Getting ready to remake our world together
(and see audio update below)
In the wake of Trump and Brexit, there’s fresh alarm about the failure of democracy and our national and trans-national institutions. In so many ways, our established practices of governance and social organisation are producing perverse and bizarre outcomes. Marginalisation and oppression are rampant again and even the pretence of moral leadership has faded from the world.
Yet there’s hope and possibility. There’s enormous everyday sense, resourcefulness and capability available to us all — even for tackling the most intractable of our human circumstances. But it’s hiding: huddling beneath the shroud of self-imposed individualism and personal isolation that we in the West have worn for the past five centuries, and that through globalisation has now been carried to the rest of the world.
We can and should seek and strive for new structures of governance and social order.
But until we stop orienting and educating ourselves for individual achievement, and instead build systematic practices of accomplishment in groups — practices that use our differences as shared resources — new structures won’t alter things. Only by recognising one another clearly, and by developing everyday skills for working in the midst of others, whatever the situation, can we advance as a species.
In a world of scientific and managerial determinism, this is new work. It’s not grand and analytical problem-solving, but down-on-the-ground, ordinary, here-and-now conduct. It’s not organising or designing: it comes before that. It’s about noticing others, and noticing ourselves, and continually adjusting and improving the relationship between the two.
The absence of this capacity means that we come together in our shared endeavours largely as locked-in, pre-occupied entities. We collide rather than join with one another. We struggle to find some basis of mutual accommodation, often in forms of words, rather than in deep-down intentions and aspirations. We are seldom available for spontaneous learning or for unexpected insight. The productivity of these conventional efforts is extremely low, and is geared to repetition rather than advance. For all the difference they make, so many well-intentioned and high-purposed meetings and gatherings might well have not occurred.
Since our existing encounters — in settings and forums of nearly all kinds — are so unproductive, even a modest improvement can transform things. We just have to practice the full range of human skills that are available to us, rather than the narrowband presentational ones we mostly deploy at present. Where we have already learned some of these skills, we need to make them visible and transferable. And we need to teach them in schools, in families, and on the street.
Being fully human together will open up a new planetary era for us. The Human Methods Lab aims to make this a systematic and practical capacity for everyone.
The work of the Human Methods Lab
Using new combinations of facilitation, technology and enactment, the Lab is developing and testing methods for people working in groups that include:
- careful practices of welcome and grounding — practices that redistribute power and bring members of a group into a comfortable working relationship with one another
- advanced noticing skills, especially helping people to identify their most distinctive muscles of orientation and capability in relation to the others in a group
- experience of alternative forms of conduct, inviting people to inhabit the world of another person, and to act from an inner sense of perspectives and behaviours other than their own
- orientation to the needs in the room, building a shared language of attentiveness and response that acclimatises people to the ongoing entirety of their working environment
- pursuit of spontaneous group synergy, fostering, demonstrating and taking note of wordless co-leadership in unplanned everyday situations, based on mutual understanding of one another’s strengths
This work draws on a different set of assumptions than those of established organisation development and self-help practices:
1.The long history of the art and practice of human encounter is a crucial resource for our future;
2. Relational learning takes place in groups, and not in efforts by individuals alone;
3. Each person has a distinctive competence to offer — though without deliberate effort the relational character of that distinctiveness may easily go unrecognised;
4. Differences of orientation are precious, and can combine to give unique power and resilience to a group’s efforts;
5. Theories and models of personal and organisational change are mostly unhelpful and distracting abstractions;
6. Listening to and accumulating stories of personal experience is much more helpful in understanding complex human circumstances than is exchanging opinions or debating the causes of things.
Join us
The Lab is developing methods that are transformative; efficient; engaging; easily replicated; and embedded in everyday practice. We’re developing a family of tools and products that embody these methods, and the Enspiral community of 300 social entrepreneurs and their associate communities around the world are the test-bed for their prototypes. To learn more, or to join in our work, please contact theodore.taptiklis@enspiral.com.
