Reflection
The role reflection plays in our work cannot be over-stated. In navigating so much complexity, it’s important to normalise that not everything will register the first time. Especially when trying to actively speak to complex systems in an ongoing learning process, sometimes calls with partners are designed to be about surfacing thinking, to make sense of later by using the recording. This is a process of making visible your thinking, to reflect and synthesise later.
Reflection is also important on the level of your own contributions to the team you’re part of. Working in a process-oriented way necessarily means there is an inner dimension to the work. Working to complete a project, without reflecting on where your contributions are coming from, is likely to result in just the completion of a project. One thing that makes certain projects more regenerative is when team members and the project (and its environment) co-evolve together, throughout its development. This can only happen when there is a level of awareness of the possibility of such relationship, and that happens through reflection. This is also part of the depth our publishing tooling has been designed for.
Such reflection can come in different forms and timeframes. Sometimes reviewing notes from the prior week can feel like the perfect refresh ahead of what’s to come. Other times, you might find yourself watching back call recordings from 18 months ago, remembering the original purpose of a much larger project trajectory.
Active Thinking and Learning
Living systems are always in a state of change, requiring attention to curiously inquire into where they are, today. Where they are, now, may be different to where they were 6 months ago, or in 1990, and it may necessarily require new perspectives and the letting-go-of-assumptions in order to meaningfully integrate and positively effect these new realities. Depth of intention means taking accountability for if your actions truly are aligning with what’s needed to positively contribute toward increasing orders of ecosystemic health. Recycling thought from past apprehensions risks contributing toward keeping systems held in the patterns you’re also, on another level, intending to change.
Self-management means being present with yourself enough to be present with others, for the group as a whole to be intentionally evolving toward higher-orders of capabilities of positively effecting systems-change. Only you can choose to cultivate the quality of attention within yourself required to meet and positively effect reality.
The following attitudes are an anti-pattern for the active, reflective communication needed when learning from systemic change:
- 21st century seven-second attention spans
- Corporate chief executive single-metric expectations
- General complexity-aversion
Sometimes it also needs recognising that the quality of the present moment and therefore the contributions needed are operational, not reflective. Action and learning are closely in relationship, yet also clearly distinct in the quality of thinking required.