A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
For the first time in quite a while, I am moved to consider a book project, something I do with a fair amount of trepidation. When an idea is powerful enough to take me over, I find it can be all consuming and I never really know where it will take me. I find it exciting but also disorienting, never knowing what leads to treasure and what to swamp land. Joining me in this writing venture directly is my colleague, Mary Gelinas, as well as colleagues mentioned at the end of this post who have actively pursued with me the creation of generative fields. Without them, I would surely be lost.
What follows is the opening declaration for this project and an initial introduction to social fields.
REVELATION
A REVOLUTIONARY FRAMEWORK
FOR AWE, EQUANIMITY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Revelation 1) An act of uncovering something that has been hidden from view.
2) Communicating from a sacred or universal source
We believe there exist fields, often expressed through suggestive metaphors, that influence individual, group and organizational effectiveness – from the most harmonious of social dynamics to its mirror opposite, corrupted and violent interactions.
We believe becoming conscious of these fields, in all their variety, and learning to navigate them can result in positive social transformation, including greater equity, justice, and sustainable living. Fields contain different kinds of energy and have unique histories that impose form and organization onto social interactions. Learning to create generative fields and disrupt dysfunctional ones will be the pioneering work of the next decades and current century.
We believe it is our evolutionary responsibility, individually and collectively, to shape what happens within these fields. Fields can be altered and by doing so create new possibilities for the future.
One of the primary way fields are re-made is through human consciousness. Only in the past forty years have we learned that the individual brain continues to develop through its entire life span, capable of neuroplasticity, the re-wiring of neural pathways necessary for learning and new behavior. By working at the edges of scientific discoveries of the brain and organizational insights about the nature of social change, we can become pioneers of new social forms, highlighting our capacity to adapt and grow without discounting the biological and historical obstacles all forms of social change encounter.
This post is a reflection inspired by an active dialogue between Kathia Laszlo and me, as we co-design our upcoming retreat Unfolding Wisdom scheduled for April 16th – 19th at the Mercy Center in Burlingame, CA. It is adapted from the original post at our Unfolding Wisdom website, as a response to Kathia’s blog post “Learning, Leadership and Spirituality.”
Reading Kathia’s posting on the threads woven through her life gave me pause to consider my own. We are made up of these threads and their weaving gives shape to our lives. Consciousness of how we weave and re-weave these tangled strands reveals that the narrator of events is as critical as the events themselves. We create the narration and the narration shapes who we are, and then we forget. Remembering our wholeness is recognizing the co-arising nature of both narrative and narrator. The poet Rumi says it with a most clever twist: “Do you remember how you came into existence? You may not remember because you arrived a little drunk. Let me give you a hint: Let go of your mind and be mindful. Close your ears and listen.”
My listening occurred in the dark womb of alienation. I was sixteen with no language for having a felt sense of being other. I felt little connection with my family or lineage; Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania observing customs and rituals from a religion that bore no resemblance to my experience of the world around me. Nor was I inspired by the professional aspirations that surrounded me in the working/middle-class neighborhood of Queens where I grew up. An image of the accountant who lived across the street was seared into my brain – trudging home at the exact same time every evening, head down, shoulders slumped; an advertisement for the fatalism of conformity and the despair of successful assimilation. Dramatic responses to desperation were woven into this world, but ones I could not foresee at the time. And not just for me: one classmate would become a famous playwright, another a porn star legend, and a third, director of the C.I.A..
What we need more than shouting our answers out loud is a quiet confidence in not knowing. We need better questions and most critically a practiced tolerance for allowing the new to arise from the old.
From the perspective of neuro-science, not knowing is an intentional choice to inhibit the part of the brain wired for certainty, predictability and control. Not knowing doesn’t mean we ignore what we know. It means we hold what we know lightly so something new can emerge. We listen to voices other than our own, seek to understand the system we are part of, and bring to light underlying assumptions limiting our thinking.
When addressing the value of uncertainty, I like to reference the concept of “negative capability,” a term initially articulated by the poet John Keats in 1817. He described it as the capacity of being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Organizational theorists were drawn to its implications for leadership. They observed how leaders, when encountering situations of great ambiguity, moved into defensive behaviors that only made things worse. And they noticed three specific defensive postures.
The first was to become overwhelmed, reflected in behaviors such as avoidance, postponement, or the inability to come to a decision — not because of the uncertainties but because they were in a state of fear or overload. The second defensive behavior was hyper-intellectualization; going into an explanatory mode that sounded good but resolved nothing and often was associated with becoming emotionally unavailable. The third defense– maybe the most common of all – was moving directly into action without thoughtfulness or consideration of consequences.
The linguistic root of the word “capability” is associated with holding or containing. I just bought pots for bamboo and was told to buy ones with thicker walls because bamboo can crack through the thinner pots. In the same way, our emotional and conceptual containers need to be strong enough to hold discomfort and large enough to cultivate new ideas. By negative, Keats was not referring to pessimism or destructive thoughts but the rare ability to be empty of pre-conceived solutions. By naming this ability a strength, he was shining a light on a leadership skill necessary for encountering volatility, ambiguity, and complexity – a skill we need now more than ever.
Note from the authors: We, Alan Briskin and Kathia Laszlo, have been in deep exploration on Unfolding Wisdom as part of the design process for an upcoming retreat on this topic. The retreat is meant for leaders, facilitators, consultants and change agents who are curious about the tension between intuitive knowing and its practical application in organizations and society.
Our rich conversation has become fertile ground for our future time together. The following post will give you a glimpse into our dialogue. We invite you to participate in it by sharing your own feelings and thoughts as comments. We begin with some initial reflections from Kathia, followed by a response by Alan.
