Books
D&D and Systemic Transformation
 
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Peter Blocks' "how to" manual for transformation.
 
An excerpt:
  • Conventional thinking about communal transformation believes that focusing on large systems, better leaders, clearer goals, and more controls is essential, and that emphasizing speed and scale is critical. The conventional belief is that individual transformation leads to communal transformation. Our explorations to this point lead instead to the understanding that transformation occurs when we focus on the structure of how we gather and the context in which the gatherings take place; when we work hard on getting the questions right; when we choose depth over speed and relatedness over scale. We also believe that problem solving can make things better but cannot change the nature of things.
  •  
  • Community transformation calls for citizenship that shifts the context from a place of fear and fault, law and oversight, corporation and “systems,” and preoccupation with leadership to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance; social fabric and chosen accountability; and associational life and the engagement of citizens. These shifts occur as citizens face each other in conversations of ownership and possibility. To be more specific, leaders are held to three tasks: to shift the context within which people gather, name the debate through powerful questions, and listen rather than advocate, defend, or provide answers. (p.73)
 
Comments?
 
 

 

Otto Scharmer's outline of the dimensions of systemic transformation and a process roadmap for bringing them about.
 
 
From the Introduction:
  • Finance. Food. Fuel. Water shortage. Resource scarcity. Climate chaos. Mass poverty. Mass migration. Fundamentalism. Terrorism. Financial oligarchies. We have entered an Age of Disruption. Yet the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal has never been more real. Now is our time. 
  •  
  • Our moment of disruption deals with death and rebirth. What’s dying is an old civilization and a mindset of maximum “me”—maximum material consumption, bigger is better, and special-interest group-driven decision-making that has led us into a state of organized irresponsiblity, collectively creating results that nobody wants. 
  •  
  • What’s being born is less clear but in no way less significant. It’s something that we can feel in many places across Planet Earth. This future is not just about firefighting and tinkering with the surface of structural change. It’s not just about replacing one mindset that no longer serves us with another. It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level of our humanity, of who we really are and who we want to be as a society. It is a future that we can sense, feel, and actualize by shifting the inner place from which we operate. It is a future that in those moments of disruption begins to presence itself through us. 
  •  
  • This inner shift, from fighting the old to sensing and presencing an emerging future possibility, is at the core of all deep leadership work today. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that cares about the well-being of all, including oneself. When operating with ego-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our small ego self. When operating with eco-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our emerging or essential self—that is, by a concern that is informed by the well-being of the whole. 
 
Comments?
 
I like this item 4.0 -- "seeing and acting from the whole" -- and I certainly do agree that "this is what we should be doing (if possible)".
 
The big issue -- the roadblock, the difficulty, the challenge -- might be that "the elephant in the room" is being perceived by six blind men, as per the famous metaphor.   We're all looking at the same whole, and we're all arguing.
 
What IS "the whole"?  How can we conceptualize it?  Speaking for myself, I am not satisfied with the models I have seen out there.  We've come a long ways -- but I think we still have some serious "transcending and including" yet to do before we are face-to-face with the container that holds it all...
 

 

David Korten's manifesto on systemic transformation