6 guiding principles that emerged from our first year of Chimes

Learning Doing Being

Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation
Good Shift
5 min readMay 11, 2022

--

#YCWOL2 — Here we share guiding principles that emerged during 2021 in our fortnightly reflective sessions called Chimes.

This is the second in a series of blogs in which we work out loud (WOL), putting to ‘paper’ our experience of building the practice of Being while Doing. By sharing these we hope to solidify the themes that emerge for ourselves, share those emergent themes with others who may be traveling along similar paths, and also reveal ‘by doing’ how this ancient practice brings value to modern workplaces.

Learning, Being, Doing I.Burkett for The Yunus Centre Griffith 2022

Our first blog shared one of the main reasons for starting our chimes. We wanted to weave together the strands of work we’re doing across The Yunus Centre. We wanted to make sure our combined efforts were working towards our goal of accelerating transitions to regenerative and distributive economies.

Two strands that had a particularly close overlap were the community engagement layer of the Homebase innovation incubator, and our Civic Innovation challenge — so how we were engaging with communities was top of mind.

Within our chimes, over time and through our meandering discussions, we continually sense-checked our foundations with an iterative reflective process.

  1. We thought about our ‘bubbles’ and the work going on in each of them, and where the crossovers were.
Org structure of The Yunus Centre Griffith — four main bubbles: Learning + Teaching; Research, Design, Development + Demonstration; Practice Lab and Enablement
The Yunus Centre Griffith organisational structure as at early 2022

2. We reflected on our Yunus Centre Griffith organisational ‘team memes’ and how our community engagements demonstrated BEING and not just doing.

Our Team memes: We are pathfinders for a better world; We give a damn; We make good happen; We’re clear and transparent; We are radically flexible; We have sharp-eyed focus.
Our team memes are a bit like our mission and values

3. We asked ourselves how can we do the work we’re doing in a way that’s aligned with The Yunus Centre goal (vs just ‘putting on an event’ for example)?

As a group we knew we were passionate about these core concepts for BEING. But the reality was, we were often caught up in the DOING and the busyness. Time pressures and our own expectations to ‘get shit done’ overshadowed, and we unconsciously pushed aside the integration of BEING into each activity.

What emerged

We recognised if we wanted to engage with communities authentically, we would need to embody shared principles. Principles that centre BEING while DOING. Here’s what emerged from our conversations:

  1. We are intentional in the way we gather people. We stop to ask who we’re gathering and why we’re doing something and plan accordingly.
  2. We ask questions. We listen to the answers. We try very hard not to assume, even if something appears obvious.
  3. We invite people to create with us and learn with us. We learn from our work with others, our observations, mistakes and achievements.
  4. We want to do good things but recognise that change takes time, and some of the things we are doing may not be seen/felt until after we leave this space (like ripples after throwing a stone into a pond).
  5. We are learning to be more mindful in the way we BE and recognise that this too is a skill and mindset we evolve over time.
  6. We ask why a lot. Why are we holding this event? Why are we inviting this group of people? Why would we plan the running order that way? Why… why…why…

Principles sound lovely, but what does this look like in practice?

Let’s draw a picture of a chime session — It’s a typical week in the turbulent world of 2021. We’re hosting too many events, which are being rescheduled and redesigned due to lockdowns; we’re scrambling across the Centre to respond to ongoing external dynamic forces beyond our control; we’re managing changes to internal teams; our Learning & Teaching team are running courses, simultaneously switching to online; we’re also contributing to advisory and/or research projects.

A group of us join an online chime session. We immediately fall into the DOING crisis management conversation …because … it’s really hard to switch off. But we catch ourselves and recalibrate to BEING. We stop the task lists and switch our conversation to questions:

  • Is this continual DOING moving us toward our impact goals?
  • We’re using all our time and energy on events which are engaging and fun, but so what? If there’s no ‘next step’ planned, what’s the impact after we leave?
  • If we’re not identifying and activating the conditions that foster civic innovation, supporting communities to progress ideas and actions, then what’s all this work for?

We needed to remind ourselves that every task, action, engagement we were doing was in service of our goal — to accelerate transitions to regenerative and distributive economies — not to hold X number of events for X number of people. And that meant we needed to return to how we BE.

We agreed that one of those ways of being, was to be intentional about how we gather people. Three strong ideas resonated in that principle — place-based community building, civic innovation practice, and Priya Parker’s work.

So, we committed to a few things:

  • We would always prioritise time in our busy schedules to dig into the purpose of each event to inform everything from venue choice, to catering suppliers, to guest lists.
  • We would ensure every Yunus Centre event or workshop would include time for nurturing connections to support ‘what’s next’.
  • We would say no. If we couldn’t see a ‘what’s next’ then we wouldn’t progress. If it wasn’t aligned to our Centre’s goal, we wouldn’t progress. Even if we really wanted to do something because we were passionate about it, we recognised we didn’t always have the capacity to do it within our core principles.

Making the time to chime, and identify these principles, helped us get clearer around making sure all our DOING was based on the strong foundations of BEING.

Instead of spinning in circles to the point of dizziness and confusion we understood why we were doing what we were doing.

--

--

Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation
Good Shift

Griffith University's Centre for Systems Innovation exists to accelerate transitions to regenerative and distributive futures through systems innovation