What is an underlying question that gives form
to your work or interest in this field?
What are individual and/or collective practices that
increase the likelihood of us experiencing collective wisdom?
What is your personal experience of collective
wisdom in groups?
My own experiences of collective wisdom have included
Quaker meeting, dialogues with work teams, a circle of women friends
that has been gathering for the last decade, experiences in the gatherings
of three communities of practice: The Society for Organizational Learning,
the Courage to Teach, and the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership--and
sometimes when it is at its best, my graduate leadership course.
What is it about the work in this field that excites
you and connects you to your own deepest self?
At a logical level, what connects me to this work is
my work with dialogue, and with the processes that invite and engage
the full self of the individual on behalf of the collective endeavor.
At a creative level, what connects me to this work is my poetry, which
speaks through me, of many of the dimensions of being together, and
working together, in ways that invite collective intelligence.
Some examples perhaps will serve:
Different
Nothing
can be
repeated,
Even a walk
on the beach.
The sand
is different
after
every
wave.
Shards
The beauty
of the broken
and irregular
is clear
with seashells.
Why not so
with one another?
Cirque de Soleil
When I grew up
the circus
had the animals
in cages,
the elephants in lines.
Then even as that scene
began to trouble me,
emerged within our lives
a circus of a different kind:
no animals at all,
but humans with trapezes,
trampolines and bicycles.
Instead of ropes and whips,
there were long flowing sheets
of ruby-colored silk
from which the
acrobats could swing.
What saved the animals?
Was it our seeing
what we'd done to them
and feeling bad?
Or was it
that the beauty
of a way
of doing "circus"
so entirely new,
swept us away,
and saved us from ourselves,
and saved the elephants
and tigers too?
How would you like to be available to others in
this field?
I'm happy to be in touch via email
or on the phone when I am in my home in Hyattsville.
