The Fifth Feature of a Flourishing School

It's the patterns, stupid . . .

Which patterns provide the clearest indication of the current state of life on earth?

Which patterns provide the clearest indication of the current state of life in you?

And what’s the relationship between the two?

As the polymath Gregory Bateson famously observed, the pattern which connects all living systems is “a pattern of patterns.” Indeed, patterns comprise one of the seven core design principles of the natural world.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve shared articles for four of those principles: IDENTITY, INFORMATION, RELATIONSHIPS, and EMERGENCE. 

This week, let’s dive into the fifth, PATTERNS -- a.k.a. the bread-crumb trail(s) we leave and follow in order to better understand what (& how) we might become something different than before.

Principle Five: Find the Pattern(s)

THE CHALLENGE

Your challenge is to draw a picture that represents your core personal and/or professional community. 

When you think about this shared culture, what it values, and how it functions, what images or metaphors come to mind?

Once you’ve drawn it, reflect on its deeper meaning. To what extent does your metaphor reflect your community in its ideal state? And if it’s not in its ideal state, what is holding you back, and what is required in order to help propel you all forward?

THE CONTEXT

Everyone knows the world is changing. But sometimes it’s hard to make sense of just how far, and how fast.

Consider this: in 1,000 B.C., the entire human population was just 1 million. 

By 1,000 A.D., it was 300 million. 

And since then, we’ve been making babies at a rate one scholar described as “more bacterial than primate.”

Over the centuries, we’ve been just as bacterial in our making of stuff. Whereas in 1500, for example, we produced goods and services worth about $250 billion in today’s dollars, today it’s $60 trillion -- a 240-fold increase.

Meanwhile -- and as a direct result of all of the above -- one-third of the Earth’s land is severely degraded. There are half as many animals in the world today as there were in 1970. And we’ve used more energy and resources in the past thirty-five years than in the previous 200,000 -- the total amount of time that homo sapiens have been on Earth.

Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis says these are the patterns of human behavior that expose the fallacy that it was ever possible to achieve infinite growth on a finite planet. It is, he warns, “a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.”

Against these odds, it’s easy -- inevitable, really -- to feel hopeless. And yet just as past behavior patterns have laid bare the extent of the damage we have done to the natural world (and ourselves), so, too, can our propensity as pattern recognizers lead us to course-correct in the service of a different story, and a different way of being.

As climate activist Bill McKibben puts it, “the great advantage of the twenty-first century should be that we can learn from having lived through the failures of the twentieth. We’re able, as people were not a hundred years ago, to scratch some ideas off the list.”

In fact, part of being human requires scratching things off the list. “Uncertainty is the problem that our brains evolved to solve,” explains neuroscientist Beau Lotto. “Humans live according to the ideas that arise from their ecology, from their interaction with the environment. These ideas are what we see, think and do. Overcoming uncertainty and predicting usefully from seemingly useless data is arguably the fundamental task that the human brain, as well as all other brains, evolved to solve.”

Today, however, our evolution is attached to even greater stakes — no longer merely about individual survival, but the survival of entire social structures, and perhaps even the species itself. “Until we can expand our scope beyond self-centered and purely human concerns to hold in mind the trillion worlds alive on this earth at any moment,” argues Susan Murphy,  “we are living in a kind of madness -- which is to say, not living in reality. The great question of our time is whether or not we will prove able to wake into full awareness of the earth, and the geophysical changes now in play, in time to avert full-blown catastrophe.”

Journalist Joshua Cooper Ramo agrees. Whereas for centuries we all lived under the same systemic trappings of modern life (from capitalism to communism), today the spread of networks and network power is creating a new kind of order, and a new source of strength. “Anything not built for a network age — our politics, our economics, our national security, our education — is going to crack apart under its pressures,” Ramo suggests. “Our era is one of connected crises. Relationships now matter as much as any single object. And puzzles such as the future of United States-China relations or income inequality or artificial intelligence or terrorism are all network problems, unsolvable with traditional thinking.”

As a result, a wide range of scholars have begun to suggest, as Dan Pink has, that “the future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind — creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place.”

As this shift occurs, our ability to discern new patterns of life and social organization amidst the daily deluge of bits and bytes will determine how much longer homo sapiens get to stick around. “The emerging new scientific conception of life can be seen as part of a broader paradigm shift from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological worldview,” writes Fritjof Capra. “At its very core we find a shift of metaphors that is now becoming ever more apparent -- a change from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.” 

Educator Stephanie Pace Marshall is even more to the point. “Reconnecting to the deepest patterns of life reinforces the simple truth that in an interdependent world, it is relationships, not things, that create more life. Change the patterns — the configurations of learning, teaching, communicating, and problem-solving — within a system, and you change the system itself: its culture and its structures.” 

What, then, are the patterns we should be looking for? 

And what is the shape of the change we seek?

As you’ve read thus far in this series, a healthy living system depends on the interplay of three interrelated characteristics as its seeds for growth: the clarity of both individual and shared identity; the circulation of relevant information; and the strength of reciprocal relationships. These conditions are what allow living systems to begin planting seeds of change, through the property of emergence.

Over time, however, living systems depend on three additional design principles, which serve as seeds for regeneration: patterns — the things we notice; processes — the ways we work; and structures — the things we build. 

“To understand and work with the system,” says organizational theorist Margaret Wheatley, “we need to be able to observe it as a system, in its wholeness. Wholeness is revealed only as shapes, not facts. Systems reveal themselves as patterns, not as isolated incidents or data points. And in groups, organizations, and larger systems it is the structure of the relationship among individuals that -- when changed -- gives rise to different behavior patterns.” 

Conservationist Eleanor O’Hanlon has seen this theory in action repeatedly through her work. “The patterns of living relationships are always in motion as the animals test and are tested by the terrain, the weather and each other,” she explains. “Through the generations, they refine their capacity to innovate, adapt, and thrive together as one community, interdependent and whole. 

“To be what they truly are, to live ardently and fully, each one requires the other.”

This is what’s required of us as well — a willingness to observe the patterns of relationship that give shape to the systems we inhabit and perpetuate, alongside the courage to adjust our behavior accordingly in ways that will benefit the whole. 

It is, in other words, a fundamental part of being a well-functioning person. “Starting even before we are born,” writes David Brooks, “we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.” 

And so ours is the search for new sources of education and advice. “Pattern born amid formlessness: that is biology’s basic beauty and its basic mystery,” James Gleick offers. 

To which Nietzche would add a caution. “The more abstract the truth you wish to teach,” he once wrote, “the more you must allure the sense to it.”