| Capacity for: | Actions: | | 1. ATTENTION | sense, probe, observe, listen, find patterns | | 2. INSTINCT | perceive, intuit, let come, know subconsciously | | 3. APPRECIATION | discover, play, learn, laugh, understand, thank, care | | 4. REFLECTION | suspend, consider, open, let go, entertain, explore | | 5. INTENTION | love, have passion. persevere, follow through | | 6. CRITICAL THINKING | question, infer, deduce | | 7. ELICITATION | incite, provoke, draw out | | 8. IMAGINATION | conceive, ideate, let emerge | | 9. COLLABORATION | facilitate, help, connect, cooperate, co-develop | | 10. RESPONSIBILITY | care, nurture, cultivate, mend, sustain, groom | | 11. RESOURCEFULNESS | bring to bear, supply, give, equip, prepare | | 12. CREATIVITY | model, recreate, innovate, realize | | 13. COMMUNICATION | relate stories, convey, converse, explain, describe | | 14. DEMONSTRATION | offer, show, exhibit | | 15. IMPROVISATION | respond, decide, try, experiment, perform | | 16. RESILIENCE/GRACE | self-change, adapt, accept, self-manage |
My list of 16 essential human capacities
THIS IS PODCAST #1 (16:40) -- CLICK ON THIS ARCHIVE.ORG LINK TO LISTEN TO IT. TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS.
DAVE: On September 24, I had the chance to interview Chris Corrigan, author of the Parking Lot blog and one of the leading voices for Open Space
methodology, a technique for addressing complex problems. Chris has
applied Open Space most notably with aboriginal peoples, and discovered
that this methodology is very similar to the way First Nations people
tackled challenges in their communities for millennia before the
Europeans arrived and imposed their much less effective
command-and-control methods.
As a prelude to this interview, to
tell you a bit about this very wise young man, I want to share a quote
from Thomas Merton that Chris posted on his blog today:
I
do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I
was more sure of 'answers'. But as I grow old in the monastic life and
advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to
seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can man make sense out
of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by
adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why
the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is
necessary for a good life?
My brother, perhaps in my solitude
I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms
which you are not able to visit. I have been summoned to explore a
desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and
in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark
land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear
and peopled by specters which men studiously avoid except in their
nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know
hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.
How
to Save the World has been talking about the need for what I call
Let-Self-Change, a process of self-learning, adaptation and building of
self-sufficiency and resilience that is, I believe, what we must all do
before we can hope to be able to make the world a better place, a more
sustainable place, and before we can start to create models that will
be useful to future generations when our civilization starts to fall
apart from its own excesses and fragilities.
So the first
question I asked Chris was about capacities, and specifically what
capacities he thought were necessary for us each to acquire and nurture
in others as agents for positive change.
He identified three
capacities. The first was capacity to act. This capacity entails the
freedom to act, the courage to act, and the wisdom to know what actions
to take. Getting that wisdom, through community and communication, is
the second capacity:
CHRIS: Sometimes it surprises people to
learn that I'm a really big fan of action, of doing things. So, I think
the first capacity is being able to act... The second capacity is 'how
do you gain wisdom'? ... I have this thought that what you need to do
to gain the wisest possible action is to sit down with other people. We
can make a plan to change the world but we don't really know the limits
of our own wisdom until we sit down with a group of other people and
say 'what is the wisest course of action here?'...
So the second
capacity is the capacity to get wisdom from others by sitting down with
them and re-learning how to be in communication with them. I was
reminded of a teaching from the Nuu-chah-nulth tribes here on the West
Coast of Vancouver Island that says that it is a mark of a person's
character if you're able to ask for help when you need it. The person
who can't ask for help is held in low esteem.
DAVE: The third capacity, Chris said, is sustainability of one's actions, and all three capacities are connected.
CHRIS:
The third capacity is that, if you're going to go to all the trouble of
acting and gaining wisdom from others, is to make it last. So
sustainability is the third capacity. And sustainability is all about
being in relationship -- to others, to the enterprise, the environment,
the community. If you're not in relationship with something, you have
no stake in its future, no investment in it. If you have a
relationship, there is a level of accountability, like in the old days
when business was done with a handshake. There is real accountability
when we're working with friends...
So sustainability depends on
your ability to have a deep relationship with whatever you want to see
lasting...So for me those are the three capacities. Taking action.
Taking wise action. And taking wise action that lasts.
DAVE: I
said to Chris that I thought the third of these capacities,
sustainability, must surely be the hardest, because it entails a huge
commitment of time and energy and attention, in a time when we are all
just too busy to sustain attention on anything. Chris mentioned a
speech he attended by Desmond Tutu in answer to this:
CHRIS:
What separates you and me from Desmond Tutu is that he wasn't a citizen
of his own country, he wasn't able to speak his own mind, he wasn't
able legally to organize, and yet he did all this stuff, and it was
just a question of what he chose to do with the 24 hours in his day.
It's a question of being selective about what really has heart and
meaning for you.
DAVE: We talked then about how you can help
engender these capacities in others. I was aware from previous
conversations that Chris' children, and many of the children in his
community, are home schooled. I asked him how he found time for this
along with all the other important and demanding things he was doing.
He told me it required looking at learning a completely different way
from the way school systems do:
CHRIS: We call it Life Learning, the positive appellation of 'Unschooling' ..
One
of the things Life Learning has taught me is that the more you let go
of inappropriate control the easier things get, and this is a lesson
also from Open Space, by the way. We feel the need to be in control of
our children's education, and lots of people who decide to introduce
home schooling feel the need to reproduce the school environment in
their house, to know how and what their children are learning. They
look to the education system to show them how to do this, so lots of
home school parents will do things like test their kids to give them
confidence that it's all working. We don't do any of that in our house,
because it's not conclusively known in the education system whether any
of that testing works...
It forces you into a more narrow box,
and doesn't allow the child's learning to uncover the complex
relationships that actually make up the world. They divide the world
into subject 'chunks' when the world isn't made up that way. The world
wasn't designed with math, geography, physics etc., all separate. So
having a much more interrelated experience of the world is our
approach. In terms of finding time to do this, this is something my
partner and I are pretty single-minded about. We carve out a whole lot
of time to be present with our kids.
My daughter and I both
subscribe to StumbleUpon and we'll send each other interesting items
and she'll be all over it, so then for the next week we'll be talking
about sacred architecture or quantum physics or Edgar Allan Poe [DAVE:
So the focus is on helping her discover, rather than teaching?] Right,
it's enabling her to learn rather than teaching her. This 'strewing and conversation'
approach applies to websites, to books, to people, to opportunities, we
just throw them out there, and some of them the kids take up, and some
they don't. And then we talk about it, about the experiences, and
engage with them and be present with each other.
DAVE: Chris
went on to explain that this approach, rather than providing a shallow
education on a lot of subjects, allows children to learn profoundly by
studying subjects that they feel passionate about in more depth than a
school curriculum would normally allow:
CHRIS: The experience of
watching my children and other unschooled kids who dive deep into
something is that the entire world is accessible through any door, so
that whether you decide to become a martial arts master or study
medicine or learn circus arts like my kids are doing right now, or my
daughter who's looking at sacred geometry...
When you engage
deeply into these spheres, the whole world is there for you, the whole
world opens up. That's where you see sustainability happen...So my kids
develop relationships with ideas, they develop relationships with other
people, they develop relationships with our community, so that when it
looks as if something is going to happen with those ideas, with that
community, they're right there.
DAVE: At this point we talked
about entrepreneurship, and the terror and self-doubt most young people
have about making a living for themselves. I asked Chris, as an
entrepreneur himself, if he had any advice for young people thinking of
creating an enterprise. He talked about the advice that John Holt, one
of the grandfathers of the unschooling movement, offered on this
subject:
CHRIS: It's not particular knowledge you need, it's
just the ability to know how to learn. Because we're not going to know
what's going to be needed in the future. You need to be able to learn
and adapt to new environments and new knowledge, knowledge we don't
even know is needed. So the first thing you need to do is let go of the
idea that somebody can tell you how to do this, to run this business or
to be in business at all. I know lots of entrepreneurs who didn't have
a clue what they were doing, didn't go to business school. That didn't
stop them. They just knew that this was a useful thing to do, that it
should be possible to make a living doing it, that they could
contribute.
[Because of technical problems I turned off the
recorder at this point. You'll have to take my word that I've captured
what Chris said during the last few minutes of our conversation.]
DAVE:
Chris went on to say that his advice, and perhaps John Holt's, to
aspiring entrepreneurs would be: Just Do It. Converse with prospective
customers and partners and people who know more than you do. Make those
relationships a permanent part of what drives and informs your business
decisions. Most importantly, he said, echoing the message of my book, never try to do any of this alone. He also recommended an out-of-print book on entrepreneurship called Get a Life, that I reviewed and summarized on my blog, and refer to as well in my book.
We
then transitioned to the concept Chris called 'active relationships'
which, he stressed, are much deeper and more pervasive than just
'networks'. Chris consciously uses the terms 'relationships' and
'communities' instead of 'networks' and I got the sense that he finds
mere 'networks' to be unsatisfying and shallow because they often lack
essential elements of active relationships and true communities,
elements like passion, commitment, accountability and responsibility.
I
asked Chris how we can go about finding people with whom to build
meaningful active relationships, for business partnerships and for
other reasons. His answer was to draw on another critical element of
Open Space -- the Invitation. A well-crafted invitation, he reiterated,
will attract the right people for any endeavour, whether it be an Open
Space event, a prospective business partnership, or any other important
activity involving relationship.
Active relationships, he said,
are built not on role or control but on friendship, trust and shared
passion. I've gone so far as to use the word 'love' to describe these
relationships.
My last question for Chris was what books he's
read that have taught him the most, and about what. His answer, perhaps
not surprisingly, was that he doesn't read books for instruction, he
reads them for inspiration. You learn, he said, by doing. What a book can do is to inspire you to do, to act.
We
ended up talking a bit about leadership, and the cult of leadership
that seems to pervade many businesses, where the executives are
credited, unduly, for almost all of the enterprise's success, and
criticized, unfairly, for almost all of its failures. What, I asked
Chris, can we do about that, to get organizations to realize that a
business is nothing more than the actions of all of its people.
Perhaps, Chris replied, we need to discover that we don't need leaders. Hey, he said, there's an interesting subject for your next podcast.
And
indeed that will be the subject of Podcast #2 next week. Stay tuned and
tell me, at How to Save the World, what you thought of this one, and
how I can make future podcasts better. Until then, this is Dave
Pollard. Thanks for listening.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
