Generativity — why now?
Life wants to have more life. That’s why we can consider generativity a core attribute of life itself, present in all manifestation of living, biological or social. In the world of humans, that broadest sense of the term informs as various and more special uses of it as adult development psychology, organization design, technology theories, appreciative inquiry, and many other disciplines.
Generativity is gaining a growing currency, with 1,570,000 Google hits and rising. It is particularly prevalent in social sciences and activism. Why now? Contrasted against the backdrop of humanity’s multiple crises, our times call for distinctions that open possibilities for new, game changing practices for enabling a better future, supported by a firm theoretical basis.
Generativity can be our friend in opening those possibilities. Just as any good friendship, it needs to be cultivated. With our Generative Action Research (GAR) methodology, we aim at contributing to that.
Through the lens of psychology and organization design
In ‘The Psychology of Mattering’, Gordon L. Flett wrote, “Generativity is the propensity and willingness to engage in acts that promote the wellbeing of younger generations as a way of ensuring the long-term survival of the species.”
In her inaugural lecture at the Nyenrode Business University, Professor Zandee said, about generativity, “It extends our temporal horizon and it awakens our yearning to create a future reality that is not available yet… When we take a generative stance, we ask what might be the noblest possibilities for human existence on Earth and commit to engaging with one another and the larger world in relational processes that bring those possibilities within reach.”
Kenneth Gergen argued for “the creation of ‘generative theory’ – a theory that challenges the status quo and opens new repertoires for thought and action.”
Bill Veltrop, a “generative change architect” and elder of the personal and organizational transformation movement wrote, “We see that which is generative as transcending and including that which is rational, linear, predictable, managed and machine-like. We see ‘generative’ as a ‘both/and’ distinction that includes our ‘either/or’ realities and helps us step up to the next level… We want to imbue this distinction with a sense of limitlessness, to offset our deeply ingrained human tendency to want to define, categorize, and otherwise ‘contain’ wild unimaginable possibility with a reassuring level of definition/structure.”
Bill has been a mentor to George Pór, the founder of Future HOW, and the Generative Action Research lineage goes back to him.
Our contribution to enriching the concept of generativity comes from using it to develop our distinctive approach to action research, namely the GAR, which is enhancing Participatory Action Research with the generative capabilities outlined below.
Generative capabilities allow an organization, action research, social movements or systems, in fact, any social holon, to regenerate itself into something qualitatively new. It is that regeneration that permits it to continuously serve its internal and external stakeholders in the conditions of rapidly changing and evolving environments.
What follows is a brief introduction to the four capabilities/waves building on one another, which are essential for that kind of regeneration.
The properties of self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating are autopoietic attributes of the GAR methodology. They also represent a developmental progression of the research community that requires skillful and heartfelt facilitation of the process. Each phase presents its unique dilemmas, opportunities, and challenges, the meeting of which results in strengthened or new competencies.
The last paragraph introducing each of the generative attributes describes how they apply in the action research context.
Self-Sustaining
Self-sustaining requires that the social holon has a collective nervous system, shared memory, and collaborative sensing and meaning-making organs. They are foundational to maintaining the balance of innovation and continuity.
For a system or method to be self-sustaining, it needs to attract and cohere uses.
In Generative Action Research (GAR), continuity is provided initially by the core team of the research. It is carried on by the commitment of the research community who collectively sustain the initiative. Change is dependent on circumstantial factors and unfolds throughout the phases of the research. This quality also means that the dynamics of the research can thrive beyond the time frame of the initial cycle, in which GAR was used.
Self-Improving
A self-improving system can revise and strengthen its capacity to serve its unique purpose, by:
- Setting the action→ assessment→ feedback→ learning loops so that they form an improvement-supporting infrastructure and become the target of ongoing conversation and action
- Establishing a “generating & generalizing” process for growing new capabilities, then offering them throughout the entire system
For a system or method to be self-improving, it has to continue the attraction process until a sufficient number of elements allow new combinations of differences to synergize.
During GAR, practices worth replicating in the researched communities are observed, validated, and documented in a pattern library. That allows them to easily move into play wherever and whenever they are needed. The feedback loops from the new use cases allow for the emergence of new, unsuspected combinations. Thus, self-improving primarily means that the holon is enhancing its value, over time, for the participants.
Self-Evolving
A self-evolving system is intentionally aligning with the most powerful force on Earth, evolution itself, by:
- Increasing its aliveness by deepening, widening, accelerating and nurturing the value flows that connect its parts with each other and the whole
- Embodying a culture that is prefigurative of the future society that it wants to call into being through its actions
For a system or method to be self-evolving, all of its elements need to be able to freely interact with each other, so that emergent evolution can occur.
When feedback loops are properly set for monitoring and interpreting the pertinent changes in the environment, GAR projects co-evolve with them, as well as with the deeper individual and collective aspirations of their participants. They can do so only by being deliberately developmental: conducive to the emergence of higher individual and collective consciousness and broader visions.
Self-Propagating
Embodying the core idea in a way that inspires others to awaken new possibilities in their lives, relationships, projects, and organizations, for example, by:
- Being an open source of learning and experience for others; consciously spreading innovative practices worth replicating
- Inspiring the birth Transformative Communities of Practice or deliberately developmental DAO guilds that learn, teach, and prototype bridges to a desired future state.
For a system or method to be self-propagating, it has to facilitate its re-use and transformation in new contexts.
In a sense, GAR projects are enduring infinite games. At this stage, they hearten others to start their own project, GAR-like or not. The underlying patterns of successful GAR projects, initiatives, and systems will be emulated in wider circles.
GAR projects propagate not by scaling up but by scaling sideways. Their praxis, the practice-led unity of their theories and practices, becomes an attractor for other collectives in various domains to re-use it in their own projejcts.
The Origins of the Generative Capabilities Framework
The first version of this framework was developed in the 1990 by Bill Veltrop, inspired by the Metamatrix of Gus Jaccaci and George Land.
The Metamatrix model used the words “Gather, Repeat, Share, and Transform” respectively, self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating phases. They represent aspects of generative capabilities, which we take into account in the unfolding dynamics of action research projects.
George Pór also integrated Otto Scharmer’s U Process in GAR and presented the updated framework, along with the four generative capabilities, at the 2012 meeting of the International Federation For Systems Research.
Applying the Generative Capabilities Framework
Our action research framework was first used in a project for establishing a network of communities of practice, commissioned by the National Health Services’ (UK) Leadership Academy. Our current GAR focus is to discover and promote ways to increase the aliveness of social movements for systems change, by amplifying their connectedness and impact with what Web3 tech and movements can bring to them.
We also provide on-demand Generative Action Research as a Service (GARaaS). Presently, we are in exploratory conversations with a few Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) about helping them meet specific challenges and opportunities with this approach.
As regenerative social movements become systems of influence capable of replacing the legacy systems, they have to go through phases of self-sustaining, self-improving, self-evolving, and self-propagating. The GAR methodology, relying on those distinctions, provides a robust yet flexible conduit for the necessary experimentation, collective self-reflection, and prototyping.
When used as a movement-building framework, its every phase (but particularly, self-propagation) can provide fertile terrain for the “transcontextual mutual learning” (Nora Bateson) among the movements and their initiatives. Their mutual learning is the best chance for discovering and walking on the pathways to humanity’s Phase Shift.