Beyond Dysfunctional) Polarization…It’s a Dance!
Listen to our audio narration with music accompaniment: Beyond Polarization…It’s a Dance!
Paradoxically, the more (some) things seem to change, the more (some) things stay stuck in the same old dysfunctional grooves.
Binary thinking tends to box-in or box-out…
It makes people — us or them — right or wrong…based on preconceptions, assumptions, generalizations, limited information, grand leaps of judgment…
Polarized positions seldom tell the whole story…
Deep down, we know that things are usually messier, more nuanced, more colourful…
Don’t we?
Sometimes on a spectrum…The more complex…the more layered and variable…
Why then, do we continue to witness and/or lapse into those sense making grooves that seldom accomplish good and, on balance, seldom make much sense?
Is it because:
🔻 We fear the consequences of giving others the benefit of the doubt…that slippery slope of giving into something that looks and feels misguided or wrong-headed?
🔻We equate disagreement with being wrong — “Because I don’t agree, that makes you wrong?”
🔻 By acknowledging another’s perspective as valid, having some merit or understandable, given the context, circumstances or frame of reference — we fear we’ll lose or slip into a danger zone?
🔻 We allow others to influence us without doing the deep thinking or due diligence ourselves?
🔻 Cognitive biases become more deeply buried, unconscious, habitual and hijack our own innate thinking ability?
🔻 We trust our own perspectives and sources and distrust others’?
🔻 Any or all of the above?
We are human. Often, we want to make things simpler (or sometimes more complicated or complex) than they really are. Sometimes we lack — or don’t take — the time to think things through, to listen, to observe. Sometimes we’re convinced, adamant that we are on the side of right and they are on the side of wrong.
We (primarily) seek and see the things that continue to prove us right, reinforced by the media algorithms that track us. We dig in deeper — invested in our way of perceiving the truth. Righteous indignation, feeling unheard or undervalued, can kick in at any time.
A recurring theme — messy humanness strikes again. We often observe that pushing harder with our own perspectives produces an equally forceful push back…
What are the consequences of stalling or worse, a stalemate? What is gained? Even when we’re absolutely certain that we are on the side of right…
…so what?
How can we be so unequivocal when we are dealing with complex issues? No one of us can see whole elephants, encapsulating all the complex overlapping wicked meta-poly-perma-omni crises and their causative factors.
Do the ends justify the means?
Are we sometimes blind to the ways we are, in effect and inadvertently, feeding the dysfunctional soul-sucking paradigm that we (many of us) are so passionately working to leave behind?
Polarization can lead to a form of othering, or villainizing those who maintain a position that is counter to what we believe or know to be right or true.
However it manifests or persists, othering is deeply bothering!
Whether we are doing the othering, keeping othering aflame, or being othered, too often deeply entrenched positions become divides — whereby people adopt a rigid stance on any and all, macro and micro, life, work and societal issues of the day.
Binary, either-or left brain leaning can box people into myopic perceptions or limiting beliefs where it becomes increasingly difficult to see or seek a wide(r) range of perspectives on complex issues that are truly layered and nuanced. Furthermore it can produce false dichotomies, whereby people become fixed on labels, making erroneous leaps or assumptions about the positions that others hold, judging their underlying motives and/or maligning their character.
We also observe some conversations in praise of polarization.
Depending on the circumstances, world views and other factors, those vocalizing a strong stand on particular issues might be celebrated as courageous heroic leaders or activists. Alternatively they might be villainized.
At times, people are criticized or shamed for not (publicly) advocating a strong unequivocal opinion…for not taking a hard stand….
Context matters. Mindful deliberation and discernment on whether, when and how to take and declare a strong definitive position on what issues is important.
There is a perpetual avalanche of oft-sensationalized news and media posts and declarations about events and people — with conclusive broad brush verdicts of what is good and what is bad.
Yup. Some things are definitively good. Some things are definitively bad.And on balance, some things are (potentially) more good or more bad.
However, in many cases, these seem to be gross conflations of the whole truth. So often there is a mix. So often it depends on one’s worldview. So often information is missing and assumptions are made. So often the truth holds gradations and nuance.
And the humans involved — are always human. They aren’t perfect. Most of the time they aren’t heroes. And they aren’t villains. They are doing what they believe to be right. They are influenced by their life, work and world contexts and the information they get, seek and trust.
And much of the time — they are we and we are they.
’Twas ever thus.
There is a place for healthy debate, that contributes to individual and collective critical thinking. The context and purpose for debate is also important.
Does it:
🔻 Lead to deeper understanding?
🔻 Open and widen pathways toward creative alternatives, ways to deal with difficult dilemmas and tensions?
🔻 Help to acknowledge and address the double binds that so often keep people and systems stuck?
🔻 Deepen attachment to and entrenchment in fixed positions?
As long as we keep widening the divides and building fences — we are stuck — idling in neutral or backsliding into more dysfunctional human dynamics.
That doesn’t mean we should be wishy-washy and uncommitted on any and all issues. And that doesn’t make ineffectual middle-of-the-road compromise the auto-default. But surely we can try to understand the basis for (diametrically) opposed world views, viewpoints or underlying disagreements — different ways of seeing things and different ways to navigate.
“True, we can have too much challenge, too much uncertainty. However, if we look closely, we’ll find that that only happens when we’ve become too attached to outcomes. In the moment of that realization, our challenge becomes ‘How well can we learn to let go and stay engaged?’ … Tom Atlee — Crisis Fatigue and the Co-Creation of Positive Possibilities
Simply picking which side of the divide on which to stand — is not enough.
Surely an openness to learn more is a minimum requirement in order to understand, address legitimate concerns and make meaningful progress toward a reframed common good.
Surely we must engage our humility, and take responsibility for the roles we’ve played, continue to play — and mindfully choose to play, going forward.
Digging a bit beneath the surface…there is usually more to explore.
And paradoxically, concluding that polarization is either good or bad…is potentially another binary box!?!
For a deeper dive examining the inherent existential role of polarization in society, this provocative article by Hanzi Freinacht doesn’t succumb to a binary view:
“It’s not polarization that is bad. It’s ‘more polarization than our institutions can handle’ that is bad.” ~ Hanzi Freinacht
Our intent here, is not to naively and idealistically eradicate polarization.
Polarities exist. They persist. They are real. They contain the poles of divergence present in all living systems — whether or not we like and support them. The forces, perspectives, lived experience and world views that give rise to conflicts cannot, and will not magically evaporate.
Nor is the intent to strike an easy, simple comfortable place that offers a warm fuzzy blanket. None of us can tidily encompass all perspectives and angles.
The intent of this article is to widen our lens, deepen understanding, recognize the dysfunctional impacts of pervasive imbalance and to make mindful choices as we navigate.
Indeed the threads interwoven through this article and many others that we have written, reflect a deepening humble acceptance of the limits of our own knowability at any given point in time. When we embrace our lives and work as an ongoing learning journey, we can potentially see beyond our own limited (sub)contexts and collectively interbecome a bit wiser.
When conflict is acknowledged and accepted as real, when we don’t auto-flip to a binary polarized position, when we listen deeply and hear — perhaps we’ll uncover and discover more choices on how we address the underlying deeper roots that grow conflict in our everyday lives and across larger societal domains.
Perhaps we all need to learn how to dance with monsters.
Many, perhaps, believe or fear that attempts to collaborate and find common ground will invariably lead to mediocre tradeoffs or groupthink — whereby issues are down-played, and compromise will produce poor, sub-optimized if not downright dangerous results.
The concern is a valid one. Avoidance, denial, placating or lukewarm compromise often lead to consequences that may or may not be immediately evident, visible or even traceable…
The Abilene Paradox illustrates a classic simple case of what can go wrong when people go along with an idea, plan or decision that they really don’t support. Thinking they are alone with misgivings, and not wanting to rock the boat…only to discover at some point that most had fallen into a pattern of accommodating to keep the peace. The fallout of being complicit, when that invariably becomes evident, can be very disruptive and divisive, especially when people defensively focus on fixing the blame.
It’s much healthier to surface and explore disagreement earlier. It can also help considerably, whenever possible, to explore and define practices and criteria for making decisions on contentious issues, before becoming deeply immersed and enmeshed in disagreement.
Once a dysfunctional pattern is set, it invariably becomes more difficult to shift. We can bring dysfunctional patterns into our fields of collective awareness. We can consciously choose to surface and work through divergent views. We can learn from experience.
We can care deeply and still potentially become less attached to our well-honed perspectives. Our views do not represent all that define us. How we think and see things, at any given point, doesn’t define (all of) who we are…Does it?
It seems that modern western Industrial society has commodified and objectified life so thoroughly…whereby humans — the things we say and do — are also somehow branded as products. What happens when we, as ‘products of society,’ internalize and further normalize these patterns?
Being human is an ever-developing, dynamic living process. ‘Human being’ embodies more than human thinking, human feeling and human doing. We are always more than our thoughts, feelings, ideas and behaviour.
And our beingness is interconnected to all living beings…
Conflict avoidance or denial inevitably manifests in more (forms of) trouble. It might go underground for a while. It might intensify and escalate. It might gather more impetus and force. We have only to look at history and current events to find examples of this pervasive pattern.
Wariness may well be warranted. It’s important to understand the circumstances that give rise to deeply-rooted distrust and superficial knee-jerk responses to our most troubling societal crises — wherever and however they manifest.
Our world — and the way it is portrayed on the world stage — is very polarized. In the midst of it all, a large percentage of ordinary citizens are likely confused, angry or apathetic, with no clear understanding of what to believe. And yet, on the ground when people converse directly and within real contexts — in neighbourhoods and communities — we also (may) discover that (some of) those divisions aren’t quite as deep as dramatically conveyed in the media.
Dysfunctional polarization is also potentially rooted in and reinforced by individualist cultural patterns whereby everyone is entitled to their own opinion or interpretation — with little regard for real facts, little concern for the (interconnected) wellbeing of others (people and living beings) and/or the real potential for damaging downstream consequences.
Much of the ping-pong debate we observe doesn’t seem to contribute to sound critical thinking or the kind of wisdom that’s needed for people to navigate well within and across social contexts, cultures and places.
It is understandable that people and interest groups prefer to have as much choice and control as possible. However this must be balanced with what is best for the common good within interdependent local and global societal and planetary needs — healthy freedoms (agency) within sound limits (guardrails.)
Arguably the most vicious clusters of monsters congregate around the polarization that intertwines with dysfunctional human system patterns.
It’s often hard to definitively know what constitutes the common good amidst the noise, messiness and entanglement of layered issues. What is known, unknown, not yet known or unknowable? These need to be explored and disentangled within and across real living contexts…
There is also a place for right and wrong — a need to delineate clear red lines that we are not willing to cross. Humans do have the potential for good and bad/evil (shadow sides that take over) and those slippery slopes can take us farther down the wrong road.
“If you don’t have a moral question in your governing process, then you don’t have a process that’s going to survive.”…“Every day you don’t do what’s right is a day you lose an option.” ~ Faith Keeper Oren Lyons
And so, it is important to have a moral compass that governs our decisions and actions. There’s plenty of wisdom, knowledge and resources — spiritual, philosophical, sociological, ecological, anthropological, historical — for us humans, on which to draw. (A deep subject that warrants exploration well beyond the scope of this article.)
A moral compass can (generally) guide and help steer our beliefs, thinking and behaviour/actions — distinguishing right from wrong — on some deeply important issues.
What do we mean by moral compass? Who’s moral compass? Based on what?
Some issues are binary and clear cut…For example, good science can unequivocally point to established proven facts — in essence the truth — the best of our scientific and technical knowledge at this time. How to clearly relate…conveying those proven facts in ways and with terms and language that others can hear, see and understand — is yet another real challenge.
Conflicting positions can potentially be productively addressed and/or circumvented without fuelling the intractable and dysfunctional polarization that too often objectifies and dehumanizes — producing stalemate, pushback, malice and downright hatred.
There are many ways to engage in difficult conversations, work through conflicted positions and interests, better understand the underlying issues and move towards workable resolution (where viable solutions might be found) and/or better manage inherent dilemmas, predicaments or polarities. This points to the need for sound acceptable guardrails, criteria or guiding first principles when working to find viable common ground that can guide navigation toward the common good.
Sometimes being right paradoxically ends up being wrong.
Sometimes…
Paradox is real. Seemingly opposite views do coexist. They may pose dilemmas and show up internally — the conflict within us as we try to reconcile competing needs. Conflicts manifest between us, interpersonally and as double binds or predicaments, in the ways we assert (or impose) our views (our sense of reality) and interests and try to make sense of and derive meaning from our complex world.
What might seem like polar opposites…more often are parts of a wider, deeper complex whole.
While people do not have to agree on everything, there is a need to see things through a wider lens and to appreciate the underlying perspectives, issues and lived experience that give rise to (legitimate) differences and concerns. That is where the common[s] ground can potentially be found, when it becomes possible to feel (more) empathy, perhaps even compassion and gain tangible mission critical progress.
“The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.”
“All significant breakthroughs are break — ‘with’ old ways of thinking” ~ Thomas Kuhn
Reaching agreement on relevant diagnostic questions in a spirit of open inquiry, is in itself, a healthy intervention that can invite new patterns.
Some questions that might be helpful:
🔻 Are there key parties or stakeholders (careholders) whose perspectives, knowledge, lived experience, information, rights and/or influence are ignored, missing or excluded? Deep-rooted pervasive historical and ongoing colonization* — patterns of injustice — are a huge, gaping blindspot.
🔻 How are we defining or framing the situation — the problem(s) and the opportunities?
🔻 What are the similarities and differences in how we view the presenting problems?
🔻 What are the deeper issues beneath the surface?
🔻 What data and sources of information are informing positions and how are these being filtered and interpreted?
🔻 Are we able to move from hypothetical, conceptual abstract realms to consider the practical on-the-ground application and implications?
🔻 Are we (able to be) forthcoming and candid about our respective perspectives and the feelings that are evoked?
🔻 Can we disclose these, taking responsibility for how we think and feel, without posturing or attacking the motives and character of those who maintain a different (opposing) position?
🔻 How are we addressing and attending to the fundamental human drivers of love, power and justice, as articulated by Adam Kahane?
🔻 What minimum criteria must be met in order to make and sustain meaningful progress?
🔻 What is necessary to (begin to) build a minimum threshold of trust?
🔻 Can we engage in joint action learning and research and experimentation, put some ideas and alternatives to the test in a pilot, as interim and iterative steps?
Pervasive, blatant and insidious colonizing patterns — the exploitation and marginalization of peoples, cultures and communities, close to home and around the world — are a dysfunctionally polarizing disservice to life anywhere.
*Colonization has long standing historical roots with multiple layers and facets. At some level, individually and collectively, across the multiple contexts where we show up, decolonization calls for deep, ongoing learning and normalizing of authentic humility — as a natural way of relating and stripping away the conscious and unconscious assumptions any of us too easily make about people and the right way to address needs and challenges.
Creating the safe spaces to share feelings and be vulnerable — the human stories that have led us here — can help break down some polarizing barriers. We have a very long way to go to truly understand and address deep-rooted injustices and harms. Compassionate inquiry, kicking open some doors, opening of hearts and minds and embarking on healing are ongoing processes that call for unwavering determination to make real progress in the contexts of our work and lives.
Decolonization, undertaken in earnest, potentially liberates us all from the dysfunctional, degenerative dehumanizing societal patterns that fail to serve humanity and a living planet.
Here are a few excellent resources that can pry eyes and doors open and offer learning pathways…
Vanessa Andreotti’s work and writings, Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activation, illuminate some of these pathways. Vanessa and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures [GTDF] collective share insights that might deepen our understanding of why and how pervasive entangled colonizing patterns persist, in this excerpt, ongoing research toward an upcoming book — Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse With Compassion and Accountability
Riane Eisler’s lifelong research and ongoing work transcends the domination-oppression model that continues to distort and narrow our lens, restricting our understanding of the possibilities and choices before us. She uncovers partnership patterns evident throughout human civilization history that can (re)birth a healthier society.
Valuing holistic interconnectedness, longstanding Indigenous wisdom and equitable ways of being can potentially restore greater balance.
Embracing and embodying true partnership and regenerative ways — is not a superficial adoption of buzzy trends, catchy slogans and hollow manifestos. Too often slogans or memes are the lingering surface deep signs of industrialized modernity. Understanding decolonization means we cannot misappropriate — assume ownership of wisdom, principles and learnings — in effect, continuing the underlying colonizing patterns that have become so ingrained.
The injustice and harms of colonization reflect deep-rooted imbalance.
True justice, diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging can only be realized when life-affirming patterns grow deep systemic roots across all domains of society — cultures, race, faith, genders, generations and all living beings. That is the world in which we — from all walks of life — hold in our hearts and activate through our work.
Recognizing the deep work required, growing numbers of us are humbly undertaking efforts to shape and activate a variety of accessible pathways that might help us live into a decolonized future — honouring long standing Indigenous cultures, restoring our lost Indigeneity and reframing a sense of belonging that embraces diversity and transcends tribal homogeneity.
When we restore a healthy partnership balance…we can also reframe leadership— uplifting and appreciating so many ordinary, extraordinary leaders whose everyday contributions are invisible, undervalued, ignored and discounted.
Sometimes the possibilities for joint collaborative navigation and resolution are truly very constrained:
🔻 What else is necessary to initiate or resume (additional or alternative) third party intervention, facilitation and conflict mediation strategies?
🔻 What new or alternative governance or legislative guardrails or policies and economic models* are required to change the contexts that continue to drive pervasive dysfunctional polarizing behaviour patterns?
🔻 What enabling conditions can be established and what work can potentially get underway, in parallel, to shape new contexts?
🔻 What are the specific context-based risks and consequences of ongoing dysfunctional polarization?
🔻 What strategies might influence or enforce (essential) compliance, if and when warranted?
*The deeply flawed driving GDP neoclassical economic model is a big hairy overarching monster. For many of us this is no longer ‘an invisible elephant in the room.’ We recognize the requirement for serious overhaul. Opening pathways to wellbeing multicapital economies that value life-affirming capacities and flows — is a key enabling building block to shift dysfunctional polarization and foster equity, justice and common[s] sense for the common[s] good.
The principles, strategies and methodologies that guide readiness building stages can (begin to) transcend dysfunctional polarization. These include a variety of overlapping, synergistic and transparent practices that can (begin to) establish the requisite trust needed to (begin to) co-create viable pathways forward.
Increasingly as people work together, they/we can become more adept, acquiring the commitment, muscle memory and wisdom required to engage authentically and well.
Overlapping issues underlying rightness, wrongness, righteousness, paradox and wise navigation reflect recurring hydra-headed themes. These three articles elaborate, shedding more light on Industrial Age patterns that also feed dysfunctional polarization:
🔻 Being right often isn’t enough…if it changes nothing… Not being wrong…doesn’t necessarily mean we’re right…Doing less damage, being less wrong…is seldom right or good enough…
🔻 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
As long as we’re still entrenched and polarized…we are stuck in deep sh*t…
If this stuff was easy, we wouldn’t find ourselves stuck so often between these rocks and hard places…And so we need to figure out how to navigate through deep SHfT…
Can we hang in…can we learn…can we get better at it…bringing these underlying patterns to a more conscious level where we can deal with them?
Sense-making in our society is indeed fraught with problems. Vested interests on all sides create massive distrust and further erode the social fabric needed for healthy open discourse among ordinary citizens (all of us) on important subjects. And yet we must start somewhere — and hang in — within contexts that foster the conditions to build understanding and mutual trust. Setting a clear context for this work is vitally important in order to gain and grow navigation wisdom.
Finding that unifying common ground doesn’t mean people will, must, or can agree on everything.
Pervasive dysfunctional polarization points to the challenges we face across so many overlapping systemic societal issues and the need for many collaborative, co-creative context-based and place-sourced initiatives. Finding the common ground — calls upon us to reasonably balance inherent polarities, working synergistically with planetary imperatives and human needs toward life-affirming patterns for all.
Definitive, narrowly-defined answers or solutions generally fall short. Combining partial, fractal perspectives and elements into a wider, more holistic frame can potentially go farther to understand, reasonably balance and manage dilemmas and polarities. Alternative strategies can emerge. When people with individual agency, work collaboratively and co-creatively toward collective coherence agency — bringing (yet not narrowly fixated on) their own scientific and technical expertise, acquired skills, lived experience, Indigenous wisdom and ways of knowing — therein lie potentially promising ‘aha’ breakthroughs.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” ~Albert Einstein
Fixed binary, either-or polarized positions keep things stuck, on a circular merry-go-round and/or lead to pendulum swings that perpetuate dysfunctional imbalance.
Seems our biggest challenges are human system. Learning how to dance in dynamic flow with emergence and strategy — organically and intentionally-by-design — is grounded, simple and practical and layered and complex work.
The excellent 2019 Rebel Wisdom Series: The Science and Psychology of Polarisation, is well worth watching. This deep dive into the inner neurobiology of polarization and the challenges of navigating difficult, high conflict conversations offer important insights — not widely understood and yet integral to developing our capabilities as humans facing complex life and societal challenges.
We gotta make peace with paradox and make space for gifts-differing as people engage and contribute, aligning personal and collective passion and responsibility.
Paradoxically, our biggest commoning denominator, is also our humanness being and potential.
People really don’t want to be boxed-in or boxed-out!
Maybe we find ways to pull…draw…invite people in a bit closer where we can see their humanness…be more human…bridge the gulf…share the deeper stories including the underlying feelings that help us make more sense and understand what’s going on…
Maybe…
Let’s do all we can to inspire and develop more wholeness and integration. Let’s do what we can to end the disintegrating dysfunctional cycles of polarization that we (inadvertently) feed…that (unconsciously) hook us…
Maybe, as we work to break and shift these patterns…
…we’ll witness them less
…we’ll stop the (paradoxical) sabotage of our own best efforts and mutual best interests
…we’ll experience more real empathy and compassion
…we’ll feel more heard
…we’ll collaborate more with those who see things differently from us
…we’ll discover more ‘aha’ breakthrough moments
…we’ll actually experience more of the tangible positive shifts that we deeply care about…
Maybe…
Roughly, rightfully, truthfully…what could possibly be more important?
After Notes…Stories are always being shaped…shifting and ongoing…
In essence we’re challenged to reframe rightness and wrongness beyond the atomized decontextualized problem solving, solutionist programming of the Industrial Age.
We affirm the ongoing work and writings of Nora Bateson of the International Bateson Institute. Many of the references included in this and other articles, invite us to widen our relational (trans)contextualizing capacity — to access, develop, engage and combine all our senses and sense-making, individually and collectively as we navigate in relationship. Nora often poses these two questions to contextualize and widen the possibilities:
🔻 “Who can I be when I’m with you?”
🔻 “Who can you be when you are with me?”
This formidable juncture of our civilization history calls upon us to widen and deepen our co-intelligence, as Tom Atlee explores and implores in his latest book Co-intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity. This compendium, synthesizing decades of research and work, builds from the wise democracy pattern language.
We continue to explore how to nurture wiser co-intelligence patterns, extending the horizons of possibilities that can make this work more widely accessible. Retrospective and forward-facing, we can enrich our learning and expand our relational and sense making capacity as careholders — as engaged participants, leaders and citizens in our wiser human evolution — within the (nested) contexts of ongoing every day work, life and societal shifts.
In this May 2024 deep dive Before Skool 4-hour video/podcast: Game Theory, False Narratives, Survival, Life Advice, Daniel Schmachtenberger cogently articulates and unpacks the many overlapping challenges that interweave across the meta crises and the multipolar traps that keep people, systems and society stuck on a degenerative spiral of human civilization decline. There’s no way to sum this up with a pithy quote. Watch if and when you can.
As we listen…we recognize the underlying issues and themes — moreover the questions — that many of us have been excavating and exploring as we wrestle with ways to navigate mindfully. With this recognition and the growing gulf of precarity, is an ever-deepening dawning that we — integrally connected to the web of life — aren’t alone on this quest to widen sense making portals and the multitudes of ways to engage with people generatively within and across contexts.
A reaffirming recurring theme is the the need to gain wisdom…and how some of those layers of wisdom might best be derived by humbly accepting the inherent — I and we don’t knowness — as we navigate, guided by what is most precious about life in all its wondrous forms.
In this July 2024 Moving Beyond Polarization in Service of Life | Reality Roundtable, Nate Hagens, Vanessa Andreotti, Nora Bateson, Rex Wyler and Daniel Schmachtenberger, peel back layers — reflecting on communication as an ecology. Together, they aspire towards a rich ecology of communication-in-action, ways of co-learning that are always open-ended. Many layers. Each uniquely contributed and together combined nourishing ingredients within the context of the inquiry they are cultivating. Do watch…in living context….
The need for connective here-and-now meaningful dialogue that moves us toward collective coherence, enlivening our ongoing everyday work and life and human and more than human evolution — is underscored. Contextual meanings and possibilities can be explored — deepening mutual understanding, reciprocity and co-intelligent ways of being.
How we behave — walking-the-talk-and-listening-while-we-walk — can become more congruent, carried forward in relationships, emergent embodied learning, adaptation and mindful activation.
We learn how, by doing and practice, which can increasingly flow naturally and intuitively — perhaps re-conditioning our neurobiology.
🔻 Livingness — the nature of messy inter-relational complexity — is ever-present, available and possible
🔻 Not as a prescriptive communication playbook
🔻 Not as a final destination
🔻 There are no shortcuts…no hacks that can substitute for digging down into the essence of beingness in (authentic) relationship(s) and context(s)
🔻 No substitutes for learning-as-a-way-of-being-relating-living-working
🔻 There are no substitutes for life itself
We are nature. Our natural human capacity for life-affirming relationships enlivened and enriched through meaningful coherent dialogue surely must extend and transcend way beyond this current juncture in our civilization history.
The work of living is a humbling learning journey for us all.
🔻 What are we carrying forward?
🔻 How are we cultivating the terrain?
🔻 How can we widen communication ecology pathways?
Moving beyond dysfunctional polarization is an ongoing dance! Nurturing enabling conditions for coherence — perhaps the most important ecological work of all.
Listen to our audio narration with music accompaniment: Beyond Polarization…It’s a Dance!
Music — Nordic Noir album by Mari Samuelsen, Hakon Samuelsen and TrondheimSolistene chamber ensemble
*This article was updated again September 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt — a learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress— moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They reflect a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work. Each article is a fractal-like glimpse into the unstitutional ethos.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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