Syntony Quest: Evolutionary Competence

EL Center Directory | Learning to Learn

Evolutionary: Consciousness | Literacy | Competence | Praxis

Evolutionary Competence

“Individuals make tremendous leaps from one kind of society to another when they have a chance to experience fully the ways of living and thinking in the new society”
— Margaret Mead & Rhoda Metraux

“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.
You may have to work for it, however”
— Richard Bach

The third stage of evolutionary learning involves developing the ability to act in ways that make possible both the transcendence of problems and the cultivation of social systems of syntony.

Competence is the integration of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes that empowers individuals and groups to act in knowledgeable and ethical ways. As a result, evolutionary competence is about developing the abilities and sensitivities to act upon the awareness and understandings of the two previous stages. The development of evolutionary competence involves self-empowerment as evolutionary systems designers.

Evolutionary competence, or the capacity to act based on an evolutionary understanding, involves…

… Developing community building skills

Learn facilitation skills that catalyze effective interaction.
Stewardship; responsibility connected with rights.
Communicate ideas in different languages, both verbal and non-verbal, to reach different peoples and cultures.
Learn to live peacefully and sustainably.
Learn to think, learn, and work collaboratively.

… Developing design competence

Ability to shape our destiny through social systems design, a sub-component of evolutionary systems design.
Participate in the creation of ideal images and bring them into being.
Find practical ways of living lightly, simply, meaningfully in and with Earth.
Learn to design communities of syntony.

… Developing a syntony sense

Regain the common sense that helps us to be in harmony with ourselves and with nature and nurture it, listen to it, appreciate it, use it, and refine it.
Learn to flow with nature on purpose.
Learn to listen to each other and to our surroundings and think about how what one thinks resonates with internal intuitions and orientations as well as with the external context.
Develop a sense of responsibility coupled with response-ability to affect purposeful, positive, evolutionary change.
Develop a sense of sensibility coupled with sense-ability to intuit, discern, assess, and orient toward life-affirming and future creating opportunities for change.

So far we have been exploring various aspects of evolutionary learning by learning to learn and developing evolutionary consciousness and evolutionary literacy. But in order to develop evolutionary consciousness, we need to get hands on experience, and we need to do it in community. Here is where Evolutionary Systems Design, as a soft technology that enables the creation of Evolutionary Learning Communities, comes more fully into play.

Evolutionary Systems Design is a heuristic that integrates the evolutionary learning journey – from evolutionary consciousness to conscious evolution – in a larger framework of collaborative work that includes generative and strategic processes.

Generative processes are focused on community building. By cultivating the process of creating a shared identity and a common purpose, the individuals in an Evolutionary Leaning Community learn to become whole human beings in relationship with others. Through dialogue, the generative processes leads to the creation of shared identity, world view and purpose and to a collective inquiry that focuses on the thoughts, values, and perceptions of the group. It creates a flow of shared meaning and a social milieu of friendship and fellowship.

The members of an ELC can explore the following questions as part of their generative processes:

How are we going to enable ongoing generative dialogue in our community?
What are the questions that will guide our process of becoming an authentic community?
Which means of communication are we going to use under what circumstances?
How are we going to resolve conflicts?
How are we going to assure that our community enhances personal uniqueness and interpersonal harmony?

Some methodologies and tools to engage in generative dialogue and build community are:

The World Café

The World Café is a self-organizing process that enables communities to engage in “conversations that matter.” The principles of the World Café are:

Create Hospitable Space
Explore Questions That Matter
Connect Diverse People and Ideas
Encourage Each Person's Contribution
Listen Together for Patterns, Insights and Deeper Questions
Make Collective Knowledge Visible

You can learn more about the World Café at: www.theworldcafe.com
and you can download the concise resource guide at: www.theworldcafe.com/twcrg.html

Synergic Inquiry

Yongming Tang developed a framework for facilitating the expansion of consciousness and embracing diversity. He calls it Synergic Inquiry, and it involves a four-step process. The first step calls for self-knowing: examining and making explicit one's own values, beliefs, assumptions. The second step is other-knowing: learning more about the way of being in the world of another. The third step is differences-holding: embracing two different consciousness as equally valid and able to co-exist, and thinking in terms of "both-and" rather than "either-or" frameworks. Finally, there is differences-transcending: the transformative step of going beyond the limitations of each single consciousness. It is this last step that characterizes the emergence of an authentic community, or as M. Scott Peck describes it, "a way of being together with both individual authenticity and interpersonal harmony so that people become able to function with a collective energy even greater than the sum of their individual energies."

To learn more about Synergic Inquiry, you can also check the following online articles:

Masaji Takano
A narrative assessment of synergic inquiry: Its effectiveness in fostering
transformative learning in cross-cultural settings.
www.edst.educ.ubc.ca/aerc/1997/97takano.htm

Yongming Tang
Synergic inquiry (SI): An alternative framework for transformative learning.
www.edst.educ.ubc.ca/aerc/1997/97tang.html

Bohmian dialogue

The following webpage from the Co-Intelligence Institute is a rich introduction to Bohmian dialogue and beyond, with additional links to more resources.

www.co-intelligence.org

The strategic processes focus on design as the means for translating the intentions and visions of the community into reality. Evolutionary systems design involves innovation informed by an evolutionary ethic. Knowledge, imagination, and values inform each other in the process of making choices that affect the present and the future of those involved in the design. In this context, strategic processes involve the integration of theory and practice, sciences and arts, and work, learning and play, and their purpose is social transformation from a systemic and evolutionary perspective.

There are many methodologies and tools that can guide and support an evolutionary learning community in its design endeavors:

A story of transcendence

The self-empowerment of an evolutionary learning community to participate in conscious evolution begins with facing one essential challenge: that of transcending the current state. From an evolutionary perspective, transcendence is the self-organization of a system into a higher level of complexity with new emergent properties that could not be predicted from the previous state. In terms of human experience, transcending also means letting go and adventuring into the unknown.

The Native American tale of Jumping Mouse is a wonderful allegory that teaches us the difficulties and the rewards of going beyond, of leaping out, and of reaching new possibilities.

Fuzzy guiding principles for Evolutionary Learning Communities

A brief introduction to chaos theory: complex dynamic systems have a “chaotic” behavior. However, underlying that seemingly random behavior, there is a pattern that gives coherence to the organization of the system. The pattern or attractor has clear “rules” that define the dynamics of the system behavior.
Evolutionary learning community is an attractor for the self-directed lifelong learning of individuals and groups in harmony with life, but instead of rules, it self-organizes around fuzzy guiding principles. Each community explores what these fuzzy guiding principles mean for them, what their implications are for their learning, design and action. As a result, each ELC is unique. They always follow the pattern guided by these principles, but their manifestation in the real world is an authentic reflection of the specific community’s members, their values, needs, and aspirations.

The ten fuzzy guiding principles of ELC, briefly described, are:

Lifelong evolutionary learning:
The purpose of the community is to facilitate learning for the evolution of consciousness to enable conscious evolution.
Evolutionary ethic:
Decisions and choices with regard to learning, design, and action in the community seek to promote the greater good of individuals, societies, ecosystems, and future generations of all non-destructive forms of life.
Partnership:
The community chooses to embody a partnership (rather than dominator) model of relations and promotes win-win dynamics within social systems and with their environment.
Environmental sustainability:
The learning, design, and action of the community seek to mitigate ecological damage, to promote sustainable development, and to learn to respect and to live in partnership with Earth and all its life support systems.
Social responsibility:
The community advocates and embodies a culture of participation and shared responsibility for a more just and peaceful society.
Future orientation:
The community is committed to the creation of their future and to the protection of the right of future generations to engage in their own evolutionary learning and design.
Quality of life:
The community enjoys a life that is fulfilling, inwardly rich, and characterized by the presence of a holistic sense of wellbeing and happiness.
Flow:
Each individual finds ways to express his or her unique gifts and experiences optimal challenge while contributing to the emergence of sustainable and evolutionary futures.
Syntony:
The community “listens” to the dynamics of change of which they are a part and consciously participates in the creation of evolutionary consonance in all the endeavors in which they engage.
Wholeness and interconnections:
The community is aware of the interconnected and embedded nature of the world and strives toward wholeness.

These fuzzy guiding principles were developed through dissertation work on Creating the Conditions for the Design of Evolutionary Learning Community: A participatory and co-creative exploration of educational images for a sustainable and evolutionary future. If you would like to have a more detailed description of the fuzzy guiding principles in terms of ideal standards, guiding questions, and action markers, please let us know. You can also access an executive report (pdf) [link to: ELC_Executive_Report.pdf] of the dissertation in the resource section.

Sustainability criteria
We need to design evolutionary social systems, and beyond that, entire ecosystems of syntony. The following list of sustainability criteria guides design and evaluation initiatives to assure that both the products and processes of change are:

Socially desirable
Culturally acceptable
Psychologically nurturing
Economically sustainable
Technologically feasible
Operationally viable
Environmentally friendly
Generationally sensitive
Capable of continuous learning

Sustainable strategies must seek to identify opportunities for increasing the dynamic stability and self-sufficiency of individuals and groups in interaction with the broader set of components of its particular time and place. These strategies should always indicate areas of evolutionary potential to be developed to the advantage of the complex dynamic systems involved in ecosystemic interaction, now and into the future.

Social Systems Design
Social systems design, as developed by Bela H. Banathy, is a decision-oriented disciplined inquiry that empowers communities to identify their need to change and to translate their ideal vision of the society into a feasible reality. Social systems design provides a means to create the conditions for the development of individual and collective potential and for the social evolution of humanity toward sustainable pathways. Systems design is concerned with what ought to be.

For a brief introduction to social systems design visit: www.isiconversations.org

To learn more about this systemic methodology, we recommend the following books:

Banathy, Bela H. (1996). Designing Social Systems in a Changing World. New York: Plenum.

Banathy, Bela H. (2000) Guided Evolution of Society: A systems view. New York: Kluwer Academic.

Bela H. Banathy founded the International Systems Institute (ISI) and each year there is a week-long “conversation event” in Pacific Grove, California, at Asilomar, focused on the design of social systems. For more information about ISI and the Asilomar Conversations check:
www.isiconversations.org

Open Space
Harrison Owen is one of a group of consultants who coined the term "organization transformation," and who is the originator of Open Space Technology. He is author of two books on Open Space, published by Berret-Koehler --

Expanding our Now: The Story of Open Space
Open Space Technology: User's Guide (Second Edition)

Open Space Technology is an innovative approach for creating high-energy participation and commitment to action. It is a large group meeting process that enables groups to deal with complex issues in short time periods. For a brief and useful guide to this process check the following link:
www.planeta.com

Your personal design
If you want to become an evolutionary systems designer and an empowered global citizen, there is no better place to start than at home. Your personal design can become a transformative experience and the most important step you can take to make a difference.

Think: Does change happen to you or through you?
Are you living your life in the most fulfilling, most meaningful, most healthy, most beautiful and most sustainable way?

Whatever your current situation, you can always do something to bring more syntony into your life. Here we offer a few guidelines for you to create your life design, your personal syntony quest, so that you can consciously start moving in the direction of your ideals:

Step 1. Fantasize your future
If you could be anything you wanted to be ten years from now, what would you be? Now, imagine ten years have suddenly flown by and the future is now. What are you doing today? Think in terms of these dimensions:
- intellectual/professional dimension
- health/nutrition dimension
- the social/interpersonal dimension
- spiritual/intrapersonal dimension
- religious/transcendental dimension

This process helps you paint a portrait of the life you wish to lead. The syntony is internal, and yet, if it is well balanced and dynamically in tune such that the balance among the 4+ dimensions (because not everybody has an active religious dimension in their lives) is responsive to (and creatively influences) the socio-physical environment in which you live, then it will also be in syntony with your world and with your planet.

Step 2. Identify your motivational passion
Try to think about the themes and topics that always capture and hold your attention. Think in terms of issues, topics, events, experiences, courses, projects and activities that you have both enjoyed and been challenged by. Start to write these things down and when you have some ten or twenty words in your list, look at what it tells you. What you are looking for is consistency. Do the items on your list have a common theme that ties most of them together? Not all of the passions you have identified will be linkable, but that doesn't matter. What you are looking for are the broad themes. The point is that you can align your personal and professional development so that it is in syntony with your potential to fulfill yourself while at the same time keeping your life in balance (which is an other aspect of syntony).

Step 3. Portray your present
In this step you do exactly what you did in step 1, except that this time don't evaluate your life ten years from now, evaluate it as it is today. Go through the 4+ dimensions and create a realistic portrait of the balance (or lack thereof) that characterizes your current style of life.

Step 4. Identify the gaps and make commitments for change
So what do you end up with after going through all this? You end up with a rich picture of what your ideal potential-filling future is and a basis for comparing it with your life as it is at present. You need to take the results of step 1 and compare them to the results of step 3. Are they different? If so, what are the dimensions that need more attention? How can you work back from the ideal image you created so that you can gradually approximate it in the years to come? By creating a positive image of a future state toward which you can move, you set up your own personal life attractor. Do a "gap analysis" to determine the areas in which your current life style is heading you away from, rather than toward, that attractor, you can see what tendencies and what habits you need to work on to bring'em in line! Your motivational passion should be the energy to start the change process.

You can download the guide (pdf) for your personal design with some graphics for you to fill out here [link to Personal_Design.pdf in resources section].

Our Evolutionary Mentoring program is available for individuals looking for a more in-depth and guided personal design process.

Opportunities for developing evolutionary competence and becoming evolutionary systems designers:

Syntony Quest is dedicated to foster evolutionary learning communities as a means for empowering individuals and groups to participate in the co-creation of a sustainable world. We offer the following programs as vehicles to catalyze ELCs for different audiences and with specific purposes. We invite you to get involved in any of these initiatives:

A Better World (pdf): Enabling evolutionary learning communities throughout the world

FutureMakers: Empowering youth to create their future

ConSiDER: Consumers for Sustainable Development and Ethical Responsibility

Artists with Conscience: Promoting critical and inspirational socio-cultural art

In addition, we facilitate Purposeful Conversations and offer Workshops and Seminars as opportunities for collaborative evolutionary learning.

The following books provide a partial list of suggested reading for developing evolutionary competence:

Banathy, Bela H. (1996). Designing Social Systems in a Changing World. New York: Plenum.

Banathy, Bela H. (2000) Guided Evolution of Society: A systems view. New York: Kluwer Academic.

Bohm, David (1996). On Dialogue. New York: Routledge.

Berry, Thomas (2000). The Great Work: Our way into the future. New York: Crown Publishing.

Checkland, Peter (1981). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. New York: Wiley.

Merry, Uri (1995). Coping With Uncertainty: Insights from the new sciences of chaos, self-organization, and complexity. Westport: Praeger.

Weisman, Allan (1998). Gaviotas: A village to reinvent the world. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.

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