Group Genius

Gail: My first realization of Group Genius was with young students. In 1976 I stumbled on Lawrence Halprin's personal notebooks in the library. He had written the words "group genius" beside one of his journal entries. At that moment I realized that my work was all about Group Genius. 

In 1980 when Matt and I founded MG Taylor Corporation, Group Genius became our primary process and these words defined it for us:

"The ability of a group working iteratively and collaboratively to seek, model and put into place higher-order solutions.

Time compression, consistent flow-state—the merging of action and awareness in sustained concentration and involvement to the task at hand, dynamic feedback, individual and collective creativity are core features of Group Genius."
 

Some of our clients have defined it, too:

• "Group Genius is the power of simplicity. Simplifying complexity to enable people to better understand ourselves and each other. A better understanding of our business is the natural consequence.” 
• "Group Genius is the ability of a group of persons to imagine, to create together and to realize. This has made us stronger, and most importantly, it given us more ideas, energy and vision."

Today, with Tomorrow Makers, the committment to spreading and teaching the art of Group Genius continues.

Sapiential Leadership

Simply stated, the person who can most clearly see the next step is responsible for communicating this step and facilitating or leading the group through it. In an age as complex as ours, it's unreasonable to imagine that any one person has all of the questions and all of the answers. To invest individuals with such responsibility creates unnecessary burdens and pressure and debilitates the creative edge of other members of the team.

This kind of leadership always resides within Group Genius. It is a kind of leadership that allows space to play, iterate, design and learn the art of flow as team.  One of our Axioms speaks to this: Everyone in this room has the answer. The purpose of this intense experience is to stimulate one, several, or all of us to extract and remember what we already know.

 

Resilience

The Resilience Alliance defines resilience as “the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future. Humans are part of the natural world. We depend on ecological systems for our survival and we continuously impact the ecosystems in which we live from the local to global scale. Resilience is a property of these linked social-ecological systems (SES).

"Resilience" as applied to ecosystems, or to integrated systems of people and the natural environment, has three defining characteristics:

• The amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on

function and structure

• The degree to which the system is capable of self-organization

• The ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation.”

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a temporary frame or framing element used for support in the creation, repair or recreation of complex processes, structures and systems. Our use draws on the usages found in construction, chemistry, engineering, design and ecology. Scaffolding helps align things that happen fast with those that are slow so that everything could come up together, in the right sequence at the right time.

See Chapter 4: Assembling Complexity of Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly for more on the role of scaffolding in emergent systems.

Panarchy

Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.

The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has led to the term panarchy. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable. Such changes comprise economic, ecological, and social systems, and they are evolutionary. They concern rapidly unfolding processes and slowly changing ones; gradual change and episodic change; and they take place and interact at many scales from local to global.

Our take on panarchy is closely adapted from the Resilience Alliance.

Paradigm & Paradigm shift

A paradigm is a pattern of assumptions, concepts, values and practices that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them. A collective mindset.

A paradigm shift constitutes a transformative change in the basic patterns, assumptions, arrangements that underlay a community’s collective mindset. 

When we speak of “the paradigm,” we are not espousing that there is only one paradigm. Individual domains and communities can all be said to operate within multiple paradigms. Each field contains tens if not hundreds or thousands of experiments and experimenters trying to identify, understand, influence and accelerate the characteristics of a healthy, sustainable social-economic way of life for ourselves, future generations and our planet. When forces and circumstances enable or cause multiple shifts to align, this confluence can trigger a phase transition at a global level.