Everything is connected to everything
so learn to suffer
and choose to grow
choose how to grow
choose to explore consequences
for you
and us
take risks
forget floating
choose to swim.
_____ _____ _____
This what I heard Paul Bedford, former Chief Planner for the City of Toronto say at the Canadian Institute of Planners Conference this weekend.
What is a meeting for, but to know and understand things differently? What if the objective of every meeting you entered, at work, with your kid’s teacher, with a client or your doctor, was for you, and the other(s) to learn something new?
In Leading from the Emerging Future, authors Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer offer 4 levels of structure/awareness to describe how our social relationships are evolving. The power of what they offer is in the articulation of these levels, allowing us to see them more clearly so we notice more easily what we are growing out of, and what we are growing into. (For a recap of how I have made meaning of the book, see the links below.) The real power of what they offer is the difference between meeting and learning with others.
A meeting is information exchange. It may or may not mean things change as a result. It does not compel those involved to feel connected to the work, or themselves. Reading between the lines, here is what Scharmer and Kaufer offer as characteristics of habitat that support and sustain learning:
Imagine meetings where you are able to offer who you really are. Where you learn about yourself and your relationship to the work at hand. Where you are able to be honest to others, and true to yourself. Where as groups we undertake the learning that needs to be undertaken to improve our collective work.
This only works when we each take on the responsibility of seeking to know and understand things differently.
What steps do you take to know and understand your world differently?
______ ______ ______
Some friends and I started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book. This is another piece, on Chapter 8. Here’s what came from my exploration of earlier chapters:
_____ _____ _____
This post is a wee bit of the book I am working on, while I am working on it. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City – The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:
For Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer, authors of Leading from the Emerging Future, making the move from silos to wiser ways of organizing means shifting the locus of leadership. Moving leadership from the center to the periphery, from one place to many, requires silos to connect. It is a shift from centralized leadership, to distributed and relational sense-making. It is a transformation of our relationships from ego (I-in-me) to eco (we-in-me.) A wee poem that captures the meaning I made:
I’m in awe of what we know
at the edge, in a mess.
With patience sparking, we lean
into the periphery, growing
the growing Self into the future,
work not to do alone.
______ ______ ______
Some friends and I have started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book. This is another piece, on Chapter 7. Here’s what came from my exploration of earlier chapters:
_____ _____ _____
This post begins a series of posts on Chapter 10 – The Emerging City, offering bits of the book I am working on. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:
To transform the quality of communication throughout our social and economic systems, we must learn to see ourselves through the eyes of others and the whole. This is the next revolution, according to Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer, in Leading from the Emerging Future.
To pull this off, we need an open mind, rather than denial. We need an open heart, rather than cynicism. And an open will, rather than depression. With these, we will have what we need to create conversations that will recreate the world.
Throughout the book, Scharmer and Kaufer articulate 4 stages of our economic evolution, through which we have, and are, evolving, and our corresponding levels of awareness and modes of coordinating. They are (p. 74, 177-178):
The most common forms of communication, according to Scharmer and Kaufer, are linear, unilateral. They involve little inclusion of others, or transparency. The most precious forms of communication, for the transition to Stage 4, are multilateral and cyclical forms of communication that are high on inclusion and transparency. Notably, Stage 4 communication holds the intention to serve the well-being of all, rather than a few.
To make the move to these precious forms of communication, they articulate 5 innovative infrastructures that will allow us to reach our untapped reserves of creativity (p. 187-188):
While exploring this chapter, my colleagues and I were playing with the metaphor of “the bus”, and how easy, or difficult, it can be to get off a bus when the mode of communication is not your style. Or in Stage 4, who drives the bus?
In my sketchbook I connected back to Spiral Dynamics (click here for a primer on the emerging Spiral), another way to look at evolving levels of organization. Here’s how a fleet of buses would relate to each other, depending on the value system:
We organize in hierarchical structures of different degrees, as well as circular structures. In the top right, there’s another form, more fluid, that reflects all modes of communicating simultaneously. Conceptually, this fluid form, with various values flowing together, could look like this:
What Scharmer and Kaufer do not say clearly, is that while evolution to Stage 4 is necessary, it does not mean throwing out the use of the earlier Stages – they each have their time and place. In certain contexts, they will be the most appropriate ways to communicate. All together, they add up. What Stage 4 adds, that again they do not say, is a bridge to a place where we see the ongoing values of the preceding modes of communication, in the right context.
Which state of communication are you most comfortable with?
Which is the next natural step in your personal development?
_____ _____ _____
Some friends and I have started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book. This is another piece on Chapter 6. Here’s what came from earlier chapters:
_____ _____ _____
This post begins a series of posts on Chapter 10 – The Emerging City, offering bits of the book I am working on. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:
There is a battle underway between individuals and our institutions, but it isn’t us vs them. It is a battle embodied within each of us, between my self and my larger, highest potential Self. Our collective efforts are only as deep and good as we are, as instruments of the future.
Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer, in their book Leading from the Emerging Future, remark that the “world has enormous unexploited potential in the form of inspired, intentional, and collective entrepreneurship.” Its time for how we show up as collectives to evolve into something other than insensitive entities, but this will only happen if we choose to offer our Selves to make them better, rather than fight and scrap our way.
Here are Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer’s principles and practices to help advance your individual journey from self to Self, from me to We:
Offering your Self to your city is an essential contribution. It allows your City to serve citizens.
Some friends and I have started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book. This is another piece on Chapter 5. Here’s what came from earlier chapters:
_____ _____ _____
This post begins a series of posts on Chapter 10 – The Emerging City, offering bits of the book I am working on. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:
What’s moving in me
is a convergence connecting
the inside and outside of me
a pattern of knowing and feeling
how to open, to let go
my dreams are not mine
I’m not a salesperson anymore
life isn’t about me
I’m about life
allowing
listening
Some friends and I have started a book club to explore Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer (Theory U) and Katrin Kaufer’s new book. This is the meaning I made of our circle on Chapter 4. Here’s what came from other chapters:
Chapter 1 – Life guard
Chapter 2 – The antennae of possibility
Chapter 3 – Prototype social habitats
*
The momentum of the world around me is overwhelming at times, particularly in cities. We tell stories about our cities to ourselves and the stories we tell are the stories we create. Do we tell ourselves that cities are big and ugly and inhumane, or that they accelerate the development of our well-being, in health practices, the arts, and economic opportunities?
Eckhart Tolle (in Stillness Speaks):
The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw your attention in completely.
Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts too seriously.
As a citizen, there is great value in recognizing when I am simply getting caught up in things, particular the drama in my mind. As Tolle puts it, “it is easy for people to become trapped in their conceptual prisons.”
We have thoughts, and we ought to notice those thoughts and tell the stories of what we are noticing because we notice ways to improve our cities and this serves the evolutionary impulse. But we do not need to get caught up in the momentum of what we see. See it, be aware of it, and yet hold it light enough that we do not take the new story so seriously that we hold onto it as tightly as we held the first story.
To be comfortable with uncertainty, we need to be able to hold our stories lightly enough to toss them when they no longer serve us as well as they could.
Are you holding a story that limits your experience of the city?
What new story is emerging in the city you see?
_____ _____ _____
This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:
_____ _____ _____
Did you always know you would be doing this kind of work? This is the question a young reader just asked me. My simple answer is no/yes.
On the surface, no, I did not know I would be doing this work. I remember finishing my undergraduate degree in canadian studies, and public policy and planning, feeling like it wasn’t specific enough. I could read and write, but in a family of teachers, engineers, pharmacists and business owners I couldn’t say what ‘I’ was. So I kept looking.
I have one of those personalities that likes a wide variety of things, so career counselling based on interest was always expanded the options, not narrowing them. Somehow, in that wide mix, city planning appeared. Frankly, I had no idea what it really was, but it was intriguing. I moved to a new city to do a masters degree in city planning, and on my first day of school I knew I was in the right place. It felt good.
Choose work that feels good.
As I look back on my years working, I see that the spirit of that first day of school is still alive. When jobs started to feel less energizing, I actively found ways to make the work more exciting. Sometimes that meant having a chat with my boss and/or co-workers recreate the work on the job, or finding a new job. I have the privilege, in my part of the world and in the life I have, to choose my work.
I see now that as I choose work that feels good, I am not surprised by the work I am doing, because I realize that it was always in me to do. Choosing what I like to do all along means that what I like to do grows. Its a natural progression. Its a natural extension of me.
Work is a natural expansion of You.
As I follow the work that makes me feel good, I become a more full Me. Not the ego ‘me’, but the larger, fullest possible potential of Me. And as I do so, I expand the contribution I make to the world around me. Deep down inside, I always did know I would be doing this work. Years ago, ‘i’ couldn’t see it yet.
Your work is in You.
What is the work that energizes you?
_____ _____ _____
This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:
_____ _____ _____
From 2005 to 2007 I had the best job in the world, full of challenges at a fast pace. I was running the planning and development department for North America’s fastest growing municipality: the Regional Municpality of Wood Buffalo in the heart of Canada’ oil sands. Political, cultural, social, environmental and economic struggles were the norm, and in the middle our municipal government with a little department with few people to do the work that needed to be done. I know now that the whole time there was something bothering me, a little itch that came and went. W. Timothy Gallwey, in The Inner Game of Work, perfectly describes my itch: performance momentum.
Not all movement or action taken in our work actually moves me, or the organization I serve, forward. Gallwey: “There is a kind of activity that most of us are very familiar with that is not done with conscious intent or awareness of purpose. I call it performance momentum.” Most often it is ‘busy’ work, work that makes us look (and feel) like we are doing something of value. We get energized by the adrenalin and even panic to get things done. We get galvanized by the drive to get things done. And we lose sight of purpose and priorities.
I recognize this phenomenon in groups of people and individuals. We each have moments when we have the foot on the gas regardless of whether we have traction, when we assume that having a foot on the gas is always a good thing. We must always check to see if what we do is effective. We need feedback loops and we need to be open to hearing the messages of the feedback loops.
A city, an organization, a person that is intent on doing things – without a clear and conscious purpose – suffers from performance momentum. It could be connected to a need to be doing, or seen to be doing. We collectively create this culture for ourselves and for each other.
When I get caught in performance momentum, I get tired and unable to do the work well for long. Yet stepping out of performance momentum is not a license to not perform. There is certainly work to be done – and work to be done in a timely manner. The catch is knowing if the work taking place is the right thing to do at the right time, recognizing the work’s purpose. It is about working consciously.
I didn’t reach this understanding until I gave myself time and permission to stop and look at what was bothering me – at what and why I was itchy. I started to scratch this itch five years ago, and as usually what happens with an itch, it has become itchier and itchier. My choosing to write and explore is a risk I welcome: I may find relief, or I may find that I set off deeper, longer lasting itches.
So what’s the opposite of performance momentum? Performance with purpose, full of feedback loops that tell us when we are on track. Noticing when we have traction, rather than wheels spinning, is part of our learning journey.
_____ _____ _____
This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.
Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters. Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City. Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.
Last week, I attended the Canadian Institute of Planners / Alberta Institute of Planners conference in Banff. As I was there, I was noticing that I was very uneasy, itchy. While there, I posted a blog about scratching the itch, recognizing that 800 of us were there to collectively scratch an itch – to find and implement better ways of organizing ourselves and our cities to work better.
This is a universal itch for humanity, to make our world a better place, at any scale. I observed at choice last week about what to do with the itch. Sometimes it is best to ignore the itch and let it go away. Other times, the best thing to do is scratch, inviting the discomfort that comes with learning something new.
At the conference, I chose not to itch. Today I do.
For the last 15 years I have had great difficulty giving my full attention to speakers at conferences. I am often, but now always, physically unable to sit and listen to any length of time. The reason for this is becoming more clear to me.
Over time, I have begun to choose very carefully where I spend my time. At conferences, I choose to go to sessions that call me. I take time to generate the issues that I was tackling with at work. It may have looked to others like I was not paying attention, but I was exploring what was working for me, and not, allowing the words of presenters to pop in and out of my head. It is a wonderful opportunity to generate a plethora of ideas and ways to improve my work. It was time well spent.
As I became older and started to meet more people, the conference also became an opportunity to connect with people. My itch this week was how little opportunity there was to connect with each other. A professional conference is a room full of professionals engaged in parallel play. Each of us is taking in what we find of value for our personal, individual work. We are a collective because we do the same work. We do not have the power of a collective that engages in deepening our work together, learning how to create the social habitats our cities need to reach their full potential.
Planners work out of a passion for our cities. As our last speaker went overtime, allowing no questions from the audience, I was acutely frustrated. And many of the audience rose to their feet in ovation. We celebrated a one-way transaction. No interaction. No feedback. In fact, we celebrated this one-way information delivery.
This stopped me in my tracks.
I see the value in the presenter’s message. I see it was appreciated, for it articulates our shared understanding of city life, and a shared intention to improve city life. And I see that the presentation also, in its delivery, was anti-itch cream. It maintained the status quo of our shared frustration, slowly-paced change. We didn’t scratch.
The maintenance of the status quo takes place because there was no opportunity for the interaction of our minds, hearts and souls as we work to similar purpose – the well-being of our cities. We are able to hide in ourselves because in traditional conference settings there is no, or minimal, opportunity for:
Just as our cities need quality feedback, so too does any group of people wishing to take conscious action together. Conscious action does not come from hiding. In fact, as I moderated a session on public engagement strategies, I noticed a further challenge: while together, we do not practice our practice. We spoke about engaging the public in new ways. And we did not engage the audience in new ways. So the audience did not experience something new. They only heard about it.
And here I am writing about it, telling you about what I see, but not giving you the experience of what it could be.
There is value in simply receiving information, and sitting to get it. The value of this diminishes, however, when we do not create opportunities to digest individually and collectively the information that comes our way. I itch for balance. To hear what others have to say, and to figure out what WE think it all means, and what WE and I ought to do about it. What we need is no different than what our cities need. There is a big gap between what we want to do and how we go about learning how to do it. Just as you can’t learn to ride a bicycle hearing about it, we can’t learn to work with communities, stakeholders, citizens and cities hearing about it either. We need to practice what it means to live, work and serve our cities. We need to practice active citizenship, rather than excessive, passive downloads of information.
I love this irony: I figured out the language for this tension as I sat and listened to a plenary speaker at a 2008 planning conference. My body snapped up straight as Bill Sanford said these words: ‘Akrasia – Greek for the gulf between what we know we ought to do and what we actually do.’
Akrasia implies a gap, a space for improvement that compels us to work to make things better. The conventional conference has its time and place to share information, but let’s not mistake it for the development of citizens, or professionals. From time to time, it is the right thing to do, to receive information and hide ourselves. I am wary of when it tucks us away from working for what we want.
What we need more of: stepping into the uncertainty and unease of living in community and dreaming together explicitly about what our cities are and can be for us, and what we need to be for them.
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