Tapping into Something Significant that Wants to Emerge
Read this article in Portuguese
Part 1 — Cambia Festival in a Societal Transformation Journey
This is the first of a series of five articles recounting the story of Cambia Festival’s u.lab 2x journey in the Societal Transformation Lab 2019, a Presencing Institute Program for teams co‑shaping more sustainable and equitable social systems worldwide. The sequence of this series is:
1| Tapping into Something Significant That Wants to Emerge
2| Going to Places of Most Potential
3| Tackling Violence Through Music
4| Building Community in the Face of Ecological Breakdown
5| Spreading Societal Transformation to New Territories
Hi. I am Monica, and this is the story of my first Theory U experience, a profound journey into the emerging future which led my team to the edges of the system on a quest to transform society and break down barriers between different movements, social classes, ethinicities and generations. And as a bonus, we met Otto Scharmer in person along the way.
Designed for Positive Emergence (April 2018)
Cambia Festival was my group project during a Gaia Education Design for Sustainability Program in São Paulo (Brazil, 2018). As part of the “New Economies Village”, our goal was to co-create and build something collectively, touching on the social, economic, ecological and worldview dimensions. Our initial spark came from exploring the question:“What could happen to a social system without money?”
Getting rid of money altogether sounded radical and would later become one of the key goals of all our action based experiments. The scarcity of money, our dependency on it and lack of mobility were the central issues of concern for our team. We spend most of our lives without questioning how the most important technology of our society - money - accentuates many facets of today’s global crises and divides. We live in a debt-based economy which requires unending economic growth, overstimulating consumption without accounting for the destruction of our biosphere. A dysfunctional system that generates artificial scarcity and a win-lose dynamics reinforcing extreme inequality.
Ronaldo Crispim, one of our team members, suggested we build a “gift festival” and try out something outside of our monetary system. Offering gifts resonated deeply inside of us. Once we all agreed on that initial idea, our group sat in a circle for a collective dream. What we dreamed during that generative conversation was eventually translated into the principles that guide Cambia Festival’s culture.
The original prototype edition of Cambia Festival — Society Transforming the Economy — took place at UMAPAZ in São Paulo, an Open University for the Environment and the Culture of Peace, part of the Municipal Department of Environmental Education in July 2018, just over two months after its original conception in the dream circle.
Inspired by an “unconference” format, all Cambia Festival's participants were invited to share their knowledge and skills and practice the act of gifting. The space was offered to us for free, as were all the 32 self-organised activities and the food we shared that day. Our team built the entire festival for about 10 Reais (2 USD) spent on stationery items and composted all of our organic waste.
The original Cambia Festival was a social experiment that allowed us to materialise and envision a possible economy based on a culture of sharing and in the felt sense of a community, by cooperating with others to build something meaningful together.
The magic of the first Cambia Festival touched people in profound ways and after our first “encounter”, plenty of new ideas for different editions emerged. In November 2018, two of my colleagues, Cristina Zimmermann and João Leme, suggested we take part in the inaugural u.lab-2x — Societal Transformation Lab. u.lab 2x is a global innovation ecosystem for change makers activating systemic changes guided by Theory U methods designed by Otto Scharmer, co-founder of the Presencing Institute, economist and senior lecturer at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The program uses innovative social technologies, blending systems thinking and systems “sensing” to support teams to move from prototypes to ecosystem impact.
Around the time of its launch, I was puzzled by what was happening in the world. Several alarming reports had been released, such as the IPCC climate change report, the WWF biodiversity loss report, and Bolsonaro had just been elected. All in a matter of weeks. The possibility of being part of a global online to offline journey to transform society felt like an ideal opportunity to enhance my capacity to uncover new potentialities from the real world and do something practical about the mess we were in.
The best way to understand Theory U is by first hand practical experience and u.lab-2x was my introduction to awareness-based systems change. It was a fascinating adventure in leading from the emerging future.
Co-Initiating — An Open Innovation Journey (Dec 2018)
After receiving the confirmation that we would join 300 teams from around the world at u.lab-2x, we set up a Cambia Festival instagram account (@cambia.festival), a facebook page and created an event, calling it an “Open Innovation Journey”. People were invited to sign up via google forms and join us in the co-creation of the next phase of Cambia Festival in the preparation for its global launch.
In just a few weeks we received 135 applications from an incredible and diverse group of change agents. We quickly understood that our original core team (3 people) would not be able to handle such a large group, so in the process we also opened applications for new core members. Something about Cambia’s open innovation call resonated with many people, which led us to form two innovation hubs, one in São Paulo and one in Rio de Janeiro.
Adam Yukelson, co-creator of u.lab 2x, observed that from the response to our call, it felt like we were tapping into something significant that wanted to emerge…
3D Mapping — Co-Sensing the system we want to change (Feb 2019)
The 3D Mapping was the first tool we learned in an online session with the Presencing Institute team. This practice helps teams look at the multiple elements, dimensions and perspectives of a system together. For Cambia Festival's 3D workshop all participants were asked to bring an object that represented the system we wanted to transform. We left “the system” open for interpretation. There were about 25 of us there, representing the broad diversity of our society. We divided ourselves into 4 groups, each with our own table, materials and one facilitator.
Our 3D Mapping was deep. In a couple of hours, we faced the imminent societal and environmental collapse of our times, recognized the invisible and deeper forces shaping the system we want to transform and then, moved into an entirely new field of the future allowing us to see a brand new regenerative culture emerging through Cambia Festival’s 3D models.
Here were some key observations of the current state of the system we mapped during this exercise:
(1) There are plenty of blockages preventing us from evolving towards a more desirable society related to our own internal world: our fears, selfishness, apathy, ignorance and in particular violence, between ourselves and between humans and other species.
(2) Even though we are connected digitally, we felt a sense of isolation/loneliness, misinformation and an overall downgrade of human well-being related to our use of technology.
(3) Money shapes the system. Consumption — and the desire to accumulate more — intensify its degradation, trash the planet and bring us closer to the “apocalypse” (represented by a toy dragon in one of our models).
(4) The sources of power are only interested in serving themselves and are isolated from people’s real needs.
(5) We had to face the difficult awareness of our own part in the degeneration of our broken system and our place of responsability for the knowing-doing-gap: the disconnect between our collective consciousness that our patterns of living no longer serve us and our collective action for transformation.
The 3D exercise also showed us that not all is lost. There is hope. There is light, but it is not distributed evenly. There is love, but it is repressed. We have the potential to “pollinate” the world with hope and love. One of our models showed us a key first step in the shift from isolation to our future system: connecting ourselves to nature, represented by an image of hands on the soil.
A structural change of the same model happened once we removed profit-seeking interests, in particular over natural resources. The system went through a regeneration cycle and “the apocalypse” receded. In our future system, our economic paradigm, based on growth and consumption, is replaced by a circular economy and a “Gaia” worldview (James Lovelock, Living System’s Theory).
New possibilities also emerged once we eliminated violence from one of our 3D models. It opened up space for more meaningful connection between people and life in community began to flourish. This group created a learning space based on love. Another group identified a potential to elevate our level of consciousness and recognised a place for “the mystery” in our future system, represented by a hole that grew from the base of one of our models.
Next Steps:
More than a list of stakeholders, a few places of most potential emerged from this exercise:
(1) A sensing journey to Jardim Nakamura, a poor neighbourhood of São Paulo which saw a remarkable decrease in crime rates after a series of community led initiatives were implemented, perhaps best represented by the work of Instituto Favela da Paz.
(2) A visit to São Paulo Stock Exchange (BOVESPA) or a stakeholder interview to get a different perspective on the ultra competitive nature of our dominant culture.
In the next articles of this series we will continue to tell the story of Cambia Festival, what we learned in our visits to the places of most potential and what happened in our prototypes to transform society.
I want to thank Shiliu Wang and Rachel Hentsch for the inputs in this series of articles, Adam Yukelson for the support throughout u.lab 2x, Hannah Scharmer and Zoë Ackerman for the encouragement to write and Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute Team for welcoming me into the Field of the Future Blog.
Inspiration
Otto Scharmer (Theory U), Charles Einsenstein (Sacred Economics), Daniel Whal (Designing Regenerative Cultures), Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organisations), Jon Croft (Dragon Dreaming), Harrison Owen (Open Space Technology), Claudio Miranda (Instituto Favela da Paz), Manish Jain (Shikshantar)
