What I've been doing

The way that can be described is not the absolute way...

-- Lao Tse

It's been a while since I last posted and so I feel the need to explain my absence from the blogosphere to the world. The basic justification is that I have been immersing myself in my MA in Participation Power and Social Change and, more specifically, the preparation of my Analytical Paper. The Analytical Paper is, essentially, supposed to be a kind of concept paper that can be used to frame the work I will be doing when I return to Seva Mandir. It will combine a contextual analysis, a conceptual framework and an overview of how I plan to go about addressing the questions that I intend to ask.

I won't go into the context just here, but the conceptual framework seems worth sharing. Essentially, I will be locating my action research project at the theoretical intersection of three main domains: complexity, power and learning.
There are plenty of theories related to each of these domains and I have been seeking out the particular ones where they converge. This has led me to a number of texts that have quite significantly contributed to the way that I think about my participation in the universe - and particularly in social life.

So far my learning journey here at IDS seems to have given me a much more solid understanding of the more philosophical dimensions of the work that I am involved in. In particular, I have come to gain a more solid understanding of the idea of 'epistemology' - a word I had often heard, sometimes used but whose definition (and importance) I had never understood so completely. I have also manged to explore the linkages between knowledge and power and understand how participatory action research serves to transform power relations by engaging people in the creation of new knowledge.

I have also had the opportunity to explore Mezirow's work on Transformative Learning:

"the emancipatory process of becoming critically aware of how and why the structure of psycho-cultural assumptions has come to constrain the way we see ourselves and our relationships, reconstituting this structure to permit a more inclusive and discriminating integration of experience and acting upon these new understandings."

Combined with Hayward's (2000) reconceptualisation of power as 'the network of social boundaries to action' and the very important observation that the very idea of negative freedom is absurd (she argues instead for a positive and political form of freedom), all this has amounted to a rather powerful set of concepts that have been making me continuously rethink the nature of and my engagement in the world.

On top of all this, I have been trying to familiarise myself with Ralph Stacey and the idea of complex responsive processes. Stacey has perhaps provided me with the most radical worldview of all. Three papers, all available for free, can be downloaded from his university website:

• The Emergence of Knowledge in Organisations
• Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People
• Affects and Cognition in a Social Theory of Unconscious Processes
  

Together these provide a fairly powerful explanation of the relationship between the individual and the social, consciousness and unconscioussness, meaning, knowledge, learning, identity, power and communication all from within a complexity-based framework. I have been doing plenty of learning by explaining and this has really helped me to internalise some of these new ways of seeing the world. I really don't think I can think about anything the same way again!

In that fuzzy space where complexity theory, power theory and learning theory intersect, I will be conducting my action research; exploring the ways in which I can engage in conversations that bring about positive transformation in human organisations (both Seva Mandir and the communities). I think it's going to be a lot of fun! The essay, however, which will only be 5,000 words, is going to be a bit of a challenge. So much to say, and so little space!

On a somewhat different note, I have been having a lot of really great conversations. Feedback - and the need for it - has been one of the recurring themes, as has the need to explore power relations within our learning group, and my Analytical Paper (of course)... Tomorrow will be the second complexity world cafe in which we will recap the last session, go over the concepts that had not been covered previously and then have some further conversations to explore what some of this might mean for practice... It will be interesting to see what kind of energy is present in the room as it will probably be my last opportunity to participate in one of these sessions for sometime :) I can't help but hope that this process of exploring complexity gets the wind under its wings!

It is now way past my bedtime! Sweet dreams!

Complexity World Cafe

On a radically different note from the previous post...

I co-hosted the first of what may be many sessions on complexity at IDS today! After extensive brain-scratching and chatting with colleagues and co-learners a World Cafe format was developed and we got a good mix of students - including some new faces from outside IDS - talking, sharing and co-creating knowledge!

I must admit that I was a little bit nervous before hand. I know the limits of my own knowledge and wondered what would happen if we didn't get the energy in the room that we needed (it was my first world cafe of this sort!). But we did! And after some initial concern that danced across the faces of people who felt like they didn't know much (most probably including my own!) once the process took off there were people buzzing around the big boards we had put up with marker pens in hand adding all kinds of wonderful ideas to the key-words that we had put up.


The key-words were: systems, self-organisation, emergence, chaos, non-linearity and attractors. We also had blank sheets up for people to add whatever concepts they might want. Everything got completely filled up and the curiosity and eagerness to share ideas felt almost electric!


The wrap up was a little rushed (and couldn't be finished) but it was really good to have Rosalind Eyben, a fellow(ess) here, to do some of the wrap up and guide the reflection on what had emerged. We ended with declarations of a desire to take the work forward, people volunteered to help out, suggestions rolled forth and I wondered how so much happened without my really doing anything. Quite remarkable!!!

Big thanks to Agnes for the photos ;)

As the dust settles...

Well, it has been a while now since I posted here! The dust is finally settling a little here at IDS and I feel that I have reached a comfort level where I can return to my blog!

I have not been inactive at all during this time! I have been furiously conversing, reflecting and also writing - it's just that none of it has found its way onto this blog. And there doesn't seem to be much of a way that I can do justice to the experience I have been having. I have started maintaining a journal using Tomboy on Linux, which allows me to link up all my reflections, reading notes, class/lecture notes, daily to do lists and so on with each other.

I have also set up a ning platform for our class (presently limited to just the 9 of us) after everyone agreed on it and have made a couple of posts up there as part of my reflective practice and also as part of the effort to get it up and running properly. There is much to learn about how my co-learners and I can and will function in this virtual space... There is, of course, at least as much to be learned about how we function in the real spaces that we share together...

In any case, this posting is merely to explain the absence and to point out that some slightly more consistent blogging can be expected here. I was thinking that, amongst other things, I could use this space for my meta-reflections - reflections on how I have been reflecting, learning and changing as part of the course. In the meanwhile, however, I will follow up with a few posts from the ning platform.

Also for an update, I have initiated a long with some co-learners a process for establishing a 'complexity' group. The remit is appropriately fuzzy at the time being but it is essentially supposed to function as a kind of platform for all those interested in and/or working with 'complexity' in any of its various guises to engage in dialogue and learning together... hopefully in order to figure out new ways of translating whatever emerges into new and more effective ways of being and doing... This should be most interesting (even though I won't be around to see it directly)!

Aside from that there is a 'Questioning Development' group (funny how that's been one of the labels I've been using in this blog for some time now!) set up by some co-learners that has started meeting regularly and this is generating some hot stuff for everyone to sink their teeth, minds and souls into. We seem to have quickly entered difficult terrain here; with one of the key subjects for discussion being around the need for deeper acknowledgement of historicity in development interventions and also the need for a deeper acknowledgement of the pain and injustice that has been (and still is being) meted out in much of the non-Western world as part a process that supports Western lifestyle and consumption patterns. Great. We will continue to delve into this, with all the pain and difficulty that it entails. There is much space to be held as we question the very notion of 'development'...

Which reminds me of what triggered me to return to this blog... I read just now, the following quote in a review of World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent Times by Joanna Macy (2007) on Amazon (see here) and thought it was really rather worth sharing with the wider world. It also makes me think I should be reading this book!

"Development is not imitating the West. Development is not high-cost industrial complexes, chemical fertilizers and mammoth hydro-electric dams. It is not selling your soul for unnecessary consumer items or schemes to get rich quick. Development is waking up - waking up our true potential as persons and as a society." (p. 132)

On that note, following are two posts that I had shared on the ning platform... Not perfect pieces, very much raw and unedited, but I've decided to share them nonetheless! So here goes...

Some positive feedback on the 6th CP process

Another pleasing outcome of today's 'last' meeting for the 6th CP process has been the positive feedback on the overall process received by the team (which includes me). It was good to hear people voicing many of the points that I had mentioned in an earlier post based on my own observations. I guess it means that something has worked :)

My biggest fear, however, lingers: we have said great things, and committed to great actions... but when it comes to delivering, how will we avoid those old attractors - those negative, self-defeating behaviours and patterns encoded in our relationships and values that lock up our potential...

Having said that, I do seem to have been accorded (publicly) responsibility for helping to ensure that the conversations continue, that people from the organisation keep on coming together to talk about their work and to feed this into the organisation's ongoing evolution...This is great because it's definitely part of what I hope to work on when I come back for my field placement in January! It will be fascinating to help the oragnisation through the difficult process of untangling its great commitments in the form of new and more effective ways of relating to and engaging with the change process!

on complexity, chaos and self-organisation

Just the other day, I was reading a post by Dave Snowden on management vs. self-organisation that triggered a few questions in my mind... This is what I commented:

chaos and anarchy are not the same thing at all. anarchy would imply not having any ruler but this does not mean chaos since a group can be self-governing and leadership a dynamic and distributed process... take for example the classical example of a jazz quartet doing improvisation (would it mean anything to say that the underlying form of the music manages the player's interactions)? now, can the same thing be said of management? can a system be said to display self-management or self-organising properties?

i often come up across this question in the context of my work... is it about the coordinator 'coordinating' the team or is it about there being 'coordination' within the team and does thinking about it differently lead to different ways of trying to achieve the end result (i.e. a team operating with a high level of coordination or coherence)?

For some reason, I also thought that self-organisation was supposed to be a property of complex, not chaotic (= lacking any organisation or coherence) systems... tipping a system into a chaotic state may be a way of temporarily unlocking the system so that it has greater chance of self-organising in new ways (this would also be where the role of the 'manager' comes in - creating the container/parameters within which all this can happen)... It's also worth pointing out that self-organising does not mean 'good'.

I also think that you can call it management if you prefer the horse analogy but there can be many other words for it... one, possibly more appropriate one - given all the connotations - might be facilitation... but then perhaps there is a scale from command and control (absolute micro-management) to not doing anything at all (with facilitation somewhere more towards not doing anything)?

but what I understood from what I have read, practiced and reflected on of systems theory is that the whole point is that regardless of what you are doing in the system (i'm talking about an organisational -i.e. complex - system here), the system has its own complex dynamics, attractors, etc. - which leads to self-organisation (which could be good or bad)... so, like you said (but in different words?), the manager has to work with the self-organising characteristics of a complex system in order to help it continuously transition to levels which secure it a better fit with more of its external environment... in a social (human organisational) system, this would entail communication and quite possibly involving the whole system in the management of itself...

for some reason this always gets me thinking about the fact that little organisms had a big hand in making our atmosphere into something breathable... and plants which continue to play a critical role in regulating the earthly climate...

sorry for the rambling! does this make any sense?