Monthly Archives: December 2007

Collaboration As A Living Emergent Co-Creative Process

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Two quotes came across my field of vision today, both speaking to the art of working in groups in a living, present, emergent way, mirroring some of my own thinking over the past few years.

“One primary qualification for guiding others in a living process is less on what we know and more upon our capacity for holding presence with the unknown; that is, to be curious and open to whatever is emerging in our awareness that appears to be fuzzy, ambiguous or unclear. This capacity for sense making is amplified when we are together and diminished when we are apart. There is a power that comes to us when we meet as an ‘ensemble’ where, for a moment, we forget ourselves and work for the benefit of the larger whole. Creating spaces for exploring what we do not yet know, spaces where we can be present to what is unformed and incomplete, sets in motion a process of unfolding order, a practice which has always been familiar for the artist but unfamiliar to others whose have been educated into a more parts-based mentality that is common in the industrial world. Once this living process is initiated, it will follow along the trajectory of its own unfolding potential—one that is natural, organic and unrepeatable—and which reflects the expression of wholeness as it appears to us in that particular moment.” — Michael Jones, Roots of Aliveness, Fieldnotes

“Humans in relationship with each other are, after all, living systems, and as such even a group of two people can be an incredibly complex system, bouncing between high degrees of chaos and order. So there is nothing whatsoever mechanical about human beings, and therefore any approach to working with humans – and life in general, is by definition a living systems approach….And so I am led instead to think about the attributes of living systems so that I might better understand effective ways of working with people.” Chris Corrigan, Parking Lot

Chris and Michael’s words echo the thinking I have done with my colleague Ann Svendsen as we’ve developed our Co-Creative Multi-Stakeholder Engagement model, which is grounded in a living systems view, and suggests that new ways of thinking, leading and engaging are required for innovative outcomes. Some of the characteristics from living systems that are important include:

New Ways of Thinking

  • Systemic. A shift in thinking from a mechanistic consideration of separate parts to the relationships and dynamics of the functioning whole.
  • Network-Based. Recognition of networks as the fundamental pattern of all living systems, and of human networks as complex adaptive systems. A ‘community’ is created over time around shared purpose, language and meaning , and the development of shared values, reciprocity and mutual trust in the longer term from being and doing together.
  • Holistic. An integrative mindset where the aim is to evolve the whole system while allowing each “part” to retain its unique core identity and purpose.
  • Sustainable. A focus on the social, environmental and economic considerations and impacts in both the short and long term.
  • Inclusive. Engagement of all relevant and affected members of the system, rather than just those stakeholders who meet the test of credibility, influence and urgency. The organizing assumption is that there is strength and innovative potential in diversity.

New Ways of Leading

  • Voluntary. Stakeholders are free to set their own priorities, and to contribute when and how much they wish. They engaged because they are motivated to do so, rather than ‘compliant’ and forced to participate.
  • Relationship-Focused. Building connections, trust-based relationships, and mutual understanding is essential for effective system-wide action. Relationships between members of a network are dynamic – they grow, change and die out over time.
  • Egalitarian. A co-creative approach is egalitarian where members of a system come together as equals to address shared issues and opportunities. Shared contributions, shared benefits, and respect for the contributions of all are important features of this approach.
  • Common Good Focus – The focus is on seeking a common good and on finding common ground where stakeholders are willing to take action together in ways that integrate perspectives and benefit the whole.

New Ways of Engaging

  • Learning-Focused. Creating opportunities for learning together about the history and points of view of other members, developing shared language, vocabulary, interpretations and mental models are all important aspects of building the will, intent and capacity of diverse networks to act together. Collective learning starts from the assumption that no one organization or individual has all the answers, and that addressing complex issues depends on integrated, innovative solutions co-created from all parts of a system.
  • Authentic and Meaningful Dialogue. Transformative and learning conversations between stakeholders that support genuine interactions and communication are emphasized, rather than debate-based and polarizing appproaches.
  • Self-Organizing. Ultimately, though there is usually a convenor, responsibility and leadership for outcomes is shared; leaders emerge rather than being assigned. This reflects the property of emergent systems to self organize and evolve to higher levels of orders that are both more complex and more capable.

For more information, read: Convening Stakeholder Networks

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You Were Made For This

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This message by Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author of Women Who Run with the Wolves) seems perfect as we move into the darkest and longest days of the year: “there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.” This is the full text:

“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D
Author of the best seller Women Who Run with the Wolves

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Effecting Systemic Change and Profound Innovation

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When Adam Kahane was in town for the C2D2 2007 Vancouver conference, I was fortunate to be invited to a small invitational workshop hosted by the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University to explore some of his experiences and theories. Through his international consulting work with Reos/Generon Partners, and his colleagues Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge at the Society for Organizational Learning, Adam has contributed to the development and application of Theory U – a conceptual framework for thinking about deep collective change capable of bringing forth new realities in alignment with people’s deepest aspirations.

Theory U is a helpful visual for understanding three smaller movements or ‘spaces’ – co-sensing, co-presensing and co-creating – representing the journey we must go through to effect systemic change and achieve profound innovation. Typically, in the face of simple or complicated issues (where the problem is knowable, even if difficult socially or technically), our habitual reactions are a linear progression or extrapolation of past standard responses to similar challenges. The journey to addressing complex issues as illustrated by the U can be thought of as these three broad, not necessarily sequential, movements:

  • Co-Sensing – observing and listening with your mind and heart wide open through immersing yourself in current reality.

  • Co-Presencing – retreating from current reality, to reflect and connect to inner knowing, inspiration and will, for what life calls you to do.

  • Co-Creating – acting in an instant from a deep understanding of the whole, to prototype and embody new co-created and co-evolved approaches, solutions and responses.

In this framework, co-creation proceeds from agreement on a common purpose, but not necessarily on a common vision. Consistent with the philosophy of Future Search, parties agree to take action on perceived common ground, despite potential areas of significant disagreement, and learn by doing, that is, through fast-cycle prototyping where the extent of goodwill, commitment, understanding and trust are quickly establish in fact, rather than as possibility.

If we are trying to change reality, says Adam, then until we start to do something together, we haven’t really done anything to truly change reality. The imperative in co-creation is to begin to act together much sooner than we are normally comfortable with, because until we do, what might be possible remains merely a theory.

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Enhancing Capacity for Collective Action

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Recently, I came across the term “civic agency” which in many ways is closely related to the term “co-creative power” that I’ve coined with my colleague Ann Svendsen. “Civic agency”, according to Harry C. Boyte, the founder and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and author of Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life, is “the capacity of human communities and groups to act cooperatively and collectively on common problems across their differences of view. It involves questions of institutional design (that is, how to constitute groups, institutions, and societies for effective and sustainable collective action) as well as individual civic skills. Civic agency can also be understood in cultural terms, as practices, habits, norms, symbols and ways of life that enhance or diminish capacities for collective action.”

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute has developed a framework for building civic agency based on their theory of public work, which they define as “a sustained, visible effort by a mix of people that creates things – material or cultural – of lasting civic impact, while developing civic learning and capacity in the process”. The public work framework moves away from the dominant paradigm model of one-way expert interventions, to a citizen-centered approach that taps and develops diverse talents, and also away from the illusion that professionals can – or should – control processes and outcomes. Five key elements that underpin the public work framework include:

  1. Surfacing the irreducible plurality of interests and ways of seeing the world which is part of the human condition, and understanding that at times interests can be integrated while at other times, merely mitigated.
  2. Conceiving of the citizen as a co-creator of a democratic society – a problem-solver and co-producer of public goods, which is a far more robust definition than volunteer, voter, protestor, client, or customer.
  3. Rooting action in the life of places and reconnecting it to mediating local institutions like schools, businesses, congregations, unions, and non-profits with local communities.
  4. Re-conceptualizing the role of professionals from service deliverer and outside expert to collaborator, organizer and catalyst (on tap not on top), and recognizing that knowledge is co-produced by diverse groups, not simply academics, with the purpose of helping to animate the public world, and not mainly securing commercial gain or communicating to other academics.
  5. Shifting the definition of democracy – so that it is not mainly about elections, laws, and institutions but rather about a society, a lived cultural experience; “not just out there in the public sphere”, “but in here, at the very soul of subjectivity,” and re-conceiving government not as prime mover but as catalyst and resource of citizens.
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Inspiring Quotes on Leadership in these Complex Times

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“We are crossing the river by feeling for stones.” Deng Xiaoping on reform in China

“What does it mean to be a leader in complexity? It means accepting that certain aspects of our work are inherently unknowable. It means accessing the wisdom in our communities, rather than being the ‘Big Brain’ leader who provides the wisdom. It means not beating up on ourselves when we can’t figure something out. Leadership in complexity requires different skills than traditional models of leadership. It requires us to think of leadership as inquiry, and this in turn means that we need to think much more critically about the kinds of questions that we ask. It may not be the answers that need changing, but the questions.” Brenda Zimmerman, Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed

“There is no greater power than a community discovering what it cares about. Ask “What’s possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking. Notice what you care about. Assume that many others share your dreams. Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. Talk to people you know. Talk to people you don’t know. Talk to people you never talk to. Be intrigued by the differences you hear. Expect to be surprised. Treasure curiosity more than certainty. Invite in everybody who cares to work on what’s possible. Acknowledge that everyone is an expert in something. Know that creative solutions come from new connections. Remember, you don’t fear people who’s story you know. Real listening always brings people closer together. Trust that meaningful conversations change your world. Rely on human goodness. Stay together.” Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, A Simpler Way, Berrett-Koelher Publishers

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