FROM CONVINCING TO CONVENING

“But how can we convince the others?”?

It never fails. No matter what the sector, I can almost count down the seconds before this question comes up in any good-size gathering where we’re exploring the need to shift to more life-aligned, regenerative perspectives and practices. A recent 100-person, half-day meeting of Montreal’s venture capital ecosystem was no exception. There, hot on the heels of a compelling, confronting presentation by Nate Hagens , this question – the first to be asked – took on its most extreme form:?

“But how can we convince all 8 billion people?”?

Beyond the impossibility of it, Peter Block would say this is a question that has no power. In his fantastic little book, The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Block observes that questions like this are a defense against action, “against our own responsibility.”?

The question ‘How do you get those people to change?’ distracts us from choosing who we want to become and exercising accountability for creating our environment…. [W]hen we honestly ask ourselves about our role in the creation of a situation that frustrates us, and set aside asking about their role, then the world changes around us.?

My own experience bears this out. The shift to more life-aligned, regenerative practices goes nowhere if it is not first an honest reckoning with our own role in creating the situation we face and our own potential to create the conditions for something new to emerge.?

Nate shared a quote pointing to a similar conclusion. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine observed that:?

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.

In so many ways, our world is far from equilibrium, a sea of chaos. And within it, there is little logic in trying to “boil the ocean” of 8 billion people. Instead, the only thing that has ever worked to effect meaningful change is to gather with others in “small islands of coherence” and spread from there.?

Convincing has a more limited role in this than the ever-ready question presumes. The etymology of the word is “to defeat, to overcome.” (Consider the common root in “invincible.”) But as Buckminster Fuller famously advised: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

And though Nate’s presentation of undeniable data had an impact (leaving us all a little shell-shocked, in fact), we’re daily flooded with information that is, nevertheless, all too easy to set aside. It’s not lack of facts that keeps us locked in destructive patterns.?

Instead, what is needed most is collective spaces where we can take in the data, make sense of it with others, come to terms with it, and find both courage and resources to act on it together. What is needed even more than convincing is convening. Islands of coherence don’t happen by themselves. The real challenge and opportunity is not in persuading others but in creating practice grounds for seeing, stewarding and becoming the new. The real power is in finding the collective will to have bolder conversations and to focus not only on changing our systems, but on changing ourselves.?

Fortunately, that was exactly the intention of the venture capital gathering, and that’s what I had been invited to support. The event was the annual general meeting of Real Ventures , a VC fund that “serves entrepreneurs and nurtures the ecosystems in which they thrive,” according to their website. At the end of the meeting – a thoughtfully crafted afternoon of sharings, conversations and activities – we invited each person to write on an index card “the conversations we’re not daring to have in this ecosystem… the bold questions we’re putting off to tomorrow that we need to be asking today.” The answers went further than I had dared to hope, and the Real Ventures team is now exploring how they might guide future gatherings. This will be an island to watch as it takes shape.

So here’s to the courageous conveners. And here’s to those courageous enough to accept the invitation, despite the confronting facts and the inherent uncertainty of island-building.?

This is the work of our times.?

Photo credits: Julian Haber and Richard Bastarache