Accentuate our differences

Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home.  Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute…

Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.”

One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide us with evolutionary potential.  This immediately rang bells for me as I’ve been thinking about this in the work of strategy, whether that means creating a ten year plan for an organization or simply exploring options for moving forward on a discrete piece of work.  Finding the pathway of best evolutionary potential requires that we introduce diversity and difference into the system.  Working together across difference, as my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart would say, is a strategic and evolutionary imperative.  Accentuating the differences between each other is crucial for learning new things, seeing the world in new ways and finding new pathways out of complex tangles.

This is one of the reasons I like Open Space Technology so much.  It brings a huge variety of exploration to a common topic to create multiple pathways forward for exploration.  Buit whatever we can do to accentuate our differences and work together across them actually improves the evolutionary potential of the system we are in.