Trip to New Zealand Blog 2
(this blog post follows Trip to New Zealand blog 1)
I arrived at the Summerfest, right at the time of dinner. This meant I missed the introduction in the afternoon but had some time to hear what participants here were offering as topics they wanted to dive deeper into. It was really a very diverse and huge list of questions, ideas, offerings and more — as diverse as the participants, coming both from inside Enspiral and from outside.
I participated in a session introduced by an Australian lady, Sarah Houseman, who is doing a PhD on a couple of organizations that are using new forms of governance. She had interviewed 15 persons from Enspiral, using questions and answers, but also asked people to make drawings or visuals and take some Tarot cards that would express their ideas and feelings.
One of the points she mentioned is that there is a tension between strategy on the one hand and emergence (short, rough definition: new insights coming up from what is going on) on the other. This brought us to the concept of ‘emergent strategy’. Rich, one of the co-founders of Loomio, mentioned that they never build a strategy upfront — as one is supposed to do in a real business — but that the definition of emergent strategy is: to have an ongoing series of strategic conversations. That kind of sunk in for me! Being a psychologist I never had much relationship with words like strategy and marketing, but ‘an ongoing series of strategic conversations’, I can totally relate with that!
Another point in the conversation was about the fact that many people within the Enspiral network/community have a high level of personal mastery. This makes for ease in conversations and working together, and a huge openness and curiosity for more and next learning. My contribution was to mention that with this level of personal mastery there is potential for something more.
I linked it with Rich’s recent blog post, where he describes his musical jamming with a friend of his, and the collective co-creative writing with the same person. I told the other participants that great personal mastery makes it possible to reach a level of conversation that I learned from Otto Scharmer in the frame of Theory U, called generative dialogue, which very much has the same energy as the jamming and the same co-creative flavor as the writing. In Scharmer’s description this is the 4th level of dialogue, as one can move from (1) speaking as if your reality is the only one that exists, to (2) a realization that others have other perspectives, but mine is the only right one and I try to convince you of mine, to (3) an emphatic listening and conversation where I can put myself in your shoes to finally level 4 where after the conversation I don’t remember who said what or who initiated a certain idea, but in the end we are all somehow moved by the dialogue and real novel insights came to the surface.
On the website Collective Presencing you find a description of ‘basic circle practice’, that is a good lead and practice into what I came to name as ‘deeper circle practice’, which is exactly describing the conditions and workings of what this generative dialogue is about.
From the individual mastery, it led me to write down: What is and where is the collective mastery? My sense is that this question describes very well the interpersonal challenge we are in these days, in order to be equipped to navigate the complexity we are in and faced with.
