Finding the Common[s] Ground: a reframed sense of belonging
The stuff that [still] keeps-us-awake-at-night…😳
…[still] lets-us-sleep-at-night…😴
…though many of us are not getting enough peaceful restorative rest during these extended turbulent times…🙃
Experts — thought leaders, practitioners, scientists and academics — are looking at the meta, poly or perma crises and the various underlying issues from overlapping and differentiated viewpoints and [ad]vantage points. Observing the elephants and the naked emperors, many are calling for transparency, advocating and seeking alternative pathways for people and planet.
The issues are interconnected and layered. Some of us take a wider-lens perspective. Some of us take deep dives into the technical, practical and/or nuanced details. Even when we zoom-in-and-out and straddle…no one can see all the wholes/holes.
Multiple hairy issues are bigger than any of us…😨
There can be no single stunningly brilliant (r)evolutionary pathway forward.
We all experience special what-the-f*ck moments, days, weeks and months as we navigate…😱
When addressing wicked problems, we gotta double down on diverse strategy, holistic systems thinking and lots more creative, collaborative capacity and learning to guide co-intelligent navigation.
Our biggest challenges and barriers are [still] human…
…human system-related and created by us.
There’s no lack of expert knowledge and yet the experts, thought leaders and practitioners assimilating the knowledge and expertise are still:
🔮 Often divided by disagreement….for all kinds of reasons
🔮 Vying for [prominent] influence…for all kinds of reasons
🔮 Needing to make a living and gain the funding required to advance their/our work…
🔮 Impacted by the same driving economic model and dysfunctional paradigm that they/we are [still] working to shift
So often it comes down to divergent views on the HOWs — the ‘best’ and most ‘promising’ pathways and points of leverage that might help to shift in the right ways…
And how can they/we agree and collaborate?
Sometimes it’s the language and labels used that cause people to become combative or shut down. Assumptions and judgments are made. Things are interpreted in different ways.
Often, world views, frames of reference and lived experience are different. People looking at different parts of the elephant may be talking — but not engaged in the same conversation. There are gaps in information and understanding — sometimes not [really] listening or hearing what’s underneath the surface of the words?
Needs to be okay to disagree. In fact it’s essential to explore the fertile ground of disagreement. When we avoid conflict, our creativity is stunted and problems keep growing deeper and more entangled roots.
And yet we also must seek and discover the common ground toward common good.
Not groupthink. Not a false compromise or other fallacies or cognitive biases that leads to sub-optimization or mediocrity. Authentic commitment to listen deeply and hang in through the tough issues respectfully, passionately and with humility …can lead to more creative and-and patterns of perception and possibilities.
There are red lines…a moral compass that guides this stuff…and those need to be made conscious, perceptively understood and worked through.
🔮 What do we mean by moral compass?
🔮 Who’s moral compass?
🔮 Based on what guiding purpose, criteria and conduct for the common good?
A moral compass can [generally] guide and help steer our beliefs, thinking and behaviour/actions — distinguishing right from wrong — on some deeply important issues. There’s plenty of wisdom, knowledge and resources — spiritual, philosophical, sociological, ecological, anthropological, historical — for us humans, on which to draw. [Deep subject that warrants exploration beyond the scope of this article.]
Staying polarized across the deep [and even the minor] divides can keep systems stuck. And this article reveals how Being Right is [almost]Never Enough — a recurring hydra-headed theme. We explore some of these layered issues further here:
🔮 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
Even when experts vehemently agree on the need for change…unless there is ‘reasonable’ common ground…on the ground..guiding navigation strategy and pathways…stall tactics, denial, x-washing and the same old mechanistic reductionist economic models just keep rolling along…feeding the ‘dark’ dysfunctional patterns of a zero sum game.
In the meantime, many people are feeling waves of confusion, apathy, helplessness, anger, despair and/or anxiety as they experience and observe what’s going on in their lives, work, communities and around the world.
As long as the experts, thought leaders, researchers, academics and practitioners remain divided — circulating, speaking, publishing books and papers and promoting and delivering their own best advice and practices within their own, [still] too limited circles — where does that leave the vast majority of citizens in society who:
🔮 Are negatively impacted by escalating problems?
🔮 Lack access to the knowledge and ongoing learning that might guide their navigation and choices?
🔮 [Potentially] could exercise huge/greater [untapped] collective [coherent] agency helping to shape a more life-affirming trajectory for their lives, communities and future generations?
We can potentially gain and sustain more meaningful progress — a reframed sense of progress — when more people have agency, access to knowledge and the ability to play [more] active roles shaping the trajectory of their lives and communities.
With 8+ billion people on the planet — collectively, ordinary citizens anywhere and everywhere can [potentially] have greater [positive] influence— when we create and support the space, contexts and enabling conditions for meaningful engagement.
Here we are… and the stakes are mounting…
Absolute, definitive wraparound answers on the most entangled complex challenges are not known…
Clarifying first principles can potentially and immensely help. Our theories of change, awareness of patterns and ongoing pattern recognition capacity — can guide us.
And we’ve also gotta ask:
🔮 Whose first principles?
🔮 Whose theory of change?
Sometimes our best principles and theories trip-us-up, when they are culturally limited, narrow or biased, become too rigid or airtight or are lacking the permeability to absorb relevant additional or new knowledge — to perceive and make space for alternative lenses and [shifting] patterns.
Unpacking and understanding the basis for disagreements , the deeper roots — is foundational.
The what may be clear, but the how to get there is often another story. How to apply those principles in practice, in and across contexts, might be debated, unknown, unclear or variable.
And so…we gotta get more attuned to living the questions while drawing from engaging with and listening to multiple perspectives about what is known and knowable across varied streams of knowledge — ways of knowing and place-sourced culturally rooted lived experience.
People whose perspectives, input and commitment are needed — often those who disagree and/or are impacted — are routinely excluded or marginalized. This can be oversight, avoidance or deferral to a later date. Invariably this spells trouble at some point — missing crucial information, failing to build essential support, lacking the engagement, agency empowerment and/or Indigenous self determination essential to grow resilient roots.
There are some context-based solutions, alternatives and promising progress that point in the roughly right direction, subject to ongoing research, adaptation, experimentation, observation and learning. Navigating well, potentially enables us to right-scale, widening and deepening meaningful progress.
We aren’t starting-from-scratch either. Given the gravity of cascading problems, we can’t afford to approach everything from a ground zero perspective, repetitively starting over-from-the-beginning. We need to get better at building from the work underway — reflecting knowledge, learning and wisdom already gained and spanning decades.
Many creative breakthroughs are [more] ready to be birthed.
We must unearth [more] integrative ways to work across [artificial] divides — with the outliers…the radical visionaries…the brilliant thinkers AND doers, inventors, designers and builders, the unusual suspects and especially the many more marginalized people who aren’t featured on the main stages of conferences and high profile events.
This kind of work is often beyond mainstream purview. It might be blossoming or languishing at the fringes.
With increasing awareness regarding the need for experimentation, learning and real shifts — these are times for new pilots and prototypes to help shape viable pathways forward. Bringing alternative workable models and frameworks into [more] real places and spaces also calls upon us to shape, translate and communicate in multimodal ways that can be understood, applied and adapted more readily and widely.
Deepening understanding that enables mindful activation — not easy and more important than ever!
Discourse easily devolves into emotionally-charged matches of intellectual ping pong. We’ve all been there…embroiled or observing from the sidelines. Once they start, and lines are drawn, dysfunctional patterns are hard to break, often escalating and/or leading to cut-off.
Brings this tongue-in-cheek quote to mind…
“Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you’ll be a mile from them, and you’ll have their shoes.” ~ Jack Handey
Things do trigger people. Sometimes it’s the choice of words. Language is important. Our efforts to string-the-right-words together in the right ways can be clumsy. Even well-articulated comments can miss the mark and create misunderstanding.
Sometimes it’s the assumptions and the associated judgments. Sometimes it’s what is left unsaid. Sometimes it’s the continuation of the old story and the familiar old tapes keep on playing…
These commonly observed patterns can inadvertently impede the very things [we say] we most value.
We are all messy humans and works-in-progress. We want to [believe we] walk-the-talk. None of us are 100% congruent, though we work at it — don’t we — with varying degrees of alignment at any given time?
We can’t see our own blind spots, and we all have them. Even when we work hard to develop our own conscious awareness…we can’t know what we can’t see. This is invariably uncomfortable and there’s plenty of righteous indignation that kicks in when people — rightly or wrongly — try to point out the unconscious bias that might be skewing our perspectives. Sensitive issues can become even more contentious.
At best, preliminary conversations can serve as springboards. Discussion surfaces some key issues and points the flashlight. Some doors and thought avenues open up. That’s great! Some shut down…not so good…
The essential hard work — voluntarily undertaken — happens beyond initial conversations, asynchronous communication and abstract hypotheticals, on a deeper level with real stakes.
The bridging relational work of navigating wisely and well across boundaries of all kinds — disciplines, sectors, stakeholders, cultures, generations, genders — is integral and yet it’s often overlooked or treated as secondary to those big hairy problems that keep us awake and loom.
Our inherent messyhumanness warrants dedicated focus. Seriously!
We appreciate Nora Bateson’s work — imprinting transcontextual into our lexicon. Well beyond transdisciplinary, we can [re-]contextualize — bringing our lives and world[s] into relational, navigational and practical perspectives. Think many of us have been carrying this around — embodying and trying to convey what Nora expresses so well.
Looking through a relational transcontextual lens helps us understand naturally interconnected wholes — rich with warm data.
Working through diversity of thought, understanding and honouring different lived experience, accepting and reconciling invariable differences in the ways we choose and agree to engage — maybe getting unstuck, maybe allowing things to flow — that’s the real messy human stuff.
That’s also where key breakthroughs can happen — the ‘aha’ moments and creative synergies — when we begin working together in earnest, committed to finding and traversing the common ground. This includes facing difficult truths, hard data and making tough decisions in the best collective interests of people and planet.
We also appreciate the ongoing work of Vanessa Andreotti and the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective. Their current research might deepen our understanding of why and how pervasive entangled western industrialized colonizing patterns persist.
Excavating tender territory warrants deep embodied work and working through, with sensitivity, an open mind and a warm heart…
Our understanding: Industrial Age patterns of modernity have programmed and imprinted engrained ways of thinking, perceiving, and relating that become hard-wired.
“Cultural supremacy is not a distorted perception of the other”…
This goes beyond cognitive biases and blindspots…
The Industrial Age driven by colonizing domination-oppression patterns has emphasized individualism. Our interconnectedness and interdependence with all life and living beings became submerged under this fictional story of separation and dominion over nature.
“Cultural supremacy” rooted in “separateness” manifests as “entitlement” — a distorted identity of self as separate with reinforcing loops that also keep social/societal systems stuck on compartmentalized left-brain leaning mechanistic repeat-rewind….
Understanding how this has become so insidious and cyclical is essential in order to compost degenerative entitlement patterns. Inner and socially mirrored norms whereby a distortion of self as separate along with the tendency to relate and rate via hierarchical ranking — cannot shift with a flip of a cognitive switch.
🔮 This has potentially profound implications towards understanding social justice and the intertwined nature of the meta-poly-perma crises.
🔮 Altruism and shaming — are likely a continuation of false dualities.
🔮 Deep shift calls for holistic embodied re-patterning — with healing pathways and relational learning to nurture deep decolonizing rewiring.
🔮 This cannot be accomplished from the context of personal enlightenment.
🔮 Cognitively adopting values that reflect diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging doesn’t really go deep enough toward embodying an authentic sense of oneness.
🔮 This calls for a variety of ways to shed dysfunctional patterns — unlearn, relearn and restore ways of being that are aligned with our interconnectedness and interdependence — deeply embodied with the sacredness of all life.
We are nature — has deep ecological and epistemic roots.
Seems the path toward interbecoming is a nonlinear mutually enlightening intergenerational, multi-generational pilgrimage.
All of this goes to the heart of our commons-based work and learning journey — (co-)catalyzing and supporting collaborative context-based, place-sourced communities, initiatives and coalitions— building bridges, addressing overlapping issues and living into life-affirming patterns.
Drawing from the Latin — coalitiō: to grow together — in a relatively neutral play-space, people can potentially work across any and all the divides — sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations etc. — in a spirit of enquiry toward mission-critical progress. Bringing expertise, culturally diverse lived experience and resources into a creative, collaborative living lab environment — equipped to navigate and adapt through various iterative stages from initial readiness to shaping sound strategy, people can gain collective coherent agency and mindfully activate toward regenerative capacity.
Yup…there are stages and layers. This stuff is not linear. And there are different ways to navigate…
Emergent and strategic…no silver bullets…a paradoxical dance as we navigate, humbly living the questions and moving beyond a world that is polarized by a distorted sense of separateness, with division everywhere, deep distrust and no lack of opinions, positions, binary thinking and tunnel vision.
If it was easy — if life-affirming patterns were the norm — we wouldn’t find ourselves [still] swimming in this murky existential soup…still mired in deep sh*t…SHfT.
Decades — including painful experience — illuminate the evolutionary navigation that can help folks — all of us — make meaningful progress. There are ways to navigate toward the common good — best mutual interests for people, planet and wellbeing. There are some essential building blocks that help shift counterproductive patterns from awareness through to activation. These enable movement beyond cyclical talking about to forging working pathways and collaborative learning. There are ways to cut through the noise.
While people don’t have to agree on everything, there is a need to look through a wider lens, appreciate and experience the relational nestedness between things and the underlying perspectives and issues that give rise to [legitimate] differences and concerns. That is where the common ground can [likely] be found, when it becomes [more] possible to feel authentic empathy [even compassion] and gain mission critical progress in the roughly right direction.
Experience tells us that people have way more capacity and potential to learn and work together collaboratively on important stuff given the space, the context and the enabling conditions to get on with it — to embark and continue on the journey…
Those enabling conditions are crucial in order to overcome blockages, co-discover breakthroughs, identify points of leverage and gain real traction.
In our interconnected humanness, we can discover that we have much in common while honouring and valuing gifts differing and the rich diversity that makes us who we are.
Rather than being boxed into limiting tribal homogeneity, we can reframe a sense of belonging rooted in life-affirming common[s] goodness.
As we [re]engage in meaningful dialogue, [re]conciliation and connectedness, stripping away barriers — including the toxic layers of historical trauma and colonization — we can also potentially discover some of the simplicity and joyfulness along the way that helps sustain the journey…
Together, we can co-catalyze and build on good work underway, making new stories and shaping lives worth living and work worth doing for all.
Working from the collaborative commons space between, being unstitutional exists for us all — as a metaphor, a symbol and an alchemical invitation. It can help us let go of patterns that don’t serve.
Being unstitutional might help, over time, to restore and support reasonable balance in society — enriched through (bio)diversity and healthy interdependence.
We can all be ‘unstitutional,’ in a wide variety of ways!
By finding the common[s] ground — on the ground, in many places and in many ways — we can collectively build the momentum needed to citizen well.
After note
There’s a huge body of work spanning decades and ongoing, that speaks to the commons — advocating the need to find and restore balance, bring truly democratic processes — commonsing — into the mainstream living fabric of society. More of us are underway working to move beyond conceptual aspiration — tangibly activating ‘the commons’ in a variety of ways, forms, places and spaces.
Sometimes advocated as a need for a hybrid 4th sector, we are activating the commons through pilot living lab initiatives bringing people together from across sectors and divides, creating relatively neutral spaces to experiment with new patterns.
These can help form and root alternative workable interdependent ecosystems with [minimum critical] governance frameworks, structures, multicapital economic models and adaptive practices designed with nature’s principles, towards multigenerational regenerative flourishing.
We sometimes describe the enabling conditions and building blocks for common[s] ground as “wisdom with teeth.”
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.
In conversations with Tom, we’ve been exploring how to nurture wiser co-intelligence patterns and extend 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 — co-activating co-intelligence as engaged participants, leaders and citizens in our wiser human evolution — within the contexts of ongoing every day work, life and societal shifts.
*This article was updated again July 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 portray 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.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
Sharing is caring. Please take a moment to tap the 👋🏼 icon if you liked this article. Medium lets you clap up to 50x on any articles you appreciate. Good to know :-)
