Join the cohort that’s forming now. Programs start May 28. Registration closes May 23. All of the details are at context.org.

For more depth on the capacities and the programs, watch vimeo.com/1167213883, a 49-min video presentation.

For the overall approach to cultural change that these programs is part of, read co-evolving.context.org…, a 5-min read, or watch vimeo.com/1158032224, a 32-min video presentation.

For more depth on the framework these programs are based on, read co-evolving.context.org…, a 19-min read.

There’s still time before Mar 2 to register for our two 4-week capacity-building programs that can equip you to stay ahead of the curve and be proactively adaptive in this time of profound change.

Why we need to expand our capacities

Today’s rapidly changing world keeps asking more of us than we’re prepared for.

We feel it in the big, obvious ways – climate crisis, political turbulence, institutional breakdown – yet also in immediate, daily ways:

• The conversation that, in hindsight, you sense could have been handled better if both of you weren’t so stressed.

• The relationship pattern that isn’t working but can’t seem to change.

• The complexity you’re trying to navigate with tools that were never designed for it.

• The group dynamics where the actuality is well below the aspiration.

You increasingly feel the mismatch between the territory you’re in and the capacities you have. And you see that mismatch in people all around you.

It’s not an individual failing. It’s a cultural gap.

The education we received, the workplace cultures we inhabit, the broader society we’re part of – they taught us a lot, but they left out important capacities. What we need to know now is how to:

• partner skillfully with our nervous systems for emotional resilience

• develop our capacity to think systemically, to hold complexity without collapsing it into separate categories

• build our skills for genuine collaboration, for navigating challenges toward outcomes that serve everyone involved as well as the larger whole

• develop our uniquely human capacities for creativity, intuition, discernment, somatic awareness, courage, and compassion – capacities that AI will never replace

In today’s world, these capacities aren’t optional. They’re foundational. And they’re learnable.

That’s what our Essential Capacities Programs are about.

We’ve combined the growing knowledge from neuroscience, complexity science, and related disciplines with our four decades of experience in group process, cultural change, and personal development. And we’ve distilled it all into practical capacity-building programs for the essential capacities you need for navigating complexity and co-evolving the future. These programs are a core part of our system for accelerating cultural transformation, described in Co-Evolving the CulturalOS.

Program 1: Expanding Personal and Collaborative Capabilities
March 5 - April 4

Focuses on upgrading your personal “operating system.” You will develop greater self-awareness, emotional agility, cognitive flexibility, and advanced collaborative skills. It helps you stay grounded in the face of complexity and uncertainty, relate across differences, and work in new ways that integrate value for yourself, others, and the whole. This program is open to everyone and is a prerequisite for the second program.

Program 2: Co-Evolving Whole-System Organizations and Cultures
April 20-May 16

Builds on the Program 1 prerequisite and applies it to groups, organizations, and culture at any scale. You learn how to work with living systems, design healthier organizations, and support cultural evolution in real-world contexts.

Together, the programs help you:

• Bring your initiatives into the world with more clarity and momentum

• Build adaptive capacity in a rapidly changing world

• Understand your inner dynamics and stay resilient under pressure

• Work with others more effectively and with greater productivity

• Apply practical methodologies from within our Foundational Keys framework to support personal growth, enhance project and organizational development, and design better systems for responding to a world that’s grown beyond its capacity to cope

• Develop and adopt new “cultural DNA” patterns that make the old ways of business-as-usual obsolete

• Partner with AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT as thoughtful allies in your work

The programs are structured to be deep yet time-efficient:

• Weekly content, under 45 minutes to read

• Experiential activities that integrate into your daily life

• Two Zoom meetings per week: one small-group triad and one large-group session, available Thursdays and Saturdays at 10 am PT

• A private online community for connection, reflection, and project support

• Support from your AI assistant trained on the program material that you can use for your projects

Registration Rates: (Register by Mar 2)

For Program 1 only

• Individual – $375

• Supporting rate – $475

• Group rate – $325 each

For both Programs 1 and 2

• Individual– $700

• Supporting rate– $850

• Group rate – $600 each

Group rate is available when 2 or more people who work or live together register for the same program(s). Supporting rate registration contributes to the Scholarship Fund and helps us continue Context Institute’s commitment to geographic, age, and background diversity.

Scholarships are available. Contact me for more information.

You can spread the payments over as many as twelve months if that’s helpful.

There’s a full money-back guarantee for each program through the first week of that program. For example, if you’ve registered for both but then decide to drop Program 2, you’ll be refunded the difference between the combined rate and the Program 1 rate.

Register for EC Programs here

The sooner you register, the sooner you’ll be added to the program’s private online group. In the group, you’ll find pre-program resources and, if you choose, you can begin your orientation to the program.

FAQs

• Will you be offering this series in the future? Yes, we plan on offering this multiple times throughout the year, although we don’t have dates yet. If you take only Program 1 now, you can take Program 2 in a later cycle.

• Where can I find out more about the background for these programs? Please look at Foundational Keys and Co-Evolving the CulturalOS, both on this site. For more on my background, see My Story.

Questions?

Here are some of the influences into, and benefits from, the Essential Capacity Programs:

During that time, Context Institute’s core team has been developing and testing what feels like a major breakthrough in our 40+ years of working on deep cultural change.

Our approach to accelerating cultural transformation starts with recognizing that, to address the needs and opportunities of these times, we need to work at the deep level of the culture’s operating system: the constellation of often implicit assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors that shape the culture’s thinking, being, and doing.

The culture’s institutions and specific patterns and behaviors are then like apps built on this operating system (OS). They can only be improved within the limits of the culturalOS.

Our modernist culture’s operating system is based on the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment (AoE), which has taught us to:

• view the world in fragmented, mechanistic ways

• see language, categorical thinking (rationalism), and reductionist empiricism as the legitimate forms of knowledge

• focus on individual accomplishment, advancement, and fulfillment as the primary aims in life

These and related elements of the AoE culturalOS have had a profound influence on the world over the past few centuries. However, since World War II, modernist culture has created a world where the symptoms of its limitations – as exemplified in the polycrisis – have grown enormously.

While we appreciate the many efforts to deal directly with those symptoms, we have chosen to focus on the culturalOS level. In this time of great change, that is where we feel the real leverage resides.

We’ve developed a framework for where and how the culturalOS needs an upgrade, which we call the Foundational Keys.

Distilled from a wide range of experience, science, and scholarship, the Keys are a set of topic areas and perspectives that point to a culturalOS that is better suited to the 21st century. They retain the still-valuable parts of the AoE culturalOS (such as the value of empirical science) while supplying missing pieces and replacing overly simplistic assumptions (such as about “rationality” and “objectivity”). More than a critique, they are a map to an appealing, realistic, coherent culturalOS that can stand on its own.

At their heart are the essential capabilities of being:

• Savvy about psychodynamics, especially your own

• Skillful with diverse modes of perceiving and thinking (cognition)

• Adept at win-win-win collaboration

(For more on the Keys, please see this Substack post.)

But how can you upgrade something as pervasive as a culturalOS?

We approach this with the help of the Foundational Keys and recognize that culture is a living system, a complex adaptive system. Its evolution can be influenced but not controlled or engineered. The changes need to be lived and evolved through experience.

• We begin by showing that the upgrade can be done, by helping people acquire the Keys-based capacities they need to begin to live using the new OS.

• We strengthen the upgrade by creating strategic cultural innovations based on the new OS that make old business-as-usual patterns obsolete.

• The upgraded OS and its innovations then spread organically by example and the real benefits they convey.

• We support that spread through educational programs, media, and networking.

We are guided by decades of social-science research on the diffusion of innovations, including the recent work of Damon Centola, for how to facilitate the spread of both individual innovations and the culturalOS upgrade.

The approach we’re using is illustrated here:

(Click to enlarge the image.)

Start at the box that says “Essential Capacities programs”. These are experiential learning programs that enable participants to apply the Keys in practice in their lives and, in the process, begin to live the new culturalOS. I’ll describe these programs in detail in the Building Essential Capacities post.

The graduates from the new programs can then choose to become part of our network, which provides ongoing support for living the new culturalOS. Some of these graduates will develop:

• new cultural innovations

• new educational programs

• new media material all based on the new culturalOS.

Most graduates will continue to do their professional work in the world. As they do so, they will bring their new orientation, help to develop the new cultural innovations, and share their learning back with the network.

The output from all of this activity then spreads out to the public.

What kind of cultural innovations are we envisioning? A good example is Optimal Zone Resilience.

• It’s a set of life-skills that can be adopted personally or by groups.

• It addresses modern culture’s lack of skill in collaborating with our autonomic nervous system (ANS). As a result, we wind up being blindly driven by our nervous system’s automatic reactions.

• It conveys clear benefits: access to our better, more creative and resilient cognitive capacities and a more positive emotional life.

• Its implications are pervasive and profound: Our autonomic nervous system shapes every moment of our lives, and most of the world’s current problems are made much more challenging by the widespread lack of these skills.

• It rests directly on the HumanOS and Psychodynamics Keys: The past few decades have provided major advances in our understanding of the ANS and how to partner with it. The culture hasn’t caught up but, with the help of this innovative set of life-skills, we can catch up and then help others to do so as well.

This is just one example of the many strategically significant innovations that the Keys illuminate. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit just waiting to be harvested!

Groups play an important role in the process, since culture needs to be shared. This starts with the network of program graduates and then radiates out to all the groups those graduates are part of.

We are particularly interested in providing guidance and support to organizations who want to transition to a group culture and structure based on the Keys. These will serve as living laboratories where the new culturalOS and its “apps” are further developed.

Context Institute has precursors in place for most of the parts of this cultural transformation system. These include Bright Future Now, which we offered from 2016 to 2024 as a live online training and is now available on this site as the BFNow Self-Study program, and the Bright Future Network, with over 360 Bright Future Now graduates from 34 countries.

Our work over the recent months has brought the overall system to a whole new level. I’ve been working for decades on how to enable deep, lasting cultural change, and it feels like the puzzle of how to do this finally has the pieces it needs.

I’m thrilled to be able to share this and to be part of bringing this living system into being.

The Building Essential Capacities post gives you more specifics on the benefits of the Essential Capacities programs and invites you into ways you can become part of bringing this new culturalOS into being.

Let me encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

In the previous explorations, I’ve described the potential for direct cultural change via an innovate-implement-communicate strategy on the part of co-evolvers. Up to now, I’ve mostly been talking about co-evolvers working individually. What’s missing to make the strategy really effective? Connection and mutual support to amplify our impact on the evolution of the culture.

In the Bright Future Initiative, we do that through the Bright Future Network (BFNet). So far, BFNet is made up of the 360+ graduates of the original Bright Future Now online course (BFNow). We use the shorthand of “BFN” to refer to the overall system and culture that includes both BFNow and BFNet.

As I update this in July 2025 from the BFNow original, we’re in the process of creating a new pathway into BFNet and will also be upgrading the network. We call this new phase BFN 2.0. This exploration builds on what we’ve already done while it looks forward to BFNet 2.0.

What is BFNet? It’s a territory (of course!). It requires multiple maps to give it a reasonably good description and even then, the maps will be incomplete.

It’s also a work-in-progress, an evolving complex adaptive system, so these maps are bound to be provisional.

In this exploration, I’d like to take a high-level view and introduce you to a variety of ways of thinking about what it is and where it’s headed.

Maps for BFNet I find helpful include:

• a community

• an organism

• a learning environment

• a lab

• an incubator

• a platform

• a strategy

BFNet as a community

Being a co-evolver all by yourself is hard. It’s lonely, you probably won’t be as effective as you could be and it’s just not much fun. Doing it in a community with other co-evolvers is so much better.

BFNet is such a community – a community of purpose and practice for co-evolvers. The shared journey through BFNow created a common ground of shared understandings and practices. In the network, we continue to communicate with each other and share activities. In times of crisis (like the start of Covid), we make sense of what’s happen together. Some of us work together on teams. Others are together in Common Interest/Inquiry Groups.

We are known and know each other – not every person in the network but enough. We recognize each other as community members and we support each other. It’s like the feeling that developed in each cohort, only extended in scope and time.

BFNet as an organism

We know ourselves to be a complex adaptive system – a living, dynamic, evolving community, where everyone is involved by choice. We are interconnected yet with autonomy. We use and adapt structures where it suits us but they don’t define us. We have emergent properties that add magic to our culture. We’re unpredictable, with surprises emerging all the time.

BFNet as an ongoing learning environment

People in the network offer educational programs for each other and have brought in outside specialists on topics of interest. For all of this, BFNet acts as a supportive container. In BFN 2.0 we plan to expand on this by using the network as the basis for creating educational programs for the public.

BFNet as a lab for new culture

Innovating and then embodying new cultural patterns requires experimentation and practice. BFNet gives us a place to explore new patterns for everything from personal practices to new ways of working together – and to do so with others who share the BFN common ground.

BFNet 1.0 represents an early stage in manifesting this kind of living laboratory. We plan to make this a much stronger and more central part of BFNet 2.0.

BFNet as an incubator

Some innovations take the form of projects or even new ventures. Some may emerge out of the BFNet living lab or some may arrive through individual inspiration and commitment. Whatever their source, the network is there to enable us to support each other in the early phases of the new project. Mitra Martin, who developed the Buddy Program, describes the experience like this: “Incubating a startup in the Bright Future Network is like being a young tree in an old-growth forest. There’s potency, wildness, wisdom, grace, and just really rich and nourishing soil.”

BFNet as a platform

Weaving these threads together, I find it helpful to think of BFNet as a platform.

Some of the most successful organizations to emerge in the past few decades – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft – are all providers of a “platform,” by which I mean infrastructure that allows others to create and distribute content and more specific services.

Regardless of what you think about these companies, the platform business model has clearly been a success, at least in conventional terms. I suspect that one of the main reasons for this is because platforms create ecosystems and evolve with them as complex adaptive systems. From my perspective, they are part of a shift away from a centralized, self-contained model (think traditional car companies, including their dealer networks) to a more distributed and web-like model (even if the companies themselves are internally hierarchical). It’s a transitional phase but useful to see the direction things are moving.

BFNet 2.0 is designed to be a platform for co-evolvers – an ecosystem in which we can flourish.

In this model, most of the cultural change coming from the network will be via the efforts of many, many small groups and individuals. In that way, we, as members, can contribute to cultural change across the whole growing edge of culture and be quick to adapt to new opportunities. And we can do so with the support of BFNet as it provides the cultural, organizational and digital infrastructure – the nourishing habitat – for our efforts.

BFNet as a strategy

Overall, BFNet is designed to enable co-evolvers to be more successful at influencing culture. One of my early inspirations for this kind of support was the Mondragon Cooperatives in northern Spain. In the 1950s they created a support system that enabled 80% of their new cooperatives to succeed. It’s still working. In contrast, about 50% of small businesses in the US fail in the first five years. Can we, in a more general sense and with a new BFN understanding of “success,” do the same thing for co-evolvers and their endeavors? Can we help each other focus our efforts in the most fruitful areas? Can we collectively achieve more impact than we could in isolation? Can we accelerate the emergences of the Planetary Era. BFNet 2.0 is designed to help us answer yes.

Experiential

• What are your hopes for what BFNet 2.0 will enable you to do and/or become?

• What are your hopes for what BFNet 2.0 can do and/or become?

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 6: How Change Works Overview page.]

Let me encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

In Cultural Co-Evolver, my August 2021 presentation at The Stoa, I described a co-evolver as a cultural change agent who understands culture as a complex adaptive system.

Actually being such a co-evolver combines two important dimensions, one general and the other quite personal. All co-evolvers need a shared toolkit that includes a general understanding of the way cultural change works and the capacities to influence it. At the same time, each of us needs to discern for ourselves, what is truly mine to do?

I’d like to use this exploration to address both of these.

That said, the experiential is about what is truly mine to do?, so if you want to keep it simple, focus on the second half of this page.

The shared co-evolver toolkit

The first three explorations have covered important parts of the toolkit – understanding culture as a complex adaptive system and then understanding how culture evolves. To this I would add the more specific understanding that we’re in a time of profound cultural transition – as big as the shift out of hunting and gathering and into agriculture and cities. While there are no guarantees, this transition has the potential to evolve into something we would recognize as the Planetary Era.

Getting there will require new cultural patterns. Specifically, we need to go beyond what I describe as the main dysfunctions of modernist, Age-of-Enlightenment-based cultures:

• Cluelessness about psychodynamics

• Narrow modes of cognition

• Outmoded strategy for success.

Inverting these dysfunctions reveals three powerful capacities for our co-evolver toolkit.

• Savvy about psychodynamics

• Skillful with diverse modes of cognition

• Adept at the new strategy for success.

Each of these is a big territory. I’m going into each one in my “Philosopher in Residence” events at The Stoa, but that’s just a start. In this exploration, I’d like to indicate how what we’re doing in BFNow contributes to and provides examples for each capacity.

Be savvy about psychodynamics

I describe psychodynamics as “the conscious and subconscious mental and emotional forces that determine personality and motivation.” We’ve focused a lot on this, especially in the first three modules. Here are examples of being savvy about psychodynamics:

With yourself

• Practice self-awareness and self-compassion (Module 1)

• Become aware of your trauma triggers and defenses and work to unwind them (Module 3)

• Understand your motivations (from the Layers of Motivation)

• Act from your Optimal Zone (Modules 1 & 3)

• Focus on what you want (aligns you with your Optimal Zone), not what you don’t want (would align you with your defenses)

With others

• See others as territories (Module 2)

• Compassionately understand their motivations (Modules 1 & 3) Offer a healing response (Module 3)

• Motivate through Optimal Zone qualities – like love, creativity, curiosity and future-pull – rather than fear

Be skillful with diverse modes of cognition

I describe cognition as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses” – another big territory! Here are examples of being skillful with diverse modes of cognition:

• Learn to move between object perception and territory perception (Module 2)

• Learn to move between categorical thinking and system or map thinking (Module 2)

• Learn to move among linguistic, visual and kinesthetic thinking; understand the systems around you (Modules 2, 4 & 6)

• With others, build common ground and shared understandings drawing on all the modes (Module 5)

Be adept at the new strategy for success

I describe success as “anything that improves the harmony within, with others and with nature, for our selves, in groups and for the culture.” More simply, you can think of success as a win-win-win outcome: a win for you, a win for the other(s) and a win for the whole.

This has always been the nicer approach but in the past it hasn’t had much practical success, being overshadowed by the win-lose approach. What’s different now is that in today’s highly interconnected society, the ripple-effect benefits from win-win-win accumulate faster and stronger. This tips the balance and makes the win-win-win approach now the smarter approach as well as the nicer one. We’re in a time of transition and the old win-lose approach has a lot of legacy-inertia behind it, so it may not yet look like we’ve reached the tipping point, but from my perspective, the trends are headed that way.

Here are examples of being adept at the new strategy for success:

• Understand culture as a complex adaptive system rather than as a machine or a controllable hierarchy.

• Embody the 3 harmonies rather than enforcing the 3 dominations.

• Catalyze culture change directly through innovate-implement-communicate and the diffusion of innovations.

• Use the other two capacities: be savvy about psychodynamics and skillful with diverse modes of cognition.

• Focus your efforts where they will do the most good, which is likely to be with the next ring of adopters for whatever innovation you are co-evolving.

• Help your collaborators to act from their optimal zone as much as possible.

• Once in the optimal zone, help your collaborators to approach your shared challenges with curiosity, creativity and design-thinking. Use this to find those win-win-win outcomes.

What is truly mine to do?

It’s all well and good to have a fabulous toolkit, but what do you actually do with it? Each of us will have our own unique answer. Getting there, we each need to discern, what is truly mine to do?

When I work with this question, I find it helpful to look for the sweet-spot overlap of three qualities:

I have only so much time and energy so I want what I do to get a strong yes! in each of these circles.

Let’s explore each in turn:

Enhances Planetary Era Qualities

The new cultural patterns we need for the Planetary Era cover a vast territory. This grid is one map for that territory:

For me, a core message of this grid is that it’s all needed, it’s all important. Anything you do that falls somewhere on this grid, or in some combination of places, contributes to progress toward the Planetary Era, so this condition should be easy to meet.

Something I care about

We are likely to say that we care about many things, but some things have more personal energy than others. Ask yourself:

• As I look back over my life, is this something I’ve cared about over time? Is it a recurring theme?

• When I imagine myself taking a next step with this activity, what do I notice in my body? Areas of tension? Warmth? Cold? Relaxation? Relief? Heaviness?

• What do my various subpersonalities have to say about this activity?

• When I sleep on it, how do I feel about it in the morning?

It can be helpful to use the Layers of Motivation (see the PS below) as a prompt to sort out the various influences that are motivating you:

You don’t need total alignment in order to take action but it helps if at least all your subpersonalities can consent to moving forward and your motivation feels sustainable and strongly Optimal Zone – based.

Something I can affect

We each have a sphere of agency – situation, people, groups, projects – that we are connected to and can affect. Often our sphere of agency is larger than we imagine but it’s fine to start with something you believe you have a reasonable chance of affecting.

As our experience grows and our networks expand, our sphere of agency is likely to change. At least for me, that dynamism is part of what makes being a co-evolver so interesting and fun.

As you focus in on what’s yours to do, I recommend you pick something that feels both doable and perhaps a bit of a stretch. That’s a growthful sweet spot in your sphere of agency.

Experiential

Think of one or more activities that you either are doing or might do. One might be something you’ve done for a long time, another might be something that feels like a fresh possibility.

Use the perspective of each of the three circles to assess each activity. If you have more than one activity, how do they compare from these perspectives? Does this help you clarify what is truly yours to do?

This kind of inquiry is good for any activity and especially good when you are contemplating some kind of never-been-done-before co-evolver activity.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 6: How Change Works Overview page.]

PS - Understanding motivation

As we navigate through life, it’s important to understand our motivations as well as those of others. As part of “integrating” the course so far, I’d like to share some ways I’ve found helpful in understanding my own motivations. (I included this in the Savvy about Psychodynamics Stoa talk, so if you’ve seen that, the following may seem familiar.)

Layers of motivation

You may be familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which was part of his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation:

I thought it was intriguing when I first came across it decades ago but it’s never really worked for me in practice. So I’ve put together another stack that isn’t a strict hierarchy but rather a series of layers with dynamically varying transparency.

The idea here is that the motivation we experience emerges from a stack of many different motivating influences, each represented by a layer. The higher a layer is in the stack, the stronger its ability to assert itself, although it may not be active all of the time. When one layer is quiet (relatively transparent), it allows the influence from other layers to come through more fully. The layers are:

• Bio-based – Our bodies need air, warmth, water, food, sleep, etc. and will call for them strongly when there is a lack.

• Defensive Zone-based – Our defense patterns (as in Module 3) include emotionally powerful motivations that are much more influential than most people recognize. It’s not just the triggered times. More pervasive are all of our anticipatory defenses, always there in the background with strong opinions about what’s safe and what isn’t, where we should direct our anger and where we shouldn’t, etc. These may be expressed through various subpersonalities.

• Connection-based – As deeply social beings, we’re strongly influenced by those we are (or have been) in close relationships with and those in our wider social networks. Soldiers die for their buddies, not for a cause. We will believe and do all kinds of things to establish and maintain these relationships. While this could be considered part of either the layer above or below it, I feel its strong instinctual basis merits its own layer.

• Optimal Zone-based – When I’m in my Optimal Zone, what motivates me is love and creativity. My sense is that these are always with me but they can be hidden or distorted by the layers above it.

When I’m trying to make a significant choice, I find it helpful to

• Make sure all my bio needs are currently met

• Use my self-awareness and my knowledge of my own defense patterns to see how these might be coloring whatever motivation I’m feeling

• Make sure I’m at peace in my various relationships, aware of the impact my choice will have on others yet clear about charting my own path without undue influence from the opinions of those around me

• Get into my Optimal Zone as much as possible

Sustainable motivation

The big issues facing humanity as well as persistent issues in our personal lives are long-arc urgencies rather than emergencies. If we try to motivate ourselves to deal with these through fear, anger or any other motivator that produces adrenaline, it will lead to exhaustion, burnout and diminished agency.

What works for the long run are the motivators associated with the Optimal Zone – love, creativity and what I like to call future-pull (the anticipation of something positive in the future). This is why it’s so important, both for yourself and in working with others, to avoid motivation based on fear. As I described with the Equation of Change, it’s fine to point out the downsides of continuing with business-as-usual, but don’t dwell there.

The whole Bright Future approach is meant to provide a grounded, clear-eyed support for the long-haul through what will likely continue to be challenging times – but also times of great opportunity for humanity and the earth if we can stay in touch with our Optimal Zone well enough to see them.

May you find your own well-springs of long-arc motivation!

Let me encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

This exploration dives into the main process at the heart of cultural evolution with the goal of seeing how we can use it to influence that evolution.

Innovation as a territory

Time to take a closer look at innovation:

A bit of history – The earliest use of the English word innovation was apparently around the time of the Renaissance. It initially meant “restoration, renewal” but came to mean “a novel change, experimental variation, new thing introduced in an established arrangement.” I like thinking of it as something that is both truly new and that revitalizes the larger system that it enters into. In this sense, true innovation is nourishing as well as novel.

In the eyes of the beholder – What’s the difference between an innovation and a refinement, an adjustment or a modification? It’s all up to the observer. When is something a group of innovations rather than a single innovation? Again, it’s up to the observer.

To say something is an innovation is to express the belief that, in some meaningful way, it creates a new category. It’s an assertion about more than the individual instance. To make that assertion, you need to be knowledgeable about the broader territories to which this innovation could belong. However, even with the benefit of expertise, expect “innovation” to be a fuzzy concept – useful but with grey areas.

It’s not always a good thing – So far I’ve been talking about innovation in general as a good thing. That’s consistent with the broader culture’s pro-innovation bias but I don’t mean to be so uniformly positive. Indeed there are many things in our world today, like persistent pesticides, that were at one point innovations and that I would rather had never come into wide use. More generally, many innovations involve trade-offs, the full scope of which don’t become clear until they are put into practice.

So I suggest we take a neutral view of the value of innovations, recognizing that each innovation needs to be assessed on its own merits. That said, the good ones and the bad ones both spread in similar ways, so innovation is still a useful overall concept.

Nevertheless, we need them – Completing the transition to the Planetary Era will require new cultural patterns – new cultural DNA. So while we need to be discerning about what innovations we encourage, innovation is a territory we need to get good at working with.

How innovations spread

By decree – If the CEO of a company establishes a new, innovative policy, everyone in the company is expected to follow it. If the government passes an innovative law or creates an innovative regulation, everyone is expected to abide by it. On the surface this looks like a great way to spread an innovation. It can work well if those who need to follow the decree are at least neutral towards it, but never underestimate the ability of humans to subvert or get around an imposed requirement that they don’t like. In addition, anything established by decree can be removed by decree. The next CEO or the next government can undo whatever the current ones have done.

In addition, decree-spread innovations miss the opportunity to learn and mature via experience.

By diffusion – The other main way that innovations spread is by voluntary adoption. Information about the innovation travels in many ways – from word-of-mouth to various media. This process may seem slower than by decree but, with voluntary adoption, the results tend to be more enduring and the process less prone to conflict. It is also a process that anyone can use – you don’t need to be in a special role.

As far as I know, it is the main process by which evolution moves through a complex adaptive system.

The study of the diffusion of innovations began over a hundred years ago, got a notable boost in the 1920s and 30s as rural sociologists studied the uptake of new farming techniques and got firmly established with the publication of Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers in 1962. Since then it has influenced many different fields – from academic areas like sociology and anthropology to business concerns such as marketing and product development.

I’ll describe Rogers’ framework in the next section. Before doing that, I’d like to turn to an example.

An example – One of the most significant worldwide cultural changes in the past few decades has been the spread of electronic information technology. This has involved a steady stream of innovations, building on one another, and the spread of their use. A good indicator for that spread is the percentage of the world population that is using the Internet (see here for more data)

In the relatively short span of 30 years, more than 50% of the world’s total population (all ages) is now using the Internet! Compared to previous cultural changes, the extent and speed of this is astonishing – and it shows what’s possible in the 21st century.

This qualifies as a major cultural change because communications and linkages are core to any complex adaptive system. The value and impact of this change is complex but that’s not my focus at the moment. Rather, this is a classic example of the spread of, in this case, multiple related innovations by diffusion.

Strategies

How does diffusion work? I’d like to explore this question with the help of this schematic diagram:

The red S-curve shows the way that increasing numbers of people adopt an innovation over time. The curve starts at zero and rises to whatever maximum adoption may be possible for this innovation in whatever population is being considered.

Along the way, the character of the people who are doing the adopting changes:

• Innovators – At the very beginning is the person or people who bring the innovation into being. They are often independent thinkers, even a bit eccentric.

• Early Adopters – The first people to respond to the innovation tend to have similar interests and worldviews to the innovators’, although they are more connected into the culture. They are well networked, interested in trying new things and tolerant of the risks involved. They are often respected by Mainstreamers, who see them as opinion-leaders. They respond to ideas. For example, they may be willing to make their own version of the innovation just on the basis of an article they read.

• Mainstreamers – Rogers divides this group into Early Majority and Late Majority but I’m content to keep them together. Mainstreamers are even more identified with the culture but not as well networked as the Early Adopters. They tend to be focused on their personal lives and look at an innovation through a “what’s the benefit to me?” lens. They are skeptical of ideas and want to see examples, preferably where someone they respect has already adopted the innovation.

• Laggards – These may be people who just don’t like change or they may be actively opposed to the innovation. I’ve been happy to be a Laggard relative to Facebook.

Just as we need to take a neutral view of the value of innovation, so too we need to avoid assuming that it’s good to be in any one of these categories. Your placement in these categories depends on your relationship to the specific innovation. I am an Innovator for some innovations, an Early Adopter for others, a Mainstreamer or a Laggard for still others.

Just as the character of the adopters changes along the curve, so also the strategy that that change agents can use to most effectively promote the innovation needs to change along the curve:

• Innovate – When something is just being birthed, it’s important to have a safe space to innovate without much external attention. The new idea may emerge fully formed but often it goes through many changes and much development in its very early stages. You are building new DNA. Focus on its quality and leave the question of its spread and reproduction to later. This is the time for prototyping.

• Implement – Once the innovation has had its first tests, it’s time to share it with the sympathetic world of Early Adopters. As they put it into practice, they will make refinements and additions to fit with their context. This is the time for diverse pilot projects. The result will be a more robust and mature innovation and a better understanding of how to implement and use it. This is also the time to start putting in place whatever infrastructure may be needed to support the widespread adoption during the Mainstreamer phase.

• Communicate – As the Mainstreamer phase begins, the Early Adopters need to shift from focusing on implementing to focusing on being opinion leaders, sharing what they have learned during implementation. This is also the time to get the innovation out to the public via various media. It’s important not to rush this. If you go public before the implementation phase has worked out the bugs, you can create a bad reputation that will “vaccinate” the public against what could otherwise be a useful innovation. This happened to rooftop solar hot-water heating in the 1970s.

You will notice that I’m giving the most attention to the first quarter of the curve. This is the phase where innovations need the most help and where change agents can have the most impact. It comes before the world around you has much of a clue as to what you are doing or why it might be important. It can feel lonely, which discourages people from hanging out here. Bright Future Network is designed to help overcome this and make it easier to support budding innovations when they really need it.

Finally, I encourage you to look back at the Internet Usage curve. The start looks like an S-curve but the top hasn’t turned over yet. If it proves to be an S-curve, the world will likely be at about 3/4 adoption by 2030. Each innovation that supports this curve has gone through its progression of Early Adopters and Mainstreamers, spreading across geography as well. A young student from Africa might be a Mainstreamer while studying in Europe but then becomes an Early Adopter to their surrounding community back home – and that’s how the use of the Internet diffuses.

Experiential

Think of some societal issue that’s important to you and explore how that issue could be addressed through the kind of Innovate-Implement-Communicate approach described here.

1. What are the cultural innovations that would be helpful for this issue? Are the steps small enough to be doable? If not, what’s a smaller step that might work? How/where/with whom would you prototype it?

2. Are there helpful innovations already underway that you’re aware of? Where are they along the diffusion curve? Are they in the Innovate, Implement or Communicate phase? Based on where they are, what do they need to continue their journey?

As you consider these, it’s important to not rush the diffusion process. Don’t fixate on big outcomes but find incremental next steps. As usual, use your journal to capture whatever feels useful.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 6: How Change Works Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

The goal of this exploration is to provide you with some frameworks and tools to support your conscious participation in cultural evolution. As you explore this territory, please consider …

In its 13+ billion years, the universe has gone through many different types of evolution. First there was the evolution of physical structure, going from just hydrogen and helium gas to clumps that formed stars and galaxies. That led to chemical evolution as all of the elements heavier than hydrogen were formed in the cores of stars and spread back into space through end-of-life stellar explosions. Those heavier elements allowed the formation of planets around later generations of stars, like our Sun. All of these forms of evolution moved slowly, over billions of years.

Once there were planets, the evolution of life became possible. On the earth, that’s moved a bit faster but still with a pace best measured in millions or hundreds of thousands of years.

Cultural evolution has only been around on the earth for a few hundred-thousand years and it was very slow until about 12,000 years ago. Even in that more recent span, it has been slow enough so that most of our recent ancestors wouldn’t have noticed much foundational change in a lifetime.

But the pace has sped up, first in the last few hundred years and now even more rapidly in the last few decades. Those of us alive today are among the first generations to experience deep cultural evolution over the span of a lifetime or less. We may be the first to be able to consciously engage in shaping this evolution – to be conscious co-evolvers.

Take a moment to really absorb this …

The first generations with the opportunity to meaningfully experience the cultural evolution we consciously help to create.

This exploration is a small step in that direction.

Culture as a Complex Adaptive System

In the simplest definitional terms, I use culture to mean the combination of

• the patterns of behaviors, ideas and artifacts shared by an interacting group of people

• that interacting group of people

In CAS terms,

• the people are the players

• the behaviors, ideas and artifacts are the emergent properties

• the culture that includes the players and emergent properties is the complex adaptive system.

When we talk about “cultural evolution,” we’re talking about evolution in those emergent properties: in the shared behaviors, ideas and artifacts.

There are many factors that influence how that evolution proceeds. I like to represent them schematically like this …

Players or Agents – At the heart of the diagram are the people of the culture – making choices, interacting, initiating and reacting. I’ve used images for individuals but organizations can also be players. I’ve shown only five but there can be millions in a culture, each one a potential source of initiative and influence. Some players will have more influence than others but everyone has some and no one has it all. All of these multiple sources of initiative make it impossible to predict, in a mechanical way, what the system will do.

Ideas, Behaviors, Artifacts – These are the emergent properties the people share – the water they swim in. They are also what change as a culture evolves. I’m using these words quite generally. In this setting, take them as shorthand for all the various dimensions of culture, including such things as beliefs, language, customs, institutions, buildings and technologies.

The Interactions – The players are constantly being influenced by and reacting to each other. Sometimes they learn from each other; sometimes they push back in opposition to each other. Sometimes they just observe each other; sometimes they are oblivious to at least some of the others. Sometimes the influence is direct; sometimes it’s indirect. Sometimes it’s fast; sometimes it takes a long time.

Time Lags – These are all over the place in culture! When someone makes a change (in their ideas, behaviors and/or artifacts), it takes time for others to even become aware of that change, much less respond (pro or con) to it. Depending on the change and who’s involved, these time lags can range from seconds to decades, yet taken as a whole they provide significant inertia to culture and constrain the pace of change.

Tipping Points – These aren’t in the diagram but they are also all over the place in culture. They often show up in shifts of the “majority opinion” or “conventional wisdom.” These shifts may make it seem like rapid change has happened although if you look closely there has usually been a long build-up to the actual tipping point.

The Boundary – Cultures have boundaries. The edges may be blurry but it’s generally clear enough as to who and what are part of a culture. This boundary allows the culture to have unique qualities and to change in ways that may be different from what’s around it. Cultures also nest, that is, subcultures exist inside larger cultures or even other subcultures. It can get quite complex!

Context – Every culture is surrounded by a wider world – including other cultures and natural systems – that provide it context. Just what gets considered as “context” versus what’s part of the culture will be unique to each culture. “Context” is meant to be external to the culture, including all of those systems and elements over which the culture has relatively little influence. I’ve used one-way arrows for the influence of the context on the culture to reflect this relationship.

The Sun and the seasons are clearly part of the context. Climate used to be but now it’s starting to straddle the internal/external boundary with all of the human influence on climate. Among national cultures, each is in the context of the others although together you can think of each nation as an important player in the culture we call humanity. More generally, subcultures of the same larger culture are in the context of both each other and of that larger culture.

History – Culture is built on accumulated learning and so is tightly connected to the past. Each moment grows out of what has come before, often reaching back hundreds or even thousands of years. This, combined with time lags, makes for a lot of inertia in culture.

Future – Obviously, the evolution of a culture affects its future but why have the arrow of influence point both ways? One reason is that beliefs about the future play an important role in shaping the choices the players make in the present. Are the players optimistic or pessimistic? What do they expect their world to be like in 10 years, 30 years or more?

Another reason is that there is a fair bit of evidence that people can – with a lot of noise but still some signal – intuit potentials in the future. It’s hard to know to what extent this “whisper of the future” may influence people but I don’t discount it. I see this through the lens of the futurist idea of “the range of possible futures.” I don’t feel the future is set but rather there are a range of possibilities and our choices determine which ones manifest.

OK, so these are all aspects of the system, but how do they all come together in the process of cultural evolution? In practice, this is a very complex system and to gain some insight into how it functions, it’s helpful to look at real examples.

Learnings from cultural and biological history

Let’s start with cultural history. In What Time Is It?, I focused on three foundational cultural characteristics:

• Means of livelihood

• Advanced form of communication

• Basis of social organization

Tracing these through the past 40,000+ years of cultural history leads to what I like to call the Outline of History:

This outline has an alternation of stable periods and transitions. This may seem surprising – why isn’t it just one continuous stream of change? – but it parallels what is now understood as the common pattern in biological evolution.

Up until the early 1970s, evolutionary biologists generally assumed that changes in the traits of species happened continuously, although slowly, and led to an ever-better fit between the species and its environment. When two lineages of the same ancestor were separated geographically, this slow, steady drift of traits could eventually create different species. This is known as Gradualism.

Examples of this kind of gradual drift of a species’ traits do occur in the fossil record but they are not the most common examples. In the early 1970s, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould championed the evidence that the more common pattern is what they called Punctuated Equilibrium.

In this pattern, a species’ traits are stable (known as stasis) over long periods of geological time after going through an abrupt transition that left no trace of intermediate forms in the fossil record. That doesn’t mean the transition was instantaneous. Given the slow and irregular pace of the geological record, the transition could have lasted as much as 100,000 years while the stasis periods stretched over millions of years.

What’s going on here?

Species evolve most rapidly after a major change of context, such as a mass extinction. Post-extinction, there are many unoccupied niches that create a lot of opportunities for the organisms that did survive. In this initial period, the internal rate of mutation within the species is the limiting factor on the pace of evolution. The context is wide open and allows for rapid species drift.

Later, as the niches become filled and the new set of species establish their web of interdependence, the “cup” of stability that each species finds itself in becomes deeper. Species continue to experience variations but those variations rarely lead to improvements over their established sweet-spot – so the result is stasis.

Should we tear down “the old ways” first?

You could look at the example of biological evolution and say that we need to create “an extinction event” in order to enable change but that’s not how I look at it. This is a place where we need to be careful in how we interpret the parallel between biological evolution and cultural evolution.

In both of the big cultural transitions, the driving force was the cultural expansion into previously unrecognized opportunities:

• In the Tribal to Empire transition, the opportunity was opened up by farming, storable food and settlement. As cultures explored into this new space, more innovations led to yet more until the stability of the Empire Era was reached. There’s no solid evidence that this was initiated in response to adversity.

• In our current Empire to Planetary transition, the opportunity was opened up by the natural sciences and their practical applications. It’s possible that the Black Death helped to loosen old cultural patterns but it wasn’t until Europe was becoming prosperous that the cycle of innovation took off.

The ability to discover and then evolve into previously unrecognized opportunities seems to be a uniquely human trait enabled by culture.

This doesn’t mean that there won’t be destruction and breakdown in the current transition – clearly there’s already a lot and there will likely be more. The question is, where should we put our attention and effort?

I find it helpful to explore this with the help of …

The Equation of Change

This says that people will adopt a new way when [the perceived value of the new] is enough greater than [the perceived value of the old] so that their difference is greater than [the perceived cost of the change].

One of the useful system concepts here is the idea of the current constraint. From the perspective of assisting cultural change, what’s the limiting factor? It will all depend on the specifics but I would suggest that there are currently a large number of situations where people already feel that the old way doesn’t work. It’s fine to have a cogent critique of the old but you don’t need to belabor it. What’s holding them back is a lack of vision and even more so a lack of practical, tested pathways to get there.

Because those pathways are the current constraint, we have the most leverage by focusing on creating and implementing them and thereby both raising the perceived value of the new and lowering the perceived cost of the change.

Back cover image from In Context #9 – Strategies for Cultural Change, Spring 1985

Experiential

Think of a situation where you would like to see meaningful cultural change. It could be on any scale – from a small group you are part of to something worldwide.

1. Read over the list of aspects under the diagram in the Culture as a Complex Adaptive System section. See if any of them prompt insights into a better understanding of the situation and/or places to intervene to promote change. For example, could the pattern of interactions be changed, time lags reduced or the relationship with the context shifted?

2. Look at that same situation using the Equation of Change. What might you do, in your situation, to shift [the perceived value of the new] up and [the perceived value of the old] and [the perceived cost of the change] down?

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 6: How Change Works Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

This module’s goal is to get a deeper understanding of how change works in human systems, especially in groups and cultures. We’ll be doing this with the help of insights from a variety of perspectives.

We start today with exploring what are technically known as Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs) although I also like to think of them as Living Systems. The goal of this exploration is to create a common ground of language and concepts that we can build on as the module progresses.

Discovering the territory

So far we’ve been dealing with systems that are relatively simple, like the habits diagram. CASs are different. Even though they are both called “systems,” I encourage you to look at Complex Adaptive Systems as a whole new territory – a territory of systems that are complex in their many elements and interactions, and adaptive in their ability to respond to external and internal changes.

Perhaps the easiest way to start to understand them is through examples. Each of the following can be usefully modeled as a CAS: cities, markets, supply chains, ecosystems, social networks, the immune system, power grids, animal swarms, the human brain, developing embryos, ant colonies, the human psyche and, of particular interest for us, human groups and cultures.

What the above examples all have in common are agents, emergence and evolution.

Agents (or players or actors)

• The fundamental element/part/node in a CAS has agency – the ability to affect the element’s situation/environment through intentional or at least context-responsive action. The academics like to call these elements “agents” but I often prefer “players” and “actors” and will use the terms interchangeably.

• Examples of CASs with their agents/players/actors include:

  • Ourselves, where the players are our subpersonalities

  • Ecosystems, where the actors are the various species and their individual members

  • Cities, where the agents are both the residents and the city’s businesses and organizations

  • The immune system, where the actors are various kinds of cells

  • Markets, where the players are sellers and buyers plus any market-enabling institutions (from farmers’s market to the stock market)

  • Ant colonies, where the agents are the ants

• In a typical CAS, there are a large number of similar-but-not-identical agents – too many to track in detail

• There can be more than one type of agent in a CAS – different subgroups or even different categories, e.g. a city has residents and businesses as different categories of agents

• Agents are semi-autonomous; each has a mind of its own, makes its own choices and can produce unpredictable outcomes

• At the same time, agents are interdependent – with each other, with various categories of agents and with the context.

• Each agent is influenced by many others, by the broader context, by its own capacities and by its own history

• In the context of all of this influence, each agent is able to adapt, that is, to learn new behaviors; that’s what makes it an adaptive system

A CAS can have more parts than just its agents/players/actors. For example, a city has it buildings and physical infrastructure. It also has a government and related social infrastructure.

Emergence

While the individual agents can be fascinating, you can’t get the full picture of CASs without also taking into account the relationships and interactions. A CAS is very much a case where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The diversity, entanglement and often hidden character of interactions is what makes a CAS complex.

Think of how complex a human group is with all the interactions that happen inside each person, among the people in the group and for each person with the context outside the group. It is impossible to track all of those interactions, yet they have major consequences.

Out of this complexity, there often emerge patterns in the system as a whole that can’t be predicted from studying the individual agents in isolation. This phenomenon is known as emergence, which is really just a fancy term for the ability of a CAS to generate patterns that depend on interactions and relationships.

The results of emergence in natural systems can often be quite beautiful. Consider this example of what’s called murmuration in starlings, as illustrated by this half-minute video.

It turns out you can model this behavior accurately by assuming each bird follows a simple set of rules:

• Stay close but not too close to a half-dozen or so others around you

• Align your speed and direction with the same half-dozen or so others

Notice that there is no leader bird that all the others are following. Rather they are involved in a process of self-organizing with no command and control hierarchy – yet the system has order. Self-organization is often cited as a classic emergent pattern.

Once you start looking, you see emergent patterns everywhere. For example, all of the shared aspects of culture – ideas, behaviors and artifacts – are examples of emergent patterns. Language, specifically, is great example of an emergent property of culture that resides in individuals yet only exists because people are in relationship with each other. Much of what we think of as defining characteristics of “being human” are in fact shared emergent patterns of culture.

Emergent patterns grow out of co-evolution, a process of mutual adaptation (learning) as each agent discovers, co-creates and internalizes the rules and roles that enable the pattern to work. Once you have the shared pattern, it can seem to emerge spontaneously and instantly but the ability to create the pattern was likely a long time in the making.

Evolution

The third major characteristic of CASs is their ability to change. I’ve alluded to this a number of times above and I’ll go into this more tomorrow by looking at the evolution of culture. Nevertheless, it is important to call it out here.

Change in CASs is usually referred to as evolution because it occurs through many small steps as agents keep adjusting to the changes happening around them. Each round of changes then prompts a new round until some new pattern of stability is reached.

This is wonderfully illustrated in How Wolves Change Rivers. With over 43 million views, it’s well worth watching. I recommend it.

Contrast with mechanical systems

Finally, I’d like to share one of the slides out of the Stoa presentation to draw a contrast between CASs and mechanical systems, like the Home Heating example in Systems Literacy – Part 3. Our culture is so used to attempting to see systems in mechanistic terms that it’s important to reinforce the ways in which CASs are not machines.

Mechanical systems can be modeled in detail, and designed and built to specifications. CASs not so much (although there is some computer modeling of simplified CASs). Rather, the CAS framework provides a language for harvesting observations of how natural CASs work and being able to compare and contrast across different systems – as I did in What Time Is It? by applying lessons from pioneer and succession species in ecosystems to human population growth and culture.

Experiential

1. Identify a few different territories that you feel can be usefully understood as complex adaptive systems. They could be human groupings or something else. Identify the various different types of agents in each system. In addition, what do you see as emergent properties in each, that is, what are properties or characteristics in the system that require relationships among agents to emerge?

2. Look for places where our culture tries to force a mechanical model onto territories that could be better understood as CASs. Bureaucratic organizations are one example. Many aspects of government are another. Pick a specific group or organization, not just a category, that you’re familiar with and see how your understanding shifts if you look at it as a Complex Adaptive System.

As always, use your journal to capture whatever feels useful.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 6: How Change Works Overview page.]

This module focuses on how cultural change works and how you can contribute to it as a cultural co-evolver. It’s a big topic, central to what the world so urgently needs. You can make a difference.

Key Concepts and Terms
These are part of the shared language we are building throughout the course. Many, but not all, of these are also in the titles of the explorations:

• complex adaptive systems

• agents

• emergence

• evolution

• punctuated equilibrium

• diffusion of innovations

• co-evolver

We will also be building on concepts from various presentations, including:

• working with the momentum of history (What Time Is It? Part 5)

• Being a Co-Evolver (The Stoa presentation)

A visual map for this week’s content
Here’s the diagram with the titles for each exploration plus the previous modules for context. The curved arrows show connections where one exploration’s particularly influences or feeds into another. The angular arrows show the influence from a whole module, sometimes on a whole later module and sometime on a particular exploration.

Module 6 Explorations

Complex Adaptive Systems – Exploration 1

Cultural Evolution – Exploration 2

Diffusion of Innovations– Exploration 3

Being a Co-Evolver – Exploration 4

BFNet as a Platform for Change – Exploration 5

Module 5 focuses on collaboration, by which I mean working

• by choice

• with others

• towards a shared goal.

This covers a very broad range of situations, from your day job to a brief shared volunteer task.

Module 5 and the two that follow are more outward, interpersonal and accomplishment-oriented than the previous four. This one focuses particularly on the “with others” part but in the context of “towards a shared goal.” The following two modules will focus more on accomplishing that shared goal.

From the perspective of the Foundational Keys, it supports Being Adept at Win-Win-Win Collaboration.

There's a lot in the module that that I haven't seen elsewhere. I encourage you to take a look, starting with the Overview:

• Collaboration – Module 5 Overview

• Common Ground – Exploration 1

• Decision-Making – Exploration 2

• Leadership – Exploration 3

• Group Optimal Zone Resilience – Exploration 4

• Diversity as a Territory – Exploration 5

For quick access to the other modules, please see About BFNow Self-Study. For a more detailed orientation to both the content and process of the Self-Study program, see BFNow Self-Study Orientation.

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

Today’s topic, diversity, is a BIG territory with many facets. In its root meaning, diversity refers to the condition of having or being composed of differing elements, which is very general. Since this module’s theme is collaboration, we are going to focus on diversity in human groups.

In the What Time Is It? presentation, I suggested that human diversity was an important characteristic of the Planetary Era and that thriving in this new time would require us to learn how to treat our diversity as an asset.

Here, I’d like to explore human diversity in more depth. I encourage you to set aside here whatever political associations you have with the word and simply see it as a big, general, neutral territory. In that broad frame, we’ll be looking at both where it functions as an asset and as a liability in collaborative groups.

Diversity

As an asset

There are many, many dimensions along which each of us differ from one another. The following mind map gives just a few.

For most of these, having diversity in that dimension can make a group more effective, creative, perceptive and productive. A diverse group sees any territory from more perspectives, develops more maps and thus will come to know that territory more fully.

With so many benefits of this kind of diversity, why do groups so often not embrace it?

• Similarity bias – We tend to be most comfortable with and associate with those who are similar to us. One fun experiment subtly morphed the faces of politicians to look somewhat like the test subjects. Viewers of the morphed pictures were more favorable to the politician that now looked like them than they were otherwise. This bias appears to be innate and largely unconscious. To overcome it we have to train ourselves, as skillful job interviewers do, to compensate for it.

• Empire Era social hierarchy traditions – This is, especially for gender/race/ethnic exclusion, the big reason groups resist diversity but fortunately, it is learned and not innate. The Empire Era took similarity bias and accentuated it into a social order built on violence-enforced, religiously-sanctioned hierarchy – men over women, some classes over other classes, some racial and ethnic groups over others, etc. As part of your position in this hierarchy, you are trained by the culture to defer to those above you (as in the Enduring character style) and demand deference from those below you (as in the Controlling character style). You collaborate only with your peers in the hierarchy. In this tradition, for men to collaborate with women or for whites to collaborate with blacks was seen as a profound violation – and threat – to the social order.From my perspective, none of these traditional forms of dominance hierarchy are actually about what they appear on the surface. It’s not really about gender or race or whatever proved to be an easy way to stereotype people. Rather it is about the need for enforced hierarchy. As far as I am concerned, this need and its consequences have no place in the Planetary Era (I’m willing to be categorical about this!) and the more we can do to replace these traditions with deep mutual respect, the better – seeing each person as a territory full of mystery rather than an instance of a category.

• Oppression is traumatizing and disabling – the violence (physical, psychological and structural) used to maintain the hierarchy creates profound wounds, for everyone but especially as you go down the hierarchy. Some who have endured heavy oppression develop remarkable wisdom and maturity, but even still, carry the wounds. They are also excluded from learning important skills, all of which leaves them less able to step into roles that the more privileged find easy. This in turn becomes an easy reason (“not qualified”) for maintaining the exclusions that limit diversity. This reinforcing feedback loop is a significant factor in maintaining these cultural patterns. Progress has been made in the past few decades but much more remains to be done to proactively heal and reverse thousands of years of Empire Era traditions.

We need to make a conscious effort to overcome these barriers to diverse inclusion if we are to reap the strong benefits that come from collaborating in a group with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and capacities.

As a liability

Yet there are certain kinds of diversity, in its broad sense, that can be problematic in collaborative, purpose-oriented groups, especially in the dimensions of behaviors and intentions.

Relative to behaviors, group members who bully or can’t keep agreements can make it hard for a group to function. Especially for collaborative groups organized around a purpose, there need to be norms of acceptable behavior and the capacity to respond when behavior goes outside those norms. That response may, in some situations, require removing a member from a group.

Relative to intentions, personal motivations need to be reasonably aligned with the group purpose. How close that alignment needs to be is always a judgement call – a difficult call to make at times but necessary for the health of the group. It is especially challenging when a member has sub-personalities with divergent motivations, some aligned with the group purpose and others not. For example, have you ever encountered someone who seemed to be aligned initially but as time went on became increasingly demanding, co-opting the energy of the group away from its initial purpose to instead focus on their character-style needs?

These situations can provide a major challenge for collaborative groups, especially if the member who doesn’t fit wants to stay. This is a strong form of the larger question of how a group maintains its identity and self-definition. Removing a member can be an issue even for paid employment but it is especially problematic for volunteer groups. I’ve seen groups fall apart because they couldn’t deal with this challenge and other groups grow stronger by dealing with it.

The demise of a Transition Town effort where I live is an example of the former. The removal of a member from Winslow CoHousing while I was living there in the 1990s is an example of the latter.

This may not be an issue for short-term and low-engagement groups, but as the level of engagement rises and the goals of the group become more substantial, it is good to take the issue seriously. It may seem like a downer to contemplate, but considering it early is likely the best way to prevent ever needing to go as far as removing a member.

I don’t have simple solutions to offer you but I want to explicitly acknowledge the issue and offer some suggestions.

Group Immune Systems

I’d like to start in the spirit of biomimicry. Biological organism generally have semi-permeable boundaries (skin, cell membrane) that separate the organism from its surrounding environment. The organism must take in resources from the surrounding environment yet some things in that environment are toxic. The boundary needs to keep out as much as possible that isn’t helpful but it rarely succeeds 100%, so the organism also needs some way to render harmless anything harmful that gets through the boundary. This is the role of the immune system in multicellular organisms. Is there anything here that can serve as an analogy for groups?

One of the most important resources that groups take in are members. What happens when a member has persistent behavior patterns that prove to be harmful to the group?

I’ve seen two common responses to this situation that usually don’t work well:

• Denial – Everyone tries to behave as if the issue doesn’t exist. This may seem to work at a superficial level, but the overall energy in the group shifts. Eventually the issue breaks through and has to be dealt with.

• Caretaking – The group sets aside its initial purpose and shifts its attention to working with the difficult member. While this can be appropriate as an initial response, the group needs to decide how far to go in this direction. If the issue isn’t resolved quickly, continued caretaking will likely kill the group.

Steps To Take

What can be done to get a better outcome? The hard part is knowing when it is better

• to keep the group together and work it through, or

• to remove a member.

In system terms, where is the threshold between these two? I know of no easy practical rule for that threshold. It all depends on the specifics of the situation and requires discernment in that context.

The keys for me are:

• Be clear on the group’s purpose and keep clarifying it as a group – The group’s purpose should be the touchstone for deciding whether or not some one “fits” the group. As part of this, get clear on how committed the group is to personal growth work. What are the expectations individually and for the group’s support for individuals? How does this fit in with the group’s larger purpose?

• Prepare your immune system process and tools before you need them – Get agreement early on about ways to surface uncomfortable feelings and perceptions so that they don’t fester. Also agree on a respectful process that can be used when it starts to look like a member doesn’t fit. Don’t let things build and then explode.

• Have a membrane – Have a joining process that allows everyone to get to know each other before a new person becomes a full member. Have the courage to say no at this stage if there is group consensus and there are strong warning signs.

• Distinguish between differences of opinion and differences of motivation – Among people who share the same purpose, there can be useful differences of opinion about how to go about that purpose. These differences, if they can evolve to a meaningful synthesis, are valuable for the overall wisdom and vitality of the group and should be welcomed. Working through these differences will generally make the group stronger. Differences of motivation can also be beneficial if the various motivations are mutually supportive – e.g. in a community if one person is motivated by sustainability and another by non-violence, those two can likely be brought into harmony. But when someone is, for example, heavily influenced by strong unresolved psychological issues unrelated to the group’s purpose, it can be hard to pull the various motivations into harmony.

• Start with Group Optimal Zone First Aid – Give it your best attempt to work it through with the skills you have or can bring in. Get help with conflict resolution if the difficulty involves explicit conflicts. Only consider removing a member if good faith attempts at healing and reconciliation have gotten nowhere.

• The group is the immune system – This issue is fraught with grey areas, pitfalls and choices that need to be made on the basis of inadequate information. If you reach a point where a member is removed, there should be broad support in the rest of the group that this is the best choice for the group. Along the way, the assessment of what’s going on is best if it emerges from the group. Even if one person takes the visible lead in interacting with the difficult member, they need to be able to do so with the support of the rest of the group.

• Minimize blame – Keep the process framed in the specific terms of “not a good fit in this situation, with this group, for this purpose.” Avoid judging anyone in more categorical or context-independent terms. Help everyone, especially the person who is being removed, to save as much face as possible.

• You aren’t the only game in town – While removing a member should be treated with care and respect, keep it in perspective. Life will go on for everyone.

Experientials

Start these in the morning, carry them through the day and add reflections to your journal at the end of the day.

1. Have you seen a group that was particularly good at treating diversity as an asset? What enabled their success?

2. Have you ever been part of (or known about) a group with someone who didn’t fit in a way that impacted the overall energy of the group? What was that experience like? In hindsight, how might that situation been handled better?

3. If you could design it your way, what kind of group immune system process and tools would you want in a group that you were part of?

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 5: Collaboration Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

This exploration is a little different from what we’ve been doing because it deals with a topic that currently has very little recognition in the surrounding culture. Unlike something like leadership, we are just at the start of discovering its potential.

It’s important because groups function so much better when all of the group members are in their Optimal Zone, yet most groups are clueless about the Optimal Zone is and how to be Optimal Zone resilient (OZR).

If you haven't yet, I recommend you read Your Optimal Zone and Optimal Zone Resilience on this Substack. They provide essential background on OZR for individuals.

We will be building on that here by looking at OZR in the form of OZ hygiene and OZ first aid for groups.

Group OZ Hygiene

While the framework of Optimal Zone hygiene is new, many of the relevant practices are ancient. Since the Tribal Era, groups have made use of breathing, silence, singing and movement – all forms of Optimal Zone hygiene – as a way to bring the group together and into the present. These activities work well at the start and end of meetings. They can also work in the midst of a meeting when the group needs fresh energy. They can help group members move more fully into the Optimal Zone from either the agitated or the depressed side wings.

We have a wealth of human experience to draw on but unfortunately that experience is often seen as sectarian or unprofessional or touchy-feely or whatever. I expect that Planetary Era groups will understand the humanOS value of these activities and make good use of them in group activities of all kinds.

Part of living into that bright future now is to develop a comfort with using these somatic group activities in the groups that we can influence. I see our challenge as

• developing a toolbox of Optimal Zone hygiene activities that draw on the essence of past practices but have a form that fits the present, free from historical baggage

• finding good ways to present these activities so people can embrace them.

Fortunately, much has already been done along these lines but it is not yet well known and lacks the context provided by 1) the Optimal Zone and 2) the Empire to Planetary transition. The stretching, breathing, inner smile and chest glow are all examples of simple, shareable Optimal Zone hygiene.

Group OZ First Aid

When someone in a group gets triggered and moves out of their Optimal Zone, they can have a significant impact on the functioning of the whole group. This is easiest to see when someone becomes angry or visibly defensive. Others in the group will often become defensive in response and may go into freeze. Often, no one knows what to do, so the event is either suppressed or the meeting or group activity may come to an awkward end.

Less obvious but also significant are the times when someone inwardly withdraws. Their lack of participation can depress the energy in the group in subtle but important ways.

It would be wonderful if groups were trained and skillful in dealing with these situations. In Human Operating-System Literacy, Part 5, I offered the following preliminary ideas for Optimal Zone first aid:

• Get agreement and shared understanding beforehand – The time to introduce the concepts of Optimal Zone first aid is when no one is triggered.

• Train before you need it – Like other kinds of first aid, this requires practice as well as conceptual understanding.

• Center yourself first, slow down, breathe – It is so easy and common for others to become triggered in response to the first person who is triggered. It takes conscious effort and training to respond by becoming less triggered rather than more, yet it is from this less triggered, more Optimal Zone place that you can do the most good.

• Acknowledge the signal in the trigger and commit to coming back to it – There are two important things about the issue that served as a trigger:

  • You are unlikely to come up with a good response to the issue while anyone in the group is still in a triggered state

  • However out-of-proportion the triggered state may seem compared to the immediate issue, there is still likely something in the immediate issue that should be addressed. It is both respectful and reassuring to the triggered person to commit to coming back to that immediate issue once they are out of the triggered state.

• Connect through empathy and kindness – Being triggered is an emotional state that harkens back to being a distressed child. You need to meet the triggered person where they are emotionally with respect and compassion for both their adult parts and their child parts.

• Return the focus to the present through breathing, body sensing, contact – Non-verbal connection is especially effective in helping someone find their way back to their Optimal Zone.

This is just a start. OZ first-aid is a territory ripe for innovations.

Experientials

Start these in the morning, carry them through the day and add reflections to your journal at the end of the day.

1. Make a list of your best experiences of using Optimal Zone hygiene activities in a group setting. What ideas do you have for ways to bring these activities into wider use?

2. What do you feel should be included as part of an Optimal Zone first aid practice?

As with preceding explorations, if you are currently part of a collaborative group and the others in the group are open to this, share this page with them and use it as a starting point for consciously exploring your group’s Optimal Zone hygiene and first aid.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 5: Collaboration Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

The goal of this lesson is for you to explore the territory of leadership for and within groups of collaborators.

Leadership

Leadership is a big territory and one that is colored by our experience with Empire Era approaches. I expect the approach will change in the Planetary Era, but I expect we will still have a territory that we will call leadership.

The perspective I’d like to share has four parts

• Leadership = helping a group move forward

• There are many useful types of leadership

• The leadership needs of a group are likely to evolve over time

• Leadership is a role that is often shared and can move around in the group

Leadership = helping a group move forward

Planetary Era leadership serves the group. In order to work towards a common goal, groups need to develop shared understandings and coordinate their activities. Occasionally, a group is able to do this in a way that seems almost telepathic, but most of the time, for most groups, it helps to have a more explicit focus and process. Having someone serve as a focal point in that process, facilitating and articulating, is usually helpful to enable the group to move toward its goal efficiently.

There are many useful types of leadership

As a territory, leadership has no simple definition. Rather, it is a composite of many different ways that someone can help a group move forward. Here are some leadership functions. As usual, this “map” is partial, selective and provisional.

• Visionary Leadership – Developing a vision that others in the group support

• Articulator/Spokesperson Leadership – Giving voice to the “sense of the group”

• Facilitative Leadership – Assisting a group with its process and making sure everyone in the group has the tools and resources they need to do their work.

• Keep-The-Faith Leadership – Providing encouragement and steady focus when the group has not yet accomplished tangible results as it works toward its vision – while the group is “between the lightning (of inspiration) and the thunder (of results).” This is an important kind of leadership that requires a lot of patience and faith in the vision.

• Coaching Leadership – Drawing out the best in each group member and helping them to grow.

• Operational Leadership – Once there is a clear vision and plan, helping the group execute the plan.

• Relational Leadership – Building and strengthening relationships in the group and between the group and others.

• Problem-Solving Leadership – Coming up with solutions to problems that the group is facing.

• Horizon-Scanning Leadership – Identifying both challenges and opportunities that are not yet important to the group but could be, either by choice or necessity.

• Supporting leadership in others – Encouraging others to play a role in helping the group move forward and being a good supporter – and as appropriate, follower – of their leadership.

Notice that executive decision-making for the group in not central to most of these functions.

Feel free to add to this list. I’ll be interested to hear your additions.

The leadership needs of a group are likely to evolve over time

As you look over the above list of functions, it is easy to imagine that the amount of time and energy devoted to each leadership function is likely to change over time. Here’s a schematic graph to illustrate that progression (with only some functions included to simplify the graph).

The details will depend on the group but some kind of evolution is to be expected. Mapping leadership as this kind of dynamic composite is so helpful in going beyond conventional categorical ideas about leadership.

Leadership is a role that is often shared and can move around in the group

If you look in real groups at the multi-functional role of leadership, you will often see that many people in the group provide these functions regardless of whether they are acknowledged as “leaders” or not. By starting with leadership as a territory characterized by many functions, we have the mind-set flexibility to support these diverse contributions. It may be that some people in the group supply a higher proportion of leadership and are recognized in the group as leaders. That’s ok as long as it doesn’t rigidify into a categorical sense that only people who are considered “leaders” can provide leadership. If that happens, the group and everyone in it lose out on the contributions everyone can make.

The mix of who provides what type of leadership is likely to change over time. It’s common for people to be better at some leadership functions than others. The evolution of the leadership mix is made easier by

• an attitude of servant leadership, leadership for the good of the group

• treating leadership as a composite territory rather than a category

• using visuals, like the graph above, to support that perspective.

Experientials

Start these in the morning, carry them through the day and add reflections to your journal at the end of the day.

1. Make a list in your journal of the kinds of leadership functions you have provided in groups you have been part of. It could be kinds from this exploration or something else.

2. Are there leadership functions that feel like growing edges for you? How might you support your growth in those directions?

3. Think of the groups you have been part of that have handled flexible, distributed leadership particularly well. What enabled their success? How might they have been even better?

As with preceding days, if you are currently part of a collaborative group and the others in the group are open to this, share this exploration with them and use it as a starting point for consciously exploring how leadership functions in your group.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 5: Collaboration Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

The goal of this lesson is for you to explore the territory of decision-making for groups of collaborators.

Let’s start.

Decision-Making

In any group, one of the most important questions is, “How shall we make decisions?” – kind of a meta-decision!

I’ve come to feel that there are four important criteria that we can use to assess any decision-making process. Generally, we want decisions that are timely, wise and supported, and we want the process to be efficient.

• Timely – Many decisions happen in a context where the decisions need to be made within an externally imposed timeframe. If a house is on fire, decisions about how best to fight the fire need to be made quickly. A timely decision is made within its appropriate timeframe.

• Wise – I know of no magic formula to guarantee wise decisions but decisions made while in your optimal zone and that use a systems perspective (to, for example, understand the context of the issue and the ramifications of a decision) generally lead to better outcomes. Does the process include these and/or other wisdom-enhancing components?

• Supported – Many decisions impact more than one person – and even within one person, they impact more than one sub-personality. Do the multiple people (or sub-personalities) who will need to carry out the decision at least consent to it? If not, there are numerous ways to subvert an official decision so that the result is like pushing string.

• Efficient – How much time and resources were required to reach the decision? Are those proportionate to the scope or impacts of the decision? Could another process have been equally timely, wise and supported and yet been more efficient?

Applying these criteria depends a lot on the specific context or situation. I have yet to see any decision-making process that is the absolute, one-size-fits-all best process.

Let’s look at a variety of approaches from the perspective of these four criteria.

Within each individual

Whatever the group decision-making form may be, at some point it depends on the process within one or more individuals. With the goal of making wiser decisions, I expect Planetary Era cultures to emphasize two approaches that are not so common in at least mainstream contemporary culture.

• Decide from your Optimal Zone – The Enlightenment, which gave birth to modern democracies, thought everyone was “rational” except for a few crazy people. I expect the Planetary Era to have a more nuanced understanding of our complexity and see the value of doing Optimal Zone hygiene (silence, breathing, stretching, etc.) before making any considered decision.

• Get input from your whole being – Your conscious mind and the sub-personality currently acting through it are only a small part of your total being. Whether your map for this larger territory describes it in terms of subconscious, intuition, gut feelings, body awareness, and/or sub-personalities, I expect Planetary Era groups to develop ways to get input from the whole of who we are. There are many insight-evoking creativity techniques that can be used, some as simple as going for a walk or sleeping on it. Similarly, imagine convening an inner round-table conversation among your sub-personalities as you work on a significant decision. In addition, all the visual tools we’ve been using can be helpful both for individuals and for groups.

Please hold this expanded character of individual decision-making in mind as we next turn to the structures that can be used for decision-making in and for collaborative groups.

OK, on to various forms of decision-making, as summarized in this mind map.

Executive

I’m using executive to denote a process where a single person makes the decision. Like categorical thinking, this is our default for numerous mundane daily decisions and was characteristic of the Empire Era. And like categorical thinking, it has its place in the Planetary Era. It doesn’t go away; it just loses its near monopoly. I’d like to distinguish among three different types of executive decision-making:

• Autocratic – This is pure single-person decision-making. It scores well for timely and efficient but is much more mixed for wise and supported. It makes sense in emergency situations where the person making the decisions has training and the respect of others in the group. The fire chief at a fire is a classic appropriate example, even in the Planetary Era.

• Consultative – When there is not quite so much time pressure, the executive decision-maker can improve the likely wisdom and support by reaching out to others with relevant knowledge. Such experts need not be the same as those who will carry out the decisions. A lot of executive decision-making in business follows this pattern. How well it works, especially relative to alternatives, depends entirely on the situation.

• Consensus-Seeking – When there is a stronger need for support, the executive can consult with those who will be affected and/or need to carry out the decision and attempt to forge a consensus. This is generally a hub-and-spokes process where the executive at the hub still makes the ultimate decision. If done well, it can have strong support.

It is easy to see the abuse of executive decision-making in the world around us but we shouldn’t let that blind us to its appropriate application in so much of daily life. This gets confounded by the strong association between executive decision-making and the controlling personality style. The dynamics between the controlling style and the leaving, enduring and performing styles makes those styles in us particularly wary of executive decision-making. Our challenge is to consider executive decision-making from an Optimal Zone perspective and then explore its right use.

Rule-Based

The Enlightenment period in Western history attempted to replace arbitrary executive decision-making (“the rule of men”) with decision-making based on agreed standards (“the rule of law”). Confucianism in China made a similar attempt even earlier. This pattern continues in bureaucracies around the world. Both movements did a lot to curb the abuse of arbitrary individual power although they replaced it with a more class-based abuse of power. They also did not completely remove individual decision-making from the process since laws and regulations must still be interpreted in each situation.

Frequently this process is neither timely or efficient and is resisted by those who bear the brunt of the regulation. It works best where those who need to follow the rules also support those rules and can largely self-regulate. Society is hardly there yet, but self-regulation based on agreed upon rules can work well in collaborative organizations.

Expert

If you are building a bridge, you want a skilled civil engineer involved in the design. In today’s world there are many decisions where expert knowledge is essential. Such decision can ideally be timely, efficient and wise. They can also be supported if the experts are respected. On the other hand, these decisions can be narrow-mindedly based on only the aspects of the situation within the scope of the expertise and thus blindly unwise. Expert-based decisions are generally best when held in a bigger picture formed by a more diverse group.

Majority

The opposite of expert decision-making is decision-making that gives every person an equal voice regardless of his or her knowledge about the issues. The most common of these processes is majority rule, which has become the default alternative to executive decision-making. It’s justification is that it’s better than minority rule (“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” – Churchill) but it tends to lead to polarization and embittered minorities. As a process, it encourages developing proposals only to the stage where they can get majority support, which makes them less wise and less supported than they could be. It also doesn’t get good marks for being timely or efficient. Nevertheless, it is the standard that alternatives are measured against. I’m not sure where it might be an appropriate choice in collaborative groups but I wouldn’t want to categorically rule it out.

Representative

One way to strike a balance between majority rule and expert decision-making is to elect representatives who can become knowledgeable on the issues that need to be decided. For larger groups, such a system is more timely and efficient than doing everything by direct democracy and can be wiser. The representatives can also potentially use alternative decision-making processes, not just majority rule. I see representation in use as a practical matter in many existing collaborative groups.

Consensus

One long-standing alternative to majority rule is consensus, where everyone in a group must agree with the decision before it is made. One strength of this approach is that it forces the refinement of proposals until everyone is on board. Another is that decisions should have strong support. For a long time, consensus was the favorite decision-making process in intentional communities and ecovillages, places I see as important cultural laboratories.

However, over time it has become clear in many communities that consensus becomes the tyranny of the most chronically fearful. All of the processes we’ve described so far implicitly assume that the decision-makers are, in Enlightenment terms, rational – in our terms, in their Optimal Zones. That’s simply not realistic.

Part of the theory behind consensus is that the more people in agreement with a decision, the wiser the decision. In practice, it often doesn’t work that way because of those in the group who aren’t able to be in the present and who react to the issues at hand as a re-enactment of past traumas. We all do this to some extent, depending on the issue, and when we do, we have a defensive reaction, like the defense patterns in Module 3, and our judgment is clouded. Schematically we can represent this weakness of consensus like this:

In other words, while the expectation was that more support = greater wisdom, the experience has been that wisdom often peaks somewhere below 100% support. Just where it peaks, and even if it peaks, is situation specific.

Consent

In response to the limits with consensus, many intentional communities are turning to a practice called sociocracy. This is not the place to go into all of the aspects of sociocracy. For our purposes here, the key factors are

• Every group and subgroup needs a clear statement of its vision, mission and aims (common ground). This is just good organizational practice.

• Policy decisions within the scope of some subgroup need to have the consent of everyone in the subgroup. Sounds like consensus but it isn’t quite because of the next item.

• You can only withhold consent on the basis that you can make the case that the proposal is in conflict with the vision, mission or aims of the group. It is not a matter of personal preference.

• Proposals are developed with everyone’s involvement so by the time the proposal comes to a decision, everyone’s been heard. Because of this focus on co-creative design for the proposal, the decision is often just a formality.

In a way, the message of sociocracy is that the methods we use to develop proposals are at least as important as the methods we use for decisions. The ground we have covered in the first four modules could enable BFNow graduates to take the art of co-creative proposal design to a whole new level.

I’m not suggesting that sociocracy is the one size that fits all. Nor is it the only interesting model in use for collaborative groups. Rather, the example of sociocracy offers hope that in the Planetary Era we may be able to go beyond Churchill’s witty pessimism.

Experiential

Start these in the morning, carry them through the day and add reflections to your journal at the end of the day.

1. Make a list in your journal of the kinds of decision-making with which you have direct experience. It could be kinds from this exploration or something else. Notice how you make “little” decisions in the flow of your daily life as well as “big” decisions, both in groups and personally. Observe the diversity in your territory of decision-making.

2. Which of these have worked well and in what situations have they worked well?

3. How do these success stories relate to timely, wise, supported and efficient?

4. Are there any patterns you see in the success stories?

As with yesterday, if you are currently part of a collaborative group and the others in the group are open to this, share this exploration with them and use it as a starting point for consciously exploring your decision-making.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 5: Collaboration Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

The goal for this module is for you to become comfortable, in practical ways, with the territory of collaboration by applying the tools we’ve worked with so far plus some new tools.

I am assuming that, in your role as a Planetary Era catalyst, you’ll be influencing the process and character of the collaboration beyond just participating. These explorations are intended to support your capacity to do so.

The goal of this lesson is for you to explore building common ground for a group of collaborators.

Let’s start.

Common Ground

We collaborate with others, generally, out of a sense of some combination of shared purpose and relational connection. For example, you help out a friend on her project because she is your friend; you join a group to clean up a local park because you and the others in the group want to improve the park.

Often, we assume more commonality than actually exists and any mismatch in our expectations and assumptions can get us into trouble as the collaboration develops, especially for more significant collaborations.

To avoid this, it's helpful to build common ground by making assumptions explicit and, in various ways, improving the alignment and shared understandings among the collaborators.

Explicit common ground is thus a vital part of the infrastructure that enables successful collaboration. It deserves conscious attention and a toolbox of ways to develop it, especially when you are starting a new collaboration or when, in an ongoing collaboration, you want to deepen your mutual understanding.

Think of the toolbox that follows as a checklist to help you and your collaborators explore the full extent of your common ground. You may not need all of the items for any particular shared endeavor but you should at least consider and consciously choose whether to include each one.

Here’s the toolbox:

Agreements

The usual way in which people establish explicit common ground is through language-based agreements. These can be as simple as a conversation or a one sentence vision statement, or as elaborate as a multi-page legal or planning document. While far from perfect and burdened with all of the limitations of language, it is the default for most people and generally worth including as part of your common ground.

When you do this, you might want to consider including these topics:

• Purpose and outcomes – Why are you collaborating and what's the intended outcome from your collaboration? For more involved collaborations, this is a good place to uses something like Sociocracy's Vision, Mission, and Aims approach.

• Process – How will plans be made, work distributed and decisions be made? How will you communicate with each other?

• Contexts – We all carry our contexts (frameworks, history, values, other parts of our life, etc.)with us and they often include many assumptions. Many collaborations are part of larger projects that provide context for the immediate endeavor. In addition, if we are to engage in win-win-win collaboration, we need to know the contexts that we will want to include in the third "win". Likewise, for many collaborations, there are operational, organizational and even legal contexts that need to be aligned with. Good to make these contexts explicit.

• Scope – What is the expected scope of your collaboration? For example, if you are "cleaning up the park", how much will you do? Are just picking up litter or are you removing invasive plants and repairing a stream bank?

• Evolution – What's the origin story and history so far for this collaboration? Are there visions for how it might evolve beyond the current endeavor? How will you all support learning and adaptation in the endeavor?

System Models

The co-creation of system models can be a powerful way to map complex territories and build shared understanding. Creating relevant system models together – as a shared process – offers a huge opportunity for expanding a group’s common ground. This is another great way to help existing contexts to become visible and to create new shared contexts.

Experiences

Shared experiences, outside of your usual collaborative activities, broaden your understanding of each other and provide common reference points that build group culture. I’ve heard the advice for couples that they should go camping or at least go on a long car trip with each other before they get too serious. If it doesn’t end the relationship it will make it stronger. 😉 Whether it’s going to a movie, a conference or river rafting together, there are a wide range of shared experiences that can build common ground.

Here’s a visual summary of these helpful inputs for creating your common ground:

Experiential

1. Choose a collaborative group that you either
   ○ are part of
   ○ were part of, or
   ○ plan to be part of.

2. Drawing on the above toolbox, think of how you might first make explicit and then expand and/or strengthen the common ground for that group.

3. Use your journal to write out (and maybe draw out) an actionable plan for what you would do, perhaps with something under each of the above headings.

4. Were you ever part of a group that got in trouble because of too many unspoken and unshared assumptions and expectations? How might a more explicit exploration of common ground have helped?

If you are currently part of a collaborative group – anything from a primary relationship and family to work teams and volunteer groups – and the others in the group are open to this, share this exploration with them and use it as a starting point for consciously exploring your common ground. Even in groups and relationships where you know each other well, there are likely activities in this explortion (like building shared system maps/models) that could lead to greater mutual understanding.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 5: Collaboration Overview page.]

This module focuses on collaboration by which I mean working

• by choice

• with others

• towards a shared goal.

It could be your day job. It could be a volunteer activity. It could be a task that is done in 15 minutes. It could be the work of a lifetime.

These last three modules of the course are more outward, interpersonal and accomplishment-oriented than what we have done so far. This module focuses particularly on the “with others” part but in the context of “towards a shared goal.” The following two modules will focus more on accomplishing that shared goal.

If you’re currently involved in some type of collaboration – anywhere from a primary relationship to a work or volunteer team – consider sharing some or all of this module’s pages with your partners/co-workers so that your group could use the content of the pages as a starting point for evolving your own collaborative process. Use your judgement about which pages to share (they many not all be relevant to your group), with whom and how fast to share them. You might want to slow down to an page per week and give your group time to really work with the content of each one. Whatever you do, I’ll be interested to hear how it works out!

If you don’t have appropriate other people with whom to share this module’s content, that’s OK. Just get familiar with the tools and the territory so that you’ll be ready to use the tools when the time is right.

Key Concepts and Terms
Here’s this module’s set. These are part of the shared language we are building for the network. Many, but not all, of these are also in the titles of the explorations:

• collaboration

• common ground

• timely, wise, supported, efficient

• consensus, consent

• leadership

• diversity

• group immune system

We will also be building on concept from the presentations and previous modules, including:

• system diagrams (System Literacy presentation and Module 4)

• frameworks (a general term for worldviews, belief systems, mental models, ideologies, sets of working hypotheses, paradigms, etc. that I introduced in hOS Literacy, Part 4)

• Optimal Zone hygiene (hOS Literacy, Part 5)

• Optimal Zone first aid(hOS Literacy, Part 5)

• defense patterns (Module 3)

If you come across concepts or words in this module’s material you feel should be added to the list, please let me know.

A visual map for this module’s content
Here’s the diagram with the titles for each exploration plus the previous modules for context. The curved arrows show connections where one exploration particularly influences or feeds into another. The angular arrows show the influence from a whole module, sometimes on a whole later module and sometime on a particular later exploration.

Module 5 Explorations

Common Ground – Exploration 1

Decision-Making – Exploration 2

Leadership– Exploration 3

Group Optimal Zone Resilience – Exploration 4

Diversity as a Territory – Exploration 5

Module 4 combines two mutually supportive tracks: system principles and their application to habits. From the perspective of the Foundational Keys, it supports your deepening into Systems Literacy, Being Savvy about Psychodynamics, and Being Skillful with Diverse Modes of Cognition.

In the module, you'll be using the tools of system mapping to deepen your understanding of one of your habits. In the process, you'll be:

• discovering personally relevant ways to shift the habit by finding new points of leverage

• seeing how broad system principles show up in your own daily patterns

• building system-literacy skills that apply far beyond habits

• engaging your whole brain—verbal, visual, and kinesthetic—to gain fresh insights

• building experiences and perspectives that can be translated from this personal level to the "habits" of larger systems like organizations and institutions.

What you'll find here differs in significant ways from many mainstream approaches to habit change:

• While most approaches treat habits in isolation, this one is nested within the broader BFNow journey. It draws on earlier modules and functions within the Foundational Keys framework—so the learning extends well beyond habit change alone.

• Rather than relying on willpower or clever behavior hacks, this approach invites you to see yourself as a living system. The orientation shifts from manipulation to collaboration with your deeper psychodynamics.

• Many popular models aim at personal productivity or success, reflecting modernist cultural values. This approach supports those goals and connects you to something larger—co-evolution toward the Planetary Era.

There's a lot of practical value for your everyday life here. I encourage you to take a look, starting with the Overview:

• Systems & Habits – Module 4 Overview

• Diagrams & Descriptions – Exploration 1

• Timescales, Timelags & Feedback – Exploration 2

• Thresholds & Tipping Points – Exploration 3

• Connections – Exploration 4

• Character Diagrams – Exploration 5

For quick access to the other modules, please see About BFNow Self-Study. For a more detailed orientation to both the content and process of the Self-Study program, see BFNow Self-Study Orientation.

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

The goal of this lesson is for you to get a stronger awareness of the roles that time plays in systems.

Time in systems

The usual system diagram shows structure; that is, it shows the flow of influence from one part to another. What isn’t shown is how fast that influence flows. Let’s look at a simple version of the habits diagram:

The diagram doesn’t tell you anything about how much time it takes

• from seeing the Cue to doing the Routine

• from doing the Routine to getting Results

• from getting Results to feeling the Reward

• from getting Results to Other Consequences

• from getting Results to reinforcing the Cue

In simple cases the timing may not matter, but it gets interesting when there are different time scales in the system. Suppose the habit concerns eating some food that you enjoy but that causes problems of some kind. Eating and food have a lot of time scales:

• As soon as you start thinking about the food, you body starts to respond with saliva and other preparatory changes.

• When you are chewing, taste and smell give you an instant direct association with the food.

• Also when you are chewing, some of the food may get absorbed into your bloodstream with whatever quick effects that may have.

• When the food reaches the stomach, there is more selective absorption.

• It takes about six to eight hours for food to pass through the stomach and small intestine, with new selective absorption and effects.

• Average transit time through the large intestine is about 40 hours, with yet more selective absorption and effects.

• What’s absorbed gets used in the body, where it may stay for years.

Each one of these creates a different set of Results, Rewards and/or Other Consequences. Many of these involve time lags, that is, there’s a space of time between the initial action (e.g. eating) and the Results (e.g. food reactions that only show up once the food reaches the large intestine). They also involve different time scales, that is, chewing happens in a few minutes, digestion requires 10’s of hours, use in the body extends over years.

We more easily associate things that happen close to each other in time. Unless you make a conscious effort to connect the later or slower consequences, they aren’t likely to have much influence on the Cue.

This leads to the main strategy for the day: Pick the consequences that you want to have a big influence on the Cue and strengthen their visibility. One common way to do this is to create a graph, diary or calendar that give you an instant visual for events that unfold slowly.

I have a personal example that I’d like to share. Let me start by saying, this is my way and doesn’t need to be your way, but it’s the best I have at the moment to illustrate using a graph to bring slow change into the immediate present.

In December 2015, I decided I wanted to make some changes in my habits around eating, including the impact on my weight. I got a scale that measures percent body fat as well as overall weight so I could distinguish between lean mass and fat mass. I put together a spreadsheet with a graph that allowed me to track the slow changes in weight. This is five month’s worth:

You can see the overall trend but there’s a lot of up and down from day to day. Some of this is noise from the percent body fat measurements, which aren’t exact. Other places reflect changes in my diet (like the bump for Christmas around 12/24) or my level of exercise or hydration.

This graph is my self-chosen coach. As I go through the day deciding what and how much to eat, how much water to drink and how much to exercise, I know the consequences of my choices will show up in trend over the next few days.

The point is not the specifics, which might not work for you, but rather to find some way to bring slow change into your immediate awareness – and not get misled by day-to-day noise.

Reinforcing and balancing feedback

Above, I talked about feedback from the system to you. There is another kind of feedback that is usually more associated with systems, namely feedback within the system. Let’s look again at the habits diagram:

The sequence that goes Cue > Routine > Results > Reward > Cue is what, in system terms, is normally called a feedback loop. The flow of influences ends up at the same place where it started.

This can seem puzzling, if not impossible. How can the Cue cause itself? But that’s not the way to interpret what’s going on in this diagram. The word “Cue” actually stands for a whole series of events, separated in time but having the same position in the structure. We should re-write the sequence as Earlier Cue > Routine > Results > Reward > Later Cue so the Earlier Cue sets off a series of events (with time delays) that re-inforce the Later Cue.

Feedback loops like this, that come back to the same place in the structure but at a later time, are usually categorized as reinforcing (positive) or balancing (negative). The loop that includes Reward is likely a reinforcing loop, meaning that increasing the Reward strengthens the Cue. The loop that includes Other Consequences may well be a balancing loop, meaning that the stronger the Other Consequences (if they are unwelcome) the more the Cue is diminished. Reinforcing loops by themselves can lead to runaway exponential growth. Balancing loops counteract that growth. Working together, they can lead to stability. Systems with loops that reflect real territories always have some combination of reinforcing and balancing. BTW, “positive” and “negative” aren’t judgments here. Interpret them in a purely mathematical sense.

Experientials

Start these in the morning, let ideas come to you throughout the day and then return to it in the evening.

1. Find a place in your system diagram where different time scales may play a role. The Results and Other Consequences parts of the habits diagram are good examples. Make a list of all the different time scales that apply to that part of the system.

2. Pick multiple time scales from your list. (Using the food example, these could be “in mouth,” “in stomach” and “in body” – see simplified example below.) Expand your diagram to reflect these different time scales and add descriptions for what’s going on at each time scale. Are there any time lags? How could you increase the influences of the longer time scales?

3. Are there any loops in your diagram? Are they reinforcing or balancing? If you think a particular loop might be sometimes reinforcing and sometimes balancing, what are the conditions that lead to one or the other? Add notes to your diagrams.

We’ll continue to build and evolve these diagrams throughout the module.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 4: Systems & Habits Overview page.]

Expanded habits diagram for snacking as an example:

On your diagram, find some way to connect the slower timescales back into the Cue or the Context so those Other Consequences can influence the habit.

If you are working with a system other than food habits, do something analogous that brings slower timescales into the system in a way that gives them meaningful influence.

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

Today we blend the work of Modules 3 & 4. The goal is for you to get a clearer sense of what keeps the character styles in place – and then how to intervene to change those styles and complete the developmental tasks.

Each of the character styles persists because it’s supported by self-reinforcing systems. This exploration provides system diagrams for all of the styles and then companion diagrams with intervention strategies. The Experiential will ask you to pick one of the styles to work with.

The imperative statements in each heading are the healing goals for each character style.

1. Embodiment –
“Feel comfortable and safe in your body.”

Here’s a self-reinforcing system that helps keep the Leaving style in place. As with all the defense patterns, Leaving compensates for the incompleteness of its associated development task, in this case Embodiment.

(This diagram is not meant to be THE one true diagram. Rather, it is meant to illustrate a process for which there can be many variations and different descriptions.)

The outer loop, with the caregiver and the infant, is meant to show how the process starts, while the inner loop, with the child/adult, is meant to show how the process continues.

To change this pattern, it helps to intervene in multiple places. The system is robust enough that it will likely adjust and accommodate if you work on only one part.

Two recurring healing strategies, for all of the character styles, are develop skills/habits and reframe beliefs:

• You need to develop skills and habits relevant to the development task that you didn’t fully learn as a child.

• When you didn’t learn those skills or habits but developed a work-around instead, you took on various beliefs that support the work-around and interfere with completing the development task. These beliefs need to be changed into beliefs that can help you complete the development task.

Developing skills and habits as well as changing beliefs often benefits from various techniques that work directly with the body and the subconscious. The best result seem to come from combining cognitive and non-cognitive processes. (Kessler’s book, The 5 Personality Patterns, has a wealth of specific healing approaches for each character style.)

Another recurring healing strategy, not on these diagrams but in all of the Module 3 Experientials, is for your Optimal Zone adult sub-personality to supportively connect with the wounded child sub-personality associated with each character style. Consider this as a general strategy to be included with the more specific strategies on the diagrams.

OK, so here are a set of healing strategies to complete the Embodiment task:

The specifics of how to reframe beliefs and develop skills will be along the lines described in the Embodiment Exploration (Module 3 - Exploration 1) and will depend on the details of each person’s situation. The diagram just provides general strategies that can serve as a starting point. (“Regulation” is the psychologists’ term for the ability to move yourself back toward your Optimal Zone after you have been triggered.)

It is useful to work on all three interventions in parallel. If you develop the skills of self-regulation, it will be easier to calm your nervous system and likewise to reframe your beliefs around safety. If you are able to reframe your beliefs, it will also be easier to calm your nervous system and develop new skills. If you’re able to calm your nervous system, it will be easier to develop new skills and reframe beliefs. They all reinforce each other.

2. Taking In –
“Feel confidently nourished and supported from a variety of sources, including those within yourself.”

Moving on, here’s a self-reinforcing system that keeps the Pulling style in place:

This diagram focuses on the experience of a child but with a little variation it could apply to adults as well. You can think of the “child” as the wounded child sub-personality that you still carry with you.

Here are points of intervention and healing:

The skills here include self-regulation; an inner relaxation and openness that allows your internal energy to flow; and skills that improve assimilating the “nourishment” (food or otherwise) that comes your way.

The self-reinforcing system for the compensated variant of Pulling looks like this:

I haven’t done a separate intervention diagram for Compensated Pulling because, to get at the underlying issues, it’s the same as the Taking In Strategies diagram above.

3. Putting Out –
“Grow into a confident sense of your own creative, expressive capacity.”

Again, the following diagrams focus on the experience of a child but with a little variation they could apply to adults as well – or to the wounded child sub-personality.

Here are points of intervention and healing:

De-internalize means quieting the internalized voice of the caregiver, which often shows up as the Inner Critic.

4. Trusting Others –
“Settle into a comfortable sense of support and resiliency
via appropriate trust of others and of life.”

Let’s apply the same pattern to the last two character styles:

Here are points of intervention and healing:

5. Trusting Self –
“Discern your own inner direction and know how to follow it.”

Here are points of intervention and healing:

Experiential

Start this in the morning, let ideas come to you throughout the day and then return to it in the evening.

1. Pick one of the character styles that is strong in you and explore how you might apply the strategies for yourself.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 4: Systems & Habits Overview page.]

If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.

The goal of this lesson is for you to get a clearer sense of the different kinds of connections and the roles they play in systems.

Inputs, Converters and Outputs

In Exploration 1, I talked about the basic building blocks of a systems diagram, including

• parts (or nodes)

• the relationships among the parts (or connections)

Along the way I’ve been describing those relationships as influences. Today, I’d like to look more closely at how those relationships/connections/influences work in a system.

If we were working with a mathematically-based system, as in the System Dynamics models described in System Literacy Part 3, then a typical part would look like this:

where the incoming numbers would go into the equation within the part and the result from the equation would then be available (as the outgoing number) to serve as input to another equation in some other part.

In the non-mathematical, qualitative systems we are working with, these characteristics are generalized but the spirit is the same.

The inputs are generally information that comes from other parts of the system. The part itself converts/transforms/interprets the inputs into some kind of output.

Let’s use the simple habits diagram again as an example:

• This diagram maps a situation where the Context and the Cue are aligned and positive.

• In this case, the and sends a signal that starts the Routine part of the habit.

• The Routine outputs Results of some kind.

• The Results get interpreted, with some of the Results being seen as a Reward because of how they connect to Motivations.

• There may be many Consequences that come out from the Results

• The Reward and the Other Consequences bring associations to the Cue that make it either more or less likely to initiate the Routine the next time.

There are many different ways that the parts transform their inputs into outputs but everything still contributes to an overall process.

One way that this kind of system mapping is different from brainstorming or many forms of mind mapping is that a system diagram is meant to reflect the territory and not just be free associations. As you build up a system diagram, for each part ask yourself, “Is this an input into or output from another part in the territory, or is it just an association in my mind?”

Connections and Influences

I’m calling many of the connections influences because they can affect but not necessarily determine how any part will transform its inputs into outputs. Look again at

Without knowing any more detail about the inputs or the equation, the most we can say is that each of the input arrows has a possible influence on the output. This is the loosest, most generic type of input.

Sometimes, however, we know that a particular input is required. For example, you can’t drive a gasoline-powered car if the gas tank is empty. The gas is a necessary input for driving. So are wheels and spark plugs. (Plus many other things, but I’ll keep it simple for this illustration.)

When there are multiple necessary input it makes sense to group them into an and. They are like links in a chain. No one link does all the work; each is needed. Each has a necessary influence on the output

The formal terminology is necessary but not sufficient. This is the kind of mathematical/logical language that makes many people’s eyes glaze over, which is unfortunate because these really are important concepts. Fortunately, it is easier to understand when communicated visually.

We can also have inputs that are sufficient. For example,

In this case, you could take a car OR a bus OR a bike. Any of these modes would be sufficient to get you to your destination. Since there are multiple options, each is sufficient but not necessary – just the flip of what we had before. In a systems sense, each sufficient option has an influence on your ability to arrive at your destination.

What happens when there aren’t multiple inputs, like this?

With only one input into Results, that input is both necessary and sufficient. This is one place where it makes sense to go beyond influence and say that the Routine causes the Results.

That’s about as far as the logicians go but systems need one more important type of connection: the limiting connection. Let’s look at the car again:

If the wheels and spark plugs are in good shape but the car is almost out of gas, then gas becomes the limiting factor, the current constraint, the limiting connection. If you have plenty of gas but get a flat tire, the wheels become the limiting connection.

Among a set of necessary inputs, one of them is likely to be the limiting one. If you want to change the functioning of a system, look for the limiting connection – but don’t stop there. As soon as you handle one limiting connection (fill the tank with gas), the next limiting connection is always ready.

Limiting connections can also show up in a loop:

Imagine you are trying to strengthen your habit of exercising. Every time you do exercise, you get good results that feel rewarding but it’s seems hard to get a Cue that actually gets you started. In this case, the initiates connection may be your limiting connection.

Good system maintenance requires always being on the lookout for limiting connections wherever you find them.

I find that categorical thinking seems to encourage people to get confused in situations that involve multiple inputs, especially when they are necessary but not sufficient. There is a strong urge to make one of the inputs THE most important, simply because it is necessary. I find myself asking, rhetorically, which link in a chain holds it together, which leg of a three-legged stool holds up the stool?

Limiting connections are temporarily important, or at least first priority for attention, but that should not obscure the shared importance of all of the necessary inputs.

The Empire Era assumption that everything is in a hierarchy has a hard time with shared importance, so becoming at ease with necessary but not sufficient is all part of the transformation.

Experientials

Start these in the morning, let ideas come to you throughout the day and then return to it in the evening.

1. Find places in your system diagram where there are multiple inputs. Are these
   ○ necessary but not sufficient?
   ○ sufficient but not necessary?

2. Look in your system diagram for limiting connections. Which one is currently providing the strongest constraint? How might you make it less limiting?

3. Look for examples in the culture where people are arguing over which necessary but not sufficient condition is THE important one. Politics often offers a rich supply of examples.

Thanks,
Robert

[Link back to the Module 4: Systems & Habits Overview page.]