Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
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My business year usually follows the wet seasons, running for September to June. I’m finally back home on Bowen Island, relaxing and recovering, feeling rather burned out from a very heavy year of travel and work. Here are a few links that crossed my path recently:
- Euan Semple on why flashmobs are beautiful.
- Johnnie Moore on change myths and “best” practice.
- Holger Nauheimer has a series of posts on skills and change worldviews.
- Dave Pollard‘s unschooling manifesto.
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Back in Halifax after a few days on PEI staying at Rob Paterson’s place. Right next to the house we were in was a striking contrast in field ecology, comparing a monocultured wheat field with a former horse paddock which has become a meadow. Rob and I spent the better part of an hour talking about these two fields and drawing analogies between them and the kinds of organizations we work with: some are monocultures and some are communities. The above video is a five minute summary of some of the things we discovered on our own.
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Inspired by spending a bit of time with Keith Webb this past week at ALIA West, I’ve been looking deeply at the patterns of the natural world for teachings and illumination on questions that I’m working with. Wlakiong through a forest with Keith is a revelation, as Susan Szpakowski points out in this blog post from ALIA West. He helps you to see patterns that are instantly recognizable but which you may never have noticed before, even for someone who knows his way around the woods a little.
This week, along with Tennson Woolf and Esther Matte, I’m running an Art of Hosting with labour educators and union activists from the Canadian Labour Congress. Some of us were in a little conversation tonight about the relationship between invidual and collective, which is a topic that is of great interest to unions. There is special interest in what it means to be an individual leader working a whatever level WITHIN a union to help bring a union into an innovative space. Many of the people we work with feel this tension.
I thought of Keith today as we were talking about this topic and I spoke a little about what I know about the way the natural mixedwood plains hardwood forest of this part of the St’ Lawrence River valley reclaims a pasture, in a process known as ecological succession. The natural form of landscape here is mature hardwood forest, and that forest comes into being after a number of successive stages of reclamation by different species. First cedar tress move in, and it is not uncommon to see abandoned meadows and pastures with little stands of small cedars in them. A field with one cedar sapling in it is already on it’s way. After the cedars, nitrogen fixing species like poplars arrive and then later maples and oaks and ironwoods and so on.
The question I asked was, in the context of individual and collective, when does the FOREST arrive? Is it in the presence of one tree? Is it two? Is it more? What is the forest anyway, for it is not merely a collection of individual trees. It is a phenomenon itself, arising from many individuals, but possessing an emergent property. Undoubtedly, individuals have an importan role to play in this process, but when does the forest arrive?
Likewise I said in human history union is our natural way of being. The holy books that tell the creation stories that start with Adam and Eve mislead us into thinking that humans were ever alone. We have never as a species known lonliness – we have always been living in union with each other. When our structures lose life, it is individuals that reclaim our natural way of being within them. When, then, does union appear? Is it with the first relationship, or is it when the structure of the Union appears on the scene?
We’re playing in questions like these this week, all in service of the most powerful and compassionate work that unions do in this country – supporting the learning and survival of working families and communities and helping community to thrive in all times, not just good ones. Or bad ones.