Tag: natural world

New book outlines how to apply nature’s principles in (re)designing the human world

Posted on | by Sam

Today is a special day.

Two years ago, a small group of us set out on a collaborative design project, in search of the irreducible principles of a healthy learning environment  — the equivalent of DNA’s A, G, C & T.

That search took us deep into an exploration of the natural world, where we learned about the seven design principles that enable all living systems to thrive.

In response, we tried to create a bread-crumb trail for others, by providing illustrative case studies and actionable ideas to help you apply those principles to the creation of truly living schools, workplaces, and social structures — ones that can give voice, clarity, meaning and form to a new story for how we learn and live, so that together we can build a better world, by design. 

And today, we’re giving that book away — in order to ensure that its seeds spread as far and wide as possible.

Learn more at seedandspark.live, and help us #changethestory.

Nature’s Design Principles: Processes

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Nature’s Design Principles: Processes

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

As far as conundrums go, there aren’t many more complex than the one that was facing South Africa back in 1991.

A year earlier, South African president F.W. de Klerk had ended Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven year prison sentence; begun legalizing every political party that opposed him; and set out in search of a way to negotiate a peaceful transfer from a racist past to a racially just future. 

To help navigate such a landscape, de Klerk turned to an unlikely guide: Royal Dutch Shell, which for years had used the process of scenario planning — in which a set of carefully constructed, plausible stories are used to demonstrate different ways the future might unfold  — to guide its own internal thinking. 

Could the same process help a deeply divided nation envision its own possible futures, and contribute to creating a new reality in the land of apartheid?

As a member of the core facilitation team, Adam Kahane had his doubts. “Problems are tough because they are complex in three ways,” he says. “They are dynamically complex, which means that cause and effect are far apart in space and time, and so are hard to grasp from firsthand experience. They are generatively complex, which means that they are unfolding in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. And they are socially complex, which means that the people involved see things very differently, and so the problems become polarized and stuck.”

The problem is that we can’t solve complex problems unless we change the ways we talk and listen. “Our most common way of talking is telling. And our most common way of listening is not listening: listening only to our own talking, not to others. But a complex problem can only be solved peacefully if the people who are part of the problem work together creatively to understand their situation and to improve it.”

And so, over the better part of a year, Kahane and his team worked with a diverse and representative group of twenty-two South Africans. They “breathed in” — observing the world as broadly and carefully as they could, and looking for patterns across what they saw and heard. They “breathed out” — debating with one another what they were noticing, and what it augured. They talked about all the things that might happen, as opposed merely to what they each wanted to see. And then, eventually, they shared these observations with their fellow countrymen and women in the form of four simple stories — one of which, Flight of the Flamingos, imagined a future in which the conditions were created to allow everyone, white and black, to rise slowly and together.

In a pre-Internet age, the team relied on analog means to share the stories, from inserting a 25-page booklet into South Africa’s national newspaper to conducting more than 100 workshops across the country. But because the stories were simple, compelling, and illustrative of the country’s possible paths, they provided a common language for the shared aspirations of a deeply divided people. And, despite its myriad problems since, South Africa’s transition of power was indeed peaceful, hopeful, and galvanizing.

“The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with the world,” Kahane explained. Consequently, the essence of the scenario process in South Africa was “that a small group of deeply committed leaders, representing a cross-section of a society that the whole world considered irretrievably stuck, had sat down together to talk broadly and profoundly about what was going on and what should be done. More than that, they had not talked about what other people should do to advance some parochial agenda, but what they and their colleagues and their fellow citizens had to do in order to create a better future for everybody. They saw themselves as part of — not apart from — the problem they were trying to solve. They believed they could actively shape their future. And they understood that one reason the future cannot be predicted is that it can be influenced.

“If we want to change the systems we are a part of,” Kahane concluded, “we must first see and change ourselves.”

This, too, is the lesson of the natural world. 

“There is an inherent exuberance and flow to the processes by which living systems continuously recreate and sustain themselves,” explains Stephanie Pace-Marshall, who modeled the Illinois Math & Sciences Academy on the seven principles of living systems. “They are neither linear nor formulaic. Life is simply free to be and become. Processes are both the creative (novelty-generating) and self-regulatory (order-creating) ways our systems explore possibilities, measure and monitor achievement, generate and transmit information, and get their work done. They are the known and observable behaviors, observations and rules by which a system achieves and advances its learning purpose and objectives.”

Margaret Wheatley puts it more succinctly. “Who the organization is (its identity) is inextricably connected to how it is (its processes of learning and change).”

How, then, should we want our living systems to work — and how will we know when they are?

By this point, we hope it has become clear that the work to create a living school must always begin with the three fundamental seeds of growth in a living system: establishing a clear sense of individual and collective identity; facilitating an open exchange of any and all relevant information; and supporting a deep investment in relationships. These conditions are what allow living systems to begin planting seeds of change, through the property of emergence.

To remain vital and alive, however, a living school must also design its own seeds for regeneration: it must notice the patterns that emerge over time; it must implement its own processes for creation; and it must erect its own structures for operation — although not in the way we typically think about such things.

In a living system, for example — as opposed to a traditional hierarchy– structures are the last thing you add, instead of the first. Order, not control, is what marks systemwide health. And the relationship between the processes in a system and the purpose that animates it is so interwoven that, in the words of legendary activist Saul Alinsky, “it is impossible to mark where one leaves off and the other begins, or which is which. Process is really purpose.”

In this sense, the central design challenge of anyone who hopes to build a living school is the same as the one faced by Mother Nature: treating change as an essential source of creativity — not something to be resisted or feared.

“One of the most important roles we can play individually and collectively is to create an opening, or to ‘listen’ to the implicate order unfolding, and then to create dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen,” writes Joseph Jaworski, the man who led Shell’s scenario planning in South Africa. 

That’s what the processes of a living system should be designed to facilitate. 

When they are, as evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains, a spirit of interdependence takes root, which is the mark of a mature living system.  “Young immature species are the ones that grab as much territory and resources as they can,” she explains, “multiplying as fast as they can. But the process of negotiations with other species matures them, thus maturing entire ecosystems. Rainforests that have evolved over millions of years are a good example. No species is in charge — the system’s leadership is distributed among all species, all knowing their part in the dance, all cooperating in mutual consistency.”

Indeed, as you’ll see in the stories that follow, adopting processes that are both emergent and egalitarian is what helps form a truly ecological culture.

In the science of slime mold, we see one of Nature’s most remarkable adaptive processes: a single-celled organism and soil-dwelling amoeba that, when food is scarce, literally combines forces with its neighbors to become a multicellular, moving mass.

In the art of Andy Goldsworthy, we see sculptures that are always designed to be ephemeral as a reminder of the inevitability of decay, and the temporariness of all that is truly alive.

In the words of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, we hear an urgent plea for a different set of processes that can guide life on earth and restore a balance between us and our fellow inhabitants.

And in the work of Crosstown High in Memphis, we see what it looks and feels like when that thing we call “school,” and the processes by which we learn, are meant to occur as much outside the building as inside any classroom.

In each instance, what we find is evidence of the creative energy that gets unleashed when process and purpose are aligned. As psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains in his classic book, Flow, “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness.“ 

And yet, as Paolo Freire pointed out, our work to find the processes that can provide a sense of order — to the world, and in ourselves — is never done. “I think that one of the best ways for us to work as human beings is not only to know that we are uncompleted beings but to assume the incompleteness. 

“We have to become inserted in a permanent process of searching,” Freire writes. “It means that keeping curiosity is absolutely indispensable for us to continue to be or to become.”

Nature’s Design Principles: Identity

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

More than four hundred years after it was written, people around the world are still reading, performing, and wondering about Hamlet. 

Why?

The simple answer is because it’s the world’s most famous playwright’s most famous play. But the complex answer is because the title character and we, no matter our culture or our age, are kindred spirits. 

Like every young person everywhere ever, Hamlet has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist and a dreamer — a person more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of actions. And he is in love.

But Hamlet is also the future king of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder — a duty that leads to his own untimely death in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read Hamlet is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his own sense of self and accepting the role society has assigned him to play. And so Hamlet’s struggle illuminates a central question we all must wrestle with — a question not coincidentally posed by the first two words in the play:  

“Who’s there?”

This is a new question for us, homo sapiens sapiens — the being who knows, and who knows he knows. That’s because for the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” 

As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death. 

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. 

Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, coursing through all of Shakespeare’s plays, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – for better and for worse.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to understand “who’s there” is more than just an exercise in navel-gazing; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“We are learning,” says the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy — to become an island to oneself — but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. The conventional belief that equates self-development and self-consciousness with increasing autonomy has begun to lose its intellectual cachet. A growing number of child development psychologists now argue the contrary — that a sense of selfhood and self-awareness depends on and feeds off of deepening relationships to other people. Empathy, in turn, is the means by which companionate bonds are formed.”

“The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Dan Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

As far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: 

It’s not the world that makes us wonder; it’s our wondering that makes the world. 

Or, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana put it, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Going a step further, scholars like Siegel have even suggested that the very thing at the center of our most personal sense of self — the mind — may not be as distinct as we’d thought. “Mind emerges as much in relationships as it does from physiological, embodied processes including brain activity,” he explains. 

“Relationships are the crucible in which our lives unfold as they shape our life story, molding our identity and giving birth to the experience of who we are, and liberating — or constraining — who we can become. . . If we consider that our minds are a part of an interacting, interconnected system that involves our bodies and our brains, as well as the environment in which we live, including our social relationships, we may be able to reconcile how the mind is part of one system that seems to be in two places at once.”

That isn’t just flowery prose; it’s how living systems operate in the natural world — by existing and creatively organizing within and between a boundary of self. Although this boundary is semipermeable and ensures the system is open to the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, the boundary itself is structurally closed. 

A cell wall is a good example. It’s the boundary that establishes its system’s identity, distinguishes it from and connects it to its environment, and determines what enters and leaves the system. But because this meaning of “boundary” is as much about what it lets in as what it keeps out, the end result of this arrangement, according to the German biologist Andreas Weber, is a notion of self in which “every subject is not sovereign but rather an intersubject — a self-creating pattern in an unfathomable meshwork of longings, repulsions, and dependencies.” 

The Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela agrees. “Life is a process of creating an identity,” he says. Every organism is “a meshwork of selfless selves.” And these principles of life are universally applicable.

What’s true for the microorganism, in other words, is just as true true for the megalopolis.

But what does that really mean in the daily whir of our personal and professional lives? And how do we intentionally build our empathetic muscles in the service of building a living, thriving school? 

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, our work begins with a commitment to hold the space, and make the time, to allow all members of a learning community — from the youngest to the oldest — to understand that each person’s sense of an individual self emerges, as Siegel puts it, from not only our inner life, but our “inter-life” as well.

The science of the human brain — particularly its bi-hemispheric structure — has allowed us to integrate two very different ways of making sense of the world, and our place in it. 

The art of the American writer James Baldwin is a direct challenge to the myths that have shaped our shared sense of what it means to be an American. 

The insights of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn offer a window into the ways our understanding of the mind shape our capacity for well-being. 

And the genius of the June Jordan School for Equity, a public school in San Francisco, is in its ability to foster a strong sense of collective identity that can provide clearer support to each student’s more precarious individual search for who they are, and what they value.

In the past, says Weber, “with our craving to build a new and better world we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our Siamese connection with all other human beings. We have tried to escape from ourselves.”

In truth, we need to be many to become one — and one to become many.