What is an underlying question that gives form
to your work or interest in this field?
How best to facilitate the emergence of evolutionary
consciousness in organizations and communities, as a guidance system
shaped by networks of connected conversations about questions that matter.
Why do we need evolutionary consciousness? Because that’s
what it takes to meet today’s towering challenges, and steward
the renewal of organizations in higher levels of differentiation and
integration, freedom and response-ability.
What is your personal experience of collective
wisdom in groups?
12 years ago, I met two wise teachers in the Earth Wisdom
tradition, RainbowHawk and WindEagle. Studying with them, I discovered
the power of paying attention in a circle of humans, walking in balance
and beauty, and the collective wisdom that can be reached when members
of a community share practices of self-knowledge and self-transformation,
inspired by generative patterns of wholeness found in Mother Nature.
I wrote about a more recent experience and glimpse of
collective wisdom in my blog entry about “intersubjective
enlightenment”.
I feel also nourished by the virtually collective intelligence
of the thousands of online networkers I met over the years in cyberspace.
The double portrait on the top of the page symbolizes the synergy of
the carbon-based and digital, silicon-based selves.
What is it about the work in this field that excites
you and connects you to your own deepest self?
The self is deepest and highest where it meets the evolutionary
impulse, the urge embedded in life to evolve toward “higher and
higher expressions of harmony and integration.” — Andrew
Cohen
What connects me with it is my intent to co-evolve with
you all, discover and realize my/our interdependent highest potential,
for the sake of today’s and future generations. I exist because
you evolve, and vice versa.
I feel particularly inspired by opportunities to midwife
the passage from a community of learners to a community that learns,
from a collection of intelligences to collective intelligence.
Please provide a brief storyline or snapshot of
what brought you to this work.
I've been a student and catalyst/facilitator of collective
intelligence in most of my adult life, from the student movement of
the 60's and the human potential groups of the 70's to the first virtual
communities of the 80's and the organizational learning/transformation
movement of the 90's.
The different phases and facets of my journey have been
inspired by a possibility expressed in the vision of CommunityIntelligence,
that I’m committed to help turning into reality: A world in which
people's capacity to reach their full potential is strengthened by all
human organizations. A world that makes obsolete the alienating division
of work and life. A world in which work as creative self-expression
ceases to be the privilege of the few.
On my discovery journey, I met many remarkable women
and men who became my teachers/mentors and friends. I’m lucky
to count among them Arian Ward, Bill Veltrop,
Charles Savage, Colin Macklin, David Isaacs, David Marsing, Doug Engelbart,
Etienne Wenger, FireHawk, Hubert Saint-Onge,
Jean-François Noubel, Joel &
Michelle Levey, Juanita Brown, Lisa
Kimball, Mike McMaster, Mike and Patricia Bell, Pele
Rouge, Pierre Levy, RainbowHawk, Tom Atlee,
and WindEagle.
How would you like to be available to others in
this field?
What makes me the most enthused is interesting opportunities
to form learning partnerships for discovering how to combine our talents
for reaching our highest aspirations, individually and collectively.
I’d be particularly interested to learn with change
agents who work with/in organizations AND are actively engaged in 3
levels of transformation: personal, business, and social. If you’re
one of them and interested in the following domains of learning that
I feel particularly attracted to at this time, please send me a message.
1. What is the role of corporations in the evolution
of collective intelligence, consciousness and wisdom, at the level of
the enterprise, a region, or humankind?
2. Why and how are communities of practice—free
associations of people who share a passion for the common domain of
what they do and strive to become better practitioners—moving
in the center of value-creation in knowledge-based economies? How will
that affect knowledge, innovation, HR, and strategic management, and
how to prepare for that?
3. What competence do leaders need to develop or enhance
to inspire and guide organizations as constellations of communities?
4. How to be an effective catalyst for the self-organization of teams/networks
of people engaged in researching and facilitating the various facets
and enabling conditions of collective intelligence and wisdom?
My primary contribution to this field is in designing
and facilitating methods for boosting collective intelligence in geographically
dispersed teams, communities, and organizations. I’ve been doing
that work for two decades, building on combinations of a broad range
of approaches that I found valuable, including: action research, appreciative
inquiry, the art of questions, Bohmian dialogue, boostraping collective
IQ (Doug Engelbart), Complex Adaptive Systems, contemplative practices,
knowledge ecology, organizational learning, pattern language, “social
capital” and “social hole” theories, systems thinking,
and WorldCafé.
Examples of my contributions include building frameworks,
models, methods and process tools. For instance: CI Innovation Architecture™,
Community Design Architecture™, Double Helices of Organizational
Evolution, Evolutionary Fitness Wheel, Knowledge Ecology, and Learning
Expedition.
I have just finished writing “Liberating the Innovation
Value of Communities of Practice" a chapter that will be published
in a book on “Emerging Principles, Practices and Policies of Knowledge
Economics," early next year. If you want to receive a pre-publication
copy let me know.
I am delighted and passionate about living in an evolutionary jump
time, when we have a chance to co-create the next civilization that
is already germinating in so many seed patterns of our emerging planetary
reality. I offer to be a resource to evolutionary leaders who want to
nurture those seeds while helping their organizations thrive in this
gateway decade of the new century.
Links to this site or others:
Frameworks and models
Community
Design Architecture™
Evolutionary
Fitness Wheel
Knowledge
Ecology
Learning
Expedition
Articles, book chapters and speeches
The
Quest for Collective Intelligence
Knowledge
-> Intelligence -> Wisdom: Essential Value Chain of the New
Economy
Nurturing
Systemic Wisdom through Knowledge Ecology
Designing
for the Emergence of a Global-scale Collective Intelligence: Invitation
to a Research Collaboration
Other resources:
Andrew
Cohen
Intersubjective
Enlightenment
Jump
Time, by Jean Houston
CommunityIntelligence,
Ltd.: “We envision:”
WorldCafé
|
