About a week ago I met (electronically) Ted Lumely. The introduction came through Amada who lives in the UK. Ted, it turns out, lives on an Island off Vancouver, BC just 20 miles away from Chris Corrigan. With that kind of proximity to trouble, I knew I was going to be in more trouble. My prescience was perfect, but the trouble has definitely been of a good sort. Ted is all excited about something he calls "Inclusionality." I asked him what that might be, and his answer follows. It is a long read and a little convoluted <interesting use of language :-)>, but it is all about Space, Dynamic Space. I found the whole thing fascinating, and thought you might as well. Ted is not on OSLIST, but maybe he would join. And for whatever it is worth, it seems like there is a whole group of folks messing around in the same pot, most particularly one Alan Rayner, a British Biologist. For more on all this, check out www.bath.ac.uk/~bssadmr
Harrison Harrison Owen 7808 River Falls Drive Potomac, Maryland 20845 Phone 301-365-2093 Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html -----Original Message----- From: ted lumley [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 5:45 PM To: Harrison Owen Subject: RE: Your paper Open Space and World Cafe harrison, yes, 'inclusionality' has been my daily bread for some years now. in 1995, i incorporated a not-for-profit company 'goodshare' with the idea of providing an open investment advisory service which allowed investors to 'highgrade' their investments from simply going with the 'sharpshooters' (in my pool analogy) to those who were sustaining the invisible value potentials in the community dynamic, as they 'took their tangible profits'. (it has never been 'launched' however, and that is another story). it is an idea 'beyond ethical investment' (a causal assertive behaviour based scheme) as it was based on the co-creation of possibility. an analogue would be a group of drivers on a crowded freeway, the extent to which they can accommodate their assertings in a resonant manner so as to sustain a harmonious flow-dynamic. it is easy to see that the harmonious flow breaks down when each driver is intent on pursuing his individual private agenda in a non-accommodating manner. 'accommodation' in this context is to do with co-shaping the dynamical space that one is enveloped and included in (so as to sustain possibility-to-move for one another) and while an individual can't 'do it on his own', he can have an ethic of accommodation which, taken together the accommodative ethic of others, co-produces 'resilience' that sustains the harmonious flow-dynamic of the collective in spite of inevitable 'mistakes' and 'angry outbursts', spikes of aggression etc. i.e. the accommodative ethic leads to a resilient, fault-tolerant harmony-sustaining community dynamic. the more popular alternative proceeds by seeking to optimize the performance of the individual (person, company, nation etc.) and this individual performance optimization leads to a collective dynamic that is fault-intolerant (brittle, lacks resilience) and to an exclusionary ethic of elimination of the 'less-performant'. such as system is not capable of sustainable harmony (lacks the resilience of accommodative-assertive resonance) but undergoes periodic breakdown and repairs. optimizing the performance of the individual is the dominant ethic in 'the west'. it is built into a western education and into the western economic system of where competition takes precedence over co-creative shaping of possibility space (co-creation of invisible value). as in my note passed to you by amanda, one can see that space, the dynamical configuration the emerges continuously from the way things move relative to one another and the collective, is the mother of all 'value' (the 'mysterious woman' of lao tsu). it is a 'larger and deeper' way of perceiving the world dynamic than in the western cultural default terms of 'the motion of independent material agents as if in empty space'. our default view that seeks understanding in terms of 'what things do' is certainly a gross over-simplification since, in the reality of our experience, many coherently self-organizing systems interpermeate within the common space of our biosphere, and so 'possibility-to-move', without which we cannot move as we would like, is continuously emerging from the manner in which we move relative to one another. this observation is not 'new' but has been discussed in the literature of the foundations of scientific thought by henri poincaré, in particular, in the context of 'l'espace restreint' (space which is crowded as in the finite and unbounded commonspace of the biosphere). if one uses the viewing window of 'non-euclidian spherical space', rather than euclidian space, one can see that it is the shape of the holeyness that is giving possibility-to-move that is the over-riding shaper of the evolving dynamic of the collective. that is, the value-giver is what you can't see (possibility-to-move, which is purely implicit/relational) and all actuality precipitates from possibility, yet the western viewing lenses (euclidian space where all value is invested in the movements of the 'independent' constituents) would have us ascribe value to the assertive action-based performance of individual entities (persons, organizations, communities, nations) and ignore the motherspace of possibility from which actuality is being precipitated. this is where analogies like the game of pool and the group of drivers on the crowded freeway (l'espace restreint) help expose the ultimate folly of this 'individual work ethic' since to get work done requires the 'possibility space' to do it (potential energy is necessary for kinetic energy to outwell). [Sidenote: as einstein laboured long and hard to have people see, 'space is not empty', .. space is the stuff that dynamics are made of. space has an invisible potential or springy elasticity that sources kinetic outwelling and archives kinetic inwellings, but, as yvonne aburrow, one of our inclusionality sharing circle coparticipants says, if you cut the bouncy ball molecular collective apart to discover the source of the bounce, you are not going to find out 'where, exactly, it lives' because it is purely relational in the manner that potential energy (energy of position) is purely relational.] anyhow, while many agreed that the basic of concept of goodshare as an investment highgrading facility (to shift from companies that were not just shot-makers but where shape-makers and thus potentials-sustainers as well) seemed sound, access to information on which to base the highgrading was not currently available. [imagine examining individuals driving on crowded roads with the aim of assessing each individual in terms of his having the ethic of infusing and replenishing possibility-enabling potentials that could be harvested by-and-by, the accommodative behaviour that sustains a harmonious flow-dynamic. since accommodative-assertive coresonance is non-causal and cannot be attributed to the individual, there is no means by which we can examine the individual's behaviour to make this assessment]. i know that some driver's on a crowded road are into the co-creating of accommodative-assertive coresonance to sustain a harmonious flow-dynamic, ... so that nominally, there has to be some way to identify who has the ethic and who doesn't, ... but yet the mathematics says that there can be no assertive behaviour-based causal attribution of responsibility for this emergent harmonious-flow-sustaining collective behaviour. another way to look at this is that the individual geese use the enveloping space as a mediative medium that launders out the causal attribution; i.e. they beat their wings to make the enveloping commons of airspace resonant (the local air molecules stimulated by wave dynamics and their own relational elasticity self-organize as can be seen in wind-tunnel photography where the 'V' shapes forming at the nose-tips of each goose are standing waves in the 'fluid dynamic' of the air, and the geese can 'feel' when the multiple individual V's coalesce so as to create a sweetspot in the flow dynamic where resistance is lowered in the manner of the well designed ship whose asserting into the hydrodynamical vessel enters into coresonance with the natural accommodating wave dynamics of the hydraulic medium. that is, the standing wave resonance that 'wants to form' (a low-resistance, assertive-behaviour facilitating sweetspot wanting to emerge in the slipstream of the collective dynamic) in the mediative medium of the enveloping airspace is the guide that orchestrates the phase-coupling of the wing-beating of the geese and their relative proximity. the motorcyclist can feel this same thing in freeway traffic; i.e. he is the source of one of these V-shaped standing wave perturbations in the enveloping airspace and so is every other vehicle, and particularly large semi-trailers. he can feel (e.g. by the flapping of his clothes and the amount of throttle he has to use) where the sweetspots in the flow-dynamic which includes air and vehicles and all, ... are going to emerge. but they do not simply 'occur', they are co-creatively shaped and the sweetspot is 'not there' prior to his moving into it, since he is 'co-creatively fashioning it' by the manner in which he moves relative to the others and therefore by the manner in which his standing wave 'V' coalesces with the others. thus, a collective can co-create a 'potential energy hole' (sweetspot in slipstream of the collective dynamic) that they can ride along in. this is precisely what ships with bulbous underwater bows do; they create an assertive-accommodative coresonant relationship with the hyrodynamical vessel that envelopes and includes them. in the case of the ship, he can read on his fuel consumption guage, when he reaches an assertive velocity that 'matches' (is in assertive-accommodative coresonance with) the opening-up-for-his-asserting reception of the enveloping-including hydrodynamical system. where that coresonance is reached, his fuel consumption will be as much as ten percent less to cover a given distance. these ship/geese/freeway driver examples of the over-riding importance of invisible potentials (possibility space) that manifest when accommodative-assertive coresonance is sustained show their invisible value in terms of the speed and range translocation advantages; i.e. the geese can, as a group flee dangers more quickly and extend their foraging range, distinct 'evolutionary possibility enhancements'. such measurements are purely relative; i.e. relative to the dynamics of fellow, predating organisms and relative to the dynamics of plant growth (seasonal) and ambient conditions (snow covering food supplies etc.). the measurement situation blurs with human organizations, however, who tend to forget about or even deny the intrinsic relativity of their sustained existence and see themselves as independent organisms (organizations) whose future is determined purely by their assertive behavioural performance (the reductionist notion of 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest' which reduces perception to the false terms of 'independence' of assertive behaviour of individual participants), as if the space around them were empty and non-participating. so anyhow, i had this problem with the means of identifying organizations that embodied an ethic appreciative of the invisible value of sustaining assertive-accommodative coresonance, in that such identification could not be made, in any way, on the basis of the assertive actions of the organization. that is, the notion that an organization is 'good' or 'well-behaved' is nonsense, in this inclusionality sense. the problem is, that as soon as one 'isolates' the organization and sees it as an independent thing capable of its own behaviour, one denies its innate dynamical interdependence (as alluded to in the example of the football play). from the principle of relativity, which is available to our direct natural experience, ... the value of the behaviour of any individual or organization can only be relative to the enveloping dynamical commonspace that the individual is immersed and included in. if the individual was truly asserting as an independent agent in empty infinite euclidian space, ... what value could possibly be attached to such behaviour? ... the notion of value in that case vanishes. the endower of value is therefore the enveloping dynamical space that the individual's assertive behaviour is 'relative to'; i.e. space is the source of value;i.e. the relative dynamic of the collective from which possibility emerges is the source of value. stymied in the launching of goodshare by the epistemological difficulties, i moved from dallas to montreal to shift my inquiry to the inclusional nesting level of people (in 1998). i was intuitively attracted by the 'triple junction' of three cultures, anglophone, francophone and indigenous (native american). the so-called 'three-body problem' is fundamental to the epistemological difficulty where causality is laundered out of the system; i.e. where sustained harmony in the dynamic of a collective cannot, in any way, be attributed to the assertive 'well-behaving' actions of the individual. sustained harmony of a three-plus body collective being an 'emergent behaviour', ... emerging from the manner in which the participants move relative to one another while under each others simultaneous mutual influence (the condition of 'relativity'). a situation wherein, as soon as the assessor of goodness or badness of behaviour focuses on the assertive dynamics fo the individual, he misses the point. a verifiable condition which establishes why management based on the judgement of good behaviour versus bad behaviour doesn't work (i.e. it rests on the premise of the 'dynamical independence' of the individual which is a falsehood). living in downtown montreal, i was learning from the underbelly of the tripartite dynamical collective, lesbians and gays, the so-called 'mentally disordered', the addicts of gambling, alcohol and drugs, representing all three cultures. i spent alot of time in bars, played a lot of pool, met a lot of great humanist people, participated in native pow-wows and youth councils, and generally learned alot about multi-constituent dynamics. at this point, i had suspended my focus on 'investment advisory services' and was eager to co-develop a cellular learning module as a vehicle for sharing awareness of 'inclusionality' (non-independence of assertive behaviour) and at that time i connected with present colleagues alan rayner, doug caldwell et al (the log book of which is being maintained by alan rayner). the cellular learning module, i was basing on the 'centerpoint' cellular learning scheme that came out of a jungian psychology group in st louis, which has been very successful in raising awareness of subtleties in the dynamics of our individual and collective minds. it operates in the 'open space' manner of a native 'learning circle' where the group co-creates a learning 'channel' in the relative dynamical space, rather than dealing with knowledge as an object. anyhow, the conditions for the co-creatively shaped emergence of the learning cell module 'never arrived' (it would have been cheating or hypocritical to 'make it happen') and after a couple of years living in downtown montreal, my intuition induced me to relocate back to the west coast of canada to near where i grew up, not to the same place but to the mysterious-for-me-as-a-child gulf islands offshore from the coastal mainland where i had spent (or mispent) my youth, ... a region richly immersed in the native american tradition, a tradition which in my view embodies the fullblown essence of 'inclusionality', the recognition of the dynamical interdependence of all things as implied in the 'relativity' of poincare, lorentz and einstein as is incorporated in my notes such as the one that amanda forwarded to you. of course, cultures which exploit naturally emergent resources without worrying about sustainability or accommodative-assertive coresonance, such as our western culture can accrue affluence and the power that comes with it, faster than sustainable economies. histories show that these self-centered exploitive empires are not sustainable (they have no base of sustainability) and thus 'rise and fall', leaving a scorched earth record in their wake. the island social eco-culture that i am embedded and included within here is again the underbelly of mainstream society, including people who are periodically 'institutionalized' who are struggling to retain a sanity that doesn't jibe with the so-called sanity of the mainstream that the establishment is continually trying to 'return them to'. the essays on my website at www.goodshare.org are often on this theme. so, 'inclusionality' is the bread of my daily existence and i involve myself in the underbelly issues of this island community which has not totally lost its innocence and trust (for example, when i first moved here i was struck by an experience out of the past, ... driving through a dark and lonely stretch of forest (the island residents have refused proposals to put in street lighting because it interferes with star gazing) in the pitch blackness at about 10 p.m. i stopped to give a ride to three teenage girls who were hitch-hiking. they happily jumped into my car, instantly trusting me, a total stranger, laughing and joking amongst themselves and with me, and i drove them to their destination a couple of miles further on, where the forest opened up to a cluster of homes. i hadn't seen the likes of such an embodied innocence and trust on the mainland since the 1960s). my pattern is to get up and get on the internet as i am doing right now. my correspondents include locals who are working on 'island trust' community planning issues, and others who are simply 'trying to survive' in a highly exclusionary society whose exclusionalist ethic (optimizing individual performance) is slowing permeating the island communities against the will of the underbelly residents. central to my correspondences is the inclusionality sharing circle of alan rayner, yvonne aburrow and others who continue to work on 'inclusionality' while pursuing their economic survival sustaining professional employments. in my current 'inclusionalist' views, i no longer see the solutions to emergent dissonance in the community as causally deriving from the quality of the assertive behaviours of the individual constituents of community, but from the manner in which we, as individuals, act relative to one another. those that object to this 'relative' mode of perception and inquiry (not-caused by our individual assertive good-or-bad behaviours) usually try to refute or mock it, often trying to put it down by focusing on extreme 'bad behaviours' or extreme 'good behaviours', ... saying 'how can you dispute the causally attributed 'good effect' or 'bad effect' of such-and-such behaviour), .. but of course, i don't 'dispute it', ... i simply see it as 'too small a view' to get to the essential issue of 'sustaining community harmony', the implied 'larger' view of 'inclusionality' being something (essential to community harmony) that most people ignore. in a community whose constituents' behaviours are characterized by the ethic of inclusionality, the prime goal is to let one's behaviour be guided by the sustaining of accommodative-assertive coresonance, as follows directly from the principle of relativity where organizational harmony is a co-creatively shaped emergent behaviour in the continuing present (there is no path to organizational harmony, organizational harmony IS the path). to let one's behaviour be guided by the sustaining of community harmony is not equatable to 'philosophical relativism' as some would argue. their argument being based on the fact that inclusionality does not orient to 'good' or 'bad' behaviours, which means that the management schema does not need to dependently reference to absolute definitions of 'good behaviour' or 'bad behaviour', ... a condition that leads to the exclusionary tactics that are the formal defaults of our western society and lead to purificationism and optimization of the assertive behavioural performance of individual systems (persons, organizations, nations) as if they were dynamically 'independent', which they are not. to move beyond hard dependency on judgements of 'good' and 'bad' assertive behaviour doesn't have to lead to the conclusion of free-floating subjectivity and 'anything goes', however. nature is non-judgemental but sustains accommodative-assertive coresonance (community harmony) as is evident in the collective dynamic of planets, moons and sun. inclusionality recognizes 'good' or 'bad' assertive behaviours in the larger context of sustaining community harmony. for example, a high performing organization can 'look good' though it is depleting the 'invisible value' of possibility/potentials that are embodied within the dynamic of the collective and in so doing, inspire or incite 'bad behaviours' on the part of those denied access to the possibilities and potentials of the system. thus the specifications, in absolute terms, of 'good assertive behaviour' and 'bad assertive behaviour', while they may be useful guides, are not competent as foundations for community harmony-sustaining management schemas, based as they are upon the FALSE notion of the dynamical independence of the individual assertive agent. so i involve myself in multiple real, in-situ-in-the-dynamic-of-the-local-collective conversations that are continously emerging in the present space-time of this island ecosystem, evolving my understanding of inclusionality, ... codiscovering how to live and how to express and share an awareness of it. my experience informs me that awareness of inclusionality is bound up in the narrative voice we use to inform ourselves about our life story (how we are included in the enveloping organizational dynamic). differences in these narrative voices are well know in literature; i.e. there is the self-consciousness oriented narrative of two-body dynamics in romantic relationships; e.g. the narrative voice as used in james joyce's short-story 'araby', ... there is the dream-consciousness oriented narrative of existentialist angst where we realize the impossibility of satisfying our included role in the complex multiconstituent dynamical web of community through two-body relationships, as if the individual must be guided by the causal impact of his purportedly independent assertings; e.g. a narrative voice as used in franz kafka's short story 'the country doctor', and there is the 'i am the dynamical web that i am included in' existentialist-angst-relieving narrative of assumed multi-body (simultaneous mutual influencing) dynamical interdependence; e.g a narrative voice as used in jack hodgins short story 'after the season'. hodgins is a local vancouver island writer who imbues this sense of nested inclusion (in the wilderness and in the wild socio-environmental dynamic that nests within the wilderness) within the dynamics of local community, the narrative voice that we use to talk to ourselves and to one another shapes our collective behaviour and sense of self. whether as a person or as a member of an organization (business or political organization such as community or nation), when we use the cultural default of two body narrative where we see ourselves as the causal authors, through our assertive behaviours viewed as 'independent' behaviours, of certain results, ... then we deceive ourselves by this 'vanity' which ignores the over-riding influence of the invisible value of space, the quality of possibility that emerges from the three-body+ dynamics of simultaneous mutual influence. the vanity of causal authorship of tangible results, which ignores the fundamental enabling role of the continuously emerging open space possibility that arises from how we act relative to one another (the accommodative-assertive coresonant view of the dynamics of a collective), is increasingly the source of dissonance and dysfunction. 'increasingly' because what we used to do in an informal mutually self-helping mode (accommodative-assertive mode) is increasingly being done by formal organizations that orient to the optimization of their individual assertive-behaviour based performance (letting accommodative-assertive coresonance flap in the breeze, a recipe for disopportunization and disenfranchisement of those sharing the dynamical commonspace but who are not participants in the exclusionary behaviours of independently-performance-optimizing organizations.) so that',s about it for background on 'inclusionality' as my daily bread. here on the island, the residue of those with islander-ethics of inclusionality, or mutual supportiveness where multiple participants sustain moving under each other's simultaneous mutual influence in its natural precedence rather than going with the unnatural inversion wherein the optimization of individual performance takes precedence over the co-creative sustaining of assertive-accommodative coresonance. how to operationalize a means of inducing rising awareness to the hazards of taking two-body narratives as being descriptive of the complex multi-body reality we are included in, is an ongoing endeavor that i continue to work within our 'inclusionality' sharing circles on. hopefully this note gives you the 'flavour' of inclusionality as it 'tastes' to me in the continuing moment. mitakuye oyasin, ted At 07:58 AM 3/21/04 -0500, Harrison Owen wrote: >OK -- Supposing I wanted to know more about what you are doing? Website? And >I am just wondering how "inclusionality" tastes as that seems to be you >source of daily bread. :-) > >Harrison > >Harrison Owen >7808 River Falls Drive >Potomac, Maryland 20845 >Phone 301-365-2093 > >Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com >Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org >Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm >[email protected] >To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit: >http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html > > > >-----Original Message----- >From: ted lumley [mailto:[email protected]] >Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 2:59 AM >To: Harrison Owen >Subject: Re: Your paper Open Space and World Cafe > > >hi harrison, > >other than moving into my third year of discovery of what its like to >experience life on a small environmentally conscious island (pender island, >b.c.), i am participating in a research circle with alan rayner and others >in co-developing ways of expressing and sharing awareness of >'inclusionality' - the natural primacy of dynamical space over the included >dynamics of the material participants, the core theme of the discussion >post that amanda passed to you. (i.e. i am not currently engaging in any >academic or revenue producing activity) > >thanks for your interest in the paper and its background context, and i'd >be happy to share or engage further on issues of open space etc., should >there be interest/opportunity. > >best regards, > >ted lumley > > >At 04:41 PM 3/20/04 -0500, Harrison Owen wrote: > >Amanda Bucklow passed you paper along to me. I found it delightful. What > >else are you doing? > > > >Harrison > > > >Harrison Owen > >7808 River Falls Drive > >Potomac, Maryland 20845 > >Phone 301-365-2093 > > > >Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com <http://www.openspaceworld.com/> > > > >Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org > >Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm > >[email protected] > >To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit: > >http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html > > > > > > * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
