FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 971

Our wholeness
embraces
the good
the bad
the smelly

Please pass it on.

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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.