FootprintsintheWind.com

We have killed the law, or at least the people, by our work in money as our medium. Could we choose a better medium for our work? Life!?

:- Doug.

People are governments too.

:- Doug.

Engaging the new conversation—what if we are not lawyers but engagers of people? What if our job is what it always was—assisting people in meeting others with the purpose of making the world better? What could that mean today? Can we engage communities in conversation? Does conversation make for community? Can we seek good of the community of humanity? Clergy bring life to people’s relations to divinity; physicians bring life to people’s relations to their bodies; to what do we bring life?

:- Doug.

Estate Planning—it’s not about just money any more.

:- Doug.

There is a mystery, a mystifying, we do not wish to lose, for here there be wonderful good. We need not fear, for beyond the uncovering is ever more to mystify us, to call us on.

:- Doug.

We are living bricolage, artists making ourselves and each other as we go, out of the bits and pieces we find by the way—and the bits and pieces are making us and each other.

:- Doug.

Because the betweens are alive, we can neither predict nor control. We are providing the centers of life, which might actually be the betweens, with a nutrient environment, a time-place to play.

They play, they tinker, they juxtapose; they try this, they play that; some minds and some meta-minds catch fire. This is emergence; rather it may be enacting.

:- Doug.

We are seeking what will work, not what is optimal. We are in a supermarket with thousands of choices, thousands of right choices. We are tinkering, making bricolage out of each other. We are finding the raw materials not in me and not in you but between us, and the more people and the more diverse the people, the more betweens. And then the betweens the betweens react, and here may be where we get the unexpected, because we could not see that far. Once-removed interacting.

That might be why it feels uncontrollable, because we cannot control the interacting interactions. That might be why it seems unpredictable in specific result, but why we can predict something will squish out.

:- Doug.

Groundlessness ↔ Vertigo, but also Emergence ↔ Groundlessness.

:- Doug.

So the leader has to be willing to fall into the experience of vertigo when all are engaged.

:- Doug.

Contrast conversation-based meetings to a slide show put on by an expert. In the slide show the interaction is primarily with the expert and her material; any that occurs with a diversity of people is happenstance. The engagement is with one person who by definition goes away after the presentation. Any change introduced into the people is likely to be short-lived because the sand is removed from the oyster.

If we want longer lasting effects, we have to get people together in study groups or task forces and seek to apply it to our real world. Thus we come full circle to actually getting people engaged.

Except there is a difference: we are getting them engaged on something that may have little meaning and impetus in them. Pareto rides again: 20% might be truly excited by the new direction; 80% will not be. But if we have people work on what engages them, then we have the positive side of Pareto.

:- Doug.

With life

:- Doug.

In groups you are forming a larger system—a system of systems. That forces mutual adaptation and emergence of something else as this new system faces outward to its environment.

These systems (people) are forced to adapt to each other and their environment (which is tickled in them as the inviting question). They are turned outward by the inviting question to face their environment and with it react together, interact together, enact together. Little wonder that much innovation “happens” here.

But it does not just happen. It has at least a weak purpose, such as to alleviate an itch or a thorn. It could have a strong purpose, such as to change this aspect of the world. There is intention activated.

So we are bringing systems together to form a larger system to interact with their environmental systems. We are concentrating the experience of contact. Like squeezing an overstuffed sandwich, something is bound to come out. Except that here the things that come out are new, not predictable. We put pickles and ketchup and mustard and tomatoes on, and when we squish we get computers and grass and oinks!

:- Doug.

We’re people creating life creating people creating….

:- Doug.

Self-organizing webs and flows….

:- Doug.

Open Space is time compression—compressing months’ and years’ worth of work into a few days.

:- Doug.

Meet people—make life.

:- Doug.

We do not know how to make emergence happen other than get us together around a live question; but we do make it happen; we draw it forth, with some little purpose.

We want a world of significance; more than that, we want to be significant, to be heard and felt.

We want to mean something. This is our purpose—to mean life, to create life, and we do that by meeting. So meeting is the key to emergence, for we know something is there in the meeting and that something is living roads coming up to meet living feet—people meeting people making life.

:- Doug.

Emergence is not simply a matter of drawing forth worlds, but of drawing forth persons, life a-living, and that is an infinitely larger thing because each of these can draw forth additional living.

:- Doug.

What is emergence? It can be seen as part of this flow and wave. What is emerging is not just what life is or was or had in store for us, but it is a choice, and more than that it is something we bring up to meet us. Our presence is part of the emergence. The road rises up to meet our feet: this is a statement of both physics and cosmology.

:- Doug.

We live the world, the world lives us.

:- Doug.

Walk off a cliff or into a propeller:
The world merely tells us what we cannot do;
What we can do is up to us

:- Doug.

What is the middle way between the chicken and the egg? A chicken omelet?

:- Doug.