Another key ingredient to the Transition approach is telling new and appetising stories about the future. “Our culture is underpinned by cultural myths we all take for granted: that the future will be wealthier than the present, that economic growth can continue indefinitely, that we have become such an individualistic society that any common goals are unthinkable, that possessions can make you happy, and that economic globalisation is an inevitable process to which we have all given our consent.”

So true. And so clear that we need new stories “that paint new possibilities, that reposition where we see ourselves in relation to the world around us, that entice us to view the changes ahead with anticipation of the possibilities they hold.” This is where the Transition approach differs starkly from conventional environmental campaigning. It leaves us not wallowing in guilt, anger and horror, but excited to get started. “Rebuilding local agriculture and food production, localising energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero-energy building, rethinking how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an extraordinary renaissance – economic, cultural and spiritual.”

Community

Intriguingly, the Transition Initiative recognises that our early 21st century societies are addicted to fossil fuels, and part of its approach is to get to grips with the psychology of addiction and change. For my money, recognising and tackling these inner obstacles will be one of the keys to the movement’s success. The other will be its ability to build strong friendships and community as an unavoidable by-product of the process.

Power to the people – and a new role for government

Governments generally don’t lead, they follow. Many of the decisions that governments would have to take to facilitate “Powerdown” (reducing consumption and moving to a post-fossil fuel economy) today seem inconceivable from an electoral perspective. But if communities have already set out where they want to go, moving towards a positive, co-created vision of a lower-energy future, then they can start to set a very different agenda: “Here is our plan: it addresses all of the issues raised by the coming challenges of climate change and energy security, and it will also revitalise our local economy and our agricultural hinterland, but it will work far better if carbon rationing is in place, and if the true costs of fossil fuels are reflected in goods and services”. Policies which were once electoral suicide now become election-winners.

A learning expedition for participatory democracy

The Transition Initiative has a great recipe for getting people involved. First it holds an evening talk on a topic – like food, energy, building using local materials, etc.  Then, a few days later, it holds an Open Space Day around the same subject, inviting people to come together to dream and co-create the community’s next steps around the topic in question. This is the royal road to harvesting the community’s collective intelligence and creating ownership for locally-generated solutions.

The transition movement is spreading virally across the world. In three short years it has replicated itself in more than 90 different locations, from small communities to large cities and even bioregions. It provides a strong support network for new initiatives and learnings from one community spread rapidly to the others through a community wiki and newsletters.

The other part of the equation: global governance

The transition movement is a powerful and hope-giving grassroots template that can provide a lot of solutions to the ‘localisation’ part of the equation. But since so much of the problem has to do with globalisation, we’ll get nowhere if we can’t tackle that, too.

“Governments remain reluctant to address [the climate change] threat because any country acting alone to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, without similar commitments by other governments, risks damaging the competitiveness of its industries” (Financial Times – 16 November 2006). In other words, it is not that governments don’t want to act, it’s that they fear it will harm their economic competitiveness in the global market.

Destructive international competition

According to John Bunzl, the man behind the Simultaneous Policy campaign, the problem lies in the relationship between governments, and in particular its destructively competitive nature. This astoundingly simple and obvious insight seems to have escaped us all in this era of globalisation. The failure to ‘grok’ the primacy of this fact is most likely rooted in the dominant Rational worldview that underlies the nation state system and drives the current economic paradigm. That worldview can see the fish (the individual players – nation states and corporations), but not the water that governs their relationship (destructive competition). Destructive competition is the chief weakness in this worldview that renders nations incapable of dealing with the new life circumstances created by globalisation.

Almost regardless of the global problem we seek to address – be it climate change, trade justice, human rights or global poverty – and almost regardless of what NGOs, charities and activists may do in an attempt to mitigate them, no substantive progress is likely unless and until the underlying problem of destructive competition between nations is adequately recognised and dealt with.

Freedom to act constrained by competitive pressure

The above figure shows how the need to maintain competitiveness constrains governments. Where the competitive pressure between nations is low, as it is on domestic issues, they remain relatively free to act. But as soon as that competitive pressure stiffens – as it does for all international issues under globalisation – their freedom to act is severely curtailed.

When we look a little deeper, we see that this destructive competition also undermines democracy. The free movement of capital and corporations forces governments to implement only policies that won’t displease global markets. So whatever party we elect is constrained to a very narrow range of business-friendly policies that maintain international competitiveness. In terms of macro-economic, social and environmental policy, it no longer matters much who we vote for, or whether we even vote at all.

According to John Bunzl, any solution to this abysmal state of affairs must meet three criteria:

• It must be global – Because the free movement of capital and corporations is global, only global governance can suffice. Since there is currently no global supranational body with binding authority over nation states, the solution will have to come – at least to begin with – from the level of nation states themselves.

• It must be implemented simultaneously in all countries – Given the vicious circle of destructive international competition, any solution must be implemented simultaneously to cut the cycle. Only if all or enough nations act simultaneously, will no nation, corporation or citizen lose out to any other.

• It must operate through existing electoral systems – Since the most powerful governments may not see global cooperation as in their interests, the citizens must use the only power they have – existing electoral systems – to compel their governments to cooperate.

If left to reach a critical stage, competition as a strategy for individual survival becomes a strategy for collective suicide. We have now reached the point where cooperation is in everyone’s self-interest. But to achieve cooperation at a new higher level without descending into chaos, we need not only global and simultaneous action to overcome the barriers to international cooperation – we also need a catalyzing political process.

This is what the Simultaneous Policy campaign (Simpol for short) is seeking to provide. And it really is simple: individual citizens join the campaign by writing to all parliamentary candidates in their electoral area, informing them that they’ll be voting in future national elections for ANY candidate or party (whose other policies they don’t find objectionable…) that pledges to implement the campaign’s global policy package simultaneously alongside other governments. Politicians who sign the pledge attract those votes and yet they risk nothing because the policy package gets implemented only if and when sufficient governments around the world have signed up too. But if they fail to sign the pledge they risk losing their seats to their political competitors who have.

The policies that qualify for inclusion in the global policy package are those that generate an affirmative answer to the question: “Would the unilateral implementation of the policy measure (i.e. by a single nation or by a relatively small group of nations) be likely to have an adverse effect on the nation’s (or group’s) competitiveness?” – the yellow field in the figure below.

The Simpol playing field

Currently, the policies are selected and developed by the community of citizen-adopters through an annual proposing and voting process. The next big challenge will be to develop this collective policy formulation process so as to maximise on the collective intelligence of the greatest possible diversity of contributors. I can imagine the work of Tom Atlee around Citizens’ Deliberative Councils being invaluable in this context.

Where local and global meet

I can’t help putting two and two together at this point – what the Simpol campaign and the Transition Initiative have in common is that they are both driven by individuals acting collectively. I see no reason why grassroots movements like the Transition Initiative cannot take care of the ‘grey areas’ in the above figure – where the degree of freedom for local action is high – while the Simpol campaign – or something like it – takes care of the yellow areas where nation states must collaborate or we will all die.

Both the Transition movement and the Simpol campaign are using the internet to reach out globally – to collaborate across distances and spread their message virally. They are also harnessing the power of community to spread the word and educate the public. With our growing arsenal of social technologies for collaboration and communication, humanity is not sitting idly by waiting for disaster to strike. We have everything we need to make the leap to the future that most appeals to us. We just have to believe it and act accordingly.

If there is one thing humanity needs to learn at this point in history, it is how to live and work together constructively. With so much attention being paid to technological solutions to every imaginable problem and personal development for individuals on every rung of the evolutionary ladder, I keep being drawn to the areas which receive the least attention. Hopefully (i.e. my time permitting) this will be the first in a series of posts addressing some of the issues facing us at global level because of our organisational blind spots. I am acutely aware that I cannot possibly do justice to this subject – it’s vast and subtle, so this first attempt feels like jumping with both feet into a puddle. But we have to start somewhere, and I hope your comments will help to refine the ideas set out here.

22 years in a vast, relatively high-performing supra-national bureaucracy has given me some insight into the functioning of organisations driven by mainstream (both modern and most-modern) thinking. This experience has given me precious pointers to the deepest blocks that keep the mainstays of our civilisation – in particular, government at all levels – sluggish, uninspired, prone to corruption and tragically hampered by blind spots.

Little of our systemic malaise is really the fault of wicked or stupid individuals. Casting about for scapegoats to pin the blame on is not going to solve anything. Rather, I think we will find our way out of our collective messes only once we learn to pay as much attention to the internal dimensions of civilisation – our individual mindsets and cultural worldviews – as we do to the external ones. Only once we are as well-versed with those invisible inner dimensions as we are with the visible outer ones will we be able to design organisational solutions that support the kind of ethics and transparency that can carry our civilisation through the challenges now facing it into the kind of future we all aspire to, rather than the grim apocalypse that awaits us, sooner rather than later, if we just keep on doing more of the same.

Transparency is a 4-quadrant affair

Transparency and ethics tend to be seen as part of the cultural aspect of an organisation, but they must be embedded in its structures, processes and behaviours before they can truly become part of its culture.

This is part of the broader issue of how we deal with fundamentals like building an organisation. In the case of government – which pays lip service the world over to the highest ideals and values – it seems particularly important to heed one universal law: “As we are, so shall it be”. ‘It’ being that which we bring into the world. If we can’t achieve ecority and sustainability inside, then how can we promote it externally?
One point I’d like to make before going further is that as individuals, we are all also members of organisations. Even if we are self-employed or unemployed, even if we live on the streets, we are members of a family, a community, a society. And every organisation we belong to has some function or purpose in the world – be it to promote the wellbeing of its members or to effect some change in its wider environment, or both.

The interface between the individual and the organisation is inside us
The only sensing organ that any organisation has is its members. As members of an organisation that has its own function in the world, we are both individual holons ourselves, and members (not parts ) of the organisation. When we are confronted with something that isn’t right, or isn’t working within our organisation, we feel tension in our bodies. This is how we function as the sensing organ of the organisation.
People who work inside an organisation (most often as employees), typically perform a specific function or fill a specific role in that organisation. They are responsible for ensuring that certain things get done, that certain information gets channelled in time to where its needed, etc. When we are functioning ‘in role’, then the tensions that we feel in our bodies are often about what we perceive is going on in the system. Only we rarely recognise this crucial fact – and our organisations never do.

But we are also souls in roles. We just don’t leave ourselves behind when we go into work. We have only one vessel with which to carry messages to two different places – one to the soul, and one to the role. So it’s very easy for messages to get muddied – we see it happening all the time, often without recognising that this is what’s going on. It is important to learn how to distinguish between the two – it is crucial for the whole system that both be honoured and appropriately attended to.

It is also important to recognise that our individual tensions connected to historical ‘baggage’ can also be shared – they can at the same time be related to larger systemic issues that we need to be looking at.

In a truly integral organisation, it will be recognised that our bodies are a channel serving multiple communication purposes with the same range of sensations. So when we feel a tension, it might be to do with an egoic issue around our own needs for appreciation/safety, etc., or it might be to do with a functional / organisational / systemic issue that is relevant to how we work together and should therefore be addressed as an issue of governance.

The integral organisational practice called Holacracy gives us a language and process for dealing with these tensions in a constructive and evolutionary way, by regularly setting aside time for meetings exclusively dedicated to matters of governance. Not every moment is appropriate for bringing up tensions, so governance meetings are specifically there to acknowledge that the way we improve how we are doing things is by sensing what’s not working, or what could be working better, and voicing it. The decision-making process used in governance meetings – called integrative decision-making – is designed to ensure that all the necessary (i.e. relevant) perspectives on an issue are taken into account.

Individual and collective practices that support integral organisation

There are specific things that we can do – individually and with others – to increase our capacity to co-create and maintain healthy integral organisations. As members of an integral organisation, part of our individual practice should be to track our individual inner tensions and learn to discern what they are about. Part of our collective practice as a the group is to create the space for individuals to voice these tensions, and to collectively unpack, resolve and learn from them. While this process can at first appear to be time consuming, its outputs include collective clarity, transparency and trust  – all rare and precious ingredients that make a high-performing, efficient and effective community in the long term.

These practices will quickly surface the kinds of tricky issues that typically lead to all sorts of conflict and toxicity in integral circles. Every group/organisation has some taboos, things that nobody talks about directly, even when they are getting problematic – typical ones are money and ego.

Ego: We are called to be aware of what we are identified with – we are all identified with something. We all have historical baggage, unconscious habits of communication and relationship that can get in the way of collective processes. No one is perfect and we all have areas of the psyche that could do with some healing. In the integral organisational space, we are called to be rigorous but compassionate with each other in moments of unconsciousness, to call out ego – in ourselves and each other – when it is being obstructive, and set it gently but firmly in its place on the sidelines – not in the centre.

Money: We all have baggage – culturally and individually – around money. It’s a minefield that can poison the most promising of enterprises – particularly in non-profits and when working with a mix of paid professionals and volunteers, as many embryonic integral organisations are, where the boundaries and distinctions are not clear or explicit. It can be helpful to spend some time as a team talking about our relationship to money (how it is, rather than how we would like it to be), and making it an explicit practice for all members to track our own individual inner tensions when money and associated concepts come up in a conversation, and voice them. (Also when we are getting a tension around someone else not tracking their tension…). Since money is an expression of energy, raising tensions around money is a form of energetic guardianship, and should be honoured as such. How an organisation deals with money issues is a litmus test about how it deals with energy at more subtle levels.

Having a set of practices and processes with which to resolve these tensions turns an aspect of collective life that often brings misery and disaster into a rich source of individual and collective learning and evolutionary development.

Ethics at its most foundational is practicing that level of awareness where we are awake to the subtlest of contractions (what the Buddhists call emotional and mental obscurations) as they unfold inside us, distinguishing what they are about and acting (or refraining from acting) accordingly. Again, ‘As we are, so it shall be.’ It’s not a principle that we should live up to, it’s a description of the way it is.

Attending to the invisible health of the organisation – ‘Sensing into the field’

The invisible relational space is a crucial part of any human enterprise, although it is never explicitly addressed in most organisations. It is a powerful support for the inner development of the individual members and should be taken into consideration when designing organisational structures and processes. My sense is that a relational field is born whenever individuals relate to any object in their awareness – be it another person, an idea, a value, an organisation, the planet or the cosmos. The strongest fields are those which are held consciously, meaning that people (either all the people in the field or designated members)  attend to what is happening within the field consciously and with a deliberately chosen intent.

The highest-performing groups and organisations, be they permanent or temporary, typically operate inside a strong relational field that can sometimes feel tangible to outsiders entering it.

Remembering that an integral organisation has a higher purpose and a value-bearing function in its wider environment, it is important to ensure that all its members are in touch with that purpose. In order to do really good, effective work, we have to build and maintain the field that consciously connects us with life, each other, the planet and the organisation’s purpose in that context.

‘Building the field’ is a discrete activity/process which can be performed deliberately as part of an organisation’s collective life. It is important to recognise that it takes an investment in time up front to build a field for any important occasion, event or meeting in an organisation’s life, but it pays off in terms of the quality and potential impact of the event or meeting itself, as well as the impact on the energetic field of the organisation. Once individuals have built a space of trust together, less time is needed to build and maintain the field, but it still calls for intention and attention. Because this invisible fieldwork nevertheless calls on material resources (time and attention), it is part of the organisational capacity that ‘senior leadership’ must value and commit to. It is in their interests to do so as it will support the organisation’s performance and achievement of its aims in the world.

This is not a ‘nice-to-have’ luxury – an organisation can design it into each one of its processes until it becomes second nature to every member and part of the organisation. This can quickly become one of the ‘unique selling points’ of an organisation – the benefits of this relational field to the individuals who choose to work with/in the organisation should not be underestimated. The support of a powerful ‘we-space’ is one of the greatest draws to high-calibre people – something they often don’t get elsewhere in their professional lives.

Nurturing and holding this field is invisible, ‘behind-the-scenes work’. There is a need to make time to talk, to sit together in silence and wait for the middle to speak. Systematically. Breathing in and breathing out, there must be time built in for reflection. Mankind tends to neglect reflection in favour of action, just as agency gets more of a look-in than communion, the masculine more than the feminine. Much of the malaise and dysfunction we are witnessing all around us in the world today is a consequence of that neglect and imbalance.

We must build reflection into our processes – the ‘being space’ is where we become aware of our blind spots – just as in the ‘doing space’ we run up against them. Balancing being and doing.  So before we move, we need to sit back and sense into the field, think strategically and holistically about what’s required (treading the chaordic path). After we act, we need to sit back and reflect on what we have learned. And through it all, we need to be constantly sensing into, nurturing and articulating our shared purpose as it unfolds, as that is our invisible leader.

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.’

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?

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.

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…

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.

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.

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 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…