The Sixth Feature of a Flourishing School
It's process -- or is it purpose? Or is it the purpose that animates the processes . . .
Cognition is the fundamental process of life.
Every living system is a learning system. And how a living system works must be congruent with who it is and what it does.
In what ways, then, do we want our living systems to work -- and how will we know when they are?
Over the past three months, I’ve outlined the first five design principles of a healthy living system (you can find them all here).
But now I want to talk about the processes that allow living systems to thrive, and the purposes that animate those processes -- a relationship so inosculated and interwoven that, in the words of legendary activist Saul Alinsky, “it is impossible to mark where one leaves off and the other begins, or which is which.”
This should not surprise us. After all, to paraphrase Adam Kahane, to change the system(s) we’re a part of, we must first ask and answer the opening line of Hamlet:
“Who’s there?”
Principle Six: Adopt & Adapt
THE CHALLENGE
Your sixth challenge is to reflect on the way your learning community currently functions. What works well? What feels stuck? What might be getting ignored, or remaining invisible?
Now, consider which new processes (aligned with the way nature works) might encourage and promote greater truth-telling, shared decision-making (by diverse constituents), innovation, experimentation, prototyping, and comfort with failure? And of those you listed, which one would you be willing to pilot in the next thirty days?
THE CONTEXT
As far as conundrums go, there aren’t many more complex than the one that was facing South Africa back in 1991.
A year earlier, South African president F.W. de Klerk had ended Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven year prison sentence; begun legalizing every political party that opposed him; and set out in search of a way to negotiate a peaceful transfer from a racist past to a racially just future.
To help navigate such a landscape, de Klerk turned to an unlikely guide: Royal Dutch Shell, which for years had used the process of scenario planning -- in which a set of carefully constructed, plausible stories are used to demonstrate different ways the future might unfold -- to guide its own internal thinking.
Could the same process help a deeply divided nation envision its own possible futures, and contribute to creating a new reality in the land of apartheid?
As a member of the core facilitation team, Adam Kahane had his doubts. “Problems are tough because they are complex in three ways,” he says. “They are dynamically complex, which means that cause and effect are far apart in space and time, and so are hard to grasp from firsthand experience. They are generatively complex, which means that they are unfolding in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. And they are socially complex, which means that the people involved see things very differently, and so the problems become polarized and stuck.”
The problem is that we can’t solve complex problems unless we change the ways we talk and listen. “Our most common way of talking is telling. And our most common way of listening is not listening: listening only to our own talking, not to others. But a complex problem can only be solved peacefully if the people who are part of the problem work together creatively to understand their situation and to improve it.”
And so, over the better part of a year, Kahane and his team worked with a diverse and representative group of twenty-two South Africans. They “breathed in” -- observing the world as broadly and carefully as they could, and looking for patterns across what they saw and heard. They “breathed out” -- debating with one another what they were noticing, and what it augured. They talked about all the things that might happen, as opposed merely to what they each wanted to see. And then, eventually, they shared these observations with their fellow countrymen and women in the form of four simple stories -- one of which, Flight of the Flamingos, imagined a future in which the conditions were created to allow everyone, White and Black, to rise slowly and together.
In a pre-Internet age, the team relied on analog means to share the stories, from inserting a 25-page booklet into South Africa’s national newspaper to conducting more than 100 workshops across the country. But because the stories were simple, compelling, and illustrative of the country’s possible paths, they provided a common language for the shared aspirations of a deeply divided people. And, despite its myriad problems since, South Africa’s transition of power was indeed peaceful, hopeful, and galvanizing.
“The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with the world,” Kahane explained. Consequently, the essence of the scenario process in South Africa was “that a small group of deeply committed leaders, representing a cross-section of a society that the whole world considered irretrievably stuck, had sat down together to talk broadly and profoundly about what was going on and what should be done. More than that, they had not talked about what other people should do to advance some parochial agenda, but what they and their colleagues and their fellow citizens had to do in order to create a better future for everybody. They saw themselves as part of -- not apart from -- the problem they were trying to solve. They believed they could actively shape their future. And they understood that one reason the future cannot be predicted is that it can be influenced.
“If we want to change the systems we are a part of,” Kahane concluded, “we must first see and change ourselves.”
This, too, is the lesson of the natural world.
“There is an inherent exuberance and flow to the processes by which living systems continuously recreate and sustain themselves,” explains Stephanie Pace-Marshall, who modeled the Illinois Math & Sciences Academy on the seven principles of living systems. “They are neither linear nor formulaic. Life is simply free to be and become. Processes are both the creative (novelty-generating) and self-regulatory (order-creating) ways our systems explore possibilities, measure and monitor achievement, generate and transmit information, and get their work done. They are the known and observable behaviors, observations and rules by which a system achieves and advances its learning purpose and objectives.”
Biologist Merlin Sheldrake agrees. “All life forms are in fact processes, not things. The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today. Nature is an event that never stops.”
For this reason, researchers like Sheldrake use the word holobiont (from the Greek word holos, which means ‘whole’) to refer to an assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit. And the search for new words like this is not a trivial one, Sheldrake argues, because “if we only have words that describe neatly bounded autonomous individuals, it is easy to think they actually exist.”
Margaret Wheatley puts it another way. “Who the organization is (its identity) is inextricably connected to how it is (its processes of learning and change).”
How, then, should we want our living systems to work -- and how will we know when they are?
By this point, I hope it has become clear that the work to create a living system (and a living school) must always begin with three fundamental seeds of growth: establishing a clear sense of individual and collective identity; facilitating an open exchange of any and all relevant information; and supporting a deep investment in relationships. These conditions are what allow us to begin planting seeds of change, through the property of emergence.
To remain vital and alive, however, a living system must also design its own seeds for regeneration: it must notice the patterns that emerge over time; it must implement its own processes for creation; and (spoiler alert) it must erect its own structures for operation -- although not in the way we typically think about such things.
In a living system, for example -- as opposed to a traditional hierarchy-- structures are the last thing you add, instead of the first. Order, not control, is what marks systemwide health. Consequently, the central design challenge of anyone who hopes to build a living organization is the same as the one faced by Mother Nature: treating change as an essential source of creativity -- not something to be resisted or feared.
“One of the most important roles we can play individually and collectively is to create an opening, or to ‘listen’ to the implicate order unfolding, and then to create dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen,” writes Joseph Jaworski, the man who led Shell’s scenario planning in South Africa.
That’s what the processes of a living system should be designed to facilitate.
When they are, as evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains, a spirit of interdependence takes root, which is the mark of a mature living system. “Young immature species are the ones that grab as much territory and resources as they can,” she explains, “multiplying as fast as they can. But the process of negotiations with other species matures them, thus maturing entire ecosystems. Rainforests that have evolved over millions of years are a good example. No species is in charge -- the system’s leadership is distributed among all species, all knowing their part in the dance, all cooperating in mutual consistency.”
Indeed, as Paolo Freire pointed out, our work to find the processes that can provide a sense of order -- to the world, and in ourselves -- is never done. “I think that one of the best ways for us to work as human beings is not only to know that we are uncompleted beings but to assume the incompleteness.
“We have to become inserted in a permanent process of searching,” Freire writes. “It means that keeping curiosity is absolutely indispensable for us to continue to be -- or to become.”