Social Fields: Shifting the quality of our collective being
Read the article in German
Michael Pirzig, in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance finishes his transformational journey with the epiphany that the key to understanding human experience is quality. At the time I read the book, this conclusion left me quite flat. I simply didn’t get how quality could help us understand or, better yet, change the world.
That was 20 years ago. Fast forward to today and I get it. But to get it, I had to think about quality as a collective phenomenon.
For example, what is the quality of collective thinking that gives rise to Indian Residential Schools, widespread environmental degradation, gross economic inequality, racism, and war?
How do we even begin to shed light on the quality of collective thinking, being and doing? This is where the concept of the social field(1) comes in. The social field looks at our shared experience from within, at its quality and the source of that quality. This isn’t something that can be observed from outside. To understand the social field, you need to go inside — to be it.
You know the social field. Walk into any classroom, office or social gathering and, consciously or unconsciously, you begin to get a felt sense of the space. You many have had the experience of walking into a room where there has been conflict and sensed the defensiveness of those involved, then felt tension rise in your own body in response — all without a word being spoken.
When we step into a social space, something in the atmosphere resonates within us and that resonance shapes our being — the way we think, feel and act. It isn’t just that the social field shapes us. As we listen, act and interact we, in turn, impact the quality of the space we are inhabiting.
The social field, then, is a powerful leverage point for change.
So what does it take to work with the field and harness its potential?
Recognizing & Naming
While this might sound obvious, the first step to working with the social field is bringing it into our awareness. Perceiving the field comes naturally, although we might not recognize it immediately. In my work with students and members of my local community in the Concordia U.lab Social Innovation Hub, I became curious about one phenomenon. Often, hub members talked about the depth of their encounters with others in the hub. When I dug a little deeper and asked about specific relationships, they reflected that the depth of the encounter wasn’t necessarily related to interpersonal closeness or existing relationships. It was about something else present in our collective space.
That space, that safeness and security that developed on a community scale or communal scale rather than just an individual scale….. It still had that feeling of close relationship, but not friendship necessarily… I don’t know what the name for it is actually. What’s the name for a communal…? I don’t know. I don’t know what that relationship is called.
- Amanda
What is it Amanda is talking about here? Essentially, THIS is the social field: the quality of relating that goes beyond specific interactions or interpersonal relationships. It is akin to the quality of the air, felt in the whole and the parts. The feeling might differ in intensity in various parts of a system — more intense in small groups perhaps — but it is there, the same quality mirrored at different levels of scale. This is because the quality is the invisible “in-between” that permeates the field and underlies all interactions. To fully work with its potential, we need to build our ability to perceive it. We also need to name it.
I’ve always been struck that one of the fundamental rights in the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child is the right to a name (2). Naming is a declaration of existence and it holds power. It is the first step to being recognized and therefore deemed worthy of attention. When we name the social field, we bring attention to the quality of our being together and open up the possibility of including it in our thinking about how we structure and organize our collective lives.
Entering in
We don’t change social fields by observing them from the outside. To know social fields, to feel their quality, we need to enter in and be changed by them. Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (3), writes,
You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops, and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked.
We come to know social fields by stepping into them, allowing them to shape us and co-shaping them in turn. In a social field there is something that is at once collective and deeply personal. I’ve always been fascinated by the process of moving into a generative collective space where the effect is feeling clearer about who I am. In my own experience, the effect of seeing aspects of my inner self– quiet thoughts, feelings and experiences — in a larger social field has emboldened me to act and shaped the nature of my action. It left me feeling that I could no longer fail to take my own inner knowing seriously.
That experience was reflected over and over in GAIA (Global Activation of Intention and Action), a global sense-making and activation journey born in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. A community of change makers from around the world met bi-monthly to sense into the shared moment of disruption. Participants in focus groups and community sharing during the gatherings commented: “I see myself in others’ words”, “It feels as though the speaker was speaking directly to me” and “The words were on the tip of my tongue and then someone else said them”.
There is incredible power in sensing and seeing ourselves in a collective. The power seems to lie in experiencing something that lives deep within us reflected in a larger whole. This experience of resonance then has an impact on our inner and outer actions, encouraging us to trust the future that is pulling us forward, emboldening us to step into it. That resonance can only be experienced by stepping into the field, feeling it, becoming it and allowing it to change us.
Understanding the field’s power
Coming from the field of group dynamics, many collective phenomena have negative connotations — emotional contagion, group think, herd mentality — collective experience characterized by losing one’s agency. But what about healthy coming together? What about coming together to hold tenderly something bigger than we are, something generative, nourishing and life-supporting, and to be moved by it?
I once asked an elementary school principal how she knew her school had become a generative social field. She said, “All sorts of things are happening that I didn’t initiate.”
When I think about powerful social fields, the sense of possibility held within them feels universal and yet it manifests in different ways as individuals tap into their creativity and find space for its expression. It strengthens the relationship between the individual and the system because generative social fields help us discern what is ours do in relation to the whole. In this way cultivating the social field serves individuals and collectives.
Take school bullying, for example. In social field terms, bullying can be thought of as one manifestation of a degenerative field — one that creates results which harm its members. Dan Olweus, a Swedish-Norwegian psychologist specializing in school bullying, created a program that reduced incidents of bullying by one-third to one-half in 24 schools in Oslo through a multi-level intervention that aimed to change school environment and culture (4). I would argue that his interventions shifted the quality of the social field which, in turn, reduced bullying.
Nurturing the field
The social field, once born, can be thought of as a living entity. To become a generative source, it needs to be consciously supported and nurtured. We are the field, we hold the field and we are held by it. That requires a particular kind of attention. It means consciously working with potential, bringing attention to the quality of the collective experience and developing infrastructure for the simultaneous development of the individual and the collective.
I am fascinated by the social field and its power. While I can’t claim to fully understand its inner workings, I do wonder if the dynamic is something like this: when we come together with an open-hearted attention to each other and to the potential held amongst us, we somehow make possibility more accessible, holding it steady long enough to touch it and allow it to seep into our being. It is through that deeply personal, shared experience that we shift the quality of our collective thinking, being and doing. Attending to the intersection of self and system in this way is where the seed of transformation — and hope — lies.
I would like to thank Priya Mahtani, Jim Gavin and Hannah Scharmer for their review and comments on earlier versions of this draft and their support bringing it to publication. I would also like to thank Kelvy Bird for the beautiful visual created to accompany the article. Finally, I would like to thank Antares Reisky for translating the article into German.
1 The ‘social field’ is a foundational concept of Theory U. See Otto Scharmer (2016) Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges, 2nd edition. Berrett-Koehler.
2 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989, Article 7(1). https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child
3 Tyson Yunkaporta (2020) Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. HarperOne, p. 87.
4 Dan Olweus & Susan P. Limber (2010). Bullying in school: Evaluation and dissemination of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 80(1), 124–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.2010.01015.x
