Tobin refers to my communication as pointing at meditation. I had no
intention that it do so but am enlightened by that response. I think
there are more than similarities. I would say that meditation is a
practice that will allow what has previously appeared as noise - or
not appeared at all - as foreground worthy of consideration.
Now for the real challenge! What is the organisational equivalent of
meditation. Individuals may practice this and bring their insight to
the organisation. But what about this "meditation" as an
organisational practice. A practice distinct from the individuals in
it. (I'm attempting to extend my distinction of an organisation as
being an emergent and distributed phenomenon beyond the individuals
in it.)
One way might be to adapt the practices of meditation for a meeting.
That might be for a group to spend regular time considering the same
statement (not question) over and over and just listening to the
multiple associations, thoughts, responses, etc that arise and
without recording anything, continue to do this until the original
statement transformed or some other clarity emerged.
Another might be a group process that I use frequently and call
"emptying the mind". In this process, the group considers EVERYTHING
that constitutes causes, sources or elements of a thing - say
"leadership" - and each is recorded on a display that may paper the
walls of the room. Once an exhaustive list is created, the
participants just "be with" the list for a while. What occurs is
that they see they are living in a swirl of contradictory
experiences, opinions, thoughts and that there is no logic nor way to
sort out the mess. The solution then accurs in the form of a sword
for the Gordian Knot.
Clarity can be brought to issues where "everybody knows but nobody
does" and other confusions with this process.
Practices of silence and listening appear strongly again. (See
earlier conversation threads on both.)
I've also done an exercise with groups where they just continue to
"prove their case" to someone else (paired sharing) until they've
said everything that they can possibly say about what they think and
believe and feel about an issue. In this process, the participants
get sick of the "theories" of others and, eventually of their own as
well, and then are ready to "think together" rather than "opine
together".
And ...... I continue to speculate on this thread. It becomes a rich
source of speculating for me when in the context of organisations as
beings of their own.
The key to understanding this approach seems to be to consider the
nature of distributed phenomena. This nature is a correlate of
emergence. Where it is present, there is a "gap" between the
individual elements and the emergent phenomenon.
For instance, in dialogue, where something emerges that wasn't
present at the start, we can record the individual sentences or
expressions that were part of the dialogue and track (more or less
effectively) their individual relationships but we can't do the same
kind of tracking to the "aha" event of the emergence occurring.
There is a sort of "gap" in our explanation or understanding *which
we generally fail to notice* because it's kind of taken for granted
and a common experience. But a common experience isn't necessarily
understood - frequently it just isn't in awareness.
-- Michael McMaster Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk