A philosophy for regenerative sense-making

Part 1: Individual relationships.

Being able to make sense of complexity is (IMHO) one of the most important skills for regenerative practitioners. But it is something that we all need to pay attention to. Is there any pattern or learning philosophy we can apply to being able to find more personal certainty about what we can believe to be true, truthful and useful in an information ecology that is being so highly manipulated? Or to help us better manage our interpersonal relationships when the level of human trauma is rising in the world?

There are different levels of sense-making that are required in anyone’s life. In a business collaboration between two people or in a personal relationship of any kind, those two people need to make sense of how each other is feeling, thinking, responding to different developments as a business grows, stalls or if it falters. They need to craft an environment where open conversation and vulnerable sharing is possible if they are to create a successful working partnership.

If we are making vital decisions about organisational strategy, or how we are going to change the design and functionality of a city, or prioritise actions to design out negative environmental impact in our supply chains, or make sense of climate change or the impact of colonialisation on social cohesion or the potential for biodiversity to collapse our food systems — that’s different order and magnitude of complexity to comprehend and make sense of.

Our ability to do careful sense-making has a huge impact on our capacity for good decision-making. If we have no way in which we can raise our levels of confidence in decision-making in these complex times, what happens? We make bad decisions or worse still, no decisions at all, defering our agency and power to others to do that sense-making for us. I can’t think of anyone I know that hasn’t faced a complex or difficult decision and thought: wtf do I do now?

I’ve chosen to start with individual relationships because situations in our personal lives don’t have the same levels of complexity as global challenges. We don’t have to develop expert levels or knowledge or complex skills in multiple different fields of knowledge to be able to understand each other so it’s a great arena in which to develop a practice.

The goal in a relationship between two people is to have adequate information available that they are both in touch with the reality of what is being experienced by the other person, and what their thinking and emotions are. It may not have the complexity of thinking about solutions to climate change, but it still has a relative degree of complexity, and more than most people think.

I’ve recently had a very positive experience of how to design and do good sense-making between two people in my new collaboration with regenerative leadership specialist Laura Storm as we were developing and delivering our online course The Regenerators Journey.

We intentionally made space for all our individual characteristics and personalities to emerge, to recognise and interact responsibly with each other when any historical experiences or traumas or blind spots that we may hold arise to block, threaten and also enhance our highest potential as collaborators. For us this is a core characteristic of the way in which regenerative practitioners work; we work constantly on ourselves, on our project and on the potential of the project and ourselves to positively impact the system in which we sit.

Laura and I have never met in person, had never worked together before and had never run a leadership programme online before. It was also right at the start of the European outbreak of covid19, and at a time when Laura was considering moving home from Copenhagen to rural Portugal to take on a regenerative land-based project. The principles we landed on through experimentation and the 12 week period could be summarised as:-

• Time builds trust: we had been building a relationship for at least a year prior to deciding to do this experiment, having deep and open conversations, choosing to share vulnerabilities in our stories to build trust but not being public about our growing friendship or potential collaboration.
• Ensure a safe container to foster courage; which follows on from the above. We gave ourselves the courage to be vulnerable with each other because we grew our relationship in privacy with an implicit agreement that we would never share anything we spoke about as we built trust without the agreement of the other.
• Hold the other’s opposing viewpoint as having truth. Another fundamental tenet of regenerative culture, which stems from J G Bennet’s Law of Three or Triad. That in any situation where there is an activating force, a restraining force, there will be a reconciling force if you agree and accept that there is the potential for truth in both activating and restraining. It is the commitment in our interactions, based on having done the research into each others work and values, that — even in times where we might seriously disagree or misunderstand each other — that there is inherent value in the other’s viewpoint.

J G Bennett’s Triad

And that we will take the time to consider it. It is a commitment to believe each of us means well, and has each others best interests at heart. In other communities like GameB, I think they may refer to this as Rule Omega. I first started to apply this kind of discernment in my own life after hearing Brene Brown talk about it in her TED talk on vulnerability.

• Seek first to understand before seeking to be understood. A statement thought to be from the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi. There’s a lot to unpack in that short sentence. It means learning to listen deeply. It means holding on to any reaction you may be feeling whilst you listen and not allowing th reaction to take over. It means deveoping an open minded curiosity rather than a closed, defensive approach to self-justify. It means dialogue and not debate as an approach. It means listening to the other point of view and, as above, holding it as having truth.
• If one reacts, the other must stay calm and neutral. We’re all human. Inevitably there were moments of disagreement, anxiety and downright fear about what we were doing. You can’t apply the maxim above if you’re in reactive mode. We committed that if one of us lost our capacity for self awareness and reflection, needed to vent — the other would wait in silence and not rush in to share viewpoints, responses or stoke a fire.
• Not feeling shame about stupid stuff. This may not have the grace of a Greek philosophy mantra, but it’s valuable nevertheless. When we couldn’t get pictures of ourselves to be the same size on our website, to be able to say to each other that we felt awkward about that and fearful that people might think the person with the bigger picture was being superior to the other, and talk about our shared desire to avoid anything that made us look like ‘gurus with answers’. And then laugh until we cried that we should even have worried about that in the first place, and choose to take a look at the inner workings of our own minds to see what that fear was all about an work on it.
• Being aware of the source of any reactiveness. Did all the above work all the time? No, of course not. So the final commitment is to be aware that if one of us was being reactive would be to really pay attention to where that reaction was coming from. Was it coming from a place of ego which would alert us to potential to do more work on a particular issue that we hadn’t yet cleared? Or was it coming from a place of wanting to stay in integrity to our deepest values which meant exploring more where our individual differences in values lay and finding a reconciling way forwards.

So this is a relatively straightforward start on some sense-making practices to help us in individual relationships. There are two next steps in my own sense-making practice. The first is about making an effort to understand individual and collective trauma and how that shows up in individual and collective relationships. The second is how our core worldviews are expressed through language, and finding a way to understand when the language you are hearing comes from a different worldview than your own. I’ll come back to those later in this series.

In the next post I will try to look at what might be helpful when trying to make sense of complex narratives and landscapes for people involved in complex decision-making.

Useful Resources

I may be getting boring in recommending this video, but check out Daniel Schmachtenberger’s War on Information and the subsequent exploration of Rebel Wisdom on sensemaking.

Read this series on non-violent communication by Max St John. Slightly odd name How to Fight Well but he knows his onions.

Laura’s story captured on the platform What is Emerging?

If you would like to join Laura and I on our next Regenerators Journey where we work together on subjects like living systems, sensemaking, how to heal the story of separation and emerging frameworks for business transformation, the next course starts on 24 September 2020.