Image Description: Cartoon-style illustration of a person with long blond hair, dressed in a blue sweater, white pants, and green sneakers, watering a potted plant that’s sprouting leaves and gold coins. By Ayush Kumar via Unsplash.
“Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love? Love beyond marital, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance. In today’s sharp sparkle, this [season’s] air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp, praise song for walking forward in that light.”
From “Praise Song for the Day” by Elizabeth Alexander
As we help support the weaving of various kinds and scales of networks with focus on different social and environmental issues, one refrain we continue to hear at IISC from those who are at the core of these efforts is that they need more resources and they want more resource providers to understand the power and importance of investing in networks. So, why invest in networks and network weaving now? Here are five essential reasons:
Because We Are Networks. We literally live and breathe because of the many networks we are a part of. “Nobody but nobody makes it out here alone,” Maya Angelou wrote. Social-ecological connectedness and exchange are a baseline determinant of health and wellbeing of all kinds – from our bodies/minds/spirits to our families/neighborhoods/communities to local/regional economies. Think in terms of the mycelial networks that are essential (and until recently, very much under-appreciated) for their contribution to soil health, which translates into nourishment of various kinds for humans and other species. If we do not tend to this foundation, we will see all of our hopes for anything better blow away like so much dust in the wind.
Because Imagination Thrives Through Connection and Exchange. Our overall consciousness and ability to imagine the better is strengthened through warm relationship and generous sharing. To support this, we must invest in convening, different avenues for ongoing communication and grounding our individual and collective nervous systems in a state of relative regulation. These are the key conditions that allow humans to do what we have done for eons: pool information, share understanding, and iterate our way forward through cooperative learning (do, reflect, redo).
Because Our Economies and Ecologies Are Failing Without Them. We need new patterns of connection and flow to ensure equitable wellbeing for all parts of the collective human body and our more-than-human kin. As Dr. Sally J. Goerner writes, “We should care about [growing] inequality because history shows that … concentration of wealth at the top, and too much stagnation everywhere else indicate an economy nearing collapse.” Furthermore, extractive economics that ignore impacts on ecosystems and other species will continue to harm and ultimately kill the host (our Mother) that sustains us all.
Because Movements Are Calling for Them. From frontline movements for human rights, social/climate justice, and Indigenous sovereignty, we’re hearing that there is an ethical imperative to invest in distributed leadership development and right relationship that counters the cult of hyper-individualism, competition, and “doing for and to.” And there is a recognized need among movement leaders to build broad-based solidarity through these trust-bound connections to confront the common enemy of humanity – sociopathic/ecocidal greed and self-serving power.
Because the Future Depends on It. Resilience is no static goal; it is a dance of evolution, reweaving, and collective learning. There is a need to invest in the evolution and reweaving of – and between – truly inclusive democratic institutions that can serve as the anchors for regenerative development, collective learning, and adaptation going forward. Funding network-weaving positions to support these vital processes isn’t just smart, it’s visionary.
There are other reasons that we might add to this list, but honestly, if these five do not grab the hearts and minds of funders/investors, that would seem to further illustrate the plague of disconnection and dissociation that has infected so many of us. Resistance and protest because of concerns about “return on investment” (ROI) is simply short-sighted and narrow in its understanding of system dynamics and the new science of sustainability. What this “energy system and flow network science” tells us is that:
Long-term prosperity is primarily a function of healthy human and more-than-human webs.
The stories we tell ourselves about how the world works are one of our greatest survival tools – so let’s get that (network) narrative right!
The next phase of human evolution is largely based upon our ability and willingness to both learn and reorganize ourselves with more diversity, intricacy, collaborative coherence, robust sharing, and greater resulting collective intelligence.
If you want to step into this light with us, join our upcoming webinar:
“Light Work for Heavy Times: Networks as Fuel for Long-Term Collective Wellbeing” on July 15th from 1:00-3:00 pm EST. Register here.
Energy System Practice: A Sampler of Practices, Frameworks and Tools
Over the course of the last few years I have been delving deeper into the trans-disciplinary science of energy systems, largely thanks to my colleague and mentor Dr. Sally J. Goerner. Earlier in 2022, Dr. Goerner and I offered a session to The Weaving Lab on energy systems science for network weavers. A summary of that session can be found here. Since then I have been working with a few others to explore,identify and build out resources, practices and tools at different “levels” (individual, group/organization, and larger system), all within the context of the planet that sustains us, in the four different domains of Energy System Science. Together, these domains support systemnic saluto-genesis – the capacity of living systems to reproduce resilience and wellbeing. The four domains are:
regenerative flows
resilient and balanced structures
common cause culture
collaborative learning
The Energy System Sciences (ESS) see all “living” systems as “flow networks” or structures that arise from the circulation of resources, information, nutrients, etc. Thinking through the lens of flow, systemic health can be seen as being based on things like:
investment and re-investment of key and diverse resources,
healthy outflows (not polluting or poisoning “the host”),
the velocity and spread of resources in the system,
cross-scale circulation, etc.
The nature and quality of these flows determines how systems are able to adapt and evolve in healthy and health-promoting ways.
The image above offers a sample collection of resources, practices and tools, that transcend specific sectors (economics, education, etc.) and that I look forward to bringing to a group later this fall. Certainly incomplete, these practices also do not all neatly fit into one category, even where they appear to in the graphic – that’s life! If you go to this link, you will find the above image as a clearer PDF document that has hyperlinks for some of what is listed (items that are underlined) that will take you to additional information. And I am always eager to hear what others would add!
I am grateful for the many teachers and collaborators, in addition to Dr. Goerner, who have guided my thinking and practice along the way: Joe Weston, Gwen McClellan, john a. powell, Eve Capkanis, Melinda Weekes-Laidlow, Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, Joel Glanzberg, June Holley, Resmaa Menakem, Katya Fels Smyth, Tanya Tucker, Verna Allee, Carol Sanford, Robert Peng, Maya Townsend, Father Richard Rohr, Dorn Cox, Sherri Mitchell, Harold Jarche, Nora Bateson, Marty Kearns, Tara Brach, John Fullerton, Marilyn Darling, Daniel Christian Wahl, Anne Marie Chiasson, Dr. Chris Holder, Tyson Yunkaporta and Steven C. Hayes, among others.
“We must create civilization(s) for equitable human wellbeing within a healthy biosphere. Since our thinking produced self-inflicted existential threats, the main challenge is to find a practical way to reconcile our thinking with the logic of life.”
– all-women Emerging New Civilization(s) panel. United Nations
Image from Peter Karlsson, “Flower on Fire,” shared under conditions of Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0,
In ongoing work with a group of practitioners dedicated to advancing the study and practice of “energy systems science,” for the sake of resilient and regenerative futures, we continue to come back to the primacy of seeing and working in networked ways as being key to charting a course to a regenerative future. In fact, in some ways we might see energy systems science as being energy network science.
As Dr. Sally J. Goerner articulates, Energy System Sciences (ESS) is “an umbrella term for disciplines that use the study of energy flow networks to understand the laws of systemic health, growth and development in living, nonliving and supra-living systems.” ESS disciplines include: Chaos, Complexity, Resilience, Ecological Network Analysis, Self-Organization Theory, Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics, Panarchy, and others.
We are clearly in a moment of needing to take more seriously the human prospect on the Earth, and whether we will continue to reclaim and maintain a place as a stewardship species. Much of this comes down to being able to “think like an ecosystem” and align with Nature’s regenerative capacities. As mentioned in another post, regeneration points us to the self-feeding, self-renewing processes that living systems (including human beings and communities) use to nourish their capacity to thrive for long periods of time, as well as their ability to adapt to unexpected, sometimes threatening, circumstances.
From an energy systems/networks perspective, long-term human thriving is rooted in large part in healthy social and socio-ecological webs that are diverse, intricate and dynamic. And more specifically, as Dr. Goerner and other colleagues in the Research Alliance for Regenerative Economics highlight, aspects of social systemic health are grounded in:
Collective and adaptive learning – sharing information, working out loud, group inquiry and processing, prototyping, systemic sensing …
Collaborative culture – practicing facilitative leadership, weaving and coordination, designing for and engaging in collective innovation, linking and leveraging assets, collective decision-making, aligning practice to values such as trust, transparency, generosity …
Regenerative circulation – monitoring and tending to velocity, directionality, quality and quantity of flows of different resources …
Each of these four aspects links to network thinking and action, and can be further strengthened and guided by core principles (see this evolving list).
In the months to come, we will be fleshing out more of the practices around ESS/ENS to support network convenors, coordinators, facilitators, and weavers of all kinds, including those within organizations, to support systemic saluto-genesis (ongoing health creation).
Image by Wim Goedhart, “Forest Flow,” shared under conditions of Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.
“Life moves toward other life… If we trusted more in these cohering motions, we could move into an essential role … supporting the system to explore new connections, new information, new ways of being. It means focusing on opening the system in all ways.”
Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, a simpler way
“Bridging” in the work of network development speaks to the act of creating connections between socially heterogeneous groups (or putting it a bit more crassly, building bridges between “us” and “them”). The benefits of bridging include making it possible for diverse groups to share and exchange information, creating new forms of access, as well as leveraging new ideas and spurring innovation between groups representing different interests and/or backgrounds. Bridging widens social capital by increasing the “radius of trust.” Unlike “bonding,” or more in-group relationship building (think “birds of a feather flocking together”), bridging can help create more inclusive structures that can have implications for long-term resilience and more equitable development. The following is a story of a network engaging in intentional bridging work for more robust connectivity, flows and opportunity …
Food Solutions New England (FSNE) is a regional, collaborative network organized to “support the emergence of a New England food system that is a resilient driver of racial equity and food justice, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities.” FSNE is convened byFor the past 5+ years, IISC has worked with the convening “backbone organization,” UNH Sustainability Institute, to launch and structure itself as a formal network, as well as to concretize and evolve its core commitment to racial equity as it has become more diverse and inclusive and worked for systemic change.
Eighteen months ago, FSNE was faced with making a decision about where to hold its annual Food Summit. The Summit was originally conceived to bring together delegates from across New England to strengthen collaboration for regional food system sustainability. The commitment was made early on by the convenor to move the Summit around the region, holding it in each of the six New England states once before going to any of them for a second time.
Delegates to the 2015 New England Food Summit gathered in Boston, MA.
In 2016, Connecticut was the last state to host the New England Food Summit. The network’s backbone organization was faced with a decision about the specific location within the state. Previous Summits had been held in prominent hubs in the other states – Portsmouth (NH), Burlington (VT), Portland (ME), Pawtucket/Providence (RI) and Boston. While places like Hartford and New Haven might have been natural considerations given their respective amenities and relative centrality in the state, the choice was made to bring the Summit to Bridgeport. This decision was spurred in no small part by the leadership of State Senator Marilyn Moore, who hails from that city and is a member of the FSNE Network Team. Senator Moore pointed out that not only would it be significant for Bridgeport to play host, given it is often overlooked in favor of its more well-known and regarded neighbors, it would also be enlightening for Summit delegates to see reality on the ground. Furthermore, this choice was viewed as an expression of FSNE’s commitment to racial equity and food justice.
“We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.”
The past twelve months I had the pleasure of working with a team from Food Solutions New England to design and facilitate its first Network Leadership Institute. This initiative grew out of FSNE’s ongoing commitment to cultivating thought leadership and network leadership“to support the emergence and viability of a New England food system that is a driver of healthy food for all, racial equity, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities.” Another impetus for the Institute was a year spent doing system mapping and analysis that revealed four leverage areas for advancing a just, sustainable and democratically-owned and operated regional food system, including cultivating and connecting leadership. Read More
Make Meetings MatterJoin us on February 5 for a practical and energizing webinar that teaches simple facilitation practices to turn meetings into inclusive, focused conversations that lead to real progress!
