What Is Enlivenment

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
– Mary Oliver

“Enlivenment, the pulsation of heart, the warm inhale of breath, the exquisite sensation of touch, the extended embrace of hearing, and the keen perception of sight… “An enchanted sensuality of living,” wrote Dave Pendle, a colleague of ours at Campus Co-Evolve, in the chat window during a video conference, where we started exploring the Enlivenment Theory of Change.

Aliveness, this attribute of all living organisms and collective entities, is never a constant, unchanging factor; we can always experience more or less of it. Enlivenment is the natural process that occurs when we let more energy, information, and inspiration flow through us, from Me to We to All of Us. The more we support that flow by cleaning, deepening, and widening the channels, the more it can enliven us.

Seen through the “enlivenment” lens, the economy, education, and other social institutions are complex adaptive systems that can be (re-)oriented for making us, our organizations, and communities more alive, creative, and flourishing.

Enlivenment is not a given but a gift from the self-organizing combinations of myriads of unseen factors. Take our health as an example. It’s not a constant entity but an emergent quality of an extremely complex combination of hundreds of well-functioning organs, 37 trillion cells, a multitude of hormones, bacteria, and so on. 

Borrowed from biological research, the concept of “enlivenment”  is applied to the dynamics of social movements, for the first time, by our action research.

For realizing the fuller potential of those movements, “enlivening” is a more accurate term than “catalyzing” because the catalyst stays outside the change process, whereas action researchers are engaged in it both professionally and personally.  

Enlivenment, the deepening & widening of the flows between the parts, leading to surprising wholes, starts with oneself. Notice how more alive you feel when your mind, emotions, and action are all aligned in a flows state of creativity alone and with others.

Emergence in Nature and Society

Everything you see has roots in the unseen world.
—Rumi

Seen through the lens of different disciplines, the distinction “emergence” has different meanings and denotes slightly different phenomena. For example:

• Aristotle describes it as “The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts …”, i.e., the whole is other than the sum of the parts.
• In complexity theory, it refers to the rise of a system that cannot be predicted or explained from antecedent conditions.
• Related to biological and social phenomena, it refers to the unpredictable formation of collective capabilities coming into being from parts of a system, which can do something together that they would not do alone. 
• In everyday uses of the term, it can mean the process of becoming visible after being concealed, as when the sun comes out from the clouds.

“The concept of emergence is as evocative as it is open, simultaneously poetic and scientific, inspirational and aspirational.” Can Emergence Be Our Saving Grace? (by Anna Katharina Schaffner) It is that multidimensional quality of this distinction that makes it so well-suited to be both the focus of our research — discovering and building the pathways to a better future, as we walk on them — and be also central to our research methodology; the generative nature of which is characterised by the qualities of cyclic, participatory and emergent. (See more about that in the soon-coming HOW section.)

If reaching the tipping point into a thrivable world isn’t a question of critical mass but critical  connections among all those people, projects, organizations, and movements that work for it, then what would it take to grow their invisible mycelia into an enlivened social ecosystem that prefigures the qualities of the society that it is aiming for?

None of us has the answers. It will require the self-organizing collective intelligence of the research community and its stakeholder organizations to discover them in collaborative action and mutual learning.