“…latest evidence from many disciplines—from
neuroscience and biology to quantum physics—suggests that nature’s most basic
drive is not competition, as classic evolutionary theory maintains, but
wholeness….new research demonstrating that all living beings, have been
hardwired to seek connection above virtually any other impulse—even at personal
cost… ‘The individual’ is only the sum of an infinite number of inexactly
defined parts, and the parts as we currently understand them are shifting and
transforming at every moment…Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for
dominion but a constant and irrepressible drive for wholeness.” [Lynne
McTaggert, The Bond]
What does what we’re learning about fields and wholeness mean for
organizations? For communities?
More and more, it means changing the way we have operated,
moving from just coordination among individuals to actively seeking to bring
minds together to take advantage of that natural connection and opportunity for
better solutions.
When issues and challenges are very big [meta-challenges] or
very new [emergent shifts], no one person has the whole solution. We need the intelligence of the collective,
the tapping of everyone’s brain and heart.
We need the whole for big
projects, big solutions, big changes of heart, bigger ways of understanding our
systems and our place in them. That
happens together—we can’t get there on our own.
For big things, we have to invite the whole consciously onto
the field of connection and play.
Just this summer, we are becoming more fully aware, all of
us, that the weather is changing, whether or not man has had anything to do
with causing the change. The New York Times published an article
last week about the stressors on aging infrastructure in the US from heat and
storms; in another piece, the author noted that something like a third of the
food-producing areas of the US are considered disaster areas because of drought
conditions and crop loss. Mindful
responses to issues this large cannot be successfully addressed by one agency,
company, or community. Sharing ideas, knowledge, and strengths is the only way
through. How do we effectively do that,
inviting ourselves and one another onto a field of connection and
consciousness? Seeing ourselves as part of it all and co-accountable for
outcomes?
But, dealing with systemic and structural breakdowns needs
greater coordination, shared knowledge, co-learning. We respond to big issues
by showing up together on the field of connection, ready to roll up our
sleeves.
Have you experienced
that in your own life, in your own organization and around areas of passionate
interest and concern? Where with focused group energy, you were able to
transcend personal limitations, whether those were intellectual, emotional, or
limits of perspective and scope? When you felt yourself connect up and solutions
surfaced, perhaps solutions that had been unforeseen?
We are all dealing with these issues anyway. If quantum
physics theorists are correct, we are connected up anyway. So, we can draw on
that. We can connect up intentionally. We can invite our best intelligence to
join together, knowing that we are smarter together, and the stakes are often
very high.
There are lots of ways to facilitate this, but these are
some basic elements of co-creating and connecting to fields:
--Multiplicity:
the desire for multiplicity, an intention to gather greater knowledge through
connecting stakeholders;
--Engagement:
clear intention and invitation to include, an invitation to engage; an
environment that facilitates thinking together
--Thinking Together:
a process to attune to one another in dialogue and engage the purpose [those
I-We-It connective dynamics again]
--Aligned Action and
activation: the knowledge that solutions that can be acted on and ways to
implement found, that sponsorship and resources can be tapped.
We will be examining these META elements in greater detail
over the next months as they are core to connective, collaborative, and
collective process.
When intentional connections and field building don’t work
so well and the invitation to the magic of collective intelligence does not
occur, it’s usually at the level of engagement and intention where we have not
done our prep work.
But if we do fully enter into the process of creating and
nurturing fields of connection on behalf of topics of importance, we will
notice our values begin to shift:
- · We begin to value other perspectives and points of view, more than we value full agreement;
- · We begin to value the transparency between us, more than our individual self-protective cocoons;
- · We begin to value the wisdom available to us, and to put greater value on the collective rather than only individual good;
- · We begin to value wholeness.
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