Intentional Society: Capacity-building and the exercise thereof
Next orientation call is not this week, but the following week: Saturday, August 13th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).
Written down in front of me, staring at me from my scratch paper notes, are the words "capacity-building." This is a crux-y kind of tension and polarity for me, certainly in the context of Intentional Society, but even as an individual looking at today's world and asking myself how it is best to relate. Like in this quote:
How can we move at the speed of trust… when facing the speed of catastrophe?
-Alexis Goggans, h/t Brian
There are such big challenges facing humanity, which are being felt already and which may batter us harder and sooner than most of us believe. Do we have time to "slow down"? Will anything other than slowing down (to shift who we are and the capacity we have) work? How much time and energy should one put into sharpening their axe before chopping down a tree? This is of course the explore/exploit tradeoff, the donor's dilemma, several names for it.
Intentional Society (and most of my other elective efforts personally) are focused much more on interior change than on exterior change. Transformation of selves and culture, more than of laws and institutions. This is not the same thing as capacity-building vs high-performance execution exactly, but is pretty closely aligned.
In both contexts, I need to (and invite you to) come back to consideration of the integration across this polarity. I think capacity-building is generally undervalued relative to execution in most contexts and deserves focus, but where and how can we simultaneously chop wood while sharpening our axe? Where can feedback loops between inner and outer work mutually benefit each other?
I think Intentional Society needs to make space for both inner and outer work, and for all scopes of relating and change. If we ever hone our focus to the degree of saying "we're all about inner transformation here, go do exterior change stuff on your own" then reach out and slap us! For we will have fallen into the downsides of imbalance that are both ineffective and self-defeating. As IS expands its spaciousness and ecosystem-diversity (in the process of rolling out our membership reorganization), I hope we can hold this in our awareness.
Cheers,
James