Where LifeWork & World Work Mingle

Anna helped me celebrate the beginning of my Winter writing retreat. We went to the Medicine Wheel at the eastern end of the garden, pulled out the camping chairs from the storage box, and she raked the Wheel. We agreed that this ceremony doesn’t have to be ceremonious; let our hearts’ wisdom guide it.

When the fire in the center of the Wheel was lit, we sat there silently, going deeply inward…

I spoke first. Remembering the spirit of the Winter Dreaming ceremonies in the sweat lodge at the Ehama Institute of Earth Wisdom, I asked: What seeds do people sow at this time of the year? My master-gardener wife gave some examples of seeds to put in greenhouse pots at the beginning of Winter. Then the question arose, what are the inner seeds we want to sow and let germinate for the Spring of 2022? She appended the inner seeds that the world needs most.

Letting go and letting come

These writing retreats grow more and more surprising to me, year after year. I go in with a specific idea, even a plan for what I want to write about, then, as I’m readying to put keyboard strokes on screen, sometimes the moment of truth knocks me off the anticipated arc and sets off the flow of my creative juices in a different direction.

This year, those directions got a bit entangled by my multiple motivations. I wanted to write a whitepaper introducing an action research on Enlivening Large-Scale (social) Ecosystems. But I also wanted to sketch out the concept of the “Planetary Shift” learning journey to be launched at the Campus Co-Evolve, and of course, to perform the annual casting of my Circle of LifeWork around my birthday. Too many big inspirations for a few short weeks. However, they all came from the same terrain, the land in my soul where lifework and world work mingle.

I’m in the first week of the retreat. The topic of casting my Circle of LifeWork magnetized my attention more than the others and won. What motivated that choice was my hope that this retreat would be like a small-scale, indoor Vision Quest and would give me some clues on what I need to be/do in 2022.

side note: “Worldwork” and “world work”

I greatly respect the Worldwork theory and practice of Amy and Arnold Mindell, which excel at the holonic scales of group or organization. The difference in my use of the term “world work” is in its scale. When the subject of that work is humanity itself, what’s called for is bridging the gap between its present dire condition and fuller potential.

As facilitators of Mindell’s Worldwork would say, I also discovered that the energies playing in and impacting the group field also exist inside each of us. It’s just that whatever is my contribution to the work of the world, the size of the social field that I must be able to put my arms around and have an intimate relationship with is larger.

The blessing and curse of having been around for many winters

In the ‘70s, when I became a radical sociologist, I not only lectured about emancipatory human needs at the University of Paris but also supported the struggle of my students for academic reform and social change. I went with them to the demonstrations, and co-edited our pamphlets signed as “Les Irresponsables.” In those years, teaching and organizing for a world that works for all, not only for the well-off, was what energized me.

Over time, that drive didn’t fade away, not even in the ‘80s, when my journey took a turn inward, into the realm of consciousness expansion, first with experimenting with psychedelic substances, taking up meditation practices, then exploring the power of computer-based group communication for awakening collective intelligence.

Having become a consultant in organizational culture change in the ’90’s my attention shifted to advising open-minded senior managers, who were willing to listen (and pay for) how the tools and processes of computer-supported collaborative work could enable greater autonomy, versatility, and creativity in their workforce. Of course, I didn’t believe that my work could lead to ending alienation in the Fordist workplaces of corporate America. Nevertheless, I was curious of how far the organizational transformation movement, which I was part of, can go in the right direction.

Throwing myself fully into various experimentations, throughout the decades, with stretching the limits of freedom brought me new insights and friends, for which I’m grateful to my life.

Aging has also brought an uninvited and unpleasant guest, the slowing of the pace with which I can sense and absorb the new signals emerging on the planetary horizon.

I find the silver lining of that curse in my joy of learning from and friendships with younger people, who are adept at moving the edge.

Where maps and mental models come short

That autobiographical mini sketch serves as the backdrop to fast-forward to 2021. This is a time for integrating the main streams of my lifework. They can be summed up in three questions that nowadays fascinate me the most.I am also hungry to discover how they relate with each other, not as much theoretically but in the lived experience of people who care about them.

What is to be human?
What is a good society?
What tech is emancipatory?

Aren’t these the same questions that the planetary civilization itself would need to ask if it had a voice? The dimensions that those questions refer to are three river basins with many tributaries, both in my lifework and in our Emerging Planetary Reality. Realizing what I just said, I turned the casting the Circle of LifeWork” practice into a collaborative one by sharing the “triangle-in-the-circle” mandala at the top of the page with some close friends and telling them that this picture frames both my lifework and the Planetary Shift, in the context of each other and I’m curious of what it evokes, what insights and questions it may inspire. Here’s what one of them wrote back to me:

Nice, George. This is very inviting! By that I mean it appears correct, complete, and concise. Not the overly daunting, over thought, over complicated mapping we are used to. Thus, inviting because the average citizen on the street can understand and be drawn in, in a glance. Exactly what you’d want!
Yes, lots of questions come up – where is economy? education? governance? (I know you will treat that as constitutional elements of the good society). Same thing with Tech – what is tech? certainly not just post-electricity modern wizardly stuff? Language as tech for example, etc. Meaning crisis, what it is to be human is the glue for all of us. Will religion, spiritual practice, etc go under here? Could equally go under tech or good society 🙂
I know you don’t mean these as siloed pieces – But not certain regarding the visual with the arrows carries the message fully. Probably because the pyramid form is so stable – and stability is the point! Idea: How about trying to move the outer circle with the 3 legs of the stool, inside the pyramid, i.e., enliven the pyramid 🙂
Bottom line – love it! Get it! Can’t wait to read your fleshing out! Happy holidays to you and yours (which is everyone). Cheers!

His question — whether the visual with the arrows carries the message fully — triggered this response;

Absolutely not! It is not a classification system, so all phenomena don’t need to go under the “right” category. For example, you asked: “Meaning crisis (what is to be human) is the glue for all of us. Will religion, spiritual practice, etc go under here? Could equally go under tech or good society :)”
That’s where the map miserably fails the territory because there is a lot of interaction, crisscrossing, interlacing, and interdependence between the three corners that the simple, bidirectional arrows can’t convey.

Rivers of the Shift

My favorite way to reduce the loss of experience when abstracting away from it is keeping in my awareness the instances in which it is manifesting in my life. The result is an intimate embrace of lifework and world work, flowing in and out of each other and, ultimately, becoming one and the same. When we go through something like that then human species-being, good society, and emancipatory tech cease to be abstract constructs with little effect on anything that we truly care for.

I feel that’s what needs to happen at a massive scale before the rivers of the three Shifts depicted at the top can flow into and become the new mainstream. It’s delightful to notice that it is already happening in the blossoming social ecosystems in the three rivers’ basins. They are ecosystems of shared thoughts and energies manifesting in the socio-economic, cognitive-spiritual, and tech dimensions of our lives. In each of the river basins, there are dozens of “social movement” tributaries and hundreds, if not thousands of transformative initiatives and projects streaming into them.

Maybe some future historians of the Planetary Shift will try to develop an accurate inventory of the tributaries but the best that I can do to bring the triangle-in-the-circle mandala alive with real-word data, in the present, is to name some of those which my lifework has been in touch with. Whatever they are, my touch with them is not quite aleatory. Self-disclosure: what has been attracting my attention and creative energies over the decades was/is a certain North Star, the one pointing to the next step I can take to contribute to removing all barriers to individual and collective self-actualization at increasing scale.

What follows is a snapshot of some of the regenerative movements that flow into three rivers, seen before 2021 turns into 2022.

Societal Shift

What is good society?

That question begets this: what would it take for a society to generate omni-positive choices with increasing frequency? Let’s look into it. Because the future of our ascendants matters.

Deliberately developmental society

Holons, including societies, tend to differentiate, then integrate at a level of complexity unknown before, which is just a prelude to the next cycle of differentiation. Something like that is what happened to the two cells from which you came into being, on their way to become you, who is sitting in front of a screen and reading this sentence.

As technologies and the societies using them get ever more complex, so do their challenges. The era of binary solutions to complex issues is over. To grow capability in holding manifold complex inputs and contexts regarding those issues, we need to sustain, improve, evolve and propagate a deliberately developmental attitude. If you’ve heard of deliberately developmental organizations, then it may not be too difficult to imagine a deliberately developmental society.

Nothing less than that would make a society capable of consistently generating omni-positive choices. If we don’t want to fall into a utopian trap, then we need to ask ourselves, is that a realistic possibility, how would we get there? It would certainly be a big shift, but the good news is that it is already under way.

The tributaries of the Societal Shift

include such small and large ones as:

bio-regionalism, circular economy, climate movement, commons transition, community-based co-creation of health, cosmolocalism, crypto commoners, DAO, eco-villages, food commons, maker spaces, new news ecosystem (The Consilience Project), open source everything, platform cooperatives, re-imagining governance, regenerative agriculture, regenerative cultures, regenerative economics, regenerative finance, reinventing organizations, reinventing the justice system, solarpunk, sustainable/regenerative transportation, sustainable tourism, transformative education, Transition Towns, U.labs

Some of these labels indicate overlapping phenomena. Some of them can easily be co-opted by the dominant order, others cannot. All of them are expressions of efforts by a multitude of people wanting to create something better not only for themselves.

To understand how I navigate their ecosystems in the Societal Shift river basin, you need to know that I used to be an anti-capitalist until one day I realized that being an “anti-“ anything is still defining myself in terms of what I try to negate. So, presently, the movements that I pay most attention to and want to support are the ones that are making the old systems obsolete by working on building better ones.

What I find wrong with the neoliberal world order at the most fundamental level is that its ossified structures try to block the flow of life’s self-organizing and regenerating energies. We can witness those institutional barriers everywhere, from the command-and-control structures in soulless workplaces and the industrialized food system that harms our health, to the banks of centralized financed and the houses of (un)representative democracy, where one elected person is supposed to represent the creative intelligence of 10,000s of constituents.

Top the calling of the world work in 2022, my lifework may respond with the following two projects if they find enough supportive resonance in the social field.

Generative Action Research

A Generative Action Research (GAR) into enlivening large-scale emergence will be focused on deepening the flows of transcontextual mutual learning within and across such social movements as the “crypto commons” and some of the others mentioned earlier. This “enlivenment” action research is aimed at addressing the fragmentation problem of the movements. It can do that by discovering the multidimensional conditions that prevent increasing meaningful connections (value flows) within and across them and. The action research would also amplify their separate efforts with the best that Web3 technologies can offer to enhance their scalability, coordination and impact. I outlined the research’s conceptual underpinnings in the Enlivenment Theory of Change essay.

By the way, I just realized that the triangle-in-the-circle mandala can also be a visual symbol for the whole of my lifework GAR because any action research is conducted in 1st-person ( awareness, meaning), 2nd-person

relationships, culture, society), and 3rd-person (systems, technology).

Why to focus on the Crypto Commons movement? Because in its post-capitalist vibe, the commons-oriented peer production meets the radical tech innovations of Web3 and the vibrant, youthful energy of its members. A participant in their gathering, Sarah Grace Manski wrote, their ambition is “building systems incentivizing sharing, decentralization and cooperation, based on a global commons of knowledge, data, and the environment for the collective good” and “new value systems with the goal of constructing a commons-based global political economy.” — A post-capitalist guide to the future: crypto-commoners only want the earth

One of the anticipated by-products of the action research may be new ways to boost large-scale collective intelligence (CI) that I’ve been obsessed with since the late ‘80s. We know a lot about CI at the level of groups, communities, even organizations but almost nothing about CI, let alone collective wisdom (CW), at the scale of social systems and movements.

Given the manifold crises that humanity is facing, there may be nothing more urgent than meeting its CI/CW deficiency. I am holding space for the possibility of forming and funding a team of action researchers dedicated to that challenge.

Planetary Shift: a learning journey

Unlike an all doom-and-gloom dystopia or a paradise-promising utopia, protopia envisions a society which is designed so that people can continually and gradually improve it even if the improvements bring new problems.

We, at Campus Co-Evolve, have been on a 5-segment Protopia learning journey (aka “course”), of which we completed the first three segments this year.

The planned Planetary Shift learning journey will be designed for social movement facilitators and activists. Its purpose will be 3-fold:

To provide participants with powerful frameworks and tools for reflecting on and improving their practice.
To strengthen the capability of participants to critically absorb popular “planetary shift” theories and integrate any applicable lessons into their work.
To build an evolutionary learning community of movement practitioners, supported by leading academics committed to societal regeneration.

The format of the learning journey is yet undecided. I’m consulting with my movement friends about which of these options would be most suitable to their developmental needs:

A. Facilitated self-study combined with peer learning in real-time and asynchronous forums with invited guest speakers.
B. Warm Data Lab (WDL)-style program, focused on “transcontextual mutual learning” (Nora Bateson) among the participants representing various social movements.
C. Learning DAO, an educational Decentralized Autonomous Organization, with invited faculty, supported by volunteering members, crypto-based crowdfunding and a Community Knowledge Garden
D. A combination of the above

Regardless of whatever form the Planetary Shift journey will take, we will honour the Campus Educational Credo and let it guide our work. We also aim to use the process of designing this journey as a context to develop collaboration with the transformative education movement and such nodes of it as the Transformative Education Alliance and the European Bildung Network.

Meaning Shift

What is to be human?

I could have started writing this piece with that question, but I didn’t, intentionally. Our very identity has always been grounded and defined in the context of a community, from the earliest times in our living in tribes. The basic factors enabling the emergence of our ancestors from the animal kingdom, such as language, conceptual thinking, tools, and symbols, were all created in collective production. With the subsequent modes of the organization of life, industry, commerce, and other social institutions, came the differentiation of roles and, ultimately, the repressive, capitalist division of work that defines humans as job descriptions.

We are all multi-potentials

The “what is to be human” question struck me the first time, with an elementary force, some 50 years ago, on my way from a student movement activist to a radical social scientist, searching for an answer to it. I found it in a famous passage of The German Ideology (1845) by Marx: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

What I notice at this turn of the year is that all my roles are gone. No more “researcher,” “writer,” “consultant,” “community architect” and things like that. Yes, I can play all that but that’s not who I am. Of course, I still do research, write, consult, and build social spaces where people can grow, but the boundaries are gone because I’m fluidly interwoven by them. If I bring this or that bundle of my capabilities into play as the situation requires, then who am I really? (Some multi-potentials, polymaths, and neo-generalists are wondering about the same.)

The enjoyment of my work as play doesn’t make me forget that millions of my brothers and sisters waste their talents in the straitjacket of narrow job descriptions at workplaces run by the Machine. A promising sign of a better future brought already into the present is the rapidly growing number of organizations using Sociocracy, Holacracy, and other self-management processes that give members the choice to energize any number of roles sequentially or even simultaneously. In some Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, the members/owners have even greater degrees of freedom to contribute according to their capabilities and receive according to their needs.

Sovereignty is our birthright

The concept of personal sovereignty with a meaning beyond the political was introduced by Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger. In the words of the latter, “Sovereignty relates to the capacity for and demonstration of good (omni-positive) choice-making. We can define sovereignty more formally as the product of sentience, intelligence, and agency.”

Schmachtenberger writes about those three vectors as the faculties of the individual. However, the exploration of what is to be human is inseparable from their collective dimensions. One cannot practice “omni-positive choice-making” without involving collective intelligence and wisdom. That’s what connects the Meaning Shift with the Societal Shift in the triangle-in-the-circle mandala.

The main challenges to “omni-positive choice-making” have the same roots as the “meaning crisis.” At the most foundational level, humans are sentient beings with the capacity to perceive, make sense, meaning, and choices. Yet, as John Vervaeke says, “today, there is an increase in people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future.”

To manifest our individual and collective sovereignty as our birthright, we need to forge an alliance with the power of emancipatory inner and electronic technologies.

Technology Shift

What technology is emancipatory?

Let’s start with addressing what human emancipation is. Emancipation is “to seek out and defeat every (internal and external) structure and habit that enslaves the human heart and mind.” That’s the Medicine Warrior pledge I took 30 years ago in my training on the Medicine Way. I renewed it in my Vision Quest, last summer. The casting of my Circle of LifeWork, this time of the year, is part of living up to it.

Regarding technologies, none of them is emancipatory in and of itself because technology is simply the application of knowledge to reach practical goals (in a specifiable and reproducible way) which can be beneficent or maleficent, even insidious. Even mindfulness, in its McMindfulness version, can serve mostly to pacify the employees and citizens and accept everything that the system is dishing up to them. Or think of blockchain technology that can be equally used for get-rich-quick schemes by ripping off unsuspecting others, or for enabling Decentralized Autonomous Organizations to become the future of organizing bossless work.

Seeking out those affordances of inner technologies and ICT (information and communications technologies), which can be put to emancipatory uses is my passion. Inner technologies, sometimes also called psychotechnologies, are innumerable. Ken Wilber gave a high-level summary of the related fields, naming them as Grow Up by moving through the early stages of emotional maturing, Clean Up by doing shadow-up, Wake Up by doing spiritual practice, and Show Up by serving humanity in the world. I enjoyed watching a conversation between Daniel Schmachtenberger and Dustin DiPerna about the practices related to them.

Regarding the “outer” technologies, last year, I talked about Unleashing the Emancipatory Potential of AI-Enhanced Collective Intelligence at a conference in China and presented 10 opportunities for their world-bettering uses.

There are many other initiatives pointing in the same directions. Just to name a few:

AI for All that has a vision for AI, where diverse perspectives, voices, and experiences unlock its potential to benefit humanity.
AI for Good that wants to make AI a force for social impact, by bringing together the best minds and technologies to solve the world’s most urgent challenges.
Blockchain for Good that has a database of public-benefit blockchain project,
Council on Extended Intelligence that published a report on Technological Advancement in Service of People and Planet
Partnership on AI

There are also projects focused on protecting society from the negative impact of tech, such as:

I also appreciate the work of academic researchers, who write “Widespread use of machine learning (ML) systems could result in an oppressive future of ubiquitous monitoring and behavior control that, for dialogic purposes, we call “Informania.” To avoid this oppressive future, we develop the concept of an emancipatory assistant (EA), an ML system that engages with human users to help them understand and enact emancipatory outcomes amidst the oppressive environment of Informania.” But emancipatory uses of technology are not limited to AI. Even the “lowly” smartphone can find its way to fight social injustice. The “I Can’t Breathe: How Digital Video Becomes an Emancipatory Technology” research of 30 cases, in which a bystander digital video distributed via social media made a difference, shows interesting examples of that.

My Playing Field

I admit, there’s some wishful thinking in picturing the points of the triangle flowing into the new mainstream of the Planetary Shift. Fortunately, it’s not pure fantasy, as I illustrated with examples of what is already happening.

The three arcs define the space in which I feel like playing in the New Year. The collaborative learning expedition I would undertake with interested parties would scout out how the Meaning Shift, the Societal Shift, and the Tech Shift interact with each other.

What can people focusing on the whole of any of those domains learn from each other?

As I keep those questions alive, I will also keep listening to where the field wants me to show up, moment to moment. If this casting of my Circle of LifeWork for 2022 inspires you to share your insight, please do reach out.