July 2012 – The Thrivable Society

Multi-dimensional Constructions

For simplicity’s sake, we often pretend we live in a one or two or maybe three dimensional world. By which I mean, for example, in the world of “identity” I am a white woman from the middle class. Those are two “planes” of the conceptual realm. The first thing we need to correct is that these categories have some clear boundaries (are points) rather than being spectrums (a line of even a plane) where very little lives in the “ideal position” really.

The next thing we can do is layer them, especially when we talk about power. I have a sex, gender, and sexuality… I have a color, I have a financial upbringing and current financial status, I have an education, I have a professional background. I am a point where all these instances intersect across many planes.

Source: bustler.net via Jean on Pinterest

I have particular empowering and disempowering experiences… I have a degree of many different kinds of intelligences and physical abilities/inabilities. I have an age. I have a religious upbringing (or not, really, in my case) and a spiritual practice that is current. I can go on and on! All of these layers/planes of dimensionality, connect me to communities, some of them make me more central in those networks and some of them push me to the edges. Some of them conflict with each other, shoving me away from those communities.

The conceptual world is not flatland. The world of identity is not a flatland (despite how social networks used to try to singularize identity). Live in the rich multi-dimensionality of being human – of your existence and awareness. I try to… it is an ongoing practice in a flatland world.

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This was originally posted to Facebook and then modified and posted here. On Facebook, the following comments were particularly delightful to me:

Alexander Laszlo

and if you are not a being at all (or only in the expository fixedness of our linguistic forms), but rather a continual emergence? More like an aroma, shifting, flowing, emerging – more becoming than being. Then the dimensionality of which you write ebbs and flows through multiple domains in which we find the confluence of others. And it is these others which, in the final appreciation, form and flavor our sense of self.

Charles Hope

Luck and success hide in the cracks between, in the contradictions, in the rounding errors glossed over and stubbornly ignored by the pragmatic grown ups.

John Manoochehri

This makes a certain kind of sense, but leads to, as a lot of emancipatory philosophy, a world of texturelessness and unmanageable complexity. There are countless dimensions, you rightly describe, to being and experience. But which are the most important? And how do navigate without those kinds of obvious signals? I can’t spend all my life interpreting each moment’s dimensionalisation, can I?If my child is hungry, and I am focussed on another dimension of their life, their capacity for artistic creativity “hey, don’t cry about food, let’s do one of those great paintings you do! come on!”, or I am not sure which of their dimension to relate to “ok, I know they are hungry, but what about their art – or their capacity for body movement, or what about nature, maybe we should learn about gravity, or or or …” – I am obviously failing them.So, multidimensionality is good. It is also a dangerous abstraction.

The problem with a lot of equalising, emancipatory thought is that it dismisses all hierarchisation, priority setting, difference, as necessarily normativising, power-brokering, wrong.

Bad move. We must learn to tame benign hiearchies, differences. Otherwise, we drown in righteous speculations and make judgements based on post-modern whim or worse.

Jean Russell

John Manoochehri, I think you are right to be concerned about being lost in noticing the dimensionality. I think of it more as a perspective tool. For example, am I feeling locked out of things because I am a woman? If so, what other dimension do I have more power to achieve my goal? Maybe I have social power at a different level? Maybe I have intelligence of a certain kind. If you feel blocked in motion because of one dimension, look at the other dimensions within you. That is not to promise a just world to those who are resourceful – it isn’t just and won’t become so. It is that there are many hierarchies, and we navigate their power, in part by being at different points on different planes. All in fluid flow. #gratitude

Jean Russell

I don’t want to get to to tied to the instance of identity – as my point is that conceptual fields that relate to things like geographical landscape, limit our ability to grasp the full dimensionality of them. This dimensionality may explain to some people how my brain has learned how to think about things (twisting planes and intersections acting as an axis point to pivot).

Facilitation Algebra

by Thriver

We have all attended events in which we had to yawn. The pace is slow and laborious. We are stuck in a chair listening the whole time, and the mind wanders to what is on the buffet table that we can nibble on.

Imagine if we assigned a rating for degree of engagement when we gather people together for group work. Let’s say we collapse, for simplicity, the difference between engagement of speaking, learning, or connecting, and just say engagement.

If I have forty people in the room and only one is speaking, the engagement of the speaker, I hope, is maximal. Some percentage of the room, depending on what is said and their interest, is in various states of engagement. We might be able to calculate, if we knew those degrees, the sum of the level of engagement in the whole to what is being said (minus degree of engagement on other devices or to other topics in mind).

Let’s say the activity is introductions, and each person is speaking for 1-2 minutes about themselves, so the group knows itself. It will take 60 to 80 minutes to go around the room. It will also, usually cost, the facilitator energy to police the 1-2 minute limit unless they use a device like a pre-written 3×5 card to keep people brief. (I have used these cards to keep within intro time limits and then made harvest documentation by having them post to a wall using an association method, which can be quite helpful in knowing ourselves as a whole.)

Now, let’s say, instead, I ask those forty people, as part of their introductions to each other, to organize in space around the room as if it was a map of the world. I give them a compass point and four locations to work from. In 3 minutes the group has some sense of where everyone is from and who is near them. They all used their bodies, and had to talk with 2 or 3 others to be sure they were in the right relation to proximal people. What is the algebra of engagement of this activity? Assume there was no need to move chairs or change the room to do the exercise. In 30 minutes of these sorts of exercises (align yourself on a spectrum of interest in… or belief about…, for example). For documentation, you can have someone take photos of the arrangements.

The art of facilitation is the crafting of optimal processes for engagement and achievement of collective goals. There are no perfect solutions, and every group has needs to be addressed that shape the processes that can work. Facilitation is the art of creating process that moderates the flows of individual engagement and catalyzes the flow of necessary information leading to action.

Abra cadabra – work with the algebra of group energy to achieve outcomes to make magical experiences of flow and contribution.

When designing group process ask:

who will be in active engagement during this process?
who will be in passive forms of engagement during this process?
is there another way to achieve this outcome that would change the active and passive engagement ratio?
if each person’s time and attention has a numeric value, and I do the algebra, have I optimized the value in the group? Is there excess capacity that I could/should engage?
how simply can I explain what the process is?

photo credit: www.metaphoricalplatypus.com

Bridging

by Thriver

photo credit: dgoomany

My grandfather was the foreman for bridge-building crews. And for the last year or so, I have been focused on building conceptual bridges from the old economy into the new. Maybe that is a grandpa gene.

As I have been exploring this work of bridging from the old to the new, one of the things I am becoming certain of is the need to give people who resist change enough ground of the familiar to stand on. What of the old way do they get to keep? When they know what is safe for them, it is easier to allow for specific changes and a degree of uncertainty. The uncertainty is contained.

MindTime really got e thinking about this. It is a mapping process for distinguishing between people who think about the future, people who focus on the present, and those who live in the past. As I have always been so future-focused, it didn’t occur to me that other people would be holding onto the present or the past. Once I walked through what those perspectives experience, I realized how really valuable they are. People who help with continuity of the present give us all a sense of one thing leading to the next, that there is predictability about our work, and they keep the systems running. They stabilize the chaos of the future-focused, which can be living in multiple even contradictory futures. Those who are past focused are like memory keepers. They put our past glory into deep memory. They are often creatures of habits. Their attention is not on how to make what they do better, instead they attend to how fantastic (or terrible) it has been and then play it out.

If we want to build bridges from old ways of being and doing, we need to be sensitive to these different mindsets.

In the past, I have adopted chaotic change. If I changed my relationship, I would also change my appearance, my home, my job, or any other elements of my life that I could, all at once. My mother told me, after my divorce, that I should imagine each of these areas like a leg of a stool I am sitting on. When I change too many of them at once, the stool loses balance easily. This has become a powerful metaphor for me. What is it that I am going to hold stable, while I make these adjustments?

Bridge building is like that. It is about helping people acknowledge that what has been done isn’t working anymore, inviting them to the possibility that there might be something that would work better, and then being clear about what they get to keep that is familiar and stabilizing to them.

If we are helping past-focused people transition, we can call into their minds where the individual or group has made transitions before. If you can use an epic adventure narrative, then it helps even more. If we are helping present focused people transition, it is useful to remind them of parts of their day that will remain the same. By making the change appear smaller than the continuity of the past, it becomes less threatening. Then, once it isn’t as much of a threat, we can focus on the value of the benefits to be gained, and living into what the daily activity of that possibility might be like.

DIY Economy

by Thriver

I have just returned from an incredible event in Asheville, North Carolina on the DIY Economy. I helped facilitate two sessions on building the coalition for the DIY Economy that Josh Middleman convened. Here are my notes and drawings with brief explanations for those who were not there.

Together, we are building a new, Do-it-yourself style economy. Or maybe a Do-it-ourselves economy. And some of us are taking up the work of building bridges from the old economy to the new economy.

A key, suggested Grace Kim, from GOOD magazine, to forming coalitions is a clear shared goal. After doing much of the work below, the draft statement of our goal is: Acting together to create ___ economic ecosystems grounded in people having agency. We coldn’t fill in the blank in the time allotted. Maybe you can help!

I suggested, reflecting on a values exercise from the first day, that there were three main camps attracted to the DIY Economy: those who value autonomy, those who value social justice, and those who strive for resilience. All of those camps share an interest in individual agency. Together, we discussed. (You could call autonomy the more libertarian or pro-business group, but the value they are honoring is autonomy.)

To encourage us to think beyond our own values to include others, I shared the following graphic from my work with Gerard Senehi on Evolutionary Philanthropy. The evolutionary change with the highest opportunity for impact includes all the other approaches, because it perceives them as pieces contributing to the health of the whole ecosystem.

To work at this Evolutionary level, we must appreciate our differences while bonding over our similarities. Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com uses the phrase, “connect on your similarities and profit from your differences” to capture the idea that if we are too much alike, we don’t add to our creativity by connecting. My ideas are like your ideas. If we have too much difference, we can’t find common language, perspective, or understanding to be creative together. However, the middle range, enables us to use the friction of our differences to increase our creative ability. Thus, by coming together, whether from social justice work, resilience, or from autonomy, the creativity of the whole can be increased.

So how do we get more creative together in building the DIY Economy? We can borrow from the strategies being employed by others and merge them – mashups – with our own. Here is a draft map of some of the ways people are practicing and innovating in the DIY Economy.

To move forward together, we need to continue this conversation, building out our shared goal and the diversity of the tools and strategies. We have several audiences to reach – not just the general public. Here is the map of the spectrum of people for us to be speaking our DIY language with and to:

The next steps for coalition building from here could be:

organizing strategies by which camp and making a more exhaustive list
discovering and mapping specific examples of the strategies
creating a DIY Economy toolkit or game with selections from strategies
map the strategies across domains, for example, which ones are through the legal system and regulation?
inviting event attendees to tell stories on blogs and in magazines, answer DIY economy questions on quora, using the language of our shared goal and being clear which audience from the engagement spectrum they are speaking to.

Much gratitude for all who attended our session including: Josh Middleman, Caroline Murray, Robert Leaver, Rachel Berliner Plattus, David Brodwin, Grace Kim, Mark Frasier, and who else did I miss? Eli?

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Some of this harkens back to the work I was fascinated with: Field Building – Digital Media, Play, Persuasion, and Field Building, Motivating Participation, and What is Field Building.

Recent Fascinations

by Thriver

Things that have been fascinating me for a couple years… things I believe are crucial to the emerging age:

Relationship of node to network in defining context and therefore meaning. Picture the image and quote misattributed to Lincoln on Facebook. Lots of stuff on the web is creating a crisis of context. Globalization produces a crisis of context. Nomadism destabilizes contexts. Blurs boundaries.

Not only is it hard to maintain context once we unhitch from absolutes, we need to get a better grasp on what portability information has. And how it gets corrupted as it travels. I am not going to argue that it should not get corrupted, this is part of cultural dispersion and the lifecycle of ideas, but we need to better understand that lifecycle in a world in which things are evolving at different paces concurrently.

Trust and how it operates with specificity within a context. I don’t just “trust” the way the word is often used vaguely. It is specific. Specific person, specific action, specific timeline. Trust is a lubricant (for better or worse), so how do we encourage it and discourage it when cultivating flows?
Emotions in decision making and motivation. We aren’t as rational as we thought or wanted to be. We are highly emotional. Knowing this about ourselves, how do we use that to our advantage? How do we work gently with these emotional creatures around us?
Boundary spanning. Boundary crossing. The dance of discernment and integration. I think a lot in network diagrams…. I have always been someone on the boundaries between in some critical way. Much of the last 20 years has been about shifting away from silo models, whether in education, organizations, or social networks. We integrate again. And yet, disaggregate too.
Multiplicity. I am not a single identity. I have several online. I have many more inside me. I belong to many tribes, many networks, and many communities. I flow between them, but not with the same people. How does the multiplicity within me and within networks encourage resilience? How does it make things brittle?
Time. Again, this is about discernment. Something is going on with time. Asynchronous communication, synchronous around the globe. Time on a clock. Duration. The varying experience of time. Time as a distance. Time as a frequency or beat within a pattern…. What is going on with time? And how does it influence all of the above.
Do you have insights on these? What might I read to figure out more?

Archive for month: July, 2012