Last Thursday, the Future Salon was simply amazing. The topic at hand was Extreme Democracy, but what the evening especially memorable was that two worlds intersected. Most political discussions end up evitably because of the structure of the two-party system being an I/You discussion rather then telling the WE story (again, I cannot recommend that chapter in The Art of Possibility enough). Tom Atlee, the author of Tao of Democracy and also president of the Co-Intelligence Institute presented a seemingly radical approach - that dialogue and deliberation could yield an integral synthesis of different views that is not a summation of the parts, not a compromise as most consensus often is, but like emergence in complex adaptive systems a higher level of order. It was a decidedly Taoist view - not yin or yang - not separate parts but the whole.
Other links to interesting posts on the event are at these blogs: Future Salon, Ross Mayfield, Corante Many-to-Many, and Eric Rice.
Tom recounted a fascinating story:
During Canada's constitutional crisis in 1991, Maclean's magazine (Canada's equivalent of Time) scientifically selected 12 ordinary citizens who together covered the spectrum of conflicted views about Canada's future -- and assigned them the task of crafting a shared vision. Facilitated by Harvard negotiation guru Roger Fisher [author of Getting to Yes], they began in battle mode and ended three days later in understanding, shared caring, and a remarkable consensus about new directions for Canada. Macleans devoted three-quarters of their July 1 issue to "The People's Verdict: How Canadians Can Agree on their Future," and Canadian TV broadcast the group's proceedings nationally.
Tom explains co-intelligence in this way:
First, it is a systemic phenomenon. We could even accurately call it systemic intelligence. Many people erroneously assume that "collective intelligence" means that a system is made up of many individuals in whom intelligence resides, and that collective intelligence is achieved by simply gathering all those individual intelligences together. While this is true, it is only part of the picture.Much of a system's intelligence resides not in its individual parts, but in the system's characteristic patterns -- its structures and institutions, its relationships and operational habits, its culture (or personality), its fields of energy and aliveness, its flows and reservoirs of information, the stories it tells itself, and so on. The collectIVE intelligence of the whole is greater than the collectED intelligence of its parts because wholeness adds synergy -- patterns of relationship and interactivity -- to the mere sum of the parts. Individual intelligences play a crucial but only partial role in the generation of collective intelligence.
In my experience, consensus typically seems to devolve to a lowest common denominator approach because the focus seems to be on agreement and compromise on the individual viewpoints - the parts. But that's not what this process is about. This is about creating another entity - the WE story I've mentioned before. And I'd call the result the highest common denominator. This reminds me of the time I was writing a story about the open source - primarily Linux - ecosystem in Utah and the angle I took was to compare and contrast the internal leadership of the companies themselves with the open source development process. I found it fascinating that Ransom Love, then CEO of Caldera (yes, now of infamous SCO fame, but he left before that fiasco) had recently instituted this very idea of corporate "councils" that dovetailed with the philosophy of the open source movement.
David Weinberger recently noted how consensus seems to smooth out all the edges and wash out any voice in Wikipedia articles, especially when writing contentious articles (i.e. George Bush's). I thought Abe's comment to the post were enlightening:
The problem with David's observation is that Wikipedia cannot be divided into process and product. Every Wikipedia article is in constant flux. Articles which seem to stay constant are only in a state of less relative flux. The fact that [[GW Bush]] is in relatively high flux shows that it is viewed differently by many people and/or it is changing faster than we can describe it; it doesn't mean that the Wikipedia process is broken.It may be more coherent to think of Wikipedia as a conversation. Each change in Wikipedia is the latest utterance in that conversation. So, when one sees [[GW Bush]] swing between "Bush the Strong" and "Bush the Demonic", one is evesdropping on the back-and-forth of a particular discussion. By keeping all the participants together in [[GW Bush]] Wikipedia forces all sides to keep communicating with each other. To break [[GW Bush]] into sub-categories is to create echo chambers, which (as David points out) the WWW is already good enough at doing on its own.
Ross muses that perhaps "Yin is to wikis as Yang is to blogs." That's still a separatist or dualistic view. Yin and Yang are really two sides of the same coin. It may be easiest to think of Yin as yielding, letting go, receptive to inspiration while Yang as more ready-to-go, creative (as in creating), the doing-energy. Tom Atlee is trying to get us to see that yin and yang are inseparable and to look beyond parts, beyond this "or" that and embrace the whole. Wikis aren't just yin; but they seem to enable a process that embraces the integral, synergistic quality of the whole.
Another way to look at highest common denominator is to look at the process of the dialectic put forth by Hegel.
[German philosopher G.W.F.] Hegel made an important discovery about how human understanding develops. After reading Plato's Dialogues with great attention, he perceived in them just how our awareness grows. As he watched Socrates converse and debate, meeting others' certainties with objections or questions, Hegel slowly saw the first position shift as it took objections into account. He realized understanding is a dynamic operation of thought that requires the tension of opposites to unfold. Insight develops out of this conflict of opposites.If we examine our own views over time, we can easily recognize this principle at work. It is called dialectic. Hegel not only discovered its operation in human understanding - in all human beings - but in history as well. History is dialectical; it advances through a series of polar tensions that are resolved in a higher view. For example, the tension between the Roman Empire and the Christian Church led to a synthesis in which the church as the new establishment became the empire. Later, the struggle between the medieval church and the state led eventually to the emergence of the modern secular state, which in turn led to democracy. Throughout it all, an inner struggle waged between the logic and consistency of the positions. - The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions by Wayne Teasdale
This book uses Hegel's controversial theory of dialectic to introduce the tensions between the Buddhist and Christian worldviews in the U.S. but you can see how it could have wide application when conflicting views are present.
It is clear to me that these two traditions are in a dialectical historical process. If Christianity can represent, in this relationship, the position that God exists, while Buddhism negates this view or is silent about the existence of God, then up the road of history, the honest, open, patient and generous dialogue over this and other matters - such as arguments over the existence of the soul, karma, and reincarnation, grace, free will, and eternal life - will lead to a breakthrough that will carry humankind to a higher level of awareness...What eventually will emerge will go beyond both Buddhism and Christianity in their present views. It will be a new view that both can embrace, a subtle refinement of what they have both known. It is difficult to predict the precise shape of this forthcoming breakthrough... - The Mystic Heart
Dialogue and deliberation sets in motion the dialectic process - and the creation of an inclusive and evolving "we" entity that personifies the "togetherness". This process sets in motion the opportunity and the possibility of reaching a higher ground - a highest common denominator - that emerges from the process itself. As stated in the Telling the WE Story chapter in The Art of Possibility:
[I]t's an integrative process that yields the next step. It asks you to trust that the evolution you set in motion will serve you over the long line. What happens after that is not in your control, but springs spontaneously from the WE itself.
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