The Origins of Generative Scribing: An Interview with Kelvy Bird
At the Presencing Institute, one of the key concepts that frames and directs our work is the social field (1) — the web of relationships and interactions that we co-enact in any social space. The social field is about the interiority of a social system, about what it is to be a collective. Every social field has its own particular quality and texture. We feel this quality, often deeply, but it tends to remain hard to see, touch and name. One of the key questions in my work as Research Lead at the Presencing Institute is: how can we make the social field — the quality of our collective being — visible?
As ‘collective being’ is a sensory, aesthetic experience, the arts have a special role to play in answering this question. Social artists work intentionally with the social field, bringing to awareness the inner nature of our collective experience. Through creative practices, social arts help us to connect with multiple senses and sources of perception, and to integrate these in the way that only art can.
In this interview, I talk with Kelvy Bird — practitioner, author, and teacher of Generative Scribing — about the origin of the method and the inner work required of the scribe.
Eva: So, Kelvy, you are the founder of generative scribing. How did the practice of generative scribing come into being?
Kelvy: Well, I always laugh at “the founder of generative scribing…” I mean, I was practicing… lots of us were, for years. I just anchored down some shared collective knowledge about a discipline.
Back in the day (the 90’s) I was primarily scribing to earn a living. Then, the more I was around leading thinkers — like Bill Isaacs, Peter Senge, Ed Schein, Otto (Scharmer), along with those whom I consider to be matriarchs of awareness-based facilitation: Beth Jandernoa, Glennifer Gillespie, and Barbara Cecil (2) — the more I was learning about circle work, systems thinking, dialogue, and presencing. And then I started seeing the potential for weaving those practices into my existing graphic facilitation.
I knew what it looked like to literally reflect something back to a group through scribing. The shift in my practice came in sensing how scribing could help access implicit knowing within a group. In the dialogue work with Bill Isaacs, for example, a group would be in a circle for hours, and would collectively sense when something (in the group) deepened. We would know when there was a shift between advocacy and inquiry, because we could feel it. We could feel the tone in the room and in the group shift, and the space start to open. So I was really curious, “How could drawing facilitate that? Could it?” When I began working with Otto and others in the Presencing Institute, I had many opportunities to test out that theory. That’s how the generative scribing practice evolved.
My inquiry has always been about how visuals can support deep reflection and affect the human spirit.
To more directly answer your question, when a team from PI (Presencing Insitute) created u-lab in 2015, I was scribing those live sessions, broadcast from MIT, and the audience was large, about 20,000 people. Many participants reached out asking what I was doing and how I was doing it. That’s when I began to write about my practice, and that led to the book Generative Scribing. But the genesis of the practice was really an inquiry. It goes back to my art practice in school, when I was painting. My inquiry has always been about how visuals can support deep reflection and affect the human spirit. That’s some of the development that is behind what we now term “generative scribing”.
Eva: Can you remember maybe a first or an early experience of trying to express the shift through visuals and maybe what happened? Maybe something that encouraged you along the way?
Kelvy: Yes. I don’t think I was aware of the shifts until the work with Bill Isaacs and Peter Garrett, much of it based on the work of physicist David Bohm and the nature of the unfolding and the enfolding. As I was learning that, I was paying more attention to when things were coming together, when people were coming together, when ideas were coming together — and when things were unfolding or breaking apart and opening. I started to be able to notice that in a group around 1999 or so. I was scribing in those contexts on flip charts, much different dimensions than I work with today, which can be up to 400 square feet over a week.
But I don’t think my drawing matched the feeling of the shifts in the social field, because I was still drawing in a literal way. I don’t think the drawing, the output, was really facilitating the feeling. The outside and the inside were not joined. So what I was noticing internally, I didn’t yet know how to express through my hand.
The first time that I really recall (meeting the feeling of the social field with the drawing of it) was probably during the Global Forum (4). I think it was the third one. It was here in Cambridge, at MIT and I created this huge wall of taped-together boards. It was long, maybe 24–30 feet. And I noticed at some point, when I stood back on the other side of the room, that a “being” had emerged from the drawing. The drawing was very detailed. There were a lot of words in it. But the big movements of the shapes that were holding the drawing in place looked like this kind of amphibious being, and the words “Social Presencing Theater” made up the eye. There was a part where someone was talking about “grace” landing. And it was at that precise moment where I thought “Yeah! Grace has landed!” I still vividly remember that part of the drawing and the feeling of being able to connect so deeply with what was in the room. It came through.
Eva: And it came through feeling? That’s the first sense?
Kelvy: I think it came through feeling, at that point, yes. Maybe it was my own self-confidence that had shifted, to allow me to feel it? I had always felt separate from the room as a scribe, I mean, on the edge. Even if I was there in the circle and other people saw me in the circle, I never felt in the circle (let’s say, never entirely of the field). Scribes are usually on the edge of a room. But at that precise moment I felt the whole. I felt like I was part of the whole, that was shifting. Does that make sense?
Eva: Totally. Now I have two other questions about the nuance of the work. When I was reading Generative Scribing, your book, there’s a really clear distinction of four levels of scribing, inspired by the Theory U levels of listening. So I’d love to hear more from you about how that awareness — the awareness of the differentiation in the ways you scribe, or the inner places from which you scribe — how that awareness came into your being.
Kelvy: That’s a really good question. Well, you know, I felt the pressure to explain what I was doing. And so yeah, I used the Levels of Listening, Otto Scharmer’s framework (5), as a basis to check my own listening. I asked myself: “How am I listening at those different levels?” And I’m still not even sure! This isn’t answering your question, but I used that as a framework, and asked myself, “If I’m listening at Level One: Downloading, what is the equivalent of that in scribing?” The equivalent is that you just write what everybody says. You’re not really thinking at all, you’re just correlating data, one word to one word or image. Then Level Two: Factual Listening. So what is factual listening? What do I do when I listen factually?”
I just started checking my own process. You know, it’s like if somebody were to say, “You have a whole drawer, and in it you have a whole bunch of forks and knives and spoons, and all this stuff…” And then somebody says, “Sort these into four categories.” And you’re like, “Oh okay. Forks go here, knives go here, and spoons go there. And the miscellaneous utensils go there.” You don’t know how things are really differentiated until you start to try to sort them. I think that was the process with articulating the Levels of Scribing, which involved taking a hard look at what I was doing, at my practice, and asking, “What is the difference?” And I felt a little bit of pressure to just frame it, so I sort of wrote it down pretty quickly, but then I’ve been testing it ever since.
Eva: So when you know you are scribing at one level or another, what is the nature of that knowing? Where does it show up or enter into your awareness? Is a felt sense inside, the visual of what you see on the page, what you hear from others; what is the experience of that?
Kelvy: Well, if i’m really honest, my knowing is — in part — informed by my level of impatience.
When something is really true and deep and feels meaningful to me, I swim in it; I’m relaxed, and I could stay there for hours. So that’s level four. There’s just the dissolution. There is no separation between people anymore, no one’s thinking about how they look, there’s no self consciousness about the words we use, it’s just a space of “We are. We exist.”
However, if I notice an impatience, which is a mental hangup, that’s an immediate indicator that I have some other capacity to bring online, which could also indicate that my scribing might bring some other capacity online for the rest of the room. If I’m picking up that this might be all field one conversation, then I wonder “Okay, so how/what would I do to shift this?” I would open my mind more. I would slow down. I’d be more patient, and then I would open my heart, and I would try to progress my own condition in order to shift how things are coming into me and through me, taking myself as a microcosm in the room. My belief that if it can shift in me, it can shift in the room. And that is part of a field shift. In essence it’s mostly through my body that I know what field I am in, what field a group is in, and what might be ready to shift.
Eva: So I’m curious about the intervention aspect — consciously working to shift the field from, say, level one to level two. Is that something that you are doing internally or is it about what you are expressing through the drawing? Or is it something like a two-step process, like step one — felt sense or grounding in the body, step two — express visually on the page?
Kelvy: That’s my body-mind connection. If I find myself confused or overwhelmed or feeling something — but I’m not sure what the feeling is — I try to identify the feeling in order to do something with it. It’s a very fast process: one, two, one, two… a constant back and forth between what’s going on in the body and what’s coming out through what I’m feeling and thinking. Yeah, scribing is a really fast process! If you’re paying attention to the words and scribing at level four in a more energetic place, and if you’re really trying to also track the system that’s in the room, there’s a lot of detail to pay attention to. So you have to be processing really quickly and just work with things really quickly. There’s no time to delay or linger. You have to just let stuff come through.
Eva: I’ve always been fascinated that you have this instrument of expression — your arm. You’ve got this immediate instrument to express what is happening but no time to really think it through and frame it all and plan what to draw…
Kelvy Bird: Although if we think of the work of containers, there’s definite development around how many “beats” a scribe can hold at once, how many expressions we can hold in one moment, or how many feelings we can hold at once and recognize: “Okay that was just said and and I have this feeling going on…” And you just have to sort of shift from responding immediately to being able to hold it all, and then know when it’s the right time to move, when it’s the right time to draw something up. The less you can hold, the faster you have to go in order to keep up. So, in fact, you have to learn to hold more to be able to slow down.
Eva: Yeah that’s interesting.
Kelvy: That’s a good line: “The less you can hold, the faster you have to go. The more you can hold, the more you can slow down.”
I wish I could take that principle into my own life outside of scribing!
Eva: Kelvy, thanks so much for this conversation and for taking the time to share even just a small bit of the internal process that underlies and gives rise to the beautiful visuals we see manifest in your work.
Kelvy: My pleasure! And thank YOU!
To see generative scribing in action, join the MITx Online course u-lab: Leading from the Emerging Future, where Kelvy and colleagues bring scribing to support an enhance moments of global connection through live session broadcasts. The next live sessions will be October 5th and October 26th, 2023.
Notes:
1 — The ‘social field’ is a foundational concept of Theory U. For a full description, see Otto Scharmer (2016) Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges, 2nd edition. Berrett-Koehler or read Otto’s blog outlining the grammar of the social field.
2 — To learn more about the work of Beth Jandernoa, Glennifer Gillespie, and Barbara Cecil, read the Circle of Seven interview.
3 — David Bohm, On Dialogue, edited by Lee Nichol (London: Routledge, 1996)
4 — The Global Presencing Forum was an annual event, initiated in 2011, with the intent to bring the Presencing community together to see and sense its current reality and emerging future as a whole social body.
5 — A description of Otto Scharmer’s Levels of Listening can be found here.
