​​Harvesting Pad 12: Tom Atlee
​​Part of "DandDTrans," a community of inquiry and action regarding the role that dialogue and deliberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time
​​Image courtesy of www.NewStories.org
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​Tom Atlee

​​My original note to NCDD was to "the field" (field of study, profession, etc., concerned with conscious conversational practice) as embodied and represented by NCDD.  It arose from a sense that we (D&Ders) as a field were focusing our energies and inquiries in personal and professional realms and, where we did focus on social change (as with diversity work or at the community level), our work sidestepped issues (like climate change and the degradation of democratic systems) that impact every other issue and/or have the potential for civilizational collapse and human extinction.  It was a cry of pain and tragically lost potential from within the NCDD conference which, by the standard of professional associations, was busy being a tremendous success.  It is just that a rapidly dying world was thrashing in pain and possibility outside, desperately in need of our special gifts that we were busily investing elsewhere.
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​​The fact that my note was originally seen by some primarily as disparaging the conference and NCDD devastated me.  It soon became clear that NCDD as a whole was not in a place to take my call to heart, and that that call had been inappropriate in the first place.  The burst of responses on the NCDD discussion list and Ben R's and Linda's picking up on it as a legitimate and pressing inquiry for interested NCDDers (not NCDD as an organization) were heartening developments.  This is especially true since - although I had my own ideas of needed directions - I felt that "we" (by any definition) basically have no idea what to do to rise to the occasion of extinction level (or existential) issues and their transformational implications (which is the reason I originally proposed a 5 day Open Space conference, for these, in my experience, provide a context for multi-faceted inquiries and breakthroughs in the midst of Mystery).  Ben and Linda were all fired up to dive into the inquiry in a very open way and see what emerged.
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​​I gamely joined as a "thinking partner", trying to avoid being drawn too deeply into an inquiry that had proven so painful to me.  But I got drawn in nevertheless and my life grew very complex during that time, a complexity that was increased by financial, health, and other issues not directly related to the D&DTrans initiative (except by its demands on my time and attention).  I observed a full range of thinking and feeling expressed by the few dozen people who participated in each exercise - from all over the worldview map and from simple to complex - and was duly impressed.  Given the relatively few participants (at least compared to the challenges we face), the quality of thinking was pretty amazing.
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​​The main place I dived in most intensively was in 3 virtual Open Space sessions on using conversation strategically.  Here, too, the thinking - my own and others - was enlighteningly diverse, broad and deep.  I did a summary of the first two sessions and will be adding in the insights from the third (and a few other conversations I was part of) and will be sharing that with my own blog and mailing list of 1600 people.  It may prove clarifying or useful for other folks seeking to use conversation for systemic and cultural transformation.
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​​Working with the "core" team was an intense experience of passion, intention, experience, expertise, diversity, and unity all pressed into a virtual ecosystem where the reset button was constantly being pushed as new insights and challenges unfolded.  In retrospect, we did remarkably well, albeit with some class 5 rapids which shook our little raft pretty thoroughly.  But someone(s)'s wisdom (and/or patience) always kept surfacing at key moments and our shared intention kept us in the container co-creating the container for everyone else.
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​​While I was totally overwhelmed by the hackpad at the beginning, I slowly became more familiar with it and how it could flow with the other events that danced around it.  I'm still a novice, but I can now imagine what it would be like to be familiar and facile with it (like Ben R).  However, I'm aware that a group would need to stick with it dedicatedly for many months to develop a shared culture and functionality around it.  That condition is hard to meet when people are coming and going, often seriously distracted by other parts of their lives, and when alternative technologies and technological developments often surface to challenge whatever technology the group has decided to use earlier and to which they have finally become well adapted, only to be challenged by whatever or whoever is new.  So some of the struggles with the technology that I and we experienced are just part of the disturbances that are endemic in our rapidly evolving technological culture.  Given that and our one-month frame, I think we actually did pretty fabulously.
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​​I enjoyed Maestro - although I was, as usual, frustrated with the shortness of the conversations possible in both WC and OS sessions (which is no fault of Maestro's) and by malfunctions in my interface with the social function (which showed us online who was in our group).  I especially enjoyed Zoom video conferencing during the Bohm Dialogues and our core group meetings, although due to internet connection and bandwidth problems I sometimes had to participate by phone.  The face-to-face-ness of video conferencing definitely adds a lot of value and dimension to conversation.
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​​The Bohm Dialogues were deeper than other conversations but not as deep as I suspect they could have gone with greater facilitative guidance to draw us further into inquiry.  The facilitators often were strong advocates in their own right on the subject matter, while I longed for them to model the kind of inquiry for which Bohm Dialogue is most famous.  (I am under the impression that the "balance of inquiry and advocacy" meme originated more from MIT than from Bohm himself, and my own experience with Bohm Dialogue was very heavily weighted towards the inquiry and "meta-comment" form of conversation.  However, while generating considerable insight and shifts in consciousness and assumptions, those conversations did not generate much progress ABOUT the topic being discussed, which often got lost in the nonlinearity of the meta-dimensions.  So perhaps what happened was totally appropriate within the context of our larger inquiry and challenge.)
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​​Overall, I think it was a very productive effort and will become more so as people engage in harvesting actions.  I still have my original question deep in my gut/soul, but given the magnitude of what we face, it seems like an academic exercise, as does most of my work and, to a large extent, the work of others.  What we face is so gigantic, so complex, so multidimensional and challenging of virtually every aspect of our lives, cultures, social systems, consciousness, etc., etc., that few of us can maintain anything remotely like a sustained relationship with it of comparable magnitude.  I know I can't.  I know that "the field of D&D" can't.  I don't know anything or anyone that can.  So I return to my previous stance of doing work I love because I love it, engaging with people involved in that work because they are remarkable people, and remaining radically detached from any need for outcomes to be different from whatever they seem to be at any point of time, understanding that there is, ultimately, no such thing as an outcome, only the ever unfolding of evolutionary process that includes us all and does and doesn't respond to our efforts to shape it.
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​​So:  Blessings on the Journey we are all on together.
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​​Coheartedly,
​​tom
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​Comments on Tom's Story

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​Ben Roberts, 2/6
​​Thank you, Tom, for this telling of your DandDTrans story. Reading it, I'm struck by the dramatic arc of this thing. And wondering how different it must have been for people who were not part of the field that generated it back in October at the NCDD conference. At what it is like to then hear parts of that story. [I stepped away for a bit, then came back to find that Griet had just posted ​+"an outsider's story!"​]
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​​So... I too, remember being in Reston and wanting to shout out "a cry of pain and tragically lost potential." And I remember how poorly your initial missive landed in the moment. I don't know that I ever told you, though, about how when I read it, I had to laugh at the way that it validated my own parallel experience, immediately shifting my story at the time from one where I was "out of step" to one where I was "channeling the field."
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​Griet Hellinckx February, 7th
​​Thank you Tom for sharing some of the mus
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​Mark Spain 10 Feb
​​Many thanks Tom for sharing open heartedly your story of how you got engaged with this project and the challenges your faced. I especially appreciated your willingness and capacity to listen to others and make a summary of the broad range of conversation that we covered. This is a very important quality to hold the container for this work. I am also interested in the critical startegic moments the host/facilitator or other participants could have taken differently to go deeper with the Bohm Dialogues. Having a strategic understanding of these moments of intervention could help make the whole process more powerful and meaningful.
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​​​@Chris Smerald​ 23 Feb
​​Thanks for kicking this all off. Thinking about your NCDD story the divide between logical vs. heartfelt purpose feels involved. The logic of service to members in their boat by NCDD vs. your desired service to humanity who could not possibly fit in the boat as your heart might wish (Though I was not involved and may have the context wrong). This work you spored does feel like the beginning of something larger though. As I helped with the harvest I could not but be overwhelmed by how many facets are represented here, a brain dump of an entire community and as a professional who mines context to earn a living my heart sees a completeness here that is diamond in the rough.
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