I’ll start with some personal context, and a celebration… My dissertation is complete!!! YAY!!!! As in, finished and approved… not only that, my doctoral journey is complete, as well!!!! A thousand times YAY!!!!!!!!!!
So, I am now officially the bearer of a “PhD” (or, as my friend Fred would teasingly call it, “Piled higher and Deeper”… 😉 ) Not to be totally irreverent about this; it has been a deeply meaningful process in many ways…
For anyone interested in “what’s next” for me, beyond the summer reading pictured above (more on one of those books, below) here’s an update I wrote recently to my awesome research participants.
Now I will shift gears a bit, while staying with the larger topic of context and celebration…
Recently I met with some of my colleagues from the Co-Intelligence Institute, a lovely group of people drawn to Tom Atlee and his work, a significant context for my own growth and development for the last 20+ years. At this in-house gathering, we worked with Fran Peavey’s strategic questioning model to explore how our own small organization could become even more whole and life-giving for those of us who comprise it… and so in turn, generate more energy for our outward-facing work.
A few days later, thanks to Chris Corrigan and his stellar blog, I came across “Context Changes Everything” by Alicia Juarrero, renowned Cuban-American philosopher and complexity scholar. Her most recent work, it’s available for download here from MIT Press Direct.
Juarrero’s in-depth explorations on interdependence and wholeness offer powerful “medicine” for our underlying and pervasive societal illness – the atomistic worldview that creates blinders and makes it nearly impossible for us to really see wholeness.
Wholeness is also a key theme in Tom Atlee’s work, and for all of us at CII. On the one hand, we seek to celebrate, learn from, and encourage practical, on-the-ground experiences that generate collaborative and collective intelligence to make a difference in people’s lives. To this end, among other endeavors, we have been hosting monthly learning community zooms on the theme of Real World Co-Intelligence.
At the same time, we know from experience (and also from Donella Meadows’ wonderful work on “leverage points for systems change“), what a powerful difference it makes to shift worldviews. Thus the relevance of philosophical contributions that break through our cultural bondage to seeing only “dead matter” and instead help us to deeply understand and honor the movement of Life. And this is why I am joyfully celebrating Alicia Jarrero and her work, wanting her to become more widely known, beyond the very specialized academic circles in philosophy and cognitive science where she is already highly esteemed.
Without engaging narratives, though, valuable theory can remain isolated and less effective than it might be otherwise. So at CII, our commitment includes integrating practice and theory in a variety of ways, including by sharing stories and generating story fields…
Over the years, much of the work at CII has been centered on wise democracy – tracking and learning from varied practical instances, to create design tools for innovations in self-governance and collaborative governance. Beyond just “government”, this also includes a focus on how small groups, communities, organizations, and networks can make wise choices with regard to self-governance.
We view wisdom as alignment with the “prime directive” of “appreciating, evoking, and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole.” This is how Tom Atlee describes the inquiry that has been at the center of his life and work, and all of us at CII resonate deeply with it.
Of course, there are many different ways, and many different contexts, in which we can work with this “prime directive”. For several of us, including Andy Paice, Rahmin Sarabi, and myself, our connection with Tom and his work has called us into deeper engagement with the growing deliberative democracy movement.
At the same time, we see all around us and within us, how limited and limiting forms of thinking persist in us all, including within movements that seek to create change. It’s not just our internalized sexism, racism, classism, & homophobia that need unlearning and healing. Along with all of the other “isms”, an underlying worldview of separation, disconnection, and domination has conditioned much of our thinking, including in the social and political sciences.
From this alienated and alienating perspective, so much of what makes us human, is not even deemed to exist. And this unbalanced worldview of “technocratic imperialism” fuels the meta-crisis, the many existential threats we are now facing as a species…
Within the realm of deliberative democracy, we see that we can be enthusiastically supporting new democratic innovations, even as we are still perpetuating limiting mindsets. For some helpful contrast, here’s an inspiring essay by Claudia Chwalisz on what democracy could look like from an expanded, relational mindset: “A new democracy defined by joy, agency, dignity, wonder, and being in relationship“.
The commitment to transforming limited mindsets through a deeper understanding of wholeness (both our own limited mindsets, as well as that of the larger societal organisms we belong to) ia why Alicia Juarrero’s work brings me such joy. I’ll close with a few paragraphs drawn from her “Concluding Remarks”:
Neither puppets nor absolute sovereigns, human beings and the material and social forms of life they induce are true co-creators of their natural and social worlds. We serve as stewards of the metastability, coherence, and evolvability of both of these worlds. Matter matters. History matters. Social and economic policy matters. Most critically, however, […] our choices and actions matter tremendously. In acting, we reveal the values that really matter to us, individually and to the culture in which we are embedded. We must pay attention to what we pay attention to, to which options we facilitate and promote and which we impede and discard. We must pay particular attention to what we do.
Facilitating the emergence and persistence of […] adaptable and evolvable interdependencies that can continue to form and persist […] is among our most compelling responsibilities. Facilitating the emergence and preservation of a thoroughgoing resilience that affords to both the natural and the human worlds the conditions not only to persist but especially to evolve and thrive is the most pressing moral imperative facing humankind today.
Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. MIT Press. 236-237.
Mike drop, Alicia!
Now, back to decluttering and organizing and preparing for my big transition… wish me luck!
with much appreciation,
Rosa