Tracing back: influences, communities, and lived experience

This is a tentative weave of the core experiences and influences in my work, inspired by colleagues. I hope my memory serves me well, but no promises. :)

I landed in an engineering school but found myself drawn to people and intrigued by social relations. The university was the technical reference of the country, mirroring the advances of the world. But when I looked back 100 years, I noticed a striking difference: in human relations, things seemed to not have moved as fast and in more subtle ways. That realisation led me to dialogue, initially David Bohm and his peers, because I new I could trust physics. :)

Following this path, I ended up involved with a diverse group of people working with organisations. They introduced me to Deming, Churchman, Checkland, and the authors hyped at the time: Senge, Wheatley, Wenger, Maturana. I remember like it was yesterday working with “creating spaces and opportunities for shared learning.” Given that many people were from the business world, that brought me into the world of organisation. With this group I also learned some structures that invited shared learning: appreciative inquiry, world café, open space.

I was at a workshop on facilitating dialogue in Canada (2000, 2001) and there was a parallel group working on something called the Art of Hosting. I was intrigued, asked around, and joined that workshop the following year. I learned the chaordic path and don’t even remember what else, but I found a community. Many teachers, no single guru. At the time I was really following Tina Turner’s advice: we don’t need another hero.

In a distributed fashion, the AoH community developed insights for hosting learning spaces and dialogue. The highlight is the community more than the content, so have a coffee with someone. But if you only have Google for now, search for the fourfold practice, the breaths of design, the stepping stones. Practitioners also arrived with their own histories and kept practicing and exploring, so there are many intersections with other practices in the field. The last time I was at a community gathering, I co-hosted an Open Space session with a colleague. We explored what we had learned and found powerful from my systems psychodynamics background and her process work practice.

Forward to 2006. I was doing this work and experiencing the world of “human dynamics” in action without much reflection behind it. Things seemed to unfold in groups in strange ways. Conflict would be swallowed or amplified. Some people, including me, were scapegoated or raised as saviours. I wanted to understand what was happening and started a journey into group dynamics, where I learned about Bion, Klein, and most importantly, what it means to work in the “here-and-now” instead of the “there-and-then.” My first teacher’s dream was to attend Tavistock’s Leicester Conference. When I had the chance in 2012, I was there. I think you should go too. [1] [2]

The experience of group relations brought power relations and the social into focus, as well as emergence and unfinalizability. From Bohm and Buber, I became interested in the work of Bakhtin [3], went to read Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic novels, and found a reflection of what it means to recognise liminal spaces and refrain from synthesising other people’s voices to sustain a multi-voiced world. Search for dialogism, heteroglossia, chronotope, and carnivalesque.

There was a lot of reading during this period, while I was also teaching science at Summerhill School. Another author who crossed my path was Luhmann. He contributed to my post-humanist search by offering a theory that was not anthropocentric and used communication as its core, without relying on living systems or ecological metaphors. Insights from him helped me drop “human development” and pay attention to conversational spaces. His view of organisations as the ongoing regeneration of decisions is a fantastic invitation. You don’t have to accept the whole theory. But if you can open up to the possibility that “only communications communicate,” there is a whole world out there. [4] [5] [6]

It must have been around 2014 when a colleague suggested “Ontología del Lenguaje” by Echeverría. Drawing on insights from Maturana and Flores, the ontology of language presented a post-metaphysical view of people as social through language and communication. It proposed that we constitute the social world linguistically and don’t use language merely to describe it, but also to create it. (Hold your horses, not in the mind-to-matter sense.) [7] [8]

Paying attention to language and conversations looked like the work. That led me in two directions. One was a book called “Changing Conversations in Organisations” by Shaw, which seemed to be exactly where I was heading. Shaw used what I would learn much later were complex responsive processes to deconstruct the role of the consultant, facilitator, and host. Go and read that book.

The other direction was story and narrative [9] [10] [11] [12]. I came across work on networks and communities, frameworks for decision making [13] [14], and became interested in Geertz’s thick description, Snowden’s disintermediation, Bateson’s warm data. At that time, Chris Corrigan was bringing some of this work into the AoH community, and “data precedes the framework” made a lot of sense.

Because my work had been on participatory processes, I was immediately drawn to Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). Her “Working with Stories” is the magnum opus of the field and the place to start. PNI is a practical and non-reductionist way to listen to people’s stories and to the patterns emerging from them. I recently wrote a thesis using PNI. Download here

If this whole journey pointed toward experience and the here-and-now, it was PNI that made the work of Culture Sprint possible. By listening to people’s experiences in advance, it became possible to open conversations by inviting people to make sense of what is, using their own accounts and interpretations. That unlocked a condensed process for collective reinterpretation and sensemaking in the here-and-now, and for communicating and deciding on possibilities forward.

Reflection

Reading this text feels unfair in many ways. Talking about influences, there is a lot more that should be here and, most importantly, the citations are short on the depth of the people named. As you will see from the short reflections linked in the text, they are not essays. I hope they give proper credit where it is due. On top of that, some are decades old, so not only poorly written but hopefully with content that is a bit dated.

More than those shortcomings, I think the biggest one is precisely about experience. I had the chance to learn directly from some of these people (sadly not Tina Turner), but what is not in the text are the communities and colleagues where this was developed in the very local and here-and-now that I praise. Their names are not here, but practicing with them is what makes this more than theory and influence. It makes for lived experience. My collection of experiences might be unique and I could feel somewhat alone in it, but that might be exactly the richness of being together.

If you felt like listening to Tina, here it is.