Scaling and Sustaining Social and Organisational Innovation

Miranda, thank you for your interest. The famos oft-quoted statement from Bill O'Brien, ex-CEO of Hanover Insurance, goes like this: "The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener."

On the web, there are about 250 webpages referencing 7 variations of that hypothesis. Used wisely, it calls our attention to our attention to our blind spot regarding the source and quality of attention from which we operate.

Used unwisely, to cover deficiences in skillful means for large-scale social innovation (that includes birthing new systems, structures, and processes), it deflects attention from our blind spot.

Dear Chris, what you wrote is hugely inspiring.  
Letting it sink in deeply, I came to see what follows in this reply.

In your courage to sense into the unconceivable, and willingness to contemplate the “how do I hold THAT” question, I see the essence of your answer  to it.

> George...I love that you hold the broadest of what is possible.

Thank you for seeing that; it makes me feel more connected with all those who are looking into what has just become possible, in these days of deepening global crises.

> I have no idea how to hold world-changing projects.  

None of us has, alone. The scale and complexity of taking response-ability for intentional evolution is daunting. Isn’t it evolution’s way to tell us, “get wiser together by connecting your conversations”?

>  I can't conceive of that scale at all, and I feel a little grief and anxiety sometimes when I sense the monumental scale of what you are asking.

Chris, I hear you and feel you. I feel the same anxiety when I realize what is the scope at which human groups must learn presencing their future.  We know that the global crises need both local and global solutions.

A personally meaningful way, for me, to hold that tension is sensing the world as me. However, in the past, when I did that, I frequently felt stressed, overwhelmed, impatient, and out-of-balance.

Something has shifted in me in the very midst of a recent conversation with Helen and Jean-Sébastien. Suddenly, it became self-evident: it’s not that we have to hold world-changing projects, we just need to stay open to what the evolutionary urge us is asking from us.

5 years ago, Peter Merry and I recognized and named evolutionary leadership as a capacity to think, feel and act from the biggest whole that one can put his or her arms around, for the benefit of that whole and its parts.

The “putting the arms around the whole” suggests that we can engage the flow and dance with emergence, at any scale that we are ready for. The higher the scale, the more attention and intention is called for to the ways we connect our conversation and, eventually, coordinate our action.

>  holding the small in concert with others, translocally, connected but focused, somehow THAT is the pattern that begins to answer your question.

Big thank you for sensing, identifying and describing it. It is indeed a pattern, a way of conscious engagement with the greatest whole.  From the perspective of the O’Brien hypothesis about the “interior condition of the intervener,” I think the source of our attention is more important than the scale at which we feel comfortable to engage with reality. The deeper is the source of attention, the higher is where imagination can soar with it.

Will the local and translocal solutions scale up to match the complexity of our global crises? Let’s hope so and see into what conditions will make that enable. I am not so sure of that. It seems, those conditions will include the emergence of:

1.    A global learning ecosystem where breakthrough practices worth replicating, as well as better methods and theories, can travel fast.
2.    A new breed of transformation facilitators who support global initiatives and ready to welcome the leverage that their work can get from the right mix of social and electronic technologies.

> I am sure that for the rest of my life I will sit in this pulsation between uncertainty and hope, fear and confidence.  And maybe, in the end, I will have stumbled on a path that had some merit after all, but I can tell you it won't have been with any planning or intention other than following my heart!

Your commitment to that makes me feel very good about the chance of evolutionary agents stepping up to their historical response-ability, by simply expanding their compassion to include the social systems at all scale and the not-yet-born generations.

Thank you dear friend for gift of your attention to  “how do I hold THAT?”

May more of evolutionaries show up for holding that question with us.
May we find and connect soon with all those who are already doing it.

tags: complexity, connecting, crisis, evolution, evolutionary leadership, evolutionary urge, global, interior condition, learning ecosystem, local, presencing, response-ability, scale, translocal, wisdom

Dear Rik, thank you so much for  your heartfelt and insightful contribution to this conversation! Here are two quick pieces of reflection inspired by tours.

> taking to the next level this basic reaction of creating common sense: inviting to 'co-sense' the field of trust and experience that 'diverse ideas really contribute to the common"?

My guess is that the next level is more than diverse ideas really contributing to the common, and even more than "hosting conversations that matter. It is more like hosting world-changing projects and communities that make a difference, and enabling them to go to scale.

> invest a stable community-'consensus' on this and other points can help!

Can you say more about how you see the process of building that consensus?