Reflections on scale and responsibility
One of my personal intentions is, to the extent possible, to think out loud in public, so that others can contribute to the conversation. Building Belonging has a closed Mighty Network space where we tee up conversations and connect with each other; we’re currently in practice around how to share out what is transpiring there in a way that contributes to collective sense-making. In that spirit, I want to share some reflections here and welcome other ideas.
In yesterday’s monthly open space gathering for our first philanthropy cohort, we took up the question of scale. The prompt: is it possible to scale up our work in integrity? I’m grateful to Mandy Van Deven, Christina Antonakos-Wallace, Ada Williams Prince, Gautam John, and Bridgit Antoinette Evans for a deep and wide-ranging conversation that surfaced a number of themes that I continue to wrestle with. I wanted to share some reflections emerging from that conversation here in the main network, because it touches on something fundamental about Building Belonging (or at least, my aspirations for it!)
Meg Wheatley and Deb Frieze wrote the field-defining piece on emergence in the context of social transformation back in 2006. They identified three distinct phases for how transformation happens at scale in the context of emergence: Networks > Communities of Practice > Systems of Influence.
It was never clear how to move from communities of practice to systems of influence; they say it “can never be predicted.” I think that’s right… and insufficient. No one can predict the spark that will launch a social movement (the Arab Awakening was impossible until it happened)… but we do know the set of conditions that will allow the spark a chance (this is the field of civil resistance, and by extension the broader field of movement-building).
The dominant system/status quo says scale is not just good, but necessary: bigger is better, there is never enough, it is our imperative to expand and to do otherwise is failure.
The oppositional response says scale is just another example of the colonial/capitalist mindset, and efforts to “scale up” are the master’s tools in action, a form of hubris that undermines our efforts for transformation and takes our attention away from the real truth: small is all, local is better.
I think we are right to be suspicious of “scale”: historically, our efforts to play at world-building have been tainted by hubris, mindsets of domination, and haven’t worked out well. And: as people who care about the world, and who see our responsibility as enlarging the circle of concern ( john powell’s framing)… at some level thinking — and caring! — at scale is a pro-social extension of a basic human impulse.
I fear that we (those of us interested in transformation and social justice) have recused ourselves from the inquiry: there are not many spaces where we can devote ourselves with intentionality, humility, and care to the question of how we move from communities of practice to systems of influence. My experience has been that those who try are quickly pulled back by their peers, slapped with the label of playing the master’s game: who are you to take on the world? Aren’t you just perpetuating the dominant paradigm?
What I’ve come to is this: there is no “answer” or “solution” to this question. But the question itself is hugely important, and we need to grapple with it, to explore what post-oppositional approaches to scale might look like. Every problem we face today is global in scale. To take the most obvious example: to address the pandemic with anything approaching a sense of equity and justice requires 8 BILLION vaccines… and a distribution network to get them to everyone in the world. That is our task, like it or not.
What would it look like to take appropriate responsibility for the world? I don’t know, but I do have a perspective, which informs how I think about Building Belonging. I call this the move from “emergence to resonance.” Here’s how I framed it in the Concept Note (which I first drafted in partnership with john powell in 2018) that eventually provided the foundation for Building Belonging:
Of course, connection alone is a necessary but insufficient step to the global transformation we seek (what Wheatley and Frieze called “systems of influence.”) In thinking about how we reach global scale we take inspiration from adrienne maree brown’s writings on Emergent Strategy. The key point is to understand the world as an emergent system, and thus frame our engagement following the characteristics of emergent systems.
The key feature of emergence is the notion that the sum is greater than the parts: the collective can do together what no individual component can. Thus it is about the interaction — the relationships — among the components. It is about interdependence. In our body metaphor, this is about the flows moving through the connective tissue linking the major organs.
Experts generally agree on the key characteristics of emergent systems; see e.g. this great article from Peggy Holman or this incredible talk from Daniel Schmachtenberger. The core insight that has powerful implications for how we organize is this: complex transformation arises when each individual entity within the system follows a common set of simple principles.
This forms the foundation for our theory of change, and of scale. Once the principles are defined, we have created the enabling conditions for self-organization. This is how emergence becomes resonance: waves moving out in different directions, interacting to transformative effect. This effort is thus about co-creating those core principles and practices (the “civilizational operating system”) that others can then adapt to fit their particular cultural context.
Anyway, I would love to have these conversations with the broader Building Belonging community, and others who share the inquiry. I haven’t found any spaces out there that allow us to step into the full complexity of this question, and I’m so hungry for it. It raises all kinds of other questions (yesterday we discussed the role of homo sapiens in the broader ecosystem, the role of individuals in the collective, etc). I welcome reactions , and if there’s appetite we could create a synchronous gathering space to take this up together.
In community,
Brian
