Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
“We want desperately to take uncertainty out of the future. But when we take uncertainty out, it is no longer the future. It is the present projected forward. Nothing new can come from the desire for a predictable tomorrow. The only way to make tomorrow predictable is to make it just like today. In fact, what distinguishes the future is its unpredictability and mystery.”
-Peter Block (Community: The Structure of Belonging p.105)
Holacracy has always made me a bit uneasy, and I’ve had difficulty pinpointing why.
My first take looked at the contradictions inherent in a CEO commanding that their company adopt a system which itself does not condone managers or commanding. That article was more about the process of adopting self-management than about any particular self-management structure. But I think Holacracy is an enabler (even if unintentionally) of quick adoptions that are more likely to have these contradictory properties.
Inspired by Chris Clark’s article about potentially moving beyond Holacracy, it occurred to me that there is perhaps a fundamental tradeoff at work here. A central goal of Holacracy is to make it easier and faster for organizations to adopt self-management (in part by providing “off the shelf” solutions). The part of me that wants to encourage the world to move beyond traditional power structures loves the idea of speeding up that process. And yet I think this approach contradicts a core truth: that how things are done is often far more important than what is done or how quickly it is done. For example, the ownership and responsibility generated in the process of co-creation is often more impactful than the objective merits of the solution itself. (See: Peter Block)
So by shortcutting its way to a solution, Holacracy bypasses some of the vital ownership-, growth-, and community-building functions that a slower, more imperfect process of creating a solution together would have supported. This seems to be a fundamental downside of any technique to speed up or short-cut growth. That is, the tradeoff for getting something more quickly is that it’s less robust, less integrated, and less whole.
This is not an argument that Holacracy is “bad” — these are legitimate tradeoffs, and different contexts will call for different approaches. But that’s also part of the point. Truly understanding your context takes more time than adopting an off-the-shelf solution.
“The ‘shadow’ is a term representing the personal unconscious, or the psychological material that we repress, deny, dissociate, or disown. Unfortunately, denying this material doesn’t make it go away; on the contrary, it returns to plague us with painful neurotic symptoms, obsessions, fears, and anxieties. […] One of the lessons that we learned the very hard way … is that if you don’t do shadow work, [all your other efforts] can get sabotaged by your own unconscious. […] Your shadow can accompany you all the way to enlightenment and back.”
-Ken Wilber (The Integral Vision)
So true, and yet it’s still unclear to me how this fits into Ken Wilber’s model of life, the universe, and everything.
Some truths I’ve learned about truths:
Do these truths also apply to themselves? (Metametatruths?)
“White segregationists said, ‘We can’t have integrated schools because black and white children might get to know each other and might marry each other and have babies.’ The Civil Rights Movement said, ‘This is not about marriage.’ But the white segregationists were right. You bring people together, they will actually learn to love each other. Some of them will marry and have children. It will actually change the fabric of society. When people worry that having gays in our community will change what marriage really means, actually, they’re right. When people worry that having a lot of Latinos in the United States will change the United States, they are right. We’re constantly making each other. … We’re going to create a bigger ‘we’, a different ‘we’.”
-John Powell (via Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, p. 119)
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It’s not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
- Marianne Williamson (via Ryan Schoenbeck)
“When you are ready to learn, a teacher will appear.”
-Zen proverb (via David Holzer)
“All [meaningful] change begins with a small group, for the small group is the unit of change. Even a large [gathering] uses small groups to create connection and move the action forward. The small group is the structure that allows every voice to be heard. [It’s irrelevant whether] everything has been said [unless] everyone has said it. ”
-Peter Block (Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community)
“A gathering is hosted; it is the product of an act of hospitality. [In contrast], meetings are called or scheduled. They are intended for production rather than hospitality. They are mostly designed to take the past and will it into the future. So they become one more version of the past. They either review the past or embody the belief that better planning, better managing or more measurement and prediction can create an alternative future.”
-Peter Block (Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community)
It is too difficult and time-consuming to make a “fully rational” voting decision, so we use heuristics (“rules of thumb”). In particular, we use:
The nature of the times heuristic: When times are good, you vote for continuity. When times are bad, you vote for change.
The identification heuristic: You are more likely to vote for people you identify emotionally with, with people who, you sense, “get you.”
–Francisco Toro (via Evangeline White)