Category: Book Projects

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: Relationships

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.

Everything you see has its roots

In the unseen world . . .

Why do you weep?

That Source is within you

And this whole world

Is springing up from it.

–Rumi

 

In the beginning, everything was connected.

Along the way, some of us changed our minds.

And now, in the shadow of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, our survival depends on our ability to rediscover the wisdom we have lost.

In the end, it turns out, everything is connected, and at every scale — from the cosmologic to the subatomic.

“Exalted we are,” writes the American biologist E.O. Wilson, “risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits uniquely capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of Earth’s fauna and flora, bound to it by emotion, physiology, and, not least, deep history.”

“There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” says novelist Richard Powers. “The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. Forests mend and shape themselves into subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within.”

This sort of deep relational weaving is central to indigenous cultures the world over. As American activist Winona LaDuke points out, “teachings, ancient as the people who have lived on a land for five millennia, speak of a set of relationships to all that is around, predicated on respect, recognition of the interdependency of all beings, an understanding of humans’ absolute need to be reverent and to manage our behavior, and an understanding that this relationship must be affirmed through lifeways and through acknowledgment of the sacred.”

Several hundred years ago, however, a new story began to emerge in Europe — one that was fueled by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and that would come to shape the later thinking of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. It was a story that displaced us from the universal center, and urged us to no longer view nature as something to which we were bound, but something to be, in Bacon’s words, “hounded in her wanderings, and bound into service, and made a slave.”

When, in the 17th century, Decartes proclaimed Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I exist”), and Newton developed a mathematical formulation that could provide a consistent mathematical theory of the world (i.e., classical physics), the narrative shift that had begun centuries earlier had finally been completed — away from the notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe, and toward a mechanistic, linear world of separable parts. 

It’s the story that has dominated Western culture ever since.

Recently, however, its foundations have begun to crumble. New discoveries in the fields of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism have necessitated profound changes in concepts of everything from space to time to cause and effect. As Einstein put it: “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundations of physics to this [new type of knowledge have] failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.”

In fact, the natural relationship between parts and wholes confirms what some have been saying all along — that the universe is not a clock; it’s a cloud. “As individuals and societies,” explains Austrian scientist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature. Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities.” 

In fact, we are not just embedded in nature, but also to one another. “When you form groups,” writes Iain Couzin, who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz, “you suddenly have a network system where social interactions exist. We have traditionally assumed that intelligence resides in our brains, in the individual animal. But we have found the first evidence that intelligence can also be encoded in the hidden network of communication between us.”

This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature — a lesson that is equally true at the smallest scale.

“In the quantum world,” explains Margaret Wheatley, “relationship is the key determiner of everything.” Subatomic particles come into form and are observed only as they are in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent entities. These unseen connections between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of all creation.

“In this world, the basic building blocks of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all bundles of potential. Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.”

This is why the path towards creating a living school requires cultivating the individual and collective self-awareness that comes from understanding identity — who (& why) we are; applying information — what (& why) we notice; and strengthening relationships — how (& why) we connect. “Although each of these three domains has its own dynamism and motion,” explains educator Stephanie Pace-Marshall, “it is their confluence and synergy that create the generative landscape essential for individual and system wholeness, meaning, and connections. Relationships represent the dynamic, self-generating learning network of our systems, and they establish its capacity for collaborative inquiry.”

But what does that really mean in the work we do with one another in our communities, our organizations, and our schools? 

How can we attend more intentionally, and see more clearly, the webwork of ways in which we are all interwoven?

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, a higher level of relational attunement is not just what allows us to build healthier cultures; it’s what allows us to comprehend the full weight of our spiritual role in the cosmos — to be, as Wilson put it, the mind of the biosphere itself.

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’” said Einstein, “a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and our feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion  to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty.”

This is, in part, the gift of the art of Liz Lerman, who helps us see what a truly trans-disciplinary, trans-generational, trans-media approach to storytelling can reveal about who we are and how we connect.

It’s what we learn from the science of honeybees, whose deeply democratic, highly-effective form of life-or-death group decision-making helps demonstrate what a high-functioning collective intelligence can actually engender.

It’s what the work of UCLA psychology professor Dan Siegel makes visible, by providing us with a scientific definition of that most elusive of all human features — the mind — and helping us understand precisely what connects us both internally and externally.

And it’s what we can see and feel throughout the halls of Crosstown High, a public high school in Memphis, Tennessee that has crafted a student body, and a school campus, that are meant to tap the collective wisdom and shared culture of an entire city. 

“Mutuality is the principle of the individual body as well as the law governing the interplay of all bodies. It is the key to understanding reality,” explains biologist Andreas Weber. “To understand ourselves, we have to recognize ourselves in other living creatures. To be mirrored is a central element in the formation of human identity.”

Virginia Woolf put it another way. “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern. The whole world is a work of art . . . Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God.

“We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

The Art of Liz Lerman

Posted on | by Sam

Imagine, for a moment, a long, upright line that runs from top to bottom. 

At the top is art so separate from its culture that its greatness is measured by its uselessness.

At the bottom is art so quotidian that no one even thinks to call it art.

This, Liz Lerman explains, is the hierarchy of ideas under which almost all of us labor. 

And it is a false divide.

“Now imagine turning that line sideways to lay it horizontal,” she offers. “That way each of these poles exerts an equal pull and has an equal weight. If we are lucky enough, we can actually take the long highway between the sometimes opposing forces, discovering impulses that can feed our artistic impulses along the way.”

This is what it means to, as Lerman, says, “hike the horizontal.” And this is the journey she has been curating for all of us for the past five decades  — a journey that is designed to blur the lines between artist and citizen, artist and scientist, and artist and audience. 

Lerman’s career began as a young girl in constant motion — “up giant slides before my parents could stop me, racing into the flooded backyard to jump through the water, and begging for dance classes which I was finally allowed to begin when my family left California for Washington, DC, in the early 1950s.”

It continued through her teenage years, dancing in a ballet performance for President Kennedy, appearing in Life Magazine, and witnessing the tension between making art and living in a world that was alight with the civic friction of the civil rights movement. 

“What I realized,” she says, “is that dance is a birthright, and birthrights are easily stolen. It is the human connection to the body, and the body’s connection to the mind, that provides a ladder, a safety net, or a trampoline, enabling people to experience the spiritual. People use their bodies to learn their history. And so to make change at all, you first have to notice what is going on around you or inside you.”

This epiphany led Lerman to found The Dance Exchange in 1976, and to organize its work around four essential questions:

Who gets to dance? What is the dance about? Where is it happening? And why does it matter?

In partnership with her colleagues, Lerman choreographed and performed dances that were deeply grounded in both community issues and the communities themselves. The Dance Exchange performed in concert halls, but also community centers, children’s hospitals, and retirement homes.

“I wanted to document ways of seeing and being that have the power to change the environments we live and work in,” she explained, “and the encounters that we have with each other. I hunted for ways to maintain my commitment to the excellence of the concert world in a balance with the dynamic, meaningful, and equally challenging world of communities.”

Early in her career, this sentiment led her to make what was at the time a radical choice — a dance of performers both young and old. “I began to question accepted notions of who and what was beautiful,” she recalled. “It was then that I began to see that from an artistic point of view, we could change people’s lives, and from a community point of view, we could change how people interacted.

“The older people made it so easy to extend oneself, converse with strangers, and be big about it all. Older bodies make for great storytelling, beautiful movement, and a curious form of courage.”

What surprised Lerman the most, however, was the impact of the relationship between her oldest and youngest dancers. “I decided that they were dancing so well because they were so loved. The dance environment in which most of these students had grown up was harshly judgmental. It was a liberating experience that offered such unreserved appreciation for their dancing and admiration for their bodies.”

This formula is one Lerman has revisited throughout her career, one that eventually led her into a creative alliance with scientists, and multimedia performances about subjects ranging from atomic energy to the trauma of war to the double helix. “It’s by now well established that science and art have a lot in common,” she says, “as well as much to teach each other. Artists and scientists have a keen understanding that not knowing is fuel for the imagination rather than fuel for humiliation. There is nothing to hide.

“I think we are at our most successful when we make it possible for people to undergo a fresh understanding of their surroundings, of an idea, or of their own relationship to artistic experience. We look at a body and we see the person, the shape, the line, the personality. If we know the person or we know how to look deeper, we see their history as well. The same happens to us in a building or a park or our homes. We see the place, the shape, the line, the personality. If we look deeper, we can perceive their history too. When we allow ourselves to witness and respond to both things at once, we can learn much about ourselves, about the spaces and places around us.

“The opening and closing curtains bracket a moment in time; they are a pair of parentheses within the long, ongoing project of making sense of the world. The theater calls our attention, brings us together, makes us focus, asks us questions, makes us wonder, and then releases us out again into the chaos.

We each belong to many domains, and although we may live in one, we have a history, need, and empathy for others. We are dwellers in the transdomain.”

 

The Art of “Oh, My Sweet Land”

Posted on | by Sam

For as long as we’ve walked the earth, we’ve made sense of the world through stories. And for thousands of years, the theater has been our most enduring place to share them — a darkened space in which we are invited to imagine alternate worlds, and have our senses activated through the magic of language, lighting, and set design.

It has not been the place we go to experience the sting of freshly chopped onions, or to hear the crackling sizzle of a heated pan. 

But a new play, and a new frame for thinking about how and where our dramatic stories can unfold, is changing all that — and making the theater a space in which all our senses can be brought to life in the service of generating a deeper connection to the stories we tell.

The one-woman play, Oh My Sweet Land, is the work of Amir Nizar Zuabi, an award-winning Palestinian playwright; and Corinne Jaber, a German-Syrian actress. It’s based on interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan, and what unfolds over its 90 minutes is a visceral, personal look at the Syrian refugee crisis — and the brutal war that led up to it. 

The setting is simple and straight-forward: a woman of mixed Syrian-German parentage recalls her encounter with Ashraf, a Syrian man in Paris who charms her and then disappears, prompting the woman to set out in search of him — a journey that leads her to intersect with some of the millions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. 

In this production, however, the nameless woman is not speaking to us from a stage, but from someone’s private kitchen, a place in which only 20 or so people can fit — and a setting the production team only has access to about an hour before the show starts. And while she’s speaking she’s not blocking out rigid stage directions, but preparing kibbeh, a Syrian delicacy. “Since I came back, I make kibbeh again and again,” she says as the show begins, “as if I want to close a hole in my soul with these little pockets of warmth.”

Because of the setting, audience members are likely to be affected by more than just the language. “This man’s imprisonment matters so much more than a pan of onions,” wrote theater critic Alexis Soloski when the play was staged in New York City. “But you are sitting in a cream-colored Brooklyn kitchen and the stove is a lot closer to you than Syria. So it’s the onions that really trouble you. Because surely the steam has turned to smoke. Surely they are burning.”

For Zuabi, that fuller engagement of the senses is part of the point. “Where I come from, hospitality, feeding you, is a core value,” he said. “For me it was a no-brainer that the play needs to do with food and the sensuality of food, because it’s about a culture that’s under attack—not just about the horrors of Syria, but about celebrating what this culture is.” 

The intimacy of the setting adds another factor. “The way that this play has been written — it’s poetic, it’s personal, it’s intimate, it’s very vulnerable,” says Torange Yeghiazarian, who directed the play for its San Francisco run. “The storyteller opens herself up and shares intimate details that I hope will entice the audience to also open up and make themselves vulnerable. That’s why we’re having post-play conversations and sharing food. I feel like as a society we’re hungry for that kind of intimate and vulnerable conversation.”

Consequently, Oh, My Sweet Land and efforts like it are reframing the nexus between art and everyday life, in ways that can open us up to a broader emotional experience. “You might feel like a bit of a monster,” Soloski continues, “for fretting about those onions while Ms. Malouf describes people who have suffered torture and worse. Yet this is what makes Mr. Zuabi’s play so devastating. Because yes, it’s about kibbe and sex and stressful journeys across borders. But as you sit crammed together in that pleasant little kitchen, the play is also about our incomplete ability to wrap our heads around a war being fought half a world away, about our finite capacity for empathy. 

“Decent people can’t look away from what is happening,” the nameless woman tells herself. But people can and people do, like the woman who will soon look away from us as she removes the kibbe from boiling oil. So we go on — cooking, cleaning, watching plays — and we put slaughter out of our minds. What else can we do?”

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.

The Art of James Baldwin

Posted on | by Sam

How do you develop a healthy sense of self when the society into which you’re born has been constructed to deny your very identity?

This is America’s inconvenient truth, the unwanted legacy of the Peculiar Institution, and the fly in the buttermilk of every Utopian American myth and storyline since our founding. And throughout our short and tumultuous history, perhaps no artist has better captured the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction than a slender, bug-eyed boy from Harlem named James Baldwin.

He was born between the wars to a poor mother in a crowded family. As a child he struggled under the critical eye of his stepfather, a man Baldwin felt had been “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” As a young man he came of age alongside the growing resistance of the Civil Rights Movement, a period in which he recognized himself as “a kind of bastard in the West.” And over the course of his life — and a career that spanned six books, three plays, and scores of essays, book reviews, and electric public talks — James Baldwin became a witness to the destructive power of our racist myth-making, and the redemptive power of our capacity for love and reconciliation.

Throughout his life, Baldwin questioned how his fellow Americans could develop a healthy sense of identity in a society that spent so much energy cultivating an image that was not grounded in reality. “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors,” he wrote. “If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations. 

“We made the world we’re living in, and we have to make it over.”

To make the world over, Baldwin urged us to fearlessly confront the ways in which the current racial structure was preventing all Americans, oppressor and oppressed, from discovering who we were. “One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds,” he wrote. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves.” 

Black people (or, more specifically, the people in American culture that have been defined as “Black”) have always been regarded by White people (or, more specifically, the people in American culture that have chosen to define themselves as “White”)  as caricatures, not human beings. But one can only begin to recognize another’s humanity “by taking a hard look at oneself.” 

To recognize one’s true identity as an American, therefore, requires recognizing the full weight of our racial history — no matter how painful — and the full scope of the ways our racial fantasies and attendant myths have shaped the construction of both our individual and shared identities.  “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth,” he wrote. To believe oneself to be White or Black is to deprive oneself of a viable identity. What binds us together is not these artificial categories of social construction, but “our endless connection with, and responsibility for, each other.” 

“If we,” he wrote in 1962, “and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

“We are walking in terrible darkness here, and this is one man’s attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.”

 

The Science of Feedback Loops

Posted on | by Sam

Our world is made of circles: 

Living and dying. Energy and entropy. Cause and effect. 

Why, then, do we so often see straight lines?

According to systems theorist Peter Senge, “one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.” And Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. 

“If we want to see systemwide interrelationships,” says Senge, “we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles.”

This is the language, and the science, of feedback loops.

Most commonly, we use the word feedback to describe the process of gathering opinions about ourselves — all too often, unidirectionally (“How did I do?”). In systems thinking, however, feedback is a broader concept that means a reciprocal flow of influence. 

We are always a part of the process, in other words, and never an impartial observer. 

Everyone shares responsibility for the problems created by the systems they inhabit. 

And every influence is both cause and effect.  

This represents a profound shift in awareness, one that requires us to acknowledge that we are both influenced by and influencing our reality (and one another’s) all the time. 

Feedback loops provide a language to map and explain that activity, biologically.  

There are two types of loops, the first of which is called regulatory or negative feedback. The balancing feedback these loops provide exist whenever and wherever there’s a goal-oriented behavior required.  The work of a thermostat is an easy example — but so is the myopia of a school district oriented around its test scores. 

In these sorts of systems, if the goal is one you like, you’ll be happy — and if it isn’t, you’ll be thwarted at every effort to change things until you either change the goal or weaken its influence. 

Negative feedback loops, therefore, keep systems on track once the course has been established, and use information to help the system achieve its predetermined outcomes — even if those outcomes are not explicitly named or understood. 

This sort of system is great for machines — and lousy for human beings.

But there is a second type of feedback loop, positive or amplifying. These loops use information differently — not to maintain the status quo, but to notice something new and amplify it into messages that signal a larger need to change.

Positive loops do not promote order, but disequilibrium, which is the hallmark of a true living system — to continuously import energy from the environment and export entropy in order to constantly change and grow. Our understanding of them grows out of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s work on thermodynamics, which demonstrated that, prior to the conventional wisdom up to that point, disequilibrium is in fact the necessary condition for growth in a living system. 

As he explained, they’re called dissipative structures because of their paradoxical nature — they give up their previous form(s) in order to become something new, over and over. This is why they’re called self-organizing systems. As Margaret Wheatley puts it, “The viability and resiliency of a self-organizing system comes from its great capacity to adapt as needed, to create structures that fit the moment. Neither form nor function alone dictates how the system is organized. Instead, they are process structures, reorganizing into different forms in order to maintain their identity.”

They are, in other words, precisely what our human systems are not — and need to be. 

Adaptive, not rigid. 

Resilient, not stable.

In sum, if stability is the goal, runaway amplification can be very threatening — think of a shrieking microphone — and we may be wise to quell it before our eardrums burst. But if what we seek is something more emergent in its response to new information, positive feedback is essential to life’s ability to adapt and change, whether it’s your own backyard, a healthy workplace culture, or the Twitter storm that helped fuel the Arab Spring. 

It is, quite simply, nature’s way of saying that the system needs to change.

 

The Science of a Murmuration of Starlings

Posted on | by Sam

What words can do justice to the magic of a million birds, flying and weaving as one? Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?

There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what starlings do and how they make us feel when we see them.  Yet the flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior,  and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember.

Starlings are native to several continents, although North America is not one of them.  Back in 1890, however, a Shakespeare enthusiast decided that all birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays should be brought to North America (the starling makes its star turn in Henry IV, Part 1). His idea worked — a little too well. From an initial group of 100 birds, the starling population in North America now tops 200 million. And it is the behavior of each bird in those massive, undulating flocks that makes the starling so notable — and, for some, so magical. 

Almost a century ago, the British ornithologist Edmund Selous asserted that these “handsome, lively, vivacious birds” were telepathic. Today, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake suggests that starling behavior is an example of his hypothesis of morphic resonance, or the notion that the laws of nature are “more like habits, ones in which each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.” And yet beyond these appreciations and speculations, we have lacked the ability to concretely explain how a murmuration works — how one million individual creatures can dart and soar in self-organizing synchrony . . . until now.

Thanks to the work of two separate studies from 2013, we now know that individual starlings all obey the same few flight rules:

Watch your seven nearest neighbors.

Fly toward each other, but don’t crowd.

And if any of your neighbors turn, turn with them.

Why do they do this? According to one of the studies, “when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” 

By following this rule of seven, the birds become part of a dynamic system in which each individual part combines to make a whole with emergent properties. This collective behavior allows the birds to gather information on their surroundings and self-organize toward an ideal density, one in which optimal patterns of light and dark are produced that can deliver information to the entire flock (and protect them from predators). The closer each bird pays attention, the safer — and more cohesive — the entire flock becomes.

Of course, this sort of swarming behavior is not unique to starlings. Many different animals, from birds and insects to fish and mammals, have been observed in their own form of a swarm. So what can this behavior teach us about ourselves, our organizations, and our ability to change the story of the way we work and learn?

According to Andreas Weber, author of The Biology of Wonder, “the spirit of poetic ecology is the spirit of swarms. To understand the individual, we need to understand its environment, and each through the other. We have to think of beings always as interbeings.

“We are a swarm ourselves,” Weber writes, “and we form swarms. A swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence. In this respect, a swarm (or a murmuration) is an intensified counterpart of ourselves. It is what we are and what we try to imagine with our conscious thinking. Swarms are solidified feeling. The swarm is — and in its being living dynamics and their expression are welded together in one single gesture.”

In other words, a murmuration is more than just a pretty metaphor for thinking differently about organizational behavior; it’s a reminder, in physical form, that our own bodies, cultures and classrooms are governed by the same rules. As Weber puts it, “we see gestalts of the living that behave according to simple organic laws mirroring the great constellation that every living being has to cope with: to persist, to be close to the other, but not so close as to collide with him. These are the principles of poetic forms that are so thorough we can even teach them to a computer. They are the primary shapes of a poetics of living things.”

The Science of Honeybee Democracy

Posted on | by Sam

There may be no creature on earth more vital to our own well-being than the honeybee — the primary pollinator for fifty different fruit and vegetable crops that make up the most nutritious portion of our daily diet.

Less debatable, however, is whether this same bee is also the ideal model for our ongoing efforts to craft a more perfect union — or at least Shakespeare thought so, when he described honeybees as the “creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”  

But why? And how?

According to the American biologist Thomas Seeley, it’s because of the ways honeybees relate to one another — clearly, constructively, and collaboratively. “The process of evolution operating over millions of years,” he explains, “has shaped the behavior of bees so that they coalesce into a single collective intelligence. Just as a human body functions as a single integrated unit even though it is a multitude of cells, the superorganism of a honeybee colony operates as a single coherent whole even though it is a multitude of bees.”

Although there are many examples of this in honeybee behavior, the most illustrative occurs every year in late spring and early summer, when a beehive is most likely to get overpopulated. When this occurs, roughly one-third of the hive’s bees promptly elect to stay and rear a new queen — who will ultimately be chosen, no holds barred, from the current queen’s few surviving daughters — while the remaining two-thirds politely accept their eviction notices and leave with the old queen to set out into the great unknown and create a new colony.

When they depart, as many as 10,000 honeybees can form a swarm cloud as large as 60 feet across. Yet within minutes, the bees will quickly reassemble somewhere into a beard-shaped cluster, and then hang that way for the next several hours or days, awaiting word, while several hundred of the swarm’s oldest citizens spring into action as nest-site scouts and begin exploring a swath of the surrounding countryside — as large as 30 square miles — for a suitable new home. 

This is, to be clear, a life or death decision. 

To survive in winter, a hive must be able to contract itself into a tight, well-insulated cluster — about the size of a basketball. They must find a home that is high enough to avoid detection by hungry predators. And they must have space for the copious amounts of provisions — i.e., honey, as much as 44 pounds of it — that will have to sustain them until Spring. 

Despite these stakes, the swarm will make this decision within hours, and from as many as 30 different possible nest sites.  And they will do all of this democratically, without any central leader. Indeed, despite her name, the Queen Bee is not the boss of anyone, and a honeybee hive is governed collectively — a harmonious society of hexagonal cells wherein thousands of worker bees, “through enlightened self-interest, cooperate to serve a colony’s common good.” 

In a swarm, this happens when the nest scouts all set out in different directions in search of the perfect new home. When they think they’ve found one, they return to the group and offer a sort of “waggle dance,” a series of movements that outline the central characteristics of the proposed site, and invite other bees who agree on its merits to join them in waggle-dancing.

This continues as more and more scouts return, and gradually, a face-to-face, consensus-seeking assembly takes place in which an eventual winner is democratically determined. “One way to think of a honeybee colony, then, is as a society of many thousands of individuals,” Seeley explains. “But to understand the distinctive biology of this species of bee, it is often helpful to think of a colony in a slightly different way, not just as thousands of separate bees but also as a single living entity that functions as a unified whole.”

In that sense, the collective decision making of a bee swarm resembles an archetypal New England town meeting, one in which each decision reflects the freely given contributions of several hundred individuals; is informed by multiple sources simultaneously, even ones that are widely scattered; and is made by staging an open competition among the proposed alternatives. “In this way, Seeley continues, “the roughly three pounds of bees in a swarm, just like the three pounds of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions.”

(Y)our move, homo sapiens . . .