In the abstract
In the abstract
This week we had a meeting with a large part of our team where we discussed among other things how we want to work (our 'working principles') and how we want to engage with the world (what we for the moment call our 'modes of engagement') going forward. We had discussions with different contrasting opinions about individual formulations, words, or the number of principles. Each opinion was coherent and based on both the person's experience and often also explicitly on some literature. Yet what was striking for me was that the whole discussion was happening in a purely abstract and conceptual space.
The set up is that we are a foundation based in Switzerland while our activities are aiming at improving the conditions of children and young people in low and middle income countries in the Global South. Of course all of us have visited all or some of the countries we are funding activities in or have even lived in some of them. Yet I still feel we don't have common reference points, shared stories about the life of the young people we aim to 'serve' that underpin the discussions we are having in Switzerland and in a way legitimate our discussions.
The amazing thing about the team I'm part of is that everybody is super smart and well-read. But in a way that also makes it hard to ever come to a conclusion. We love to have intellectual discussions about theoretical and conceptual questions and to defend our theories and theses – I myself can get totally lost in the details of such discussions. (I'm not sure about how much we are actually listening to each other. But that is a question for another day.)
I think that rooting the conceptual discussions in a shared tangible context would both legitimate the discussions (one could not make the argument that we are wasting time instead of doing our work and supporting young people) and make them more meaningful. And I also think it would be easier for us to come to a conclusion.
At the moment we are in a way striving for the perfect solution, the conceptual framework that is coherent, elegant, logical. The reality of the young people we work for, however, is messy. Maybe our concepts need to be more messy, too. Nora Bateson says that the shape of the solution needs to meet the shape of the problem, otherwise there is no connection possible.
How to get there? One way of course is to bring the reality of young people into the room – becoming radically participatory. While we are discussing this, we are still quite far away from that – also for another day. Also this week, I read two blog posts by Dave Snowden about what he calls 'narrative-enhanced practice' (part 1, part 2). My immediate thought was whether we can enhance our discussions and root them into a tangible context by using narrative. While Snowden explains the idea in the context of knowledge management, I wonder whether we could translate it also to our situation.
I'm already thinking that narratives from young people could be part of our evidence base for strategic learning and evaluation, but maybe we could use the same database of narratives also to inform our discussions – well, writing it like this makes me realise that this is what strategic learning actually is.
Anyway, I'd love to hear what you think about these reflections. Simply reply to this email and let me know!
The Paper Museum
I'm staying with Richard Power's Bewilderment for another week, as it is such a powerful book. The narrator, Robbin's dad, is reflecting on how a new type of therapy they were trying for his son was changing him:
But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.
This reminds me of Nora Bateson's question: "where is the edge of me?" We are all (we as in everything in the cosmos if you believe people like Iain McGilchrist) processes that are in continuous flow reacting and responding to each other. Or does it even make sense to distinguish 'each other' or is it just one process? Reminds me of David Bohm's implicate and explicate order where the implicate order is the One Process in which everything is indistinguishable and the explicate order is where we can make a difference between you and I and the deer and the rock and the sun. But that any differentiation is at best transient.