The Need for Practice Grounds (or: The Outer Work of Inner Development)
Michelle Holliday
Author of The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World
I've been in multiple conversations lately with people who have recently discovered the regenerative movement, with its worldview of greater alignment with life. They feel drawn to bring living systems principles into their work with organizations. They're dreaming of having more meaningful impact in the world. But they sense – and often have been given advice – that they need to do the "inner work" first, integrating the new ways of seeing and being that are at the heart of the movement. "Perhaps the Inner Development Goals are a good starting point" is a frequent suggestion.
There is logic to this advice. And at the same time, there's missed opportunity – if not actual impossibility – in this approach.
To be clear: there is no denying the vital role of personal introspection and knowledge gathering. And there's real risk, both to the movement and to those directly involved, when someone claims – without depth of understanding or preparation – to be able to bring wise stewardship in service of system thrivability.
At the same time, it's not clear that we can sufficiently do the inner work first before engaging with the world. It's through encounter and engagement that we most powerfully discover what is needed and what more we're capable of. Perhaps more to the point, there are few of us who can afford to remove ourselves from the action for such an indefinite process.
And here's the thing: it's incredibly challenging to develop new ways of seeing and being within old structures and systems. But the converse is also true: as we introduce more life-aligned structures and systems, new ways of seeing and being come more clearly into view.
There are many portals into a living systems worldview and the stance of stewardship that goes with it; and often those doorways are cleverly, innocuously hidden within more life-aligned forms of action.
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Indeed, in between personal, inner development and societal, outer impact is the space of practice. This is the understanding behind the Core Practice Areas of Thrivability that my colleagues and I work with and teach (depicted in the diagram below). While exploring new ways of seeing and being, we can also work together to: interact in new ways; attune more fully to system potential; conduct thoughtful experiments in service of that potential; develop new ways of noticing what matters most; and be deliberate about learning as an individual and collective practice. With full awareness, intention, humility and joy, we can learn more life-aligned ways of seeing and being by doing.
In this way, our projects and organizations can become fertile practice grounds for a more thrivable world. And we can become wise stewards of the systems we're part of.
I'm not sure there is any other way.
[If you'd like to learn more about integrating this approach into your work or your organization, you're warmly invited to join a 9-part workshop series starting November 6, 2024.]
is composting capitalism. Co-evolver and catalyst to the new planetary culture. Using decades of experience in business process, systems thinking and design consciousness to catalyse the emergence of a bright future.
1 个月This inner/outer development is almost like the tango. A kind of sense and respond dance. A good friend said: joining an intentional community is the most potent self development program you can enrol in. I agree! I'm seeing islands of coherence, spaces of shared meaning and values where we can engage with inner and outer work, within community. The first experience should be called: Empire Cultural Detox! Here's all the legacy cultural code you need to debug before you can become a cultural catalyst for the new culture :)
Co-Creating Desired Futures: Developing the Art and Science of Group Facilitation
1 个月Dear Michelle Holliday, thank you for this deeply resonant post highlighting the?Inseparability of “doing” and “being”, “inner work” and “outer work”… it’s so interesting to me that at one point in time, the field of psychology discovered the power of democratic groups for healing…?it was called “milieu therapy”… and then largely backed away from that, veering instead toward toward “individual therapy”… Also fascinating to me, is the current phenomenon of democratic mini-publics, and their recurring healing and empowerment aspects... while their avowed purpose is improving policy-making and increasing the legitimacy of government, SO many participants have found it deeply meaningful to have the opportunity to be?part of a group of very diverse people, facing a challenging public issue together, in a facilitated context where each person is heard and treated with respect… Seems to me,?there is SO much we can learn from that, that could be applied to many other contexts…
Re-imagining the multi-solving potential of bringing people together to cook together, eat together, and be together.
1 个月It strikes me that the individual skills thinking can be interwoven with the narratives that we as individuals “are broken”, which, in different forms has been a dominant approach of the personal develop industry for a long time. Doing collective stewarding and practicing individual work in the collective seems more important today. Rarely have humans healed in isolation, if ever, yet we are the most physically isolated we’ve been in 100 years, likely the most isolated ever. The more I think of our work at Front Street Community Oven, it is reconnecting with all our relations - self, our bodies, community, ancestors, elders, and even spirit. The practices are designing a cooking experience, placemaking of park, co-designing and creating a welcoming space for all, hosting together, re/l-learning cooking and stewarding together as a diverse community etc
Helping leaders and organisations to navigate challenge and change, creating a positive impact for people and the planet | Bio Leadership Fellow | RSA Fellow
1 个月Michelle Holliday?ahhhh yes!! Spot on with my own experience. I also loved someone’s perspective on it’s not a linear approach. As in nature I am learning, this is a tangled, inter woven, messy experience that encompasses learning and doing and being and composting. Just going through this experience, connecting with inner and outer, human and more the human is becoming a rich lived experience for me. I loved our convo, we finished too early- the nitty gritty was getting interesting - let’s do it again soon!?
A recovering self-organization consultant; Unifying love and power as entrepreneur, pioneer, author, keynote speaker, and host and facilitator of spaces for the emergence of The Art of Conscious Collaboration.
1 个月I couldn't agree more, dear Michelle Holliday, and really enjoyed how we also touched on this topic in our wonderful conversation yesterday! I call that the flow of being, doing, and becoming, and see great value in the understanding that these are not three separate states but all flow with and within each other, one sometimes moving into the foreground, only to then make space for another, and all together forming the natural flow of life. Without the "doing" (the practice you refer to) there's no "becoming". Without the "being", there is no emergence of the "doing" that is needed now and next. This is also the basis for "Differentiation and Integration" I talk about in "The Art of Conscious Collaboration" https://www.consciouscollaboration.world/