Tag: otto scharmer

Ecosystem Activation

Just outside Berlin, during a 3-day Presencing Ecosystem Gathering in Nauen, I had the good fortune to challenge my practice in the safety of 35 friends and colleagues biased toward experimentation and social change. I experienced a profound shift in understanding the role of social art, and this post will hopefully map some of the contributing conditions to that.

As Otto Scharmer aptly summed it up after the session, we used a drawing “as a meditative surface,” as a specific tool for resonance—like a ringing bell—to “transform our collective attention, and give rise to a new type of collective container,” opening space for presencing and generative flow.

The drawing was about 8×8 feet (2.4×2.4 meters) on paper, made with acrylic, chalk, and permanent inks, crafted mainly during breaks and evenings, alone, in much silence. These are the main sections of the post:

WALKTHROUGH – CONTEXT – DRAWING – BLACK – PROCESS INNOVATION – LITERACY

WALKTHROUGH… Otto led the walkthrough of the drawing on the group’s final morning together. If you make it through the full ~17 minutes you will hear us each speak to essential parts: 1) Otto the cognitive aspects, the journey we had taken in the room that included key framings and a new process i write out at the end of the post; and 2) at about minute 10.20, my speaking to the inner aspects, the more intuitive or felt components that are suggestive of, but do not specify, meaning. It was hard to articulate, as i was still coming to understand what the drawing offered, not only what i had represented.


 CONTEXT… Notes scrawled from the opening evening welcome. For anyone wondering how my “scribe” writing is so tidy, know that the process is a slow one: from listening, to gathering data, to sitting with what is most relevant, to writing on a wall. It starts out as a mess!

Before that opening, though, in a strategy meeting with the Presencing Institute (PI) that took place days before in Berlin, my friend and colleague Manish Srivastava drew the image on the left. It was a midway mapping of a Social Presencing Theater (SPT) process from our smaller group. The details i carried most strongly into the large drawing were the placement of “aspiration” on top, balanced in a vertical axis with “earth” at the bottom. This axis seemed incredibly strong and held many other parts – such as infrastructure, conscious institutions, capacity building, and absencing (to name only some) – in relation. The axis carried through to the end of the sculpting, informing the direction of PI and the gathering.

Before the PI strategy meeting, even, there are other influences: 1) the drawing from a 2018 live broadcast for Transforming Capitalism, where i drew an activated, marginalized labor population as a texture, for lack of a more clear and dignified way to represent it (see image on left, and the area under “Value”, where my hesitancy is clear and the markings not…) 2) a 2017 u.lab session where the overarching theme was connecting with our deepest humanity and creativity, and where i used my hand and red chalk ink to represent reducing fear as a gateway to access the open will.

   

And one final, unavoidable reference… two painting series i worked on around 2007-09. Beats, on the left, made with only an index finger, channelling the small and intimate quality of a heartbeat. Pulses, on the right, placed with masses of brushstrokes, calling to the emergence and recession of our presence. These, as the images above, show the slow evolution of the “activation orbs”.

  

THE DRAWING… i’m aware this image suggests multiple interpretations, and that’s intentional, and i will leave it for you to find your own meaning. I’ve been wondering how abstract my scribing can be, especially given my love of abstraction in painting and my deep appreciation for indigenous arts. How few marks can a scribe make to adequately convey wisdom and story? How many words are really necessary? What is the balance required to engage and communicate with both the rational and emotional aspects of our beings?

Here are some journal notes, trying to document the layout and order of how the parts came to be on the page. First to come out: the channel. Last: “basic bravery.”

Overall, this drawing turned out to be a perfect example of working WITH what does not come out the way we want. Notice the two lines on the lower left, coming down from the main orb… The one on the inside was the first. It felt immediately off, mis-drawn, out of balance with the upper arms. I then drew another line farther out. Neither would have worked well on their own, but together they worked with the leg on the right and held the overall shape in place, like legs of a stool, or like a 3-legged spider.

Also of note are the many smaller drawings to the right, on white, which each person in the room had created during a brief exercise on generative scribing while i read a section of my book on “Source“. These drawings were on the wall the entire time i drew, and you can observe the influence.

THE ROLE OF BLACK… Here’s a picture of the obsidian mentioned in the video, and an inspiration for letting the shiny black ink (covering mistakes) take on a positive role. Earlier in the week, a friend had given me the piece on the right from Mono Basin, CA. Thirty years ago, i had collected the piece on the left from a beach in Lipari. My fascination with this lava glass was brought right into the present moment.

Otto and i and others in PI have for years associated the black backgrounds we choose to use in branding, drawings, websites, etc with a few meanings. These include a reference to social art pioneer Joseph Beuys and his use of blackboards for note-taking, i.e.; in a 1977 installation on “improving the future of society”. When broadcasting from MIT during u.lab and other session, i scribe on old blackboards, too, ones we’ve been fortunate to have available as built-in features of the old classroom.

Black for me also represents space, the universe, places untouchable and large that situate us as specks. I think of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Woodstock: “We are stardust, We are golden, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden” – as relevant today as it was then.

Black has a lot of meaning. Kandinsky had a somewhat negative view: “A totally dead silence… a silence with no possibility, has the inner harmony of black… Outwardly black is the color with least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minutest shades of other colours stand clearly forward.” He continues about white, just for contrast: “It differs from white in this also, for with white nearly every color is in discord, or even mute altogether.”(1)

I have a more positive view, where black represents vast possibility. It’s introspective, rather than extroverted like yellow. Black to me is old, wise, even seductive in its quiet. White is new, young, innocent, almost drifty, like dandelion spores in a breeze. Black is the most challenging color for me to draw on, and Kandinsky is of course correct: other colors can easily take on a neon quality and appear falsely bright, insincere. It absorbs light and highlights contrast. It is the silent, if visual, dance partner that edges me to take risk.

In this drawing, i was confronted with a double challenge: how to draw into black as a space of possibility and how to work with this shinier black that seemed to have it’s own, new meaning; it had come to represent denial, my wanting to hide my wrong words and mis-drawn lines.

The shiny black started to represent absencing, an “architecture of separation” that “facilitates disconnects from the world around us and the word that is emerging… which results in blaming others and destruction.” (2) I have been experiencing absencing—especially in the US these days—as a fixed state of society, an inescapable, dominant reality plagued by polarized ideologies.

But then, as I was sitting with the two unresolved bottom left lines, Arawana Hayashi led us in an SPT “Stuck” exercise, and my thinking instantly shifted. In SPT, you essentially find one pose to embody the current reality, then sense what wants to move. Then you let a new pose that embodies a future reality slowly form.

I started to make a connection between the pain and discomfort experienced in absencing and the parts of the drawing that i felt had come out forced, lacking care. When Arawana spoke these lines: “Seeing is not about the eyes; it’s about the heart” I realized my own stuck seeing. I was looking at the lines, not yet seeing with my heart into the possibility they formed. I was seeing the shiny black as a problem, not yet as an opportunity. Likewise, i had been considering absencing purely as a destructive force, not yet relating to it’s transformative energy.

PROCESS INNOVATION… In the walkthrough video, when Otto asks: “How generative are we in using the scribing?” he was referring to a prompt by Katrin Kaeufer, who had inquired about how we actually engage with generative scribing. Earlier, during a fishbowl conversation about ecosystem leadership activation, Jayce Pei Yu Lee, Olaf Baldini, and I (left to right, below) each scribed in stationary points that formed a dynamic triangle around the circle. Consistent with my experience of scribing, the drawings served the moment and then personal reflection, as individuals would walk by the posted sheets on a wall outside our main room. But it was more passive than active engagement. And Katrin must have caught this.

    

The result of her inquiry was that on the final morning, we slowed down to be with the larger, primary drawing; we settled into the image and let it’s energy—harnessed from and through the group—speak back. Hence Otto’s reference to Arthur Zajonc…

During a 2011 PI Masterclass, Arthur had spoken about the contemplative dimensions of presencing, and led us through a “focused attention” and “open awareness” practice while chiming a bell. He had us first focus on the sound and then relax into the silence, while letting go of the sound and the memory of sound to let come an afterimage. You can watch a video here where Arthur leads the practice (minute 29) “If I strike the bell, it’s a call to attention. Then sound the bell again, in memory, hear the onset, and the long quieting of the bell.” This image traces Arthur’s talk with us:

With this inspiration, using the drawing as a bell, Otto guided the following process:

1) He mapped out what i’ll now call “Four Levels of Engagement” (i imagine this language and description will shift in the coming months).

  • Level 1: Capture. The scribe records content, and those in the room get the image as an “after-artifact”.
  • Level 2:  Observe. People look at a drawing at the end of a workshop, as a final product.
  • Level 3: Reflect. Participants have touch points with the drawing midway in their process, to allow for reflection.
  • Level 4: Resonate. The social body opens up, shares stillness, absorbs the drawing, and contemplates any “afterimage”.

2) Otto and I each offered an orientation to the drawing, as a guide from observation into reflection.

3) Clustered at the wall, the group then attended to the image at level 4 for a few minutes, in silence, and then proceeded back to the circle.

4) Those in the room let go of the content of the drawing, stayed with the after-image, and tuned into the resonance. Then we payed attention to what was arising in terms of images, feelings, gestures.

5) We engaged in open, generative dialogue, with one comment building on another, and new meaning and understanding coming through the center of our circle.

One comment from someone in the group, shared after we had all parted ways: “The afterimage that came up this morning was how silently the large shadows of consequences (“black on black”) of absencing in our world had trickled through the entry points of the small groups [we’d shared through the session] as gateways into our container. How they had stretched out taking our heart into their grip like with loooong thin black fingers (for me particularly through stories) the pain, the anger, and sadness spreading out, partially into the larger circle later. Then a second image emerged: that of the introductory circle in the morning, where each of us had presented ourselves as an individual facet expression of the cracking global body we’re holding (“gold on gold” on upper right side of picture). It felt as if we’d all been speaking out of one force. Our words seemed to morph into a sparkling bowl of strength and confidence and hope, a sovereign collectiveness building to reside amongst us…”

LITERACY… In closing, and to sum up the relevancy of everything shared thus far, one key point in the drawing (upper right corner) was around the concept of literacy. The Presencing Institute has been clearly focused on these main areas: creating knowledge, convening innovation labs, and building capacity—all in service of activating social fields and civilizational renewal. The image on the left, the bubbles. The image on the right, Otto’s framing (if i understand it correctly) that layers over the top bubble “creating knowledge” and builds on peace researcher Johan Galtung‘s work. These are seven methods of literacy: “I”, “You”, “It”, “I-You”, “You-It”, “I-It”, and “Field/Presence”. And our work now? Sharpening that literacy.

      

This includes how we create, how we share, how we reflect, how we sit in silence together, how we are still, and how we come to new sense. As was spoken in this sacred circle, “We reconnect language with experience, as a way to rejoin self with our deeper humanity.”

 

(related posts: Decoding a Wall and Generative Scribing: Unpacked)

 

1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (London: Dover Publications, 1977), republished from the original The Art of Spiritual Harmony (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1914), p. 39.

2 C. Otto Scharmer, The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Application (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018), p. 31.

 

Transforming Capitalism Lab

Here are final images from the live sessions of the Transforming Capitalism Lab, a Presencing Institute initiative to curate stories that illustrate positive change happening around the world, leading the shift toward a new economy. Find out more here.

The Journey. Of note, the “upside down” world, which only seems upside down to those us in the northern hemisphere. At the end of session, i realized how heavy the “north” appeared, in relation to the openness of the “south”. Look at the way the blackboard, the dark space of unknown, enters into South America, Australia, India, and Africa. I had not noticed this until stepping back and having some perspective. While drawing, I resisted filling in the water space with blue, choosing to let the continents drift in a sea of black that is actually much larger than how we would expect to see the oceans. With this choice, the water that normally holds our land mass blurred in my mind with the sky that also holds us, and in this drawing blurred with the sea of content in the rest of the picture. Also, i drew the map from a less familiar angle, as a flattened earth, but then chose to keep the circular globe framing (as in the original by Olaf Baldini that i based this on.) This was intentional, to offer a subtle challenge to our understanding of things. Is it flat? Is it round? What is up? What is down? Such are the questions we ask as we explore the topic of capitalism and profound societal renewal. September 13, 2018. Watch live session here.

 Original Journey Map, by Olaf Baldini.

Labor: Bridging the disconnect between work and purpose, with guests Palak Shah and Dayna Cunningham. June 14, 2018. Watch live session here.

I drew this on blackboard during an hour-long session. The highlight for me was the strange space around “value” which i tried to somehow represent with a texture of imprints from my hand, into the chalk ink, mixing white and an olive-grey. But my sense of how the word landed was hard to express, as Palak had spoken to the UNDER valuing of an invisible workforce, and i had written only the word “value” and thus was caught in between the two meanings, which both seemed important: the current state and a possible future place.

Now interesting to see is how the area around “value” (which visually lands at the prototyping phase of Theory U, represented by the large arc) is divided from my representation of “source” (not named in words, but represented by the wavy curves coming out from the “seeds of the future” on the far right) by a fainter part of the U. It’s as if “seeds” are connected by “source” to a not-yet-understood “value”. And of course that’s all surrounded by the presently named topics of “inclusion”, “attend”, “choice”, and “care”.

 Nature: Addressing the disconnect between infinite growth and finite resources, with guest Winona LaDuke. May 10, 2018 by Emma Ruffin. Watch live session here.

Beyond GDP: Creating economies that generate well being for all, with guests Kate Raworth and Lorenzo Fioramonti. April 12, 2018 by Marsha Dunn. Watch live session here.

Generative Scribing: Unpacked

201606_USchoolEcology_rev

We trip and climb our way through the weeds of societal transformation, facing intertwining threads of sorrow and possibility, to ascend.

At a recent u.school ecology gathering outside Berlin – immersed in a community of global stewards of change – i faced an inner struggle to access true “will.” This was not caused by fear, but by despair; making a few inky marks over a small two-day span seemed like a futile effort to positively touch what was going on in the world.

I had landed with a heaviness from the current state of affairs in my country (the US) – mind-boggling inequality, a political circus, the Orlando massacre… among much else – to the morning news of Brexit and again-tumbling markets. A foggy, heated, 94°F landing.

Knowing these u-drawings have their own ripple effect, though, i also felt real responsibility to get out of my own way to open up, to be OF. i KNEW that the only way to honor the moment was to dive in, to scale down, to connect with the most internal and universal place i could access (a place some call Source) and from Source, make sense and draw.

Here’s the tale of the unfolding then… another drawing, another unravel. This will be in part about the actual content of the session, but more so about the drawing process itself, addressing the thinking that is behind/below the visual forms people receive as end results.

INSPIRATION – MAPPING – DIVING – LETTING GO – GENERATIVE SCRIBING

INSPIRATION

Earlier this year, I had seen an exhibit of Aboriginal art at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City, and was stunned into silence at the communally derived, cultural storytelling. Large expanse of sequential dots, lines, pure earth-pigment hues. Natural. Raw. Direct. Pure.

Aboriginal Art
Wolpa Wanambi painting Marrakulu Miny’tji, 1996

The marks pulsed with the integrity of nature, spirit straight through the application of paint, carefully applied shapes and patterns.

This prompted me to wonder: How abstract can we go with scribing? How far can we push the comprehensive limits of systems, and our own limits, to shift the place of understanding? Can scribing also generate a powerful vibrational field that transcends the literality of the words?

To date, i’ve aimed in my visual practice to synthesize threads of content into one, or a series of, encapsulating pictures. It’s been an integrative approach, to surface and reveal unnamed coherence, wholeness. In a way, it’s been the opposite of storytelling, which i have interpreted as the sharing of known, existing data, in linear flow. But what if scribing could embody, in straightforward terms, the dimensionality of past, present, and future into a larger timelessness, at once? 

Arriving in Berlin with such sadness, though, I lacked courage to attempt this kind of breadth. “Why bother?” Hot air sat on my skin like current events crushed at my heart. My gloom held back the spirit to create, reinforcing my bleakness. I genuinely wondered: How can I rise the self, to rise the tone of our times?

Cirlce_2

I sat in the empty space, the circle arranged and waiting, wall large – larger than I remembered – with black folded paper carried from Boston on the floor, unfolded, map like. And then something shifted…

MAPPING

I recalled a night sailing on the ocean with my dad and brother, with charts, but with no land in site – cold, rolling waters, impenetrable indigo through which the boat somehow cut. For a while we had no radio (or so i remember) and no clarity of a possible storm headed our way. But Dad could always navigate in fog (though that night skies were crisp) and he has always trusted his ability to accurately read conditions to guide the boat. Aside from a near-encounter with a fishing vessel, approached more out of curiosity than lost wandering, we were fine.

From my journal on that trip in August 2014:

Tack – alignment of a sailing vessel with respect to the currents below and wind above
On structures and mental models and on trends
we determine the most helpful facilitation TACK…

The role of a scribe is to craft maps that aid with tacking. Google defines the verb “tack” as to “change course by turning a boat’s head into and through the wind.” And further tack, the noun: “a small, sharp, broad-headed nail,” and “a long stitch used to fasten fabrics together temporarily, prior to permanent sewing.” All these meanings make sense!

So with this in mind, by leaving the creases of the paper intact, i sought to evoke a map. This would offer a reference to action (what to DO with information in a drawing) as informed by structure (the mental ordering and representation of things) derived from Source (deeper, natural dimensions like wind and currents.)

Header_u.lab_x0_v6

DIVING

“We are growing together what belongs together,” said Otto (Scharmer) over our first dinner. He continued: “Matt Damon recently quoted Bill Clinton, ‘Turn towards the problem you see; you have to engage.’ This applies especially in moments of disruption. How do we engage with reality? We have to step in…” He proceeded through the arc of Absencing:

Absencing

“Why is fear such a thriving business? Three unaddressed structural problems: 1) Inequity – drives desperation 2) Lack of democracy paired with dialogue / public debate, and 3) Inspiring purpose and vision in deeper levels of humanity.”

This, the fog we now face. The call for all visual practitioners working in the territory of Presencing? Create visual structures to aid in navigating disconnects. This thinking set in motion the theme of the main drawing, which was scaling down, quieting, going inside…. to scale up, to reorient.

After dinner i finally hung the paper (procrastinating, or waiting for what felt right, all day…) realizing it had to be fixed from above, trailing down, free at the bottom to crinkle in a breeze. The sober, looming verticality draped as an unintentional ode to Mikus, Martin, Rothko, and even the Holocaust Memorial, tombstones, and death. And, with this, genuine ending and beginning. It was not an arbitrary choice of material or hanging. It was the first gesture of the drawing itself.

Another initial gesture, choosing to extract and highlight the tree from the final December 2015 u.lab image. Each drawing ends with a lead into the next…

Hanging_02

u.lab_SocialFields

Headlines from the following Saturday morning’s session, linking back to that previous picture:

“What is our plow? Cultivating the quality of relationship in the social field. Without this, nothing significant can be accomplished… We turn the camera, the mirror, back on planet self, including our relationships, and back on planet earth… u.school is an aspiration, a “flip”, and activation of connection of seeds…” – OS

More time together, more insights from the group. A sampling of themes (in no order):

  • Compassion “Nurture the great potential.”
  • Structure “Bottom up…”
  • Legacy “To transcend, connect internal journey to external work.”
  • Place “How do i step in?”
  • Impact “The impact is in the black space between the stars – in the space we cannot see.”
  • Truth “Which are the hard truths that need to be said?”
  • Despair “As if the sky is falling down…”
  • Self “Who am i, truly, and what do i want to grow into that is unique?”
  • Intergenerations “We become bigger together.”
  • Ecology “What are supportive infrastructures to grow?”
  • Seeing “Current reality from a different perspective…”

As the session continued, in gaps and from my notes, I fleshed things out from the earlier starting point of the rough tree and iceberg. I drew very little – almost nothing – live, while people were talking. At this point it was clarifying that the “more known” was on the left panel, the “less known” was in the center, and the “unknown” on the right panel. “Social field” on the bottom. The “call” in the middle. “Facing reality” on top.

Wall_1_Sections

Sunday morning we were guided in an awareness practice by Arawana Hayashi, set up with a quote from Gaylon Ferguson’s book Natural Bravery: “Here sacredness is another word for the good quality of our experience.” Arawana continued, “Seeing the goodness…. Every person wants a good life. Every person aspires…”

And with that, ascension seeded.

Our work, in the midst of it all, the “activation of the intelligence of the heart, in service of social change” and awakening, strengthening the trunk, enlivening the increasingly vibrant eco-system. “The gold of knowing is already in the soil and takes listening… Practice the listening to mine the gold of what we have, to make it more accessible.” – OS

Additional gems that did not make it into the wall but seem too good not to note:

  • “Are we showing up for what we need to show up for, and how do we know?”
  • “How do we thicken our narrative? Start bringing in stories from the edges.”
  • “The minimal organizing structure is not yet clear.”
  • “The absence of structure is still a decision about structure.”
  • (As bells chimed in the distance) “So the fire can come in and it can come in with care.”
  • “We can trust the heart to set the priorities.”
  • “Look close in and expand outwards.”
  • “We are what we measure. We are what we attend to.”
  • “Help people bring about real change by making an interior journey towards a new understanding of who they are in this world.”
  • And below, notes of a shared physical sculpture representing taking in, communicating out, and receiving back – a sort of breathing through the lungs/circulatory system. (This made it’s way to the far upper right of the drawing, the very final gesture.)

Breath

Overarching themes: turning the mirror back, the readiness for a stronger trunk (enabling conditions), the activation of the intelligence of the human heart, the difficulty of inversion of identity as we come to find a more current, appropriate form for ourselves, organizations, larger institutions, and even governments.

Random scribble to self: To not draw – to reserve the hand and the visuals – encourages group listening. (Less reliance on the scribe capturing everything…)

LETTING GO

Room

Folded

Once we had ended, i quickly pulled the paper off the walls, back to the floor, and folded them carefully, deciding each part needed to go home to a different region. The body, dispersed: left section to China, center to Brazil, and right section to Scotland. The blank? To Cambridge MA, for the next round. There is great relief in the removal of images and resetting of an environment – a staging for what’s to come – a cleansing of the palette.

Dream state: (Voice to text into phone in the dark) Monday morning 4:30 AM, in bed, thick, after the heated flow-through of past two days. I cannot sleep. I think this is a consequence of being plugged into the social field, the energy of this dynamic place and the people with whom I’ve shared the past three days. Tapping in to extract, I am swollen. There is a part of me that cannot deeply rest, which comes from a hesitancy of unplugging? Of course rest is required. I can no longer find order in my mind…

I woke. The team reflected. I made it home, wondering along the way (over three movies) about the non-necessity of this exhaustion. There has to be another way. But for now, this is as far as i have gotten on the “way”. Balance is faintly on the horizon, and elusive.

GENERATIVE SCRIBING

More than a mapping of the drawing itself, and more than the context that led up to the map, I am actually compelled to speak to generative scribing – scribing of and for the social body. My experience of this kind of work, where we operate from Source, is that it’s a process of heart-sensing into. Into.

It’s not circling, hovering over or about. It’s not counting the minutes until the person stops speaking and we can go home. It’s not staying comfortable with me-them. It’s not not caring.

It IS piercing through to something essential. Seeing clearly without fear of result or consequence of what comes forward. It requires trust in the complete blankness of things. It only can happen when the social body (a handful or thousands of people and energies) are committed to being together in place and time – and across place and time – to a joining.

It’s groping in the dark to find threads of hope, and coming back to the land of sense to get that out and up on a wall for others to witness.

It’s believing that any witness of the drawing is an active participant in the creation of the drawing. There is no “other”. There is a hand that holds a marker that arcs forward from an extended arm of an upright, physical body acting purely on behalf of the whole. I draw because we are.

It’s drawing to ease the challenge of societal inversion, in service of human awakening. As we fall, we rise. As we cascade, we ascend.

Invert_close

Awaken

Listening Applied

Had the good fortune to join the Creative Thinking and Organizational Success class of Harvard’s Summer School, where in a brief 90 minutes we explored listening to inform project design. The increased sharing, in a small practice window of just 20 minutes, was felt and named by most of ~35 visiting college students and and professionals in the room. We had fun!

Harvard_Summer

References: Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, Otto Scharmer, Berrett-Koehler, 2009. More from Otto on listening:

Steady, to Scale

Bird_SteadyToScale

 

Artists reflect their times through lenses that influence insight and action, in themselves and in others. In the face of truly great art, we find our spirits lifted, our views challenged, and sometimes our very foundation of understanding tectonically shifted. Art moves us, and our species evolves with this kind of internal stirring.

As visual practitioners, as artists, we aim with care and responsibility to reach people, to expand the boundaries of the assumed known. Any reach requires steadiness, and to ensure a stable core, we rely on support for our essential, creative selves.

Take the example of an apple tree: Weak branches yield little fruit. The stronger the trunk, the stronger the branch. The stronger the roots, the stronger the trunk. The richer the soil, the more nourishment for the roots and the fruit. And so on.

Scribing with an eye towards the orchard and the village beyond – with an intent to facilitate systems-level seeing – I experience a direct correlation between the steadiness of one’s being and the range of insight that visuals can summon.

This works in a reciprocal way, where we are both held in by others to experience integrity and wholeness, and because of this, we generate visuals as a holding device for learning within systems.

This kind of support is what I’ll refer to as “containers”, which we can consciously form by considering how we hold ourselves, how we help others energetically through the use of images, and also how we let ourselves be held.

More attention, stronger tree, healthier orchard. Less attention, the field goes fallow.

To inhabit this kind of reciprocal zone of tending / flourishing / nourishing, I’ll map out my thinking in three main parts:

  1. An explanation of containers,
  2. Thoughts on quality of presence and inner cultivation
  3. Two specific examples of practice where container intentionality directly influenced a scale of reach for the drawings and the content they carried.

Containers

As my grandmother was aging, at a point when she could really only go outside with a walker and physical assistance, I recall visits where we would lunch at a local NYC diner. She would ask me things about my life, about school, about my friends, about my studies, and she would marvel at the complexity of the world in which I lived. (This was 1984, so we can only imagine what she would say about our world today!)

What I recall most poignantly is the way she would pay attention, seeming to hang on every word, and the way she made me feel safe, and loved, loved no matter what I would say, no matter what I had to share. I never felt judged. No matter what she thought about the details of my escapades, she would listen closely, look me in the eye, and continue to pursue an understanding of my life.

She provided a container, a space where I could see myself more clearly and grow as direct result of how she was holding me.

When my grandmother, somewhat hard of hearing and surely with many of her own personal concerns, was completely able to show up for me, I was completely able to show up for her. I could be more vulnerable, because I felt safe. She brought out the purest part of me by how gracefully she held me in her own heart.

Drawing with Container Awareness

There exist depths, or phases, to containers that directly correlate with attention.

By listening with the following levels in mind, we can participate in a shift of awareness and possibility. Otto Scharmer[i] has described “Four Levels of Listening” that I apply here to the visual practice of scribing.

Bird_Four_Levels

At Level One, quoting Otto, we “Download and listen to reconfirm what we already know. What we see is limited to our own projections, reflecting the past.”

In scribing, we draw what we hear, and it’s literal. Someone says “bird” and we draw a bird. I also refer to this as “object-oriented” scribing, where a focus on individual, named parts is the primary approach.

Level Two represents “Factual Listening. We notice difference, and we notice disconfirming data.”

We see what is being spoken from a broader vantage point, and still draw what we hear, but our lens expands to make sense of what is being spoken within a context, which we can map. “The bird is flying, then it reaches the coast and joins a flock,” and we enter the domain of storytelling.

Level Three shifts to “Empathic Listening, seeing the situation through the eyes of another, leading to emotional connection. Listening begins to happen from the Field, or from the other person with whom you are connecting.”

This is where containers start to really activate, where our own heart comes online as we step into the shoes of another–like my grandmother opened space to witness and feel out my shoes. We start to care, genuinely care, and we shift. What comes through us shifts. Our drawing shifts. (How can it not?!)

We realize the story in the room is coming from a cultural frame of reference beyond the room; the facts coming out have causal underpinning. No bird, no story, exists as an island. Something came before the lone bird flying, and something will come after. To get at the structural dynamic, we must activate our attunement to the negative space, what is going on between the notes or objects, the subtler envelope within which the parts form a whole. We shift from noticing moments in time to sensing movements over time. As we inquire, we start to inhabit the story and make sense of it with the company.

And Level Four, Generative Listening, “requires us to connect with a capacity to let go and let come, to connect with an emerging future possibility that helps us to connect more fully with who we are and who we want to be.”

This can be said also for Level Four scribing; we sense into and help surface the highest potentiality for the systems we serve. To do this requires a sensitivity with the energy of what is wanting to come through, an energy or vibe that has started to become tangible in Level Three. What is drawn is secondary to meeting the tone accurately and crafting gestures that evoke essential meaning.

I find here that time slows, the air quiets, and a kind of creative rupture takes place in the midst of sublime stillness, where something very fine and as-yet-unnamable is coming alive, and we, as scribes, witness it; in a way we are midwives facilitating, through our being and our hands, an emergence of some communal shift and knowing.

This could be described as Flow, or the Zone, and is rare. It takes a well-tended container–at tiers of the self, room and system–to reach this place, whether it be between two people or 70,000, in a window of an hour or decade. Numbers don’t even really matter.

What does matter is the qualitative listening behind the act of drawing, the listening that comes online by orienting within the context of a social body, with a core intent to join an invisible place and make manifest that which wants to be seen and witnessed.

Waking to Container Relativity

Our range of attention is ours to define, and the relative properties of containers give us choice: stay within the accepted known or expand to meet a not-yet-named-reality.

An old Hindu parable, first heard in a year-long program called Leadership for Collective Intelligence[ii] and paraphrased here, further explains the value of perspective in regards to holding capacity:

An aging master grew tired of his apprentice complaining, and so, one morning, sent him for some salt.

When the apprentice returned, the master instructed the young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and drink it. “How does it taste?” the master asked. “Bitter!” spit the apprentice. The master chuckled.

The two walked in silence to a nearby lake, where the master again asked the young man to put a handful of salt in the water.

“Now drink from the lake. How does it taste?” “Fresh!” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the master. “No,” said the young man.

At this, the master sat beside the young man and offered:

“The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container into which we put the pain.

So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things… Stop being a glass. Become a lake.”

We are both lake-makers and salt, depending on the context. At times, we are held in by a person or group, and that enables us to show up more securely. At other times, we expand to help a group in need meet their challenge. It works both ways. And we expand or contract depending on the need of the moment.

Inner Cultivation

Towards forming these types of enlarging holding spaces for others, and before even making a mark on any wall, we must first learn to cultivate a container for ourselves, opening our stance, to stay clear for what wants to ‘move through.’

We start by locating our best self – the self that accepts, that chooses possibility over fear – the self that welcomes the new, and actually carves a path for it. In orienting with this self, we serve as a microcosm of reorientation for every part of a system that our drawings might touch.

This can be a conscious, enlightened, spiritual choice. It’s also simply a matter of relaxing into the fact that–through every gesture, every word, every silence even–we exist in a cascading ripple of touch. Our presence allows us to show up for others, joining individuals and groups precisely where they are in their process, poised in a receptive and steadying way.

A rigid stance blocks, separates, reinforces a dualistic mentality: you|them; you|content; imagined you|true you – the “you” with the most to actually offer any given situation. As we steel up we stand guarded, sectioned off. As we soften, we are inevitably moved. Moved, additional senses come online. Attunement amplifies. Range increases. Listening cascades down those Four Levels.

In this place we meet a “knowing” beyond literal understanding of words, concepts, and impressions. An intuitive muscle comes online, and it’s an absorbent place, where – because of our open stance – we can facilitate a group from monologic to dialogic interaction.

The range of our attention relates to that which is taken in, received, and then that which is turned outward, revealed, through the hand. It’s a mutual relation; the more open the scribe, the more received. The more received, the more revealed.

We are reflective aids and, as such, our attention to personal containers helps stabilize that of the room and systems we address. If the room feels rattled and we collapse into that, we echo rattledness. Yet if we are able to stabilize internally, we’re more likely to reveal cohesion.

Draw with crystal clear intention. To make a mark before a mark wants to be made risks destabilizing the container through misrepresentation or by being out-of-sync with the true tone of the room.

Scribing is a participatory art. There are consequences to over-stacking, to overdrawing – that the image indulges the artist’s needs to express and shifts away from the marks actually called for by the container.

Examples of Practice

To land these concepts in very real application, I can speak to two engagements that each fully tested the limits of my practice. The data might sound extreme; I include it as an objective reference point in regards to the tides of container-building and scale. The stories evolved between 2013-2015 and continue as this book goes to print (NOTE: see end of post for information on an upcoming Visual Anthology).

u.lab

One example is of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called “u.lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self” offered jointly through Edx and the Presencing Institute. The gist of u.lab is that, after seven years of ramp up with experiments in online broadcasts and community-building, our team live-streamed eight times in 2015, reaching 70,000 registered participants from 185 countries, a social body made of individuals, small teams, and over 500 self-organized hubs alike.

I am such a shy person, and the notion of thousands of people watching my back made me want to crawl in a hole until the next ice age was over. To prepare, I wore soothing blackboard-matching grey, extracted chalk ink from pens to paint large-arching arrows, imagined myself one trunk in the orchard, tuned into the notion of water – extending the lake metaphor – and drew. My approach over the year, across dozens of images generated live and staged across multiple web platforms, shifted from a logical representation of frameworks to a heated extraction of some intuited field essence, which seemed most appropriate to the container that had matured globally over time.

It would have been easy to consider the u.lab “we” as a body of “users” rather than as an alive eco-system, since my voice-to-voice or email communication had only been with ~.003% of the participants, and it was hard to tune into the reality of those I might never know. But without attentional inclusion, I would reinforce the very pattern of societal disconnect we were seeking to address and dissolve. The stance I chose to occupy, then, was one of unbounded connection, where rather than an “out there” viewership, I was surrounded by a sea of individuals helping to hold me to the wall. I was contained by the very eco-system for which I drew.

Left: u.lab Netherlands Hub during live session. Photo by Maurice van Rooijen, TheoryUlab.nl.
Middle: A screenshot posted in Twitter, taken by a participant during the live broadcast.
Right: Sao Paulo Hub during the same live session. Photo by Adam Yukelson.

Executive Education

The other practical example of container application is of a custom leadership program offered through MIT’s Executive Education (of the Sloan School of Management) that offered an experiment in endurance and sense-making over long blocks of time and numerous sessions.

A highly skilled MIT team, working closely with top-level executives, customized a transformational program for senior managers from a global organization with 23,000 employees.

There have been five cohorts to date – I worked with the last three – each going through a 9-month program that included an 8-day section of intensive classes, followed by a few months of applied project work, concluding with another 8-day section.

Most of the 8-day sections involved 4-6 hours of faculty presentation per day, with each section leading to ~45 total hours of scribing onto ~100+ linear feet of dry-erase walls and sometimes extra boards. This yielded 118 unique images over the 3 full cycles, including topics on: Systems Thinking, Leadership and Organizational Change, Strategy, Finance and Macro-Economics, and Operations–most of which I did not initially know well or at all.

What was unique here was not the volume of time or images, but was the necessary weaving of content over the educational arc. One approach could have been “one topic, one picture”. The more expansive value, though, was in the wrapping of heavily-related drawings around the group, stitched nest-like, providing a solid visual container for extended cultural learning.

MIT_Envelope_01 MIT_Envelope_02

Two classrooms at MIT, where drawings offered visual and content containment through Executive Education customized programs

As initially indicated, the extension of new experience directly relates to the depth and steadiness of the soil in which it grows.

Visual practice, as a key “seeing” and anchoring device within the containers we support, serves a foundational role in our understanding of, and the evolution of, social fields. Thus, a visual practitioner’s grasp of the correlation – between our role as scribes and the fields in which we draw – cannot be underrated; as artists participating in societal transformation, we are implicate[iii] in both making apparent, and the expansion of, discovery.

Our times are riddled with disconnects, ideological entrenchment, crisis, fear. It is a time then, with open eyes,[iv] to see. It is a time to expand, to scale, to facilitate societal sight. All inner preparation – and all holding spaces we reinforce – enable the very act of making that meets this call.

Each crooked nook, fault line, gorgeous arc, blotch of color, textured application in our drawing can offer some structural integrity and some sense.

As artists, as visual practitioners of any kind, it is up to us to stretch “larger than the largest disturbance in the room.”[v]

Increasing our ability to embrace current discomfort, and simultaneously represent the possible, we participate in the engagement and ushering in of tentative, emergent, realities.

 

[i] Otto Scharmer, Levels of Listening, as found in Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, first edition, Society for Organizational Learning, 2007 and a video clip from u.lab here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfXpRkVZaI

[ii] The Hindu Story and much of my understanding of containers comes from working with Dialogos (www.dialogos.com) and the Circle of Seven (www.ashlandinstitute.org)

[iii] Here lies a subtle reference, honoring physicist David Bohm’s theory of the “Implicate Order” and undivided wholeness. Any interested reader can start to lean more via: http://www.david-bohm.net

[iv] Months after the official Bauhaus closing, Josef Albers was invited to teach at the newly-formed Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Despite knowing little English, he knew enough words to convey his purpose for teaching: “To open eyes.” Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957, Exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA, Oct 2015 – Jan 2016.

[v] William Isaacs

This text represents Draft v6, for the anthology Drawn Together through Visual Practice. In writing this piece, I received an enormous amount of guidance from Brandy Agerbeck, Sam Bradd, and Jennifer Shepherd – and thank each of them with deep gratitude for their patience and steadiness in helping to hold my container intact!