Microattunement Part 6: An Architecture of Learning for the Next Human Era
The message of all the foregoing is that the of learning and adaptation required for people to ‘get in tune’ with one another — sufficient to address the maelstrom of planetary challenges that we face — are extensive and systemic. They range across all of the aspects of our being, and involve the transformation of all scales of human relationship from the smallest to the largest. We can’t collaborate effectively without relational skills; we can’t develop relational skills without orienting ourselves in relation to one another; and we can’t orient towards others without knowing our own capacities. Yet we come to recognise our own capacities through the experience of effective collaboration. It’s a perfectly circular conundrum.
Our educational and developmental institutions are unprepared for this task. They are mostly organised to prepare individuals for a world of monetised careers that support livelihoods constrained by the acquisition of debt. Theirs is a pedagogy designed for a doctrine of personal responsibility and debt repayment, the maintenance of psychological separation, the avoidance of solidarity and an ethos of workplace dependance rather than belonging.
In Microsolidarity and Microattunement we propose a radical learning practice that will require a new delivery system, yet to be created. But the first step is to set out the basis for its design.
A New Pedagogy of Relationality: Provocation as Enactment
For the past few years at Human Methods Lab we’ve been experimenting with a phenomenologically-based teaching and learning practice that as far as we know, is entirely original. It’s organised for a group learning experience at the scale of the Crew (5–7 people).
Our practice entails the production, performance and exposure to a learning group of a purpose-designed phenomenon, a provocation called an enactment. I first encountered the notion of provocation as a learning technique in the theatrical world of Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School. There, a provocation is an invitation to construct and create a response to a constructed situation using the language and craft of drama. In their studies of entrepreneurship and creativity in the Danish welfare sector, Eva Palleson and Daniel Hjorth have discussed provocation as a means of “breaking free from the continuity of reason, as a pause in which we are powered up in our receptivity so that our capacity to affect others increases”. They argue that “provocations have the power to transform contexts into carnivals understood as times and spaces where multiplicity is the dominant form and where the governing powers of discourse are held back”.
We’ve been experimenting for several years with provocation as a way of creating a new experiential space, free from prior context or privileged access. We’ve been working with enactments: brief theatrical performances of situations from life in a range of settings. They have a contained cast of actors, a carefully-planned narrative arc, and are full of rich details of incident, character, interaction and possibility. As far as possible they offer an intense experience of real life without actually being real. And we’ve been developing the craft of enactment as a provocation that is capable of inviting increasing levels and depths of sensory and cognitive response.
Group work follows a learning sequence of increasing interdependence among the members. As part of a learning sequence, group members are invited to witness an enactment. At the first performance, they pay careful attention and record their detailed noticings and reactions separately. They then share and discuss their responses in order to begin to build a sensory and cognitive repertoire. At a second performance, they observe events through a lens that is different from their own and start to extend their skills of presence and attentiveness. Gradually they recognise the richness of the ordinary, the range of responses that are possible, and learn that differences in orientation and perception among the members of a group are additive.
By the time of a third performance, people are becoming confident of their own capability in relation to others, can recognise some of their own attributes in the characters in the enactment, and are ready to combine their differences in the next stage of their learning. An example of this next stage is an invitation to create their own piece of theatre: a performance that responds to the situation set out in the enactment that reveals their differences and shows how they can combine them to best effect. Another example is to record their own conversational exchanges and then to subject them to them to the same kind of group scrutiny.
A full suite of enactments — each of which offers opportunities for a wide range of sensory and cognitive experience while revealing and demonstrating a variety of selfhoods — enables intense workshopping with materials that build new layers of awareness, new skills of interaction, and new depths of working relationship among group members.
This is a learning practice with the capacity to develop transformative relational understanding across the entire arena of belonging, from Self to Dyad to Crew to Congregation and beyond to the Crowd. Though there are established development practices that emphasise one or other of these domains, such as Mindfulness (the Self), Theory U (the Crew), or Art of Hosting (the Congregation) we have not so far seen a methodology that interpenetrates all of them.
A Methodology of Relational Transformation at Multiple Levels
Enactment-based learning operates at several levels simultaneously. First, it replicates and ‘freezes’ real life to be experienced in ways that are not usually possible. The enormous complexity of a real-world encounter can be slowed down and studied in minute detail, addressing a central concern of Wittgenstein’s — nothing is hidden, it’s “all laid out to view”, but “it goes by too fast” for conscious awareness. Multiple readings of the same phenomenon reveal even more layers of the detail and nuance that are present in everyday human interaction.
Second, it unpacks and compares individual phenomenological response to demonstrate the multiplicity of observations and interpretations that are possible. When several people encounter and engage with several other people, the result is something like the processing of a large number of simultaneous equations. Our practice helps this processing to become visible.
Third, to make the responses of others explicit is to hold up a mirror to each person’s own experience. The responses of other people are points of reference or navigation aids to one’s own. As a landscape of phenomenological response begins to emerge, each person can identify their own position.
Fourth, discussion and comparison of responses forms a language of noticing and discrimination that becomes a resource for further study and skill development. To recognise and name a way of seeing things is to be able to use it as a lens and also not to use it. Now the possibility of variance and experimentation arises. People can alter their sensory focus and pay closer attention to their selfhood. As a result they may become more relationally flexible and adaptive.
A group of people each of whom increases their responsiveness and adaptability to each other and to the world becomes an enormously more capable unit. And the simultaneous nature of the learning process means that it can be fast-acting. In the right circumstances a group of friends or strangers can mobilise their differences to become transformed into a powerful ‘unity of unmerged voices’ in a very short time.
An Experimental Pattern Language: the Heartland
We’ve recently begun considering the use of a new relational device — something that enables people’s responses to an enactment and to each other to be located on an imaginary map. The aim here is not simply to provoke new levels of relational exchange but also to record group exchanges in a way that provides visual markers of individual phenomenological differences and their movement and change together. We’re proposing a ‘landscape’ called the Heartland: a two-dimensional array that offers a visual representation of response comparisons.
The proposal is as follows: from top to bottom, the Heartland sets out the dimensions of human capability in a sequence that goes from thinking to sensing to feeling to doing to being. From left to right, it marks our relational capacities, from articulating the self, to tuning in to others, to going on together.
The idea is that both dimensions mark out a spectrum that starts with relative detachment and separation from the body and moves towards engagement and increasing physical presence.
We are aiming here to reconcile and balance the understandings of abstract, formal logic — the categorisations and generalisations of the scientific method, linked to interiorising Cartesian individualism — with the multiplicity and complexity of sense impressions and out-in-the-world dwelling that embrace uncertainty, flow, paradox and Otherness.
Considering the dimensions of responsiveness in this way can give practical impetus to an emerging cultural shift — the return to physicality of recent phenomenological practices, with their emphasis on human connectedness. At the same time it acknowledges and includes our Enlightenment history of separation, fragmentation and analysis. Our proposal is that all of these perspectives have distinctive value and can become shared resources, forming a “unity of unmerged voices” (Bakhtin) in response to an event or circumstance for which a provocation becomes a paradigm example. In this way we’re looking to deepen and ‘rehumanise’ our encounters and exchanges.
The Heartland notion has several purposes:
- It locates our characteristic observations in a broad and deep understanding of the dimensions of humanity;
- It offers a descriptive language for exploring and identifying a large repertoire of forms of human response;
- It foregrounds empirical knowledge and personal experience rather than opinion and assertion;
- It clarifies the notion of empathy by unpacking it into its sensory and relational components;
- It enables a non-judgemental discussion of what our doings do in a manner not normally possible;
- It reveals the potential synergies between the preferred orientations of the members of a working group;
- It proposes a recognition of human intra-action that doesn’t automatically privilege verbal fluency and coercive behaviour;
- It draws attention to the subtle and complex responsive capacities of the human body;
- It invites and encourages experimentation with more imaginative forms of response;
- It can be developed as a visual medium to record and track group activity and patterns of development.
Our underlying thesis is that the arc of modernism from Descartes to Derrida has progressively shrunk our public and workplace discourse into the top left-hand corner of the Heartland — especially, articulations of the Self around abstract models and theories of organisation and human development. Through a practice of rehumanising we believe we now have an opportunity to reverse this trajectory.
Instilling the New Learning: Trickle-down and Trickle-up
The central site of learning is the small group, the Crew. This is the entity most conducive to mutual relational learning because it is sufficiently large to exhibit the natural variation of difference and sufficiently small to engender sustained purposeful connection and trust. At the scale of a Crew the simultaneous attraction of autonomy and belonging can co-exist in an easy balance.
So the project of social transformation begins with the small group. It can then proceed by way of trickle-down and trickle-up.
¶ Trickle-down. As Crew members in a phenomenological learning process gain confidence in themselves and build their skills of relational responsiveness, so they can begin to explore and develop their Dyadic relationships as sites of mutual learning there. They will be more ready in their closest relationships to open up, share and discuss struggles of the Self — the intermittent tendencies of our multiple selfhood that occasionally overwhelm us and commandeer all of our attention.
They will also feel empowered to invite experiments in conversational learning, by seeking feedback in trusted relationships to the manner as well as the content of their speaking — to how their words land compared with what they intend. Coming to this idea for the first time will feel strange and awkward, but the experience of group learning will make it easier to attempt.
Greater fluency and transparency in dyadic relationships will also ease non-judgemental interrogation and exploration of the Self. Better use of the multiplicity of sensory capabilities, and greater awareness of the ebb and flow of tendencies of selfhood, will come more naturally and spontaneously. In this way relational empowerment will help people to feel more at home with themselves in all of their lifeworld dealings.
¶ Trickle-up. Relationally-skilled Crews will be natural hosts and leaders of gatherings at the scale of the Congregation. They will devise and organise engaging events that effortlessly invite the development of relational capabilities among everyone present. They will be oriented towards the recognition, celebration and deployment of difference in the design and conduct of a gathering. They will shape and sequence the activities to allow for the full expression of bodily and cognitive senses. They will offer a pattern of encounter that leads towards deeper layers of relationality and continuity beyond the event.
In time, the strengthened relational capability of groups at scale will influence the practices of mass democracy at the level of the Crowd and beyond. Tools of participation like those developed in vTaiwan will be enhanced and widely shared.
Intergenerational Learning: Joining With our Children
In recent months the climate crisis has brought the generational concerns and voices of children into public discourse. This move opens up a great new opportunity for intergenerational learning.
Children are less burdened by the assumptions, hubris and anomie that can get in the way of appreciating and learning to use phenomenological difference. And there’s every chance that in the right circumstances, the skills of noticing and relating could become a great game. So relational learning that combines adults and children — say in family groups — could be an exciting way forward. This is a prospect that seems ripe for further development.
The vision is that trickle-down and trickle-up relational awareness operating in tandem can begin a viral and ‘staircased’ process of societal transformation. The hope is to establish a new balance of understanding and love between peoples and with the planet. The challenge is to achieve this transformation fast enough to reverse the current dystopic trajectory of life on earth.
‘People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does’ (Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1986, p.187).
So, experiences that help people in their everyday encounters to come to know ‘what they do does’ might just be the start of a large-scale shift in human consciousness.
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