IS: Cultivating wise action
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Thanks for reading, by the way. Even if you never reply, I feel connected to you here through the simple act of opening this letter.
I am also connected to a web of collaboration woven from conversation and shared attention. This runs through IS and out to so many other neighbor nodes in the network through overlapping individuals. I'm grateful for the way that attention and ideas ripple through the web — direct support through presence is awesome, but there's an extra effect that comes through the Nth-order connections. Almost like the way that a grid of small telescopes can act like a giant telescope when they're synced up.
One spirit resonating across my web currently is action — energy in the "doing" side of the "being and doing" polarity that suffuses so much of the possibility space of collectives and relating. "Wise" doing is the kind of doing "on the other side" of being-focus (attempting to rhyme with "the simplicity on the other side of complexity") there. Not the naïve doing of expert/achiever ego using modernist culture, nor the self-sacrificing doing of pluralist or group-centric ego using collectivist (traditional swirled with postmodern) cultures, but the integrated self-and-system-aware doing of the strategist/magician ego perspective supported by metamodernish culture.
The polarity-management oscillation and paradox-integration of "being and doing are co-arising in every moment" point at the post-conventional holding of "wise action", AND point me at some attributes of what it looks like to initiate wisely, for the initiation and incubation and sustaining of action are all part of the same flow.
...I'm going to think out loud, trying to synthesize across all my first-hand domains some principles on how to successfully cultivate wise action:
- Every group of people that wants to act or coordinate change is an organization, regardless of how they do or don't consciously organize their interactions.
- Every organization is a nested alternation of frame and space (structure and emergence, form and void, knowns and unknowns, top-down and bottom-up).
- Purpose is the outer frame that holds any organization together.
- "Moves" (actions) are only possible in space.
- The moves that are possible in a space are bounded by the power-holding of the surrounding frame.
- Organization-builders can create and hold structure for a space by channeling their "source" energy into frame-creation.
- The rules of frames can be changed if the rules say they can be changed.
- The moves that are possible in a space are extended by the energy animating the group/members.
- Integrity (through layers) of purpose is critical. (Yearn for the sea, AND build ships.)
- Most energy in an organization emerges, in spaces, through individual passion rooted in purpose.
- The moves that are possible in a space are extended by the relational security (corporate world says "psychological safety") of the group.
- Relational commitment and relational optionality are a polarity (good-good in tension).
- Relational commitment (i.e. bonding) grows over time, unless broken by overwhelming disruption.
- An employment contract is just one kind of bond.
- Most bonds are built gradually, and even unconsciously.
- The moves that are possible in a space are bounded by the seeing (perspective-taking and sense-making) capacity of the group/members.
- Seeing is a bottleneck at every layer of structure in the organization.
- Group attention is a precious resource that can have huge impact on seeing.
- "Using all the brains" comes from personal space for seeing plus autonomy.
- Effectiveness is so much more important than efficiency (compared to baseline corporate culture), but action is still required.
- A large fraction of coordinated action is attention-management.
- Pushing at the operations and outputs of a complex system doesn't shift it.
- Organizations are also complex (human, dynamic) systems.
I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with the focus and sufficiency of this list so far. The stuff it contains is pretty good though. As far as initiating change goes... in all my first-hand experience, individuals initiate in a Koenig-source way, even in group settings. I've been that person, and I've not been that person, but even when groups are critical to the seeing of the way, I've always seen one person "stand on the shoulders of giants" at the top of the group pyramid of sensemaking, and usually that same person convert that seeing into source energy and action drive. I'm quite uncertain about what would be possible in a hypothetical "turquoise organization", but I guess that's not relevant at the moment.
My last point about initiating is that it happens throughout an (effective) organization, and that it's pretty much the same thing as drive. Drive plus the space where it's okay to let that aliveness out and follow it.
Tip of the hat to ya if you made it this far. Next week I intend to give an experience report of Communal Reverie (from a non-public session, in our IS core community).
Cheers,
James