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First published 12/21/12

May it be the end of the world where there are desolate young men.
May it be the end of the world where desolate young men shoot 6 and 7 year olds.
May it be the end of the world where desolate people shoot anyone.
May it be the end of the world of destructive individualism.

May it be the end of the world where ‘winning’ politically is more important than what is good for all.
May it be the end of the world where we always think it is us-vs.-them.
May it be the end of the world where we are so busy thinking about our next point that we don’t listen.

May it be the end of the world where our mentally ill live on the street.
May it be the end of the world where children have no access to affordable after-school care.
May it be the end of the world where a company values their stockholders more than their employees.
May it be the end of the world where condemnation of those different than us is acceptable.
May it be the end of the world where we wait for others to fix things.
May it be the end of the world where we blame others for not fixing things.
May it be the end of the world where money is valued more than our environment.
May it be the end of the world where corporations are treated as ‘persons’.
May it be the end of the world where a conversation is a competition.
May this be the end of that world.
May this be the end of that world.
May this be the end of that world.

First published, 12/11/12

In my last blog post I talked about how conversations are the medium for our communities to survive and thrive. But how are conversations working in your community right now? Is every town hall, city council, and community meeting getting the same results? Do the conversations revolve around the same problems, the same complaints, and does it seem like they move forward slowly or not at all?

There are tools we can use to change that! In this blog I will be giving ideas about how to have conversations that are different from the past, and have different outcomes. Peter Block, in his book Community; The Structure of Belonging, said, “Nothing in our doing or the way we go through life will shift until we can question, and then choose once again, the basic set of beliefs-some call it mental models; we’re calling it context here—that lie behind our actions. …Implied in this insight is that we can choose a context that better suits who we are now.” (p. 15)

All conversations already grow from the context that each of us bring with us. We have assumptions; about what is possible, about how others will treat us, if we think others will listen or not. We hold values and beliefs that we think others share or that they do not. We have expectations about how we and others are supposed to act in this specific situation. We are normally unconscious of all of these things, yet this is what our conversations grow from.

It is possible to change the results of our conversations by intentionally choosing a new context to begin from. So what does that look like? With any group you can have a guided conversation to uncover the unconscious context of the members, and agree to a new one that “better suits who we are now”. It can happen when you agree that something needs to change, and that better results just might be possible. You might decide that curiosity is more important than judgment, that spending time getting to know the others in the conversation helps you to listen better, that you all value authenticity and honesty. I can tell you that this exercise can uncover powerful connections, help individuals let go of barriers and give you the opportunity to have a new conversation with a new outcome.

As an individual, you will find that even doing this exercise alone can impact your next conversation. You might not be able to get a group to agree to this exercise, but you can do it yourself and see what happens. Attempt to uncover your assumptions, check what you expect, make a commitment that in this conversation you will listen intently for what you have in common with the speaker, and be willing to ask questions before you say that you don’t agree. Then let us know how it worked!

If you would like instructions about how to lead a context setting exercise, let me know in your comments. I will be happy to support a new and different conversation!

What do you think? Do you have a story about how your expectations created the results of a conversation? Have you ever decided on a new context and had a new result? Let’s talk!

One of my favorite quotes is, “Are we as human beings so immersed in conversation that, like fish inwater, conversation is our medium for survival and we just can’t see it?” It’s from the book, The World Café, by Juanita Brown with David Isaacs. It calls us to notice that conversation and communication are a lot more important than we think they are. Perhaps that is because so many of our conversations seem to be about disagreement and are often, a waste of time. There is nothing like an election to make us think that everything comes from an, us-versus-them mentality. But what if we realized that unless we figure out how to have meaningful conversations nothing is going to get done? What if we decided that we need different results from our conversations– or perhaps we will not thrive or even survive?

I think we DO know this, but just don’t know how to do things differently. Since we don’t seem to naturally know how to have conversations that are a ‘medium for our survival’, what about using a system that supports our ability to have conversations that matter? I think it is possible for us to learn a new way and believe that new results are possible. In this blog, I am going to be giving you ideas about how to design a Communication Web for your community. It’s about really focusing in on the importance of a good old-fashioned conversation, recognizing that we each have to take on more responsibility, use more communication tools, be willing to set an intentional context for our conversations, and be open to talk, think, listen and act together. Perhaps it is the only way we can learn to figure things out for ourselves, instead of waiting for; the government, the mayor, the president, the principle, …”someone else”, to do it for us.

It IS possible for us to have meaningful conversations so that we make the changes we need, together, as a community? I believe it is! I would love to hear of a great example of a ‘new conversation’. Have you done a World Café in your community? What was your experience? What have you tried and what worked, or didn’t? Let’s talk about it!

Our current systems are based on a hierarchical model, where there is a: boss, mayor, president, leader; one who is ‘in charge’. It used to work to have them be the leaders and make the decisions. But our world is so much more complex now, and you may have noticed, that the hierarchical model just isn’t solving or fixing things anymore. What will work is when we come together to –talk, think, and act! Conversation is our “means for survival.” In this blog series I am laying out a framework to support our ability to have ‘different’ conversations so that we can co-create different results then we have had in the past.

If talking together is what will insure our survival and ability to thrive then each of us; have responsibility and power. We can think about what it is to be ‘citizens’, and I mean this in the broadest sense to include anyone who is a part of the community.

Peter Block, in Community; The Structure of Belonging writes, “A citizen is one who is willing to be accountable for and committed to the well-being of the whole. That whole can be a city block, a community, a nation, the earth. A citizen is one who produces the future, someone who does not wait, beg or dream for the future.” (p. 63) and “Restorative community is created when we allow ourselves to use the language of healing and relatedness and belonging without embarrassment. It recognizes that taking responsibility for one’s own part in creating the present situation is the critical act of courage and engagement, which is the axis around which the future rotates.” (p. 48)

 

Being a citizen isn’t just about participating. It is in realizing that we must be ‘in’ relationship with everyone in our community. When we are ‘in’ relationship we don’t need to be best friends, but we recognize our interconnection and interdependence. It is in acknowledging that we create powerful results when we work together. Our best decisions are made when we; provide all people with information, contribute our thoughts, listen, are willing to allow divergence, and do what is best for all, not just ourselves.

Yes, being a citizen isn’t an easy thing, as Block reminds us, “The essence of restorative community building is … citizens’ willingness to own up to their contributions, to be humble, to choose accountability, and to have faith in their own capacity to make authentic promises to create the alternative future.” (p. 48) But, perhaps, when all of us have agreed to the ‘context’ of being citizens, then we will be encouraged by each other and it won’t be as difficult. (See my November 17, 2012 post to know more about context.)

Are you ready to try something new? Realize that the communities we want, the organizations we want and the world we want can’t be created by ‘someone else’. That we can all learn to participate as citizens and co-create a world where we can meet the complex and vital challenges we face. Democracy is all about people, because when we come together to talk, and think we can take powerful actions.

I would love to hear stories about how you are witnessing this in your community. There is so much more being done to ‘engage’ citizens. What do you see happening? What do you wish could happen? How are you being a citizen?

Today is Sunday and I just went to church twice and heard the same message. In the morning I went to hear Jerry Herships speak about his pub-ministry in Denver. He holds a service on Monday nights in different pubs. They begin each service with a, service within the service, by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the homeless. During the week they go out and serve them. Their service to those experiencing homelessness includes an option to participate in communion.

Jerry tells each person who comes up that communion is a reminder of how much God loves them. One day a man who has been coming a long time stops, looks him in the eye and says, “You guys are a reminder of how much God loves me.”

Jerry has found a way to BE church and BE love in his community.

When I got home I listed to a piece on The Moth by Al Letson. Al went to Malawi and visited young men in prison. The young men sang song after song and Al was swept up to join the singing and movement until he experienced God and heard the words, “It is well”. In the face of horror, pain, dictatorship and imprisonment—it is well.

He thought he might start going to church again when he got back to the states; but he ends by saying, “At church I was handed a glass of water. In Malawi I swam in the water and no glass was going to be big enough.”

In my last few years of contemplating, conversing and playing with what church might be next, these two things sum it up for me.

Church is going to continue to exist where it can give us a place to swim; where we can BE church, BE love, BE connected.  Where we can BE spiritual AND religious. I don’t think that is impossible. We might not know what it’s going to look like yet, but it’s going to be life—changing for all of us.

Last Call- by Jerry Herships:

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Serving-Drinks-Jesus/dp/0664260586

Love Song for Malawi by Al Letson:

http://themoth.org/posts/stories/love-song-for-malawi

The appropriate action to take to violence is to be broken-hearted.

• May you be broken-hearted;
• so broken-hearted that you are willing to surrender.
• May you be so broken-hearted that the protective layer around your life is cracked open.
• So broken-hearted that your heart is open and the only choice you have is to let love pour in.
• So broken-hearted that you are ready to ask, what can I do, what is mine to do?
• So broken-hearted that you let go, allow change, and connect to others.

I am sure that this sounds cruel. My heart hurts from how many heart-breaking things are happening in the world right now. But I speak from experience that the things that have broken my heart are the things that have pushed me to change, to open up to love and to others.  It isn’t that I actually believe the saying that God does not give us more than we can handle, sometimes life does indeed give us more.

As horrible as the mass shootings are I hope that they make you feel broken-hearted. There is no better reaction than that. It is broken-heartedness that led me to begin to take action. To begin to realize that there was something that I could do to make it better. My broken-heartedness opened me up to a life that was richer, more vulnerable and less passive.

We are in a time of great change. We are experiencing the results of operating in a human-made system that is deeply flawed and self-destructing.  You might wish that our old paradigm thinking that we can control what is happening would actually work-but it will not. The thinking that we can control anything is one of the main flawed ideas that has gotten us to this place. We don’t control anything.

We are already past the point of no return.

I know that might sound defeatist, or that all hope is lost. But I think we are being given the greatest opportunity. And that opportunity is coming to us through great pain and suffering.

The opportunity here is that our world is an unsustainable system. We operate as humans in a human-made system. Our human system is totally out of alignment with how our universe operates. Many of us feel the energy of things falling apart. Our human made systems are past the critical point and are disintegrating. What we are seeing is the violence, the polarity, the disconnection of our social fabric.

It is our experience of broken-heartedness that will help us let go of all the things that aren’t working. Our belief that we can and should control things.

Haven’t you ever had the experience where something in your left fell apart, and because it fell apart you were able to let go and do something new?

It is the events in my own life that were heart-breaking that my life transformed. Where I learned what it is to be in what I call ‘the flow of god’. May you find an easy way into that flow.

Aggression, competition and control are NOT part of our human makeup. They are not part of the natural world. If you believe that people are: mean, competitive, aggressive, controlling, then it’s time to let go of that thinking. That is not how God created us and not the truth of who we are.

Gregg Bradon, a pioneer in bridging science, spirituality, and the real world, speaks of how we have misunderstood Darwin’s theory about the survival of the fittest. In an interview he said that science shows that “Nature is in fact based on a model of cooperation and mutual aid, not survival of the strongest. …Violent competition does happen in nature, but it’s not the rule, not the model. … We have strayed from the model itself.”

It’s not you, it’s the sytem

It’s not you, it’s the system is one of my favorite things about systems theory is that it teaches; it’s the system, not the person. Think of examples in your own life. Haven’t you ever worked at a job for a while and then discovered that you were acting in ways that were not in alignment with how you would normally act or wanted to act? I once worked in a place where gossip and being negative were the ‘norm’ and it took me a while to recognize how I was acting “just like everyone else”. I also worked somewhere that being kind and considerate were expected, that’s a job I enjoyed because I got to express myself as the nice person that I enjoy being.

One way to release any negative thinking about how “people are …” is to look at our current system and see how it is driving our actions. In one of my earlier posts, Awake to our Hierarchical Past, I explained how our top-down system has foundational; thoughts, patterns and beliefs that drive how we act. Once we realize how the system is actually dictating our behaviors, then we have the ability to construct together a new system.

Tweet this:

It’s not the person, it’s the system! The system is aggressive but people are love.

Let’s look at how the system creates aggression.

Hierarchical beliefs

In our current system we hold a hierarchical belief that only some people have power. We have defined power as being about an ability to control others, or having power over. In our top-down model we think that you have to be in a top position to have any power. But authentic power has nothing to do with control, or holding a specific title. Authentic power is an ability to freely and fully express who you came here to be. When you are authentically powerful you share power, you share authority, you don’t strive to have control over others.

In the system we are in, we are told that unless you at the top, you are not powerful. I find this so painful, that the majority of us are left feeling that we are powerless. Think of how this system and belief drives people to be aggressive and controlling. We have to fight our way higher up the ladder to have power and to have authority. How many of the violent and aggressive actions that we witness in our world come from a feeling of powerlessness?

Hierarchical thinking

There are two ways that we think hierarchically. The first I call the expert model; we think that you have to earn the right to be at the top—and have power. To be on-the-top you need to be an expert; you have the education, the personality, the experience, to make us believe you are more worthy than we are to be the leader.

The second way that we think hierarchically is that we view competition as necessary. To get to ’the top’ requires being competitive and being in control of, or over others, is the “way things are”. We have been living in a world which is organized top-down. Because this has been the way things have been, we anticipate that others will be competitive with us and think that to succeed we need to be competitive with them. This tension keeps us hyper-aware and we switch between defensive to offensive thinking and actions; often aggressively!

Can you see how we are living in a system that makes us think that to survive and thrive that we need to be aggressive, competitive and controlling? We believe that only those at the top have power and to get to the top we have to fight or force our way into being seen as an expert?

Hierarchal systems are not created by God

Certainly many of our current systems reward control and aggression, but aren’t many of those systems failing right now? When someone talks about a new paradigm this is what is being talked about. We are already leaving that old system behind. We are still using it, but it’s time is over.

God’s system which can be found in nature really is based on cooperation and mutual aid. For me this is the bright light that is shining through the cracks and brokenness as systems fail. The possibility before us is that we have the power and authority to co-create a healthy new system. We are not—power-less over systems; they can be socially constructed and creating a system that invites us to be how God created us is possible.

It’s all possibility

I am excited because I believe that the transformation that we are going through is God is waking us to our true nature. We unintentionally created the existing toxic system that is failing and when we intentionally work together to co-create new systems we will be inviting people to BE who they really are; loving, compassionate, giving, grace-filled and authentically powerful.

I am pretty sure that is who and what God created us to be.

GREGG BRADEN: Internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science, spirituality, and the real world. Following a successful career as a computer geologist for Phillips Petroleum during the 1970s energy crisis, he worked as a senior computer systems designer with Martin Marietta Defense Systems during the final years of the Cold War. In 1991, he became the first technical operations manager for Cisco Systems.

Gregg Braden on Red Ice Radio: Quote used is at 13.25 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5Vab_xBV7I

Slime mold intelligence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXeygGxu8-8

Who we really are.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-high-school-basketball-team-incredible-sportsmanship/

Book by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett

Sometimes messages jump out and smack you. I was given a book and started to read it without knowing anything about it. I was reading it assuming it was a work of fiction, then realized it is a true story. I read a lot, and read many technical and deep things. But when it’s time for relaxation I generally read things that don’t go deep emotionally. This book, A House in the Sky isn’t light reading.

Amanda Lindhout loves to travel and over many years begins to take photos and write a few stories for a small local paper. She and another photographer enter Somalia during war time naively thinking that it’s safe for them to be there. As has been happening in that part of the world she and her companion are taken hostage.

In the beginning the story is fairly tame. They are treated well. But the problem is that the captors thought the two were press from a large organization and that they would be able to get a few million for them. But these two were just trying to get into big-time journalism. They had no money, they didn’t have family with money, they didn’t belong to an organization with money. When their captors don’t get what they expect, the story gets pretty horrible. She is repeatedly beaten and raped; day after day. Their captivity drags on because their families can’t come up with enough money to have them released.

The lessons here are feeling overwhelming to me right now. Who Amanda is able to BE is amazing to me. I don’t think I could ever exhibit the compassion and forgiveness that she is able to.

Seeing that the system is at fault and not the people:

I have written about how bad behavior is actually the fault of the system, and is not the fault of the person. I believe that and yet I know I would not be able to get past blaming and hating the people who would do anything like this to me.

Before things get bad Amanda has gotten to know her captors. There are a few head-men but their primary guards are a group of young men. One is trying to make a little money so that he can get married. One is a militant and talks about jihad, but mainly they are young men interested in learning more English and getting paid.

As Amanda’s situation gets really horrible and the young men begin to abuse her she works to remember who they are. She recognizes that they have gotten stuck in a situation that has cornered them. She believes that they are so angry and feel trapped that they have turned on her and see her as the cause. This is normal behavior in systems, when the system is failing we instantly blame a person. Amanda learns some things about the history of one of the worst of the boys and realizes that he is acting out from his own hard life. She actually tries to focus on the fact that these young men are not actually the monsters that they are acting like. It’s hard for me to believe this story. There isn’t a part of me that thinks I could do the same thing. Even though I have written about this very belief. I guess it’s something I believe intellectually but not emotionally.

I am being totally challenged by this story. A belief I profess to hold, and yet after reading this I am noticing how unforgiving I am right now to my brother who recently was cruel to our parents. I am noticing example after example where I am not living in the way I have ‘sermonized’ about. Amanda Lindhout has been able to BE the person I would like to be.

I hope to god that I am never in any situation anywhere close to what she experienced. I am quite sure that I would be unable to measure up. I am sitting with my heart torn open at the majesty of who she was able to BE. What a story to hold up before myself as a guidepost to what is possible. To who we as humans CAN BE. I hope I never forget to stop myself when I jump to judgment and condemnation. The gap is pretty big but I know that by reading this story I will be motivated to do a much better job. I will at least be able to catch myself not acting in ways that align with my beliefs and perhaps be able to hold a new perspective.

I am feeling so much gratitude that I ended up with this book and wasn’t aware enough of what it was about to decide not to read it. Sometimes we need to be hit between the eyes with something so grand and so challenging.

Thank you Amanda for being willing to share this story. And, yes, I do recommend that you read the book.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9781451645613-5

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