IS: Coordination is hard
Upcoming events:
- Sunday August 10: Community Hub Call 19.6 for members
- Tuesday August 12: The Oasis
- Friday August 15: IS Connection Call
Last week's newsletter was "Interbeing Economy" and the Community Hub session was titled "Coordination".
"Coordination is hard!" is alive for me in this last week. Both the amazing bountiful diversity of people doing great things in this world (to a variety of different ends), and the difficulty of cohering values-aligned collectives (to theoretically aligned ends), have shown up strikingly in my various spaces and efforts within the last week. Why is this? Let me count the ways(layers):
1: Coordination (collective doing) is hard
"We" want to collectively build the [more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible]. But we don't have much coordination in this bubbling emergence of the Liminal Web ecosystem. A protocol and meta-protocol can exist, but few groups could readily participate in them. So this is extra-extra hard because both dimensions of "doing" and of "collective" are extra hard:
2a: Coherence (collective being) is hard
Deep alignment, seeing each other in deep presence, bridging purpose and perspectives. This is extra hard because people don't start out in alignment (or at peace) with themselves, let alone others!
2b: Capacity (individual doing) is hard
Doing anything is hard! Most people just don't have a lot of capacity (time, resources, energy) to spare. This is extra hard because:
3: Integrity (individual being) is hard
This is a hard "life complete" set of problems spanning livelihood, relationships, skills, and self-development. This is awareness and healing and perspective-taking that brings inner capacity online (making doing-anything possible) and inner coherence (making group coherence possible).
Picture a diamond with #3 at the bottom, branching up to #2a and #2b, which converge up to #3 at the top:
I make no claim that this model makes any of this stuff any easier. Also it's isomorphic to an Integral Quadrants 2x2 as well: interior and exterior, individual and collective. Maybe this dependency-tree formulation serves to clarify my (or our) expectations when it comes to systems change efforts.
Cheers,
James