Lately I have been in a number of conversations about self-organizing systems, emergence and what it means to be part of encouraging the development of a different kind of community. In these conversations, I feel challenged to articulate distinctions between our old ways of doing things and the alternative of working with self-organization. The good news is that I am discovering that I know at least some of these distinctions even if I am not yet able to put them into an elevator spiel. I guess after more than twenty years of working in an organization committed to the principles and practices of self-organization, it does make sense that I would have learned something.
For the past year I have been attempting to learn and live the practice of aligning myself with what wants to happen. In the process, I am continually reminded of my habitual patterns of thinking that I know what should happen and trying to make it so. This is only natural given our modern ethos of development, prediction, control and desire to change the world. Like a fish unable to see the water, it often surprises me when I am able to shift my perspective and realize that the world is constantly changing, adapting, evolving with or without my feeble efforts and my grandiose fantasies of control.
At the most fundamental level, the distinction I am sensing is cosmological. What metaphor do I use (at an unconscious and automatic level) to make sense of the world. Is the world a machine that can be reduced to its component parts, understood, predicted and controlled? Or is it a complex, living system that can only be understood as a whole and that is constantly adapting and evolving?
The metaphor through which we view the world determines what we see and how we interact with it. I know each of these metaphors from an internal experiential place as well as an observation of how they affect external reality. What I observe is that the mechanistic view has allowed for amazing scientific and technological understanding and development. It has also created an unsustainable mess of consumption, pollution and environmental destruction. From an internal perspective, I recognize that this metaphor causes me to see myself as separate and to strive and fight to change things and often to feel overwhelmed, frustrated and guilty.
The more that I learn about complexity, living systems, and other new science, the more excited I am about applying these understandings of the world to how I live and how I work. I am energized and excited by the applications of these principles to how groups, organizations and communities develop as complex living systems. When I recognize the adaptive power of communities I realize what a waste of energy it would be to try and plan, organize or control development. Change is going to happen no matter what I do, so how can I align myself with these changes and make my contributions toward the future that I desire.
Models and examples exist of groups and communities that are working within the living systems world view to address problems and to become more resilient. I am so grateful for all that I learned at the Center for Human Development as we intuitively and sometimes painfully learned these lessons. I am grateful for all that I have learned through the Art of Hosting community about applying principles of emergence and adaptive living systems to groups and to change processes. And I am grateful to have experienced this work at a community level, particularly at Kufunda Village in Zimbabwe. Now there is a book, Walk Out, Walk On that focuses on the lessons learned by communities and individuals who are working from this new perspective. Berkana Institute is an organization that has been in serious inquiry about the application of living self-organizing principles by communities involved in addressing their own problems. Walk Out, Walk On describes seven of these communities and the lessons they have learned. Following are the principles that Berkana has identified from these community experiences:
- Start anywhere, follow it everywhere.
- We make our path by walking it.
- The leaders we need are already here.
- We are living the worlds we want today.
- We walk the pace of the slowest.
- We listen, even to whispers.
- We turn to one another.
So, now I find myself in conversations and in local efforts to respond in new ways to challenges and to the need for resilience, redundancy and re-localization and I want to embody a different way of seeing and of being. I want to be able to model and practice conversational leadership and to work from the knowledge that I am part of a living system and not an expert who wants to fix it. I want to live from a joyful place of celebrating the abundance of possibilities and to resist the psychology of contraction. It feels a bit like Moses or Martin Luther King Jr. seeing the Promised Land without being able to inhabit it. Fortunately, I am able to inhabit this new way of being, even if only for moments before I revert to old patterns and perspectives. I am so grateful for teachers and pioneers who provide models and examples. And I am grateful that this is an ongoing learning process.
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