I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kelly. I really think of him as the prophet of the digital age. He has done lots around complexity. And he has spent time looking at swarms. In “Bootstrapping Comlexity,” Andrea Lloyd’s “remix” of Kelly’s book “Out of Control” we find a useful list of benefits and apparent disadvantages of swarm systems.
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Two things reminded me of the power of design and physical space this week. First, in a workshop for Juvenile Justice leaders, the 12 participants were seated at three tables. It was a cozy arrangement and the tables were useful for handling the volume of materials they were using. After a morning focused on race, class and culture dialogue skills, we brought the chairs together in a circle in the front of the room to close a segment of the conversation. I asked folks how that arrangement felt and they say “Good!!” There’s nothing like removing physical barriers and enabling everyone to see everyone else easily to foster relational and conversational intimacy!
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I am so proud of my colleague, Gibran Rivera, for the due recognition that he has received lately in various quarters for his deep thinking and transformative work. And I am grateful for how eloquently he captures the nature and intention of our collective work the Interaction Institute for Social Change in a recent interview:
“IISC seeks to make the invisible visible. When we are successful, people find themselves working in ways that are life-giving, generative, and unlike most of their experiences of working together. We achieve this by paying close attention to process. Process works best when everyone knows what it is and where we are [in] it. But process is not enough. We seek to create spaces and conditions that foster connectivity at the level of authentic relationship. When we are working in authentic relationship with one another, when we learn to connect to each other in the place where our shared purpose meets, then it can feel like the work is happening all by itself. But these spaces have to be designed; they have to be held and they have to be tended to. This is where we come in. And this is how interconnectedness becomes palpable.”
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Wonder why I’m passionate about collaborative process and strong, creative process design?
Join us at Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work on May 8-9 in Boston to explore these ideas and more!
You can’t have peace or justice without it. Consider the following:
“Peace comes from being able to contribute the best that we have, and all that we are, toward creating a world that supports everyone. But it is also securing the space for others to contribute the best that they have and all that they are.” So says Nigerian human rights and democracy activist, Hafsat Abiola. Her words echo those of John Paul Lederach , who wrote in The Moral Imagination that peace is not a condition—a process through which people can build relationships conflicting parties and continually engage to create a reality where “the other” continues to exist.
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Last week Seth wrote a blog post titled When execution gets cheaper, so should planning. Provocative statement, specially when planning is at the score of your business!
Here is how he concludes:
The goal should be to have the minimum number of meetings and scenarios and documentation necessary to maximize the value of execution. As it gets faster and easier to actually build the thing, go ahead and make sure the planning (or lack of it) keeps pace.
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Last week, I had the privilege of spending a few hours with a delegation from Egypt—four young men who were involved in the April 6th revolution and continue to work for democracy in Egypt. They were at the end of a three week tour of the U.S. focused on the role of social media in politics and elections.They were frankly surprised that here, in the country that gave birth to Facebook, Twitter and Google, we not doing more with social media to advance our democracy. Their visit with IISC was to focus on some of the social technology that fuels social change work. Still, I thought to myself, “No pressure!”
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Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing
-T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Dante’s Inferno.
Our friend and colleague Roberto Cremonini recently shared the above quote with a budding community of practice coming together around networks. It is the epigraph to Imagine, Jonah Lehrer’s latest book on creativity. It seems to make more sense today than ever before. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We are social animals. Makes me think of the definition of Ubuntu – I am because we are.
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“From honeybee swarms we’ve learned that groups can reliably make good decisions in a timely matter as long as they seek diversity of knowledge. By studying termite mounds we’ve seen how even small contributions to a shared project can create something useful. Finally, flocks of starlings have shown us how, without direction from a single leader, members of a group can coordinate their behavior with amazing precision simply by paying attention to their nearest neighbor.”
– Peter Miller, The Smart Swarm
2 CommentsIISC Senior Associate, Curtis Ogden, reflects on the question asked in a staff learning session, “What do we know from years of doing collaborative capacity building and social change work?” Recorded at Space With a Soul in Boston.
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Sometimes you fall in love with a client. There is a sweet spot where your own heart’s purpose is fully aligned with what your client is trying to do in the world. In that sweet spot they are no longer really a client – you become true partners.
I’ve just wrapped up the contracted part of our work with Urban Bush Women, but I’m certain that ours is a partnership that will continue.
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Last Tuesday, Curtis Ogden and I had the privilege of hosting an LLC webinar on collective leadership. Much of what we did was point to observable patterns in ways of working together and how these tend to open up possibilities for shared leadership. The metaphor of tilling the soil is most appropriate precisely because we have run up against the limitations of industrial implementation. The appropriate response to increasing complexity is one that can get beyond linear causality and into a mindset of ecosystems.
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The following post is reblogged from Seth’s Blog. We hope that it will enrich your life and much as it has ours.
The pain of a lousy boss, of careless mistakes, of insufficient credit. The pain of instability, of bullying, of inadequate tools. The pain of poor cash flow, corrosive feedback and work that isn’t worthy of you.
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