Constructively-Critical Reflections on The Integral Living Room 2013,
Part 2:
Theme: Emergence/Self-Generativeness vs
Leadership/Design/Structure
This is the second in a series of 6 blogposts, which are supplemental to the Notes from the Field report I wrote about the Integral Living Room event for the January 2014 issue of Integral Leadership Review online journal.
(http://integralleadershipreview.com/11117-integral-living-room-boulder-colorado-usa-october-31-november-3-2013/ )
These blogposts represent my more personal constructively-critical reflections and musings, and are not purposed for reporting, as the Notes report was. They'll make limited sense if you haven't read the Notes report, but, I hope, are of some general usefulness.
(http://integralleadershipreview.com/11117-integral-living-room-boulder-colorado-usa-october-31-november-3-2013/ )
These blogposts represent my more personal constructively-critical reflections and musings, and are not purposed for reporting, as the Notes report was. They'll make limited sense if you haven't read the Notes report, but, I hope, are of some general usefulness.
Note: This blog contains only a couple of my reflections as a member of the ILR Harvest Team; there is much more to be said, and that is a future blog, around our questions, our process, and our relationship to various elements of the Integral Living Room happening! These are dear to my heart and closer to my Divine Passions than some of the reflections and musings below, and more important to the world, IMO, than some of what is below, but these posts got written in the timeframe I had up until now. Stay tuned!
The blogposts are about various themes I’ve organized my reflections into:
Part 2. Theme: Emergence/Self-Generativeness vs Leadership/Design/Structure
That's this post, read below. Find the others via the links to them.
Each theme section is independent, so you can skip around if you like!
Part 2. Theme: Emergence/Self-Generativeness vs Leadership/Design/Structure
This is a natural creative tension in any event on this theme, and I am sharing my reflections here simply as explorations because I haven’t distilled them into any kind of recommendation or suggestion.
Especially given the diverse stages, motives, and interests of the people, and the size of the group, plus the diverse and generalized purposes of the gathering, facilitation and designed structure had to be there. The question is, was it optimal, how much did it allow for changing during the event, how much did change and on what basis, and other questions I have no answers to. The design challenges were considerable, for sure, because of the experimental nature and content of the event.
Overall Purpose: No visible nested-hierarchy of purposes. Granted this was an exploration, there were plenty of more focused “purposes” articulated in the ILR website, but I didn’t detect any superordinate goal, and felt that lack led to scattering of event elements, for example, I couldn’t answer the question: What were the purposes of the various exercises as related to the purpose of the event?
Was design sometimes too subtle? Second, since I was not involved in directly making event-design decisions I cannot speak to, because ignorant of, a lot of the subtleties of the design. This is important to note here because this event had a unique design and purposes; it was definitely not your basically-Orange-design convention around Integral presenters and content to be learned. So my Notes report is participant-eye-view and reflects ignorance of what was really going on, or what might have been deliberately planned but looked unplanned, etc.
For example, early in the event, the leadership seemed to be “plunging us into the frustrations of Green” group process/relating which turns out to have been planned. Without that knowledge, what happened could be (and was by some) interpreted as an inept/failed attempt at leading us into Integral-level group process/relating.
Most certainly there were more design subtleties than I could ever begin to comprehend or even to sense, given the experience, wisdom, and expertise of Diane, Terry, and Jeff. There was quite a bit going on that didn’t meet the eye. You won’t find so much of that at the Integral Theory Conference for example; that’s pretty much a WYSIWYG event. There were more subtle things going on here which made it more interesting; more to reflect on, once one realized there was a “more” going on. (See Orders of Learning in this blogpost series.) LINK to follow.
Design to challenge and amplify exit-Green: I can now see just how nicely the event was designed to challenge limitations of Green relating and expand it upward. I was so caught up in my own inner tensions from my expectations at the time, I missed many of these nudges. In going through my notes, I saw them!!
Designing for Emergence: One challenge I might describe as being that process was part of product: There was not much room for macro changes in the happenings, but the purpose and design included some evolution based on participant input. Spaces for
