I recently joined in with a gathering of people who have identified themselves within the Dialogue & Deliberation community. It marked the fourth community coming-together I've been involved in with Tomorrow Makers this year—each of a very distinct nature and intent. From each and from the collection as a whole, I'm left with a clear recognition of the growing interest in and sophistication of organizing structures and processes used to compliment the content and body of knowledge.

Beyond the wealth of good "process tools" that are capable of adding significant value, there is a growing willingness and, in many cases, eagerness among organizers, speakers and participants to not only use these process tools, but innovate how they can fit together to amplified effect as a whole. Community gathering is on the verge of finding meta-structures and meta-processes which can transform or fundamentally reframe the community's awareness of itself and the world.

Successful design on this level utilizes and leverages the complexity and relationships created in the discrete modules. The whole becomes not only 'greater' than the sum of the parts, it emerges a different, deeper quality of experience. The system escapes to a higher order.

These escapes – or phase transitions – are the fascination and the essence of Tomorrow Makers' raison d'être. It is precisely these situations for which the system and method that we have been practicing and coming toward knowing since 1979 was invented...

"None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond our technical or resource reach of our society" Ralph Nader, 1975

Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach was first published in 1975... before the internet, recyling bins, before we knew California was the 4th or 5th or 6th largest economy ... while many of today's activists in northern California and Washington and Orgegon were still preteen. When I first read Ecotopia, I lived in Kansas City, Missouri. I am not sure where or how I found the book but it captured my imagination and I am sure perturbed me into a new quest for meaningful community. Now here I am living in Northern California, Mendocino County, the heart of Ecotopia.

I recently purchased a used, heavily yellow-marked copy and am winding my way through Ecotopia again. I am awe struck, really with how many Ecotopian-suggestions are happening here.

"Everything someone tells you is true: they are reporting their experience of reality.... To argue with someone else's experience is a waste of time. ... To add someone else's experience to your experience--to create a new experience--is possibly valuable." -MG Taylor Axiom, 1981

Physicist David Bohm has described the principle of enfoldment in his book, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue. The one-sentence summary states that the entire universe is enfolded into each of its components and that the visible universe is the movement or process of enfolding and unfolding--the reflexive transit between principle and expression. We are literally the enfolding and unfolding of our experience.

Communicating our experience of something is necessarily attenuated. Feelings, textures, colors, sounds, the pattern of sensations dancing across time and out of time, are all incompressible--they can't be shared by the spoken word. Someone can only report to you about their experience. Since you can't truly understand the experience from their vantage point, the only wise course of action is to accept it at face value and move forward together or move further apart from that acceptance.

The big danger about arguing over someone else's experience rises if one of the parties actually wins the argument, at which point, some critical understanding and vantage point on the universe--and the resulting learning--is denied and lost. (full article on the axioms)

So how do people from two different cultures begin a conversation and create a language and a doing that supports the reality of both vantage points?

"The impossible has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Last week I wrote about creating a "See What Happens Day". This idea emerged out of a group conversation where members were exploring tipping point events and other happenings that occurred between 2056 and 2006. 150 people in teams of six were remembering those events that solidified a new paradigm -- one based on living systems, design science, complex, adaptive systems ... the elements of complex systems. This new paradigm enabled a healthier, more democratic and sustainable world to form.

Nora Bateson, an ISSS participant, gave the report for her team and spoke of the See What Happens Day. When I asked her to recount where the idea came from, this was her response: "You created the birthing structure through your challenge of backcasting. This created the challenge giving our group permission to generate and play within a larger context. It was me that suggested "see what happens day" to the group, but clearly it came forth from our conversation like "the house that jack built"...

Nora's idea got lots of applause and for me, a clear sense of "Yes!" This is a viable, valuable idea. Of course it would be a challenge and one that might take a few years to form and unfold... but it seems so logical. My mind raced back through time to the New York black out when strangers became community. It reminded me of Katrina and despite the warnings and simulations that gave clear instructions for how to evacuate and what to watch out for, most of all the reports and warnings went unheeded. And after 911 a model has been established to create simulations for protecting cities and regions. See What Happens Days can bring home the reality of our global environmental crisis.

The future is rational only in hindsight. –MG Taylor axiom, 1983

To me, emergence is one of the most wonderful happenings in the Universe. One of the dictionary definitions...

July 9 - 14, 2006 | Sonoma State University | Rohnert Park, CA

This was my first ISSS conference. For Gail and me, it was the culmination of more than a year of periodic co-design, dialogue, planning and coordination with a host of other individuals and organizations. Over the course of the conference, I was fortunate to be able to play multiple roles: participant, designer, facilitator, performer. And there was so much I missed, or simply couldn't take part in absent of being in more than one place at a time. All in all, I'm left looking forward to the next opportunity to play with this remarkable community. Here are my highlights:

Nora Bateson reading her father Gregory's Allegory - "a flirtation between different ways of knowing"...

Pille Bunnell's elegant and provocative presentation drawing, in part, on Humberto Maturana's concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition...

Alexander & Kathia Laszlo's "Transiting To Sustainability: Nine criteria for walking the talk and dancing the path"...

The DreamScape art installation and ongoing performances of the Autopoetics...

The level of engagement and depth of stories created during the Thursday morning backcasting session...

Joanna Macy's inspired presentation on Friday morning...

Spending an hour and a half with Peter Bishop, chairman of Studies of the Future graduate program at the University of Houston...

And last but by no means least, that I was...

"We can't be part of the future if we don't have the stories." Participant in the ISSS conference

Last week during our Backcasting exercise at the ISSS conference, one group suggested a "Let's See What Happens Day" around environmental crisis.
Multi-dimensional, many-sided stories unfolded on the sides of story cubes such as this. Here's the idea: In order to bring to life the reality of global change, a series of simulations throughout the world would take place. Citizens would be made aware that on a certain day, all electricity, gas stations, water, etc. would be cut off. Citizens would have time to prepare and get ready but the simulation would be real. Several should be planned each year. Modern life would come to a halt during each of these simulations. What would happen? What would we learn from these kinds of events?

Learning from the simulation…
In the day-to-day work of organizations, it is difficult to "see," let alone understand, the complexities of the system within which we work. Information flows and feedback loops are fragmented and often subject to time lags so that it becomes very difficult to have any sense of cause-and effect. These effects are magnified in departmentalized organizations as well as those spread out geographically.

A benefit of a robust simulation is that it can model and reveal the 'whole system' in an intense, time-compressed period.

Tucked near the back of the July issue of Wired, there is an article about two types, or classifications, of creative genius: conceptual and experimental. The article focuses on the research findings of David Galenson, who in 1997 "almost by accident" happened upon an observation which turned to curiosity turned to hypothesis and ultimately into theory. The creative class of conceptualists figure out what they want to create before they set out to create it. "The hallmark of conceptualists is certainty. They know what they want. And they know when they've created it." The vast majority of conceptualist geniuses, according to Galenson's research, peak at a relatively early age or stage in their careers, most often twenty- or thirty-somethings. Experimentalists are tinkerers, forever approaching a realization of an idea, never quite knowing when their work is finished. Coming to knowing rather than knowing. They are typically late-bloomers, producing their best work after years of playing with ideas, tinkering, toying, tweaking.

Is it possible to think of organizations, communities and even civilizations in these terms?

"Planning is the ordering of resources over time. Success is getting things to follow in the right order." Paul Case

For many years I thought of planning as a linear process. It could be collaborative or not, but generally it was a typical project management process. Then when I read Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control, in 1993 and read chapter four: Assembling Complexity, I learned to think about planning differently. It is the story of restoring a prairie. Nature has a lot to share! Nature does not work in a linear fashion, achieving one goal at a time. Rather, it cycles through plateaus each one attracting a new higher order plateau. Actually, to me, nature seems to have a more fun creating than most project teams have.

"Anthropologists have found 'galumphing' to be one of the prime talents that characterize higher life forms. Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in puppies, kittens, children, baby baboons - and also in young communities and civilizations. Galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity. It is profligate, excessive, exaggerated, uneconomical... In the higher animals and in people, it is of supreme evolutionary value."
Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Matt and I have long used the word 'galumph' to describe our cats racing through the house with a certain gait, or when they chase grasshoppers or snowflakes with a wild spirited abandon. However, this is the first time I have come across the meaning and context of the word. I think back to the organizations and communities that began with a galumphing. The Well, Wired Magazine, GBN, The Calvert Fund, The Whole Earth Catalog, the Open Source phenomenon, The Learning Exchange, MG Taylor Corporation, Architectz of Group Genius are a few that come to mind. Years after their origin - even though some are now deceased - the memory of them brings them back to life. They all galumphed themselves into being. Each brought delight to both the production and user communities. There was an eagerness to engage, to play, to build on the ideas.

My recent run-ins with all things Slow began shortly after returning from the World Economic Forum on Africa. A colleague I'd met there sent me an essay on "The Importance of a Certain Slowness" by Paul Cilliers, which touches on the Slow Movement and then presents, from a systems perspective, an argument that "the cult of speed, and especially the understanding that speed is related to efficiency, is a destructive one." Furthermore, "a slower approach is necessary, not only for survival, but also because it allows us to cope with a complex world better."

How and where does the quality of slowness fit into events and experiences typically constrained in time and beholden to enormous expectations of outcome? In other words, what is the role of slow in an event designed specifically to compress weeks, months or even years worth of design and decision making into a few days?