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?

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