What Makes a Social System Conscious? -- by Tom Atlee

At the first Evolutionary Salon, thirty scientists and social thinkers envisioned

an emerging movement   

for the conscious evolution   

of increasingly conscious social systems.

That's an intriguing idea.  But what does it mean?  What IS a conscious social system?

It turns out that this is a rich inquiry -- juicy and productive, taking us broader and deeper into life, as any evolutionary inquiry should.  In this essay I'll share some of my initial thoughts -- which I expect to revise frequently as new insights and examples emerge.  Feel free to explore with us on this emerging edge.

One way I see for a social system to be conscious is for all of us who are in it to be informed about -- and oriented to -- the social system's life and well-being.  Our many individual consciousnesses can then add up to a form of collective consciousness.  Sometimes a collective "field of consciousness" permeates the whole system.

Consider a mundane example:  Think about what happens when millions of us -- all at the same time -- watch a catastrophe like a tsunami, a disastrous hurricane, or a couple of giant skyscrapers collapsing on television news and the Internet.  Together, as we watch and react, we generate a palpable field of awareness and concern that powerfully shapes subsequent events.  Similar to the way magnetic and gravitational fields work, in this field of shared awareness every person and institution shifts in relationship to it.

Perhaps the most important shared awareness that we have is our collective indentity -- a shared perception that we ARE our group, community, country, or world.  This recognition underlies most other aspects of collective consciousness.  The more deeply we sense our common identity and the more care and esteem we have for each other and for the larger life we are part of, the more the human systems we live in emerge as coherent -- and potentially conscious -- entities. In well-developed forms of collective identity, we not only cherish our whole community, bioregion, or world, but see it living in and through us -- cherishing every part of itself, every individual or species, as a source of diverse delight and unique gifts.  In this expansive form of identity we can often experience a deep, flowing communion.*

So what is possible when we become a coherent living system together? The more we all know what's going on ... and care about what's happening to our whole community, society, and world ... and are linked to each other in useful ways ... and know what to do to improve our system's well-being ... the more conscious our system, as a whole, will become.  As these factors grow, we COLLECTIVELY tend to act more and more like a coherent living organism that appropriately responds to the world around it.  More and more, our community, society or world shows up as a living conscious whole.

So the consciousness of a whole social system naturally includes our individual consciousnesses.  But more is involved.  How are our individual minds informed, linked, attuned, engaged...?  To answer this, we need to explore the structures, processes, and cultures that are as much "the system" as we are.

I see many of the major factors in whole-system consciousness falling into the following four tentative topic areas.

• Holistic awareness 
• Shared knowledge and care 
• Systemic leadership
• Evolvability
  

I describe each of these a bit more below.  Within each one, I offer a few factors I believe are characteristic of human systems as they become more conscious.  Each of these topics will be explored further in future essays.

I hope this and similar models can help us focus our attention, resources and efforts on activities that have special impact on the healthy evolution of humanity.

HOLISTIC AWARENESS

How do people deeply and consciously connect to the whole systems they are part of?

In a conscious social system, we know, identify with, and care about our community, bioregion, and world -- each system we are part of -- as a whole.  We orient our awareness and behavior to the existence and needs of these precious living systems, through culture (especially stories), education, governance, and spiritual and group attunement practices.

We know about the health of our human and natural communities, thanks to engaging media, grassroots sharing of news, statistics, briefings, clear attention to environmental changes and many other common activities and facets of our culture.  We know enough about system dynamics to recognize what is happening, what it means, and how we can engage with it.

We are aware of and value each other, and what people different from us are doing.  The field of our collective awareness is vitally alive, as evidenced by the frequency with which similar ideas, innovations, and discoveries show up simultaneously in different places, as needed.

SHARED KNOWLEDGE AND CARE

How do human knowing and caring flow powerfully through the social system?

In a conscious social system, relevant knowledge or caring of one person, time or place is, to a remarkable degree, available to other people, times and places.  We see healthy communication, media, and political systems through which information flows freely, intermingling in many ways and increasing in value as it moves.

Our whole systems have forms of memory which transcend our individual memories and lives.  These include powerfully inclusive and accessible information storage, evaluation, distribution, and retrieval systems like libraries, databases, open source intelligence services, and the searchable Internet.

We readily find each other to work together and share what we care about, and systemic structures and processes facilitate this -- from electronic networking tools to self-organizing face-to-face gatherings around advertised interests.

SYSTEMIC LEADERSHIP

How are the power and guidance systems of society aligned to serve the needs of the whole?

In a conscious social system, certain parts of the system -- leaders and institutions -- are sometimes empowered by the whole to perceive and act on its behalf.

Our social arrangements make it extremely difficult for our leaders and power centers to colonize our systems' resources for their own personal or group benefit.  Well-designed feedback mechanisms and future-orientation systems keep them responsive to the needs of our whole community, society, and world.

Our political, governmental, economic, information and education systems are designed for answerability and service to the common good -- while mindfully protecting and nurturing our precious individuality and diversity from which so many social benefits flow.

Our institutions and cultural practices support legitimate leadership arising from the collective intelligence and wisdom of adequately diverse groups of us in high quality conversations, which are watched by our whole community or society and often exercise direct decision-making power.**

EVOLVABILITY

How does a whole system evolve itself?

In a conscious social system, our system as a whole (sometimes through its leaders or proxies, as above) constantly reflects on its own operation, the results of our collective activity, and our future prospects.

Key parts of our systems are kept as free as possible from bias, fixed ideas, and inflexible attitudes.  We honor wholeness in all its forms.  Our system continually creatively engages the diversity -- and even conflict -- in and around it to generate inclusive, evolving forms of common sense and shared enterprise.  Ways to do this are broadly known.

We have a certain eagerness to welcome, generate and consider novel perspectives and possibilities -- and to test them in useful ways.

We always set up the structures of our systems so they can and do change in a timely manner:  They neither resist needed changes and miss promising opportunities nor do they change chaotically in response to every impulse.  Overall, we maintain a healthy relationship between centralized and decentralized forms of collective perception, reflection, and action -- out of which the necessary level of appropriate change naturally emerges.

FROM SOCIAL CHANGE TO SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Orienting ourselves to visions like these can guide our attention beyond the normal realms of charitable and activist activity -- as vital as they are.  While we need to ameliorate individual suffering, prevent damage to the commonwealth, improve undesirable social conditions, and otherwise address social problems, we need to also explore why such problems are so persistent or increasing.

Orienting ourselves to helping social systems evolve into greater consciousness can stir our imaginations beyond fixing "bad" institutions that generate suffering, damage and harmful conditions. It can stretch us beyond even our utopian visions.

Because what we are after here is not a static ideal form of society. We want social systems that can change themselves -- that can consciously evolve in healthy directions -- over and over, in ongoing response to emerging understandings and new challenges.  We want to nurture this capacity to consciously evolve together forever.

This is not a movement for social change.  This is a movement to expand ourselves into evolution, itself, as it becomes more conscious through us and through the self-transforming social systems we create.  This is a movement to enable our world to learn its way into greater vitality and awareness with each newborn day.

Evolution's Arrow by John Stewart

This paper was send by Michael Dowd as a pre-reading to all participants of the Evolutionary Salon 2; Jan. 14-18, 2006.

He called it “an excellent 6-page summary of his book "Evolution's Arrow" - which was the original inspiration for the convening of Evolutionary Salons.”

Some quotes from this 6-page summary:
“A major evolutionary transition is beginning to unfold on Earth.  Individuals are emerging who are choosing to dedicate their lives to consciously advancing the evolutionary process.  They see that their lives are an important part of the great evolutionary process that has produced the universe and the life within it.  They realize that they have a significant role to play in evolution.”  

“Redefining themselves within a wider evolutionary perspective is providing meaning and direction to their lives - they no longer see themselves as isolated, self-concerned individuals who live for a short time, then die irrelevantly in a meaningless universe.  They know that if evolution is to continue to fulfill its potential, it now must be driven consciously, and it is their responsibility and destiny to contribute to this.”

“At the heart of this evolutionary awakening is the understanding that evolution is directional.  Evolution is not an aimless and random process, it is headed somewhere.”

“Where is evolution headed?  Contrary to earlier understandings of evolution, an unmistakable trend is towards greater interdependence and cooperation amongst living processes.  If humans are to advance the evolutionary process on this planet, a major task will be to find more cooperative ways of organizing ourselves.”  

“As life increases in scale, a second major trend emerges - it gets better at evolving.”

You can upload the 6-page summary here,
and you can even read the whole book online.

From being a work of art to evolutionary emergence, by George Pór

Helen Titchen-Beeth became a work of art. Not by accident but by intentionally pulling together the best of what she sensed as true into an elegant essay that stirs the soul.

There are works of non-objective and objective art. The first is meeting some ego needs of the artist; the second comes from a deeply held sense of world service.

Objective art is cathartic and evokes the best in us. It appeals to the evolutionary impulse that triggers our curiosity and courage. The curiosity of what is my next level of becoming, and the courage of going for it, no matter what.

 

The “being a work of art” meme refers to a particular state of being, in which one responds to the evolutionary urge within, by combining:

- a deep curiosity of a collective future emerging moment by moment, as we think, act, and fill in our calendar

- sensing the moment when a need/opportunity in the world is ready to activate a channel/form, in which any gift of our creativity likes to manifest

 

- a pure desire to give one's best to what the future in need of our co-creativity is asking to do/be in the now

 
Objective art inspires a deep, authentic conversation with oneself, similar to the one from where it was born. As I was reading Helen’s essay  in Kosmos Journal on “Evolutionary Entrepreneurship: Engaging Collective Will,” it did exactly that.

In fact, it was the urge to reflect on Helen’s thoughts in the context of my life’s ever-unfolding meaning, which made me present to what objective art is about. Just for that, thank you Helen.

I imagine that her essay evokes some deep questions in all who read it. These notes are to me an opportunity to inventory mine, and an invitation of your reflection on what it means to you. All quotes below are from Helen’s writing.

“The guidelines set out below come from the distilled wisdom of the global community of ‘hosts of conversations that matter,’ as I understand them through the filters of my own experience…”

When I read that, I feel the dance of communion and autonomy expressing itself through the act of writing; profound listening to the collective wisdom (as it emerges from many voices) joins in the dance with the sharp discernment of meaning, defined by my own experience and values.

Evolutionary entrepreneurship is a way of being of “someone who is willing to dedicate his or her life to fulfilling a collective need” and “engages—directly, consciously and with intent—with the living system, for the good of the whole.”

To name the same “someone,” I’ve been using the term “evolutionary agent.” I appreciate the enrichment of its meaning by Helen’s essay but will keep using my version not only because it’s shorter but “agentry” refers to various domains in which an agent may express her/his creativity and commitment, including such possibilities as undertaker, thinker, poet, community organizer, etc.

“[C]hange can only happen if the will of the collective is engaged. How can we maximise our chance of making that happen?”

That has been the question of (r)evolutionaries of all times. They all responded according to two specific characteristics of their times: (a) the dominant values in the tip of evolutionary wave, and (b) the leading discipline of the collective intellect or Zeitgeist. Helen lives the first and for the second she uses the theories of complex living systems. Below are some examples of how.

“We start by understanding that as members of the human race living on planet Earth, we are embedded in multiple living systems. Any aspect of society or the economy that we care to engage with counts as a living system. As entrepreneurs, that's what we have to deal with. Understanding the properties of living systems can inform us about what we must learn and what we must become if we are to succeed.”

Yes, and properties of living systems can also inform us how we can learn and become what we must. Let’s take the following example.

“In nature, a living system participates in its neighbour’s development. An isolated system is doomed. The bigger the context we can get our arms around, the greater our chances of creating sustainable improvements together. To achieve this, we must learn to collaborate.”

Learning to collaborate at a scale needed by the intentional evolution of society and collective consciousness is not a trivial act. It requires from us as individuals and communities nothing less than “participating in our neighbour’s development.” How do we do that? In any (combination) of the following ways.

➢    Paying attention to what has heart and meaning for us in their learning and strengthening it by engaging them in collaborative inquiry to advance it.
➢    Seeding and feeding that inquiry with ideas and questions informed by our seeing into the neighbour’s highest potential, without influencing it by our own will. That takes practice but training our deep intuition makes it feasible.
➢    Forming and growing collaborative sensing organs, such as a shared learning infrastructure that includes learning journals (blogs), co-authoring workspaces (wikis), real-time co-sensing (via chat, Twitter, life-streaming) and shared containers of meaning (tags and emergent taxonomies).

“Living systems cannot be steered or controlled – they can only be teased, nudged, titillated… We can influence a system in a wise direction only if we are an acknowledged part of the system. If we try to work on the system from outside and don’t see ourselves as part of the system, then although we can provide environmental stimuli, we cannot determine how the system will respond.”

That is true but we cannot determine how the system will respond even if we are part of it because we are only one part. Here the learning together of those inside and outside the system becomes essential to increase its collective intelligence.  We can accomplish that by forming a learning system including internals and externals, and endowed by the sensing organ described above. That’s a big part of what we aim at creating as “Evolutionary Learning & Action Network” (ELAN) to be described here, in the next few months.

“Élan” stands also for the vigor and enthusiasm of evolutionary agents, which they are to bring to honing their skillful means of operating in and on complex social and cognitive systems. None of us can and should do that work alone. Sustained attention of colleagues, practitioners of the same field of transformational work, to their common set of challenges, may lead to the formation of evolutionary learning communities or communities of practice.

“As cohesive communities of practice, we can reach out to other communities of practitioners in other neighbouring fields. We can then form systems of influence…”

That progression of increasing scale is one of the promising roadmaps for the evolutionary movement to navigate through the years ahead. I found its best articulation so far in a germinal essay by Meg Wheatley and Debbie Freeze. An important sign pointing in the direction of self-organizing, larges-scale social innovation is the loose system of “open everything”  that connects such communities of practice as open software, open business, open knowledge, open money, open governance, open education, etc.

While each of those communities pursue its own learning and development agenda, evolutionary agents stand for the whole, seeking out and strengthening the patterns that link them with the Big Shift into our emerging planetary reality.

These notes started by one person becoming a work of art. What would become possible if we would all choose to do so, with increasing frequency? How can we all besuch works of art?

 

To share your thoughts on any of the above, click on the "Converse" tab on the top of the page.

Influencing, moderating, enhancing, supporting on the level of systems, institutions; deep impacting

The following questions came from Evolution Salon 2 participants prior to the gathering. They where clustered by Finn Voldtofte for this site, and the headline is one of the clustertitles, that have later been moved to this section of the wiki

 

How can we further the evolutionary impulse and organize/govern ourselves as a species (globally, nationally, regionally, and locally) so that there are real and effective incentives for individuals, corporations, and nation-states to cooperate and serve the common good (each benefits substantially by doing so), and equally effective incentives against disregarding or damaging the common good?

How can we nurture the evolution of collective wisdom and conscious social systems in ways that serve life-affirming futures?

Can we find practical and inspiring ways to infuse processes and institutions promoting Collective Intelligence and Social Creativity with the intelligences pervasive in the entire Earth Community, including the elder wisdom of bacteria as well as the needs of our more closely related kin that now face extinction?


Within the context of evolutionary uncertainty, how do we seed the system changes needed so that human and organizational creativity naturally lead toward sustainable and restorative practices?

How do we develop the DNA code for social evolution?

What would a think tank, capacity-building program and diffusion strategy for social system evolution look like?

How can the progressive edge of the culture move beyond its infatuation with pluralism and individual freedom and discover a new and higher (yes, higher) unifying moral and spiritual context in which to ground our collective social/political change efforts?

How can we participate in speeding the collective stream of evolution of human consciousness in a more effective way?

What is the nature of the collective and individual work that we must engage in to birth a higher order of consciousness in the human race?

How to design evolutionary guidance systems — on all levels, from local to global optimized — to benefit from the collective intelligence and wisdom of connected, multi-community conversations about questions that matter?

How can we accelerate the shift in human consciousness from the top end of first gear to the bottom of second, from arrogance to humility, from considering ourselves to be brilliant animals, to realizing we are ignorant gods?

How can we combine and connect existing efforts in consciousness evolution to build greater momentum for change?

How can we individually and collectively support the emergence of a creative space that allows for the mystery's brilliance and guidance to come through each and all of us?

Lifecycle of Emergence - Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale

	Lifecycle of Emergence by Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, 2006 (posted with the permission by the authors)   Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change. But networks aren’t the whole story. As networks grow and transform into active, working communities of practice, we discover how Life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how Life creates radical change and takes things to scale. Since its inception in 1992, The Berkana Institute has been experimenting with the lifecycle of emergence: how living systems begin as networks, shift to intentional communities of practice, and evolve into powerful systems capable of global influence. Through our work with communities in many different nations, we are learning what’s possible when we connect people across difference and distance. By applying the lessons of living systems and working intentionally with emergence and its lifecycle, we are demonstrating how local social innovation can be taken to scale and provide solutions to many of the world’s most intractable issues—such as community health, ecological sustainability and economic self-reliance. Why we need to understand networks Researchers and social activists are beginning to discover the power of networks and networking. And there is a growing recognition that networks are the new form of organizing. Evidence of self-organized networks is everywhere: social activists, terrorist groups, drug cartels, street gangs, web-based interest groups. While we now see these everywhere, it is not because they’re a new form of organizing. It’s because we’ve removed our old paradigm blinders that look for hierarchy and control mechanisms in the belief that organization only happens through human will and intervention. Networks are the only form of organization used by living systems on this planet. These networks result from self-organization, where individuals or species recognize their interdependence and organize in ways that support the diversity and viability of all. Networks create the conditions for emergence, which is how Life changes. Because networks are the first stage in emergence, it is essential that we understand their dynamics and how they develop into communities and then systems. Yet much of the current work on networks displays old paradigm bias. In social network analysis, physical representations of the network are created by mapping relationships. This is useful for convincing people that networks exist, and people are often fascinated to see the network made visible. Other network analysts name roles played by members of the network or make distinctions between different parts of the network, such as core and periphery. It may not be the intent of these researchers, but their work is often used by leaders to find ways to manipulate the network, to use it in a traditional and controlling way. What’s missing in these analyses is an exploration of the dynamics of networks: Why do networks form? What are the conditions that support their creation? What keeps a network alive and growing? What keeps members connected? What type of leadership is required? Why do people become leaders? What type of leadership interferes with or destroys the network? What happens after a healthy network forms? What’s next? If we understand these dynamics and the lifecycle of emergence, what can we do as leaders, activists and social entrepreneurs to intentionally foster emergence? What is Emergence? Emergence violates so many of our Western assumptions of how change happens that it often takes quite a while to understand it. In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.) These powerful emergent phenomena appear suddenly and surprisingly. Think about how the Berlin Wall suddenly came down, how the Soviet Union ended, how corporate power quickly came to dominate globally. In each case, there were many local actions and decisions, most of which were invisible and unknown to each other, and none of which was powerful enough by itself to create change. But when these local changes coalesced, new power emerged. What could not be accomplished by diplomacy, politics, protests, or strategy suddenly happened. And when each materialized, most were surprised. Emergent phenomena always have these characteristics: They exert much more power than the sum of their parts; they always possess new capacities different from the local actions that engendered them; they always surprise us by their appearance. It is important to note that emergence always results in a powerful system that has many more capacities than could ever be predicted by analyzing the individual parts. We see this in the behavior of hive insects such as bees and termites. Individual ants possess none of the intelligence or skills that are in the hive. No matter how intently scientists study the behavior of individual ants, they can never see the behavior of the hive. Yet once the hive forms, each ant acts with the intelligence and skillfulness of the whole. This aspect of emergence has profound implications for social entrepreneurs. Instead of developing them individually as leaders and skillful practitioners, we would do better to connect them to like-minded others and create the conditions for emergence. The skills and capacities needed by them will be found in the system that emerges, not in better training programs. Because emergence only happens through connections, Berkana has developed a four stage model that catalyzes connections as the means to achieve global level change: Name, Connect, Nourish, Illuminate (see Appendix). We focus on discovering pioneering efforts and naming them as such. We then connect these efforts to other similar work globally. We nourish this network in many ways, but most essentially through creating opportunities for learning and sharing experiences and shifting into communities of practice. We also illuminate these pioneering efforts so that many more people will learn from them. We are attempting to work intentionally with emergence so that small, local efforts can become a global force for change.   The Lifecycle of Emergence   Stage One: Networks. We live in a time when coalitions, alliances and networks are forming as the means to create societal change. There are ever more networks and now, networks of networks. These networks are essential for people finding likeminded others, the first stage in the lifecycle of emergence. It’s important to note that networks are only the beginning. They are based on self-interest--people usually network together for their own benefit and to develop their own work. Networks tend to have fluid membership; people move in and out of them based on how much they personally benefit from participating.   Stage Two: Communities of Practice. Networks make it possible for people to find others engaged in similar work. The second stage of emergence is the development of communities of practice (CoPs). Many such smaller, individuated communities can spring from a robust network. CoPs are also self-organized. People share a common work and realize there is great benefit to being in relationship. They use this community to share what they know, to support one another, and to intentionally create new knowledge for their field of practice. These CoPs differ from networks in significant ways. They are communities, which means that people make a commitment to be there for each other; they participate not only for their own needs, but to serve the needs of others. In a community of practice, the focus extends beyond the needs of the group. There is an intentional commitment to advance the field of practice, and to share those discoveries with a wider audience. They make their resources and knowledge available to anyone, especially those doing related work. The speed with which people learn and grow in a community of practice is noteworthy. Good ideas move rapidly amongst members. New knowledge and practices are implemented quickly. The speed at which knowledge development and exchange happens is crucial, because local regions and the world need this knowledge and wisdom now.   Stage Three: Systems of Influence. The third stage in emergence can never be predicted. It is the sudden appearance of a system that has real power and influence. Pioneering efforts that hovered at the periphery suddenly become the norm. The practices developed by courageous communities become the accepted standard. People no longer hesitate about adopting these approaches and methods and they learn them easily. Policy and funding debates now include the perspectives and experiences of these pioneers. They become leaders in the field and are acknowledged as the wisdom keepers for their particular issue. And critics who said it could never be done suddenly become chief supporters (often saying they knew it all along.) Emergence is the fundamental scientific explanation for how local changes can materialize as global systems of influence. As a change theory, it offers methods and practices to accomplish the systems-wide changes that are so needed at this time. As leaders and communities of concerned people, we need to intentionally work with emergence so that our efforts will result in a truly hopeful future. No matter what other change strategies we have learned or favored, emergence is the only way change really happens on this planet. And that is very good news.   Appendix   Berkana’s Four Stages for Developing Leadership-in-Community Berkana works with pioneering leaders and communities using a four-stage approach. This has evolved out of our understanding of how living systems grow and change, and years of practice and experimentation. I. Name Pioneering leaders act in isolation, unaware that their work has broader value. They are too busy to think about extending their work, and too humble to think that others would benefit. Berkana’s first act is to recognize them as pioneers with experiences that are of value to others. II. Connect Life grows and changes through the strength of its connections and relationships. (In nature, if a system lacks health, the solution is to connect it to more of itself.) Berkana creates connections in many different ways. We design and facilitate community gatherings. We host networks where people can exchange ideas and resources. Our collaborative technology supports communities of practice through dedicated websites, online conferences, asynchronous conversations and cocreated knowledge products. III. Nourish Communities of practice need many different resources: ideas, mentors, processes, technology, equipment, money. Each is important, but foremost among these is learning and knowledge: knowing what techniques and processes work well, and learning from experience as people do the work. Berkana provides many of these sources of nourishment but, increasingly, we find that the most significant nourishment comes from the interactions and exchanges among pioneering leaders themselves. They need and want to share their practices, experiences and dreams. Creating opportunities for people to learn together has become our primary way of nourishing their efforts. IV. Illuminate It is difficult for anybody to see work based on a different paradigm. If people do notice such work, it is often characterized as inspiring deviations from the norm. It takes time and attention for people to see different approaches for what they are: examples of what the new world could be. The Berkana community publishes articles, tells our stories at conferences, and host learning journeys where people visit pioneering efforts, learn from them directly, and develop lasting relationships.

The "Magic in the Middle" of Movement Models by George Pór

To find ”the magic in the middle”, or to engage the collective intelligence of a group of people, requires that a meeting actually happens, that the participants are capable of bringing themselves present and be available for the meeting. We can not take that for granted under all circumstances. Being in real meeting can be challenging individually and socially, so practices to support processes, where ”inquiry from the middle” is intended, can be of value.

Here I suggest what some of these practices can be. A practice is an established understanding, supported by a pattern of behaviour, sustained and repeated over time and circumstances. There can be all levels of unfoldment of a practice - from initiatory experiences to mastery and teaching level insight.


Personal practices

1. Inquiry

With a metaphor: Inquiry is to be able to go to the edge of what I know, and from there look at what I do not know, with open eyes and curiosity. Inquiry as a practice is a state of mind. Taken to mastery-level, all of what I do can be done as an inquiry.


2. Stretch

Standing at the edge of what I know, looking into what I do not know, and from there taking bold steps into the unknown. The bold steps can be physcial, mental, emotional. They always require my choice to do it, and there will always be uncertainty about outcomes. There are in any given moment and circumstance always possiblities for stretch.


3.  For the sake of contributing or being seen

The practice is about being willing to and open for whether my way of being present, of participating  and contributing, of relating to others is informed by the intention to contribute to the larger purpose that has brought us together, or if I am really more doing what I am doing in order to be seen.

The point is, that the practice is not about what my actual behaviour is – it probably sometimes is for the sake of the whole and sometimes for the sake of myself – the practice is about my willingness to access this theme with regard to myself.


Social practices

4. Being silent together

One thing is to be able to be silent on your own, to settle the activity of body, mind and heart into silence. It is another thing to be able to do this together. It is a practice that can be developed by excercise.

Silence together can take the form of just a few minutes break from activity, but staying present together, with attention on the whole of the group. It can also take the form of practicing meditation together, for instance as a start of a days work together.


5. Reflecting on process

As a social skill this practice is about being able to go into a reflection on what is going on right now in the inquiry-process. It can be supported by a common framework for understanding the unfolding of process in stages. The skill is to be able to reflect on the process without creating a division between me/us and the process, that is without objectifying the process. ”I sense this in me.....! I think what I sense in me relates to what we are doing right now in this way....!”.


6. Listening for what is emerging

What can happen now in this stage of the inquiry, what wants to be said, what can now be named?

As a participant in an inquiry from the middle I shall think of my self as one that potentially can give voice to the middle. As the middle does not have physical manifest form it does not have voice it self.


7. Hang in until a pattern appears

Each participant in a meeting can be as a backdoor kept open while we fire up the house to heat it. Keeping the backdoor open happens if I am not fully committed and decided on participating and staying in the inquiry.

The social skill is about being able to negotiate, confirm and notice each others commitment to hang in.


8. Using tools to remember to go slow

As the energy in a proces that engages magic in the middle can be very intense, and thus require fine atunement in how each participant is engaging beyond what most people normally have experiences with, it is helpfull to remember to go slow in the proces as the energy gets intense.

Use of a talking stick or the like, invocating silence with a bell and other such practical agreements helps. They should not be used all the time – that would establish rules – but agreements can be made on how and when the tools can be put in use.

****

There are probably more useful practices to be discovered. I have found the ones mentioned here consistenly making sense in repeated experiences and experiments with engaging magic in the middle over the last two years. This is true both for processes where the purpose of engaging magic in the middle were explicitly stated, and in proceses where I as a procesfacilitater used magic in the middle in a specific inquiry, but without stating this perspective and these practices explicitely.

I have also written about inquiring from the middle in a reflection on a session during Evolution Salon 2, and in an introduction to Magic in the Middle. I recommend the article Archetypal Practices for Collective Wisdom by Tom Hurley. I think he is adressing the same themes, from other perspectives and in more depth, than I have done here.

April 2006
Finn Voldtofte

The "Magic in the Middle" of Movement Models by George Pór

To find ”the magic in the middle”, or to engage the collective intelligence of a group of people, requires that a meeting actually happens, that the participants are capable of bringing themselves present and be available for the meeting. We can not take that for granted under all circumstances. Being in real meeting can be challenging individually and socially, so practices to support processes, where ”inquiry from the middle” is intended, can be of value.

Here I suggest what some of these practices can be. A practice is an established understanding, supported by a pattern of behaviour, sustained and repeated over time and circumstances. There can be all levels of unfoldment of a practice - from initiatory experiences to mastery and teaching level insight.


Personal practices

1. Inquiry

With a metaphor: Inquiry is to be able to go to the edge of what I know, and from there look at what I do not know, with open eyes and curiosity. Inquiry as a practice is a state of mind. Taken to mastery-level, all of what I do can be done as an inquiry.


2. Stretch

Standing at the edge of what I know, looking into what I do not know, and from there taking bold steps into the unknown. The bold steps can be physcial, mental, emotional. They always require my choice to do it, and there will always be uncertainty about outcomes. There are in any given moment and circumstance always possiblities for stretch.


3.  For the sake of contributing or being seen

The practice is about being willing to and open for whether my way of being present, of participating  and contributing, of relating to others is informed by the intention to contribute to the larger purpose that has brought us together, or if I am really more doing what I am doing in order to be seen.

The point is, that the practice is not about what my actual behaviour is – it probably sometimes is for the sake of the whole and sometimes for the sake of myself – the practice is about my willingness to access this theme with regard to myself.


Social practices

4. Being silent together

One thing is to be able to be silent on your own, to settle the activity of body, mind and heart into silence. It is another thing to be able to do this together. It is a practice that can be developed by excercise.

Silence together can take the form of just a few minutes break from activity, but staying present together, with attention on the whole of the group. It can also take the form of practicing meditation together, for instance as a start of a days work together.


5. Reflecting on process

As a social skill this practice is about being able to go into a reflection on what is going on right now in the inquiry-process. It can be supported by a common framework for understanding the unfolding of process in stages. The skill is to be able to reflect on the process without creating a division between me/us and the process, that is without objectifying the process. ”I sense this in me.....! I think what I sense in me relates to what we are doing right now in this way....!”.


6. Listening for what is emerging

What can happen now in this stage of the inquiry, what wants to be said, what can now be named?

As a participant in an inquiry from the middle I shall think of my self as one that potentially can give voice to the middle. As the middle does not have physical manifest form it does not have voice it self.


7. Hang in until a pattern appears

Each participant in a meeting can be as a backdoor kept open while we fire up the house to heat it. Keeping the backdoor open happens if I am not fully committed and decided on participating and staying in the inquiry.

The social skill is about being able to negotiate, confirm and notice each others commitment to hang in.


8. Using tools to remember to go slow

As the energy in a proces that engages magic in the middle can be very intense, and thus require fine atunement in how each participant is engaging beyond what most people normally have experiences with, it is helpfull to remember to go slow in the proces as the energy gets intense.

Use of a talking stick or the like, invocating silence with a bell and other such practical agreements helps. They should not be used all the time – that would establish rules – but agreements can be made on how and when the tools can be put in use.

****

There are probably more useful practices to be discovered. I have found the ones mentioned here consistenly making sense in repeated experiences and experiments with engaging magic in the middle over the last two years. This is true both for processes where the purpose of engaging magic in the middle were explicitly stated, and in proceses where I as a procesfacilitater used magic in the middle in a specific inquiry, but without stating this perspective and these practices explicitely.

I have also written about inquiring from the middle in a reflection on a session during Evolution Salon 2, and in an introduction to Magic in the Middle. I recommend the article Archetypal Practices for Collective Wisdom by Tom Hurley. I think he is adressing the same themes, from other perspectives and in more depth, than I have done here.

April 2006
Finn Voldtofte

The movement: beyond events! by Ria Baeck

I wrote this originally as a framework for Moving the Edge, to provide an answer to what Tina (one of the convening team) wrote in a recent email, that people who consider to participate the gathering experience “a lack of context to relate to”.

I write it also as a ‘reflecting back’ to the collective as I see it so far: the first Evolutionary Salon (the Hacienda), The Kaleidoscope Café Retreat in Devon (Hazelwood), Evolutionary Salon 2 (Whidbey) and Moving the Edge within some weeks in Denmark and the next Salon in May.

Tina wrote also: “It also stresses for me the importance of taking time to share experiences, and set the context by which they can be understood and interpreted in order to support the integration of the insights on all levels.”
There appeared already a lot of content on the pages of EvolutionaryNexus.org but I’m sure there is still a lot, lot more hiding in people’s minds! I try to share here what I see or what I know, from the biggest context that I can get my arms around. And I invite a lot of others – who try to embrace the same context – to do the same.

A bigger perspective
Tina wrote in her long email: “ It is my impression that a lot of people … are longing to connect and understand their works and walks of life in a bigger picture and perspective, but I also think that the structures of minds dominating our culture makes it quite a difficult task, since breaking new land usually is being seen from the perspective of change as a horizontal movement and as something that needs to be integrated into something that is already there.”
What we are experiencing now, indeed needs a bigger perspective! It is a real upshift, a transformation and not “change as a horizontal movement”!
Stephen Silha wrote while being in the Salon: “I love the meta-aspects of this gathering. We’re Homo Sapiens Sapiens examining many aspects of our process. We're meta-conscious of meta-stuff.”

I will give some explanation – or better: use quotes from others - on the pieces that I see from this bigger perspective.

Beyond individuals
We go from individual consciousness to collective consciousness.

I wrote on the second day of Salon 2: “The calling we are all responding to in one or another way has to do with a deep integration of authenticity and interconnectedness. At the deepest level of this authenticity or inner coherence and at the highest level of interconnectedness – which can also be named as coherence! – I see a collective being formed by all the people here in the event. This collective being is waiting to become conscious of itself; it is a potentiality until we realize it and are aware of it.”

Finn wrote more a few days after the Salon:
“What is the edge of our community now?
We have co-created, supported and witnessed emergence of capacity for engaging collective intelligence, social creativity and community.
We can trust that collectively, and on the level of organizing ourselves, we do know what conversations we shall have to sustain our community in action.
We call into being that which can now be named.
I see a bodhi sangha.”

Michael C. wrote it in a different language: "All that Is" is birthing a new child of Collective Consciousness manifesting in communities with enough openness and awareness to accept this arrival.  Clarity will crystallize as each individual takes responsibility for his or her own participation in the collective and notices when they do not.”

And Dana added: “I think of Finn's powerful observation "we ARE an awakening community" and I feel "we ARE the turning tide"....

Beyond space
The collective consciousness seems to work beyond space, although we have little ‘evidence’ of that.
Tina wrote: “While the salon took place I felt interconnected to the field in a way that I’ve never experienced so concrete. …. I experienced having deep insights that usually only come to me by actually being present and participant in a field. The fact that I could have co-experiences across the continents – that on some level seem parallel to those you (the participants in the Salon) where having – to me add a deeper understanding of how the field is working.”

Beyond time or beyond events
For me it is quite easy to see that the collective consciousness was building, or is unfolding over time and space, partly because I was part of most of them.
From the big context of ‘the Field, or the Community as an Open Space happening through time’ I see the transfer of collective transformation from the first Salon to Hazelwood to the next Salon. And even further down the road the yearlong conference calls with the Collective Intelligence Conveners, and on the other side the line of Spirited Work who were pushing the edges of Open Space. I’m pretty sure this transfer will happen also for Moving the Edge, although I expect only a few people who were participant in the last Salon.
Finn wrote: “If the evolutionary edge of human consciousness is pushed by our common engaging a collective field - as I think we experienced in the salon - and if that field is still awake/alive/engaged/present - as I think I experience it to be - then how do we take part in sustaining that field? I come to think of the Tibetan prayer rolls that everyone in the community takes part in keeping turning.”
As I see it, it are not only individuals that ‘take part in keeping turning’ but even the events are taking their part in keeping the rolls turning. We are building a collective capacity that is not depending on certain leaders or certain methodologies, it doesn’t even need the same participants every time.
I see one big U-curve happening through the different events. The opening of the Mind in the CI Conveners (and probably in Spirited Work?), the opening of the Heart in Hazelwood and the first experiments with collectively listening to the middle and the opening of the Will in Whidbey were ‘the collective’ was truly born.
The process that happened, the collective consciousness that was build over the events, even if we are not able yet to fully grasp it, is set in the morphogenetic field and will become more accessible for other groups/communities. For this purpose it is important that not only we share the new content that has emerged in and after the events, but even more so the inner process that happened within the collective.
And even more: it would be good if we would be able to consciously design for it for Moving the Edge, Salon 3 and all the next events.

Transfer of new thinking and new practices can partly be done by writing and reading. How can transfer of inner, collective transformation be done? Part of the answer is ‘by entrainment’; but my guess is that there is more to it…

I would like to end with a quote from Mark Jones: "What happens in the in-between times that keeps calling to us?"

What is the relationship between not-knowing and taking action?

An exploration of how uncertainty (not-knowing) relates to action and activism

Note:  This material is derived from Jennifer Atlee's Jan 2006 Salon session,  but is not a report on it.  That session's convening inquiry was "if we don't know what we're doing, what is effective action, and how do we get started?"  The notes from that session complement this wiki entry.

If we want to take action -- or are taking action -- we usually have at least a general sense of what we like or don't like, or want or don't want.  But we may not know (or at least be certain of) certain things relevant to our action, including:

• what's going on - the real context in which we're living / working
• what larger purpose we are serving or what larger social or evolutionary forces are working through us
• what the real problem is - the deeper causes or needs
• the specific larger thing we want to do - our intention, purpose, mission
• where we want to go, what desirable outcome(s) we're aiming for - our vision
• how to get there - strategy, tactics, resources, plans, colleagues
• certain information we feel we need to make particular decisions
• what's possible
• what our unique role is or should be
• the actual future outcome(s) of our actions, what difference we will make - results
• which things to do first or to focus on - our priorities
  

Given that we may not know one or more of these things, how shall we act?  The following are different but in no way mutually exclusive ways that not-knowing (uncertainty) can usefully be related to action:

• Act anyway.  Most simply and directly, we can take our best-guess action without knowing everything we would like to know before taking it.  This includes having courage and being willing to take risks.  This approach may be driven by desperation:  the situation is very bad or urgent and we feel that something simply must be done -- Now!  Ultimately, since we can never know everything about a situation, this factor is present to some extent in every action we take.
  
• Engage people.  Our own not-knowing can help us motivate people -- especially through asking questions, inviting people into inquiries with us, and/or convening conversations.  What we don't know can be used to engage people and even help them make self-defined shifts or breakthroughs (as in Listening Projects and Strategic Questioning).  We (from a place of not-knowing) can use many conversational methods to help people find out what THEIR yearning, need or vision is -- and then they (from a place of knowing that desire clearly) can use conversational methods to determine the action they wish to do.  We can thus use our unknowing to release clarity about the direction a person, community or system wants to go (as opposed to where we think they should go).  Future Search, World Cafe, Open Space, Study Circles, and various visioning activities operate here on the collective level.
• Relax.  Not-knowing can relieve our stress.  The fact is that we never totally know with full certainty ANYTHING.  Coming to terms with this -- realizing that we are not letting go of knowing, per se, but rather letting go of the illusion that we actually totally know things (which moves us into a useful awareness of the relativity of our knowing) -- can give us much peace of mind as we choose our actions.  "Letting go of outcome" is an example of this.
• Dream.  We can bypass the fact that we don't know how to do what we're doing or exactly where we're going and instead use the evocative power of possibility as our orientation. This includes formulating visions and using our dreams to call ourselves forward -- or helping others do this for themselves.  Visions give meaning to life and inspire action to deal with the fact that we may not know how to get there or how exactly it will all turn out.
  
• Manifest with Trust.  Closely related to the last two items, we can keep in mind our intention or direction while letting go of our attachment to any specific outcome -- allowing, inviting or invoking our fellows or "the universe" to co-create the outcome with us.  We do this out of a trust that what is best -- "what is best" in a larger sense, beyond our personal preferences and knowing -- or what is ready to manifest (ripe) -- will come about if we make adequate space for it and stay alert to noticing it.  This opens the door to valuable surprises.  This "let go and let God (or some other higher power)" attitude invites less visible forces to work with us.  This can include invoking the nascent future, itself.  Presencing is a sophisticated form of this.  In Otto Scharmer's "U-Curve" model of presencing, the nascent future is sensed in the present and then pursued by creating and studying prototypes (which is a form of learning system, below).
• Learn.  We can use our not-knowing in its proper role in a learning system.  We can study what we don't know.  We can do action learning -- taking action, noticing what happens, and creating new understandings and prototype actions from what we learn.  There are many ways to create learning systems, such as those described by Peter Senge and George Por, the field of Communities of Practice, etc. 
  
• Commit tentatively.  This derives from several of the other items on this list.  As Donald Michael says, "Tentative commitment means you are willing to look at the situation carefully enough, to risk enough, to contribute enough effort, to hope enough, to undertake your project. And to recognize, given our vulnerability our finiteness, our fundamental ignorance -- we may well have it wrong. We may have to back off. We may have to change not only how we're doing it, but doing it at all. And then do so!"
  
• Consult spirit or intuition.  We can shift our guidance center-of-gravity from outer knowledge to inner knowledge or transcendent knowledge.  We can listen to what the whole (or evolution or the world or God) wants of us, what our heart says, what our intuition indicates.  In other words, we can listen to our callings, individually and/or collectively.  Ideally, this is combined with outer knowledge:  We inform ourselves with outer knowledge and then let it go and look to the Center for guidance.  We make ourselves available for what wants to use us for the welfare or evolution of the Whole.  There are many practices for doing this, many of which have a spiritual base, of which Listening Into the Middle and the Quaker "waiting on the Light" are two powerful examples.  (There are also other sources of certainty than ourselves -- such as the Bible or the evolved patterns of nature, which can help us let go of our own certainty in favor of that higher Knowledge, but that isn't what this item is about.  This item is about more intuitional or direct spiritual knowing.  Oracles like Tarot cards or the I Ching can be used in either way -- to tell us what to do directly or to stimulate our own intuitions.)
• Love and flow.  We can shift our guidance center-of-gravity from certainty about the world to open-heart relationship and flowing, nonlinear interactivity.  Action then emerges from the field of the relationship rather than from particular knowledge beyond the relationship.  Examples include simply loving and honoring people and life; flowing in a field of interactive relationships (as in jazz improvisation and inspired teamwork); and practices like Nonviolent Communication, Transformational Mediation, and 4-7 day Open Space conferences.  (Understanding how difficult it is to act in the face of intrinsic uncertainty might also help us feel compassion for our fellow human beings whose ideas and actions may not make sense to us.)
  
• Move beyond positions.  Sometimes what we think we know makes it hard for us to hear each other, blocking collaboration.  So some processes actively facilitate not-knowing, to help us let go of our certainties and ideologies in order to help us find common ground and work together.  Then they usually -- but not always (e.g. Bohm Dialogue) -- help us find common ground.  Examples include Dynamic Facilitation, Open Space, World Cafe, Nonviolent Communication, and various forms of conflict resolution and deliberation that help participants see a bigger picture that includes and transcends their entrenched positions.  The emerging field of transpartisanship is very explicitly based on transcending positions.
  
• Use "swiss cheese."  Thanks to all of the above, it is often useful for a leader or group to intentionally leave a proposal or idea incomplete, or to act with more humility than they perhaps feel inside -- to set aside what they think they know (in whole or part) with the specific intention of evoking engagement from others and the world, including deeper parts of themselves.  Some call this "swiss cheese leadership" in which the "hole" in "wholeness" is actively engaged.

Some words connected with the positive use of not-knowing are humility, curiosity, trust, openness, inquiry, vulnerability, welcoming, presencing, vision, heart, and spirit.  Many people engaged in this way have spiritual insights or understandings of the new sciences (complexity, chaos, quantum, living systems, cognitive science, etc.) that make some sense of the intrinsic uncertainties of life.

Many of these processes are described on the Co-Intelligent Practices page.

An interesting article on our relationship to certainty and uncertainty is Donald Michael's Some Observations Regarding a Missing Elephant (which was usefully commented on by Paul Ray and Tom Atlee; Tom's commentary includes a summary of Donald Michael's essay).  Also of interest here is Tom Atlee's poem "Let's Nail It Down, Before It Gets Away!" about living with uncertainty at the leading edge.

  

The Origin and Emergence of Movement Models - Frameworks for Evolutionary Transformation

The vision of a movement for the conscious evolution of social systems emerged from the first Evolutionary Salon and found its expression in the blog entry on Growing Together at the Emerging Edge of Evolution, by Tom Atlee, who wrote:

We decided that we were part of an emerging movement for the conscious evolution of (increasingly conscious) social systems. The success of that movement would not involve taking over society or even creating a new society, but rather having the society's conscious capacities expand until it became able to consciously and wisely participate in its own evolution. 

That's a novel, refreshing and potentially irresistible concept for social transformation. A lot needs to be learned on the way, so much that we can learn it only as an emergent social movement with a collective intelligence and consciousness.  Tom also suggested:

The movement for conscious evolution of social systems is already well underway. ... another contribution we could make would be to map these various elements of the world we want and the ways we want to get there, to show their interconnections, and to clarify successful practices -- and to do all this in an ongoing and participatory way. (A model that inspired us in this is the "pattern language for sustainability".)

Another breakthrough result from the first Evolutionary Salon is a chart of  embedded circles, which integrates many threads of inquiry, including:

Those who see us transforming the society from one form to another can imagine the smaller movement circle expanding outward until it is congruent with the big society circle: The worldview and activities of the erstwhile movement BECOME the new society.

On the other hand, those who see our Work as an increasingly conscious phase of a process that has been going on for some time and will likely continue for some time (with increasing consciousness, if we do our Work well), can visualize the thin blue rings as spreading out from the "movement" circle forever, as ripples spread from a rock dropped in the water. In this latter view, the expansion of the rings represents an ever-emerging evolution of society which always has a "movement" (an evolving network of innovators and early adopters) at its generative center. 

The two paragraphs above are quoted  from the blog entry on "A Movement for the Conscious Evolution of (increasingly conscious) Social Systems."

Tom Atlee has introduced a more fine-grained  description of the movement's model in an essay on Five Areas of Activity Needed for a Movement to Advance the Conscious Evolution of Increasingly Conscious Social Systems that he shared with particiinats of the 2nd Evolutionary salon on Catalyzing Collective Intelligence and Social Creativity. We will follow the conversation triggered by it and post its key documents on these pages.

Then Tom has developed with Peggy Holman a visual model called "An Architecture for a Movement of Conscious Evolutionary Agentry for the Conscious Evolution of Increasingly Conscious Social Systems." Quite a mouthful for a name, but it's worth to look at the rich picture. Out from the above and other seminal writing produced by a group of kindreds, as the movement is ripening, the need for a "source document" will, very likely, emerge.

Talking about the 5 Areas of Activity Needed essay and the Evolutionary Agentry picture in a conference call, somebody said, "I was sitting here looking at these two documents trying to discern the differences between 'the five pieces' in Tom's write-up and the picture of the movement architecture." Tom replied,  "They overlap, but they don't fit perfectly together, and hopefully that will be generative."

Let's take Tom's words as invitation to co-inquiry into the emerging models of movement architecture and what is missing that could make them more robust. That's the intent of The "Magic in the Middle" of Movement Models.
 

 

Moving The Edge seen as a prototype - by Finn Voldtofte

If the gathering Moving The Edge became a prototype, what was it then a prototype for?

I suggest: For gathering people around both a theme and an intention, with the intention being to participate for the sake of the whole (engaging a field of collective intelligence amongst the participants) and in service of the theme.

The theme for Moving The Edge was ”The role of collective intelligence in moving the edge of evolution”, so in this case the theme and the intention melted together. In the prototype the theme can vary but not the intention.


I suggest that theese points could be generic parts of the prototype:

Before

1. A call for conveners – can the initial vision be substantiated and backed up by more than one standing forward and commit to convene and host?

2. Establish clarity on purpose – and keep on refering back to it. Part of clarity is to be able to express the purpose in a simple and clear way.

During MTE this statement was present at the walls in all four directions:

Moving The Edge

An adventurous inquiry
into the role
of collective intelligence
in moving the edge of evolution

In hindsight this central part of the invitation kept us coming back to the purpose during the event, and also informed how we worked as a convening team.

3. Invite – and let those who feel called take responsibility for acting on the invitation. ”Feelling called” as the key identifier of ”who”.

4. Costs on ”A Company of Friends” basis. This also helps participants set expectations to the ”service-level” – expect things to be organized as it is amongst friends, including you taking your part of whatever needs to be done. Don’t expect a lot of people be there to take care of you and your needs. Pay for costs as you register – so that no other has to take any financial risk on your behalf.

From MTE we don’t know how an additional fee for the professional service of convening and hosting would have influenced the gathering.

5. It takes a field to convene a field.

”The invited field responds to what we do, not what we say, in the convening field. Any incoherence, lack of trust, lack of commitment, lack of clarity in our convening team will be sensed and responded to 'out there'. And we will sense and react upon any inertia 'out there' to having this gathering happen” (From the chronicles of convening team phonemeetings).


* Our intention is to gather for the sake of the emergence of a
coherent field of collective intelligence. As part of this
intention, we plan to set aside or hold our personal agendas in ways
that actively welcome the emergence of larger discoveries and
possibilities none of us saw before.

* As a convening team we are wrestling with "walking the talk" in
acting as a field of CI calling a field of CI.

* As a convening team we know, that we have initiated something we
don't know what is - and yet we move on with a deep felt sense that
this is something timely and ripe for evolution.

(from a clarification in response to a question on ”the distinct signature of the gathering)

6. In order to support us in ”acting from the middle” we established a routine of weekly phonemeetings, which lasted approx 90 min. We understood it as engaging the very same field as the gathering was intended to engage, so that the gathering would be a continuation of what we kept alive amongst us via the weekly calls and other kinds of communication.

7. Chronicle what you do and make it available. Transparency in communications and in decisions.

8. Act without attachment to outcomes. MTE almost didn’t make it due to attachment to an idea of number of participants. (Look  here for a detailed chronicle about that).  ”Outcomes” could also be ...finances, publicity, name-and-fame, job- and consulting opportunities....


During

9. Be attentive to the transition from the field being the convening team to being the entire gathering. Before MTE two of us hosted first one, then another, then a third in our house and finally joined with a fourth to be a group of 6 driving to the venue.

At the venue the convening team assumed the role of hosting team, and had attention to each participant's transistion from travel to arrival to settling in.


10. The flow of the gathering has four stages:

Opening – welcome, clarifying initial focussing questions and intentions, going through the stages of becoming a group of people in autonomy and communion.

Deepening – entering into the state of inquiry, that in surprising and not predictive ways adresses whatever is in the way for clarity and direct cognition on the intial intentions. Whatever it is that is in the way, principally will be what closes body, mind, heart and/or soul. What is in the way can be individual and/or group issues. Any individual holding back holds back the whole field. Any imbalances not adressed will need to be held consciously or unconsciously by someone. Any attempt to exclude will create an imbalance. The energetical experience of deepening is more and more intensity, more and more like being in a container under pressure.

Noticing – emerging patterns, indivdual and group cognition on the themes held in the initial intentions and questions, even though the themes barely have been touched upon yet.

Completing for next openening. What shall be said and what shall be done now to complete this gathering in a way that opens for what is next?


11. In each of the stages the overall pattern of opening-deepening-noticing-completing for next opening repeats. So for instance the experience of a period of confusion and even chaos that often is part of the opening, may be experienced again in each of the later stages, but expectedly less intense and shorter. This can be mistaken as if swinging back and forth between the stages, but I think it is really more the experience of substages within the overall stage.


12. The opening stage lasts until a situation is established where the group can enter into deepening inquiry together. This situation can be described as  the coexistence of a direct experience of (ideally) complete autonomy and communion at the same time. This is some times described as the state of real community (as opposed to pseudo community).

There are three phases in coming to this situation:

Establishing relations, noticing what unites
Calling in diversities, welcoming disturbances, noticing what creates complexity
Naming what wants to be set free, and what calls for being balanced.

The ”succes” of the first phase can be assessed on a trust-insecure scale. Likewise an ”opening of possibilities vs. chaos” scale can acces the work in the second phase, and ”expansion vs. emptiness”  for the third phase. If the work in each phase is done with elegance and ease, truust will be established, possibilites will open, and expansion of consciousness will happen. If the work is done unskillfull, halfheartedly or in the presence of resistance on the levels of body, mind and/or heart then lack of safety, chaos and emptiness (”I don’t get it at all”) will be experienced.


After

No points for a prototype comes to my mind now. It was of importance to the afterproces that we had a lot of laptops, wireless internet connection, access to printer, and a web-site like evolutionarynexus.org to start using while gathered.

Moving The Edge seen as a prototype - by Finn Voldtofte

If the gathering Moving The Edge became a prototype, what was it then a prototype for?

I suggest: For gathering people around both a theme and an intention, with the intention being to participate for the sake of the whole (engaging a field of collective intelligence amongst the participants) and in service of the theme.

The theme for Moving The Edge was ”The role of collective intelligence in moving the edge of evolution”, so in this case the theme and the intention melted together. In the prototype the theme can vary but not the intention.


I suggest that theese points could be generic parts of the prototype:

Before

1. A call for conveners – can the initial vision be substantiated and backed up by more than one standing forward and commit to convene and host?

2. Establish clarity on purpose – and keep on refering back to it. Part of clarity is to be able to express the purpose in a simple and clear way.

During MTE this statement was present at the walls in all four directions:

Moving The Edge

An adventurous inquiry
into the role
of collective intelligence
in moving the edge of evolution

In hindsight this central part of the invitation kept us coming back to the purpose during the event, and also informed how we worked as a convening team.

3. Invite – and let those who feel called take responsibility for acting on the invitation. ”Feelling called” as the key identifier of ”who”.

4. Costs on ”A Company of Friends” basis. This also helps participants set expectations to the ”service-level” – expect things to be organized as it is amongst friends, including you taking your part of whatever needs to be done. Don’t expect a lot of people be there to take care of you and your needs. Pay for costs as you register – so that no other has to take any financial risk on your behalf.

From MTE we don’t know how an additional fee for the professional service of convening and hosting would have influenced the gathering.

5. It takes a field to convene a field.

”The invited field responds to what we do, not what we say, in the convening field. Any incoherence, lack of trust, lack of commitment, lack of clarity in our convening team will be sensed and responded to 'out there'. And we will sense and react upon any inertia 'out there' to having this gathering happen” (From the chronicles of convening team phonemeetings).


* Our intention is to gather for the sake of the emergence of a
coherent field of collective intelligence. As part of this
intention, we plan to set aside or hold our personal agendas in ways
that actively welcome the emergence of larger discoveries and
possibilities none of us saw before.

* As a convening team we are wrestling with "walking the talk" in
acting as a field of CI calling a field of CI.

* As a convening team we know, that we have initiated something we
don't know what is - and yet we move on with a deep felt sense that
this is something timely and ripe for evolution.

(from a clarification in response to a question on ”the distinct signature of the gathering)

6. In order to support us in ”acting from the middle” we established a routine of weekly phonemeetings, which lasted approx 90 min. We understood it as engaging the very same field as the gathering was intended to engage, so that the gathering would be a continuation of what we kept alive amongst us via the weekly calls and other kinds of communication.

7. Chronicle what you do and make it available. Transparency in communications and in decisions.

8. Act without attachment to outcomes. MTE almost didn’t make it due to attachment to an idea of number of participants. (Look  here for a detailed chronicle about that).  ”Outcomes” could also be ...finances, publicity, name-and-fame, job- and consulting opportunities....


During

9. Be attentive to the transition from the field being the convening team to being the entire gathering. Before MTE two of us hosted first one, then another, then a third in our house and finally joined with a fourth to be a group of 6 driving to the venue.

At the venue the convening team assumed the role of hosting team, and had attention to each participant's transistion from travel to arrival to settling in.


10. The flow of the gathering has four stages:

Opening – welcome, clarifying initial focussing questions and intentions, going through the stages of becoming a group of people in autonomy and communion.

Deepening – entering into the state of inquiry, that in surprising and not predictive ways adresses whatever is in the way for clarity and direct cognition on the intial intentions. Whatever it is that is in the way, principally will be what closes body, mind, heart and/or soul. What is in the way can be individual and/or group issues. Any individual holding back holds back the whole field. Any imbalances not adressed will need to be held consciously or unconsciously by someone. Any attempt to exclude will create an imbalance. The energetical experience of deepening is more and more intensity, more and more like being in a container under pressure.

Noticing – emerging patterns, indivdual and group cognition on the themes held in the initial intentions and questions, even though the themes barely have been touched upon yet.

Completing for next openening. What shall be said and what shall be done now to complete this gathering in a way that opens for what is next?


11. In each of the stages the overall pattern of opening-deepening-noticing-completing for next opening repeats. So for instance the experience of a period of confusion and even chaos that often is part of the opening, may be experienced again in each of the later stages, but expectedly less intense and shorter. This can be mistaken as if swinging back and forth between the stages, but I think it is really more the experience of substages within the overall stage.


12. The opening stage lasts until a situation is established where the group can enter into deepening inquiry together. This situation can be described as  the coexistence of a direct experience of (ideally) complete autonomy and communion at the same time. This is some times described as the state of real community (as opposed to pseudo community).

There are three phases in coming to this situation:

Establishing relations, noticing what unites
Calling in diversities, welcoming disturbances, noticing what creates complexity
Naming what wants to be set free, and what calls for being balanced.

The ”succes” of the first phase can be assessed on a trust-insecure scale. Likewise an ”opening of possibilities vs. chaos” scale can acces the work in the second phase, and ”expansion vs. emptiness”  for the third phase. If the work in each phase is done with elegance and ease, truust will be established, possibilites will open, and expansion of consciousness will happen. If the work is done unskillfull, halfheartedly or in the presence of resistance on the levels of body, mind and/or heart then lack of safety, chaos and emptiness (”I don’t get it at all”) will be experienced.


After

No points for a prototype comes to my mind now. It was of importance to the afterproces that we had a lot of laptops, wireless internet connection, access to printer, and a web-site like evolutionarynexus.org to start using while gathered.

Process formats for gatherings by Finn Voldtofte

What processformats can be of service? I address this question in the light of a reflection of evolution of social skills.

At a stage in civilization mankind came to address the issue of bodily safety. A point in evolution came, where it began to be unacceptable to kill each other, beat or harm one another. Exceptions were commonly accepted when punishment for breaking law was the purpose, and towards slaves, in upbringing of children and for a husband to regulate behavior of his wife. Over time, in more and more cultures even the exceptions are disappearing – not as actions experienced, but as what is accepted as legal and decent.

At a later stage of civilization, decency on the level of mind was negotiated. Once a scientist could not state his findings, if they were in conflict with the church. Galilaei had to withdraw his postulation that the sun, not the earth, is center in the universe. Now we have understood freedom of speech and print, and have rules and standards for academic decency, Truthspeaking is an obligation in court and in public government. These understandings are often seen violated, but they are held as non-negotiables.

On the level of the heart, when it comes to relational issues, some things have been learned, and other things are still in civilisatoric negotiation and learning. There is often no consequences drawn if someone acts as an emotional terrorist in a meeting or in the public space by flaming anger and denunciation of others. And in many cultures children are still brought up by punishment and threats rather than by love and support.

Likewise, on the level of soul, on the level of free will, mankind have understood the importance of freedom – and have fought wars in the name of freedom. I think we in many ways are still at a stage where we have not really understood that we can not just beat each other up on the soullevel (or on the heartlevel for that matter). A question is coming to the foreground:

What is decent behavior - what are acceptable standards when it comes to how we show up, meet and engage with each other on the level of soul?

I don’t claim to have answers to that question, but I have some reflections and suggestions on a very practical level when it comes to processformats for gatherings like Evolution Salon and Moving The Edge.

But first some general thoughts:

I think speed hurts soul. So it is decent to slow down. Go slow. Take time. Pause. Be well rested.

On the soullevel we are very powerful, maybe powerful beyond what we are aware of. Discrimination, grief and anger are powers that can be of service, but they should come in adequate quanta and with precision on what it is aimed at. I think we can help each other a lot in learning this.

Some are holding space for others – and it is a service to do so. I think that whenever space needs to be held for something it points to some lack of freedom on the soullevel. It may replicate as lack of space for aspects of heart, mind and body. Say that space is being held for deepening in an inquiry, it could point to some fear that is blocking free will . It may not be appropriate to address that fear in a specific gathering, so holding the space for deepening serves well.

Thoughts on processformats:

Processformats engaged should not cage the freedom of soul.

All processformats can be useful as long as they are engaged by each individuals acceptance of invitation to step into a specific procesformat.

If an invitation is for a conference, with plenary presentations and preset workshops in breakout groups that you sign up for, then that can be a way of organizing that accomplishes something, while of course other things are opted out with this format. Personally I am likely to not sign up for a conference like that, but if I did it would be my responsibility to find my way through that experience.

If an invitation is for a cafe seminar, with many simultaneous conversations around small tables, all in the same room, seeded by questions that matter, and with the many conversations weaved to one larger conversation by our moving between tables as guided by a cafe-host – then that way of organizing has proven to be valuable. If you know that that is what you are invited for, and you accept the invitation, then you probably will enjoy it and benefit from it. If cafe-dialogue is used in situations where it is not made clear to the participants, some may find it to loose and unstructured in relation to what they want, and others may find it to structured and rigid in relation to what they think is possible in the group.

The same holds for an invitation to Open Space. If I am invited to a gathering, where the day starts with the opening of a marketplace, where whoever wants to announce and commit to do a workshop, give a lecture or presentation, host a conversation or inquiry can do so, and the rest of the time we participate in whatever we want to, guided by what we have heart for – then I can make the choice to be there and take part, or stay at home.

If the invitation is for at gathering where we might use cafe and might use Open Space, and might use other processformats, but we don’t know by now (at the time of invitation) and we will have to find out in the course of the gathering – then that is completely possibly to engage in as a free soul. The challenge will be to ”find out”, and not to enforce control in a situations where it is not negotiated and accepted.

There is a possible trap in this general, open processformat. The trap has the form ”let us all....(do the same thing)”. If it comes as a voicing of what is at that point true and authentic leadership, then it will be enacted with no flaws and no capturing of free soul. But if it is not completely authentic there will either be resistance, and it may take the form of an immediate counter suggestion of the completely opposite, or the suggestion will be enacted but it creates tension, because something is not allowed to be free.

I have experienced that even using the format of an ”every ones voice heard”- check in was too structured in a situation where a state of flex-flow was lively. Any attempt to guide in the form ”all follow the same procedure” died instantaneously.

So in conclusion: Any processformat could potentially be of service. Which ones do we choose to use? State that clearly in the invitation – and harvest the consequences of your choice as it shows up in who accepts the invitation. By invitation I mean not only the initial invitation for a gathering, but also the invitations extended at all subsequent stages of the unfoldment of the gathering.

Process without purpose is meaningless, so I have set aside as a given, that there is a clear purpose stated in the invitation too.

April 2006
Finn Voldtofte

The "Magic in the Middle" of Movement Models by George Pór

To find ”the magic in the middle”, or to engage the collective intelligence of a group of people, requires that a meeting actually happens, that the participants are capable of bringing themselves present and be available for the meeting. We can not take that for granted under all circumstances. Being in real meeting can be challenging individually and socially, so practices to support processes, where ”inquiry from the middle” is intended, can be of value.

Here I suggest what some of these practices can be. A practice is an established understanding, supported by a pattern of behaviour, sustained and repeated over time and circumstances. There can be all levels of unfoldment of a practice - from initiatory experiences to mastery and teaching level insight.


Personal practices

1. Inquiry

With a metaphor: Inquiry is to be able to go to the edge of what I know, and from there look at what I do not know, with open eyes and curiosity. Inquiry as a practice is a state of mind. Taken to mastery-level, all of what I do can be done as an inquiry.


2. Stretch

Standing at the edge of what I know, looking into what I do not know, and from there taking bold steps into the unknown. The bold steps can be physcial, mental, emotional. They always require my choice to do it, and there will always be uncertainty about outcomes. There are in any given moment and circumstance always possiblities for stretch.


3.  For the sake of contributing or being seen

The practice is about being willing to and open for whether my way of being present, of participating  and contributing, of relating to others is informed by the intention to contribute to the larger purpose that has brought us together, or if I am really more doing what I am doing in order to be seen.

The point is, that the practice is not about what my actual behaviour is – it probably sometimes is for the sake of the whole and sometimes for the sake of myself – the practice is about my willingness to access this theme with regard to myself.


Social practices

4. Being silent together

One thing is to be able to be silent on your own, to settle the activity of body, mind and heart into silence. It is another thing to be able to do this together. It is a practice that can be developed by excercise.

Silence together can take the form of just a few minutes break from activity, but staying present together, with attention on the whole of the group. It can also take the form of practicing meditation together, for instance as a start of a days work together.


5. Reflecting on process

As a social skill this practice is about being able to go into a reflection on what is going on right now in the inquiry-process. It can be supported by a common framework for understanding the unfolding of process in stages. The skill is to be able to reflect on the process without creating a division between me/us and the process, that is without objectifying the process. ”I sense this in me.....! I think what I sense in me relates to what we are doing right now in this way....!”.


6. Listening for what is emerging

What can happen now in this stage of the inquiry, what wants to be said, what can now be named?

As a participant in an inquiry from the middle I shall think of my self as one that potentially can give voice to the middle. As the middle does not have physical manifest form it does not have voice it self.


7. Hang in until a pattern appears

Each participant in a meeting can be as a backdoor kept open while we fire up the house to heat it. Keeping the backdoor open happens if I am not fully committed and decided on participating and staying in the inquiry.

The social skill is about being able to negotiate, confirm and notice each others commitment to hang in.


8. Using tools to remember to go slow

As the energy in a proces that engages magic in the middle can be very intense, and thus require fine atunement in how each participant is engaging beyond what most people normally have experiences with, it is helpfull to remember to go slow in the proces as the energy gets intense.

Use of a talking stick or the like, invocating silence with a bell and other such practical agreements helps. They should not be used all the time – that would establish rules – but agreements can be made on how and when the tools can be put in use.

****

There are probably more useful practices to be discovered. I have found the ones mentioned here consistenly making sense in repeated experiences and experiments with engaging magic in the middle over the last two years. This is true both for processes where the purpose of engaging magic in the middle were explicitly stated, and in proceses where I as a procesfacilitater used magic in the middle in a specific inquiry, but without stating this perspective and these practices explicitely.

I have also written about inquiring from the middle in a reflection on a session during Evolution Salon 2, and in an introduction to Magic in the Middle. I recommend the article Archetypal Practices for Collective Wisdom by Tom Hurley. I think he is adressing the same themes, from other perspectives and in more depth, than I have done here.

April 2006
Finn Voldtofte

The "Magic in the Middle" of Movement Models by George Pór

To find ”the magic in the middle”, or to engage the collective intelligence of a group of people, requires that a meeting actually happens, that the participants are capable of bringing themselves present and be available for the meeting. We can not take that for granted under all circumstances. Being in real meeting can be challenging individually and socially, so practices to support processes, where ”inquiry from the middle” is intended, can be of value.

Here I suggest what some of these practices can be. A practice is an established understanding, supported by a pattern of behaviour, sustained and repeated over time and circumstances. There can be all levels of unfoldment of a practice - from initiatory experiences to mastery and teaching level insight.


Personal practices

1. Inquiry

With a metaphor: Inquiry is to be able to go to the edge of what I know, and from there look at what I do not know, with open eyes and curiosity. Inquiry as a practice is a state of mind. Taken to mastery-level, all of what I do can be done as an inquiry.


2. Stretch

Standing at the edge of what I know, looking into what I do not know, and from there taking bold steps into the unknown. The bold steps can be physcial, mental, emotional. They always require my choice to do it, and there will always be uncertainty about outcomes. There are in any given moment and circumstance always possiblities for stretch.


3.  For the sake of contributing or being seen

The practice is about being willing to and open for whether my way of being present, of participating  and contributing, of relating to others is informed by the intention to contribute to the larger purpose that has brought us together, or if I am really more doing what I am doing in order to be seen.

The point is, that the practice is not about what my actual behaviour is – it probably sometimes is for the sake of the whole and sometimes for the sake of myself – the practice is about my willingness to access this theme with regard to myself.


Social practices

4. Being silent together

One thing is to be able to be silent on your own, to settle the activity of body, mind and heart into silence. It is another thing to be able to do this together. It is a practice that can be developed by excercise.

Silence together can take the form of just a few minutes break from activity, but staying present together, with attention on the whole of the group. It can also take the form of practicing meditation together, for instance as a start of a days work together.


5. Reflecting on process

As a social skill this practice is about being able to go into a reflection on what is going on right now in the inquiry-process. It can be supported by a common framework for understanding the unfolding of process in stages. The skill is to be able to reflect on the process without creating a division between me/us and the process, that is without objectifying the process. ”I sense this in me.....! I think what I sense in me relates to what we are doing right now in this way....!”.


6. Listening for what is emerging

What can happen now in this stage of the inquiry, what wants to be said, what can now be named?

As a participant in an inquiry from the middle I shall think of my self as one that potentially can give voice to the middle. As the middle does not have physical manifest form it does not have voice it self.


7. Hang in until a pattern appears

Each participant in a meeting can be as a backdoor kept open while we fire up the house to heat it. Keeping the backdoor open happens if I am not fully committed and decided on participating and staying in the inquiry.

The social skill is about being able to negotiate, confirm and notice each others commitment to hang in.


8. Using tools to remember to go slow

As the energy in a proces that engages magic in the middle can be very intense, and thus require fine atunement in how each participant is engaging beyond what most people normally have experiences with, it is helpfull to remember to go slow in the proces as the energy gets intense.

Use of a talking stick or the like, invocating silence with a bell and other such practical agreements helps. They should not be used all the time – that would establish rules – but agreements can be made on how and when the tools can be put in use.

****

There are probably more useful practices to be discovered. I have found the ones mentioned here consistenly making sense in repeated experiences and experiments with engaging magic in the middle over the last two years. This is true both for processes where the purpose of engaging magic in the middle were explicitly stated, and in proceses where I as a procesfacilitater used magic in the middle in a specific inquiry, but without stating this perspective and these practices explicitely.

I have also written about inquiring from the middle in a reflection on a session during Evolution Salon 2, and in an introduction to Magic in the Middle. I recommend the article Archetypal Practices for Collective Wisdom by Tom Hurley. I think he is adressing the same themes, from other perspectives and in more depth, than I have done here.

April 2006
Finn Voldtofte

Identifying the essence of Evolutionary Salons

These notes on the definition, purpose, and forms of Evolutionary Salons were developed by Tom Atlee, Peggy Holman, and Michael Dowd.  Please see them as an invitation to explore this subject further. 

If we can usefully and evocatively clarify what Evolutionary Salons are, we will be better able to enable Evolutionary Salons to spread to different areas.  Some of us wish to empower the people interested in Evolutionary Salons to create them in all varieties in all areas of the US and world.  To do this, we first need to know what it is that we are talking about.  Then we can experiment with ways to create them, and develop materials, organizing spaces, and networks to help people do that.

 

DEFINITION

An Evolutionary Salon is any pre-scheduled conversation that

1. is grounded in a science-based, inspiring, empowering understanding of evolution
2. takes seriously our role in evolution becoming conscious of itself
3. is designed to support individual and collective evolution
4. contributes to the emerging networked movement for conscious evolution

PURPOSE

The purpose of an Evolutionary Salon is to develop understandings, capacities, communities, connections, and possibilities that can serve us in growing into the conscious evolution of civilization, so that our individual and collective actions serve the whole of life.


FORM

An Evolutionary Salon can be of any size, use any type of process in any venue, include any type of people, deal with any subject or inquiry, and be organized in any way, as long as it fits the definition and purpose above.

The diversity of evolutionary salons ranges from one-time potluck discussions, to weekly living-room study and support groups, to a dozen professional or sector experts gathering for two days of intense work together, to a large week-long open-invitation open space conference with hundreds or thousands of participants -- or any other form. The more diverse forms, the better.