By George Pór for Enlivening Edge Magazine
The movements for civilizational renewal are like a mycelium; no one member of the fungal colony has a sense of the mycelium’s full extent.
The renewal that we’re in the midst of is so humongous, reaching into so many areas of the social world, reinventing so many of our economic, political, educational, healthcare, even spiritual and other institutions, that from the vantage point of any individual, it’s too easy to lose sight of “what on Earth is happening.”
Unlike members of a fungal colony, humans have the potential to give a direction to the (intentional) evolution of their world.
To realize that potential, we need to help our Emerging Planetary Reality become self-aware, by engaging:
- collaborative mapping its uncharted territories
- collective self-reflection practices at increasing scale, from communities to organizations to societies to global systems
- and by growing competence in receiving and effectively transmitting evolutionary epiphanies, through cultivating deep collective sensing and presencing
What can you and I as individual change facilitators do with all this? As unconnected individuals, probably not much. However, if you read the first part of this series, then you know already about Transformative Communities of Practice (TCoPs) and how much your own vertical development can power up the one that you’re working with.
If you happened to read the second part, too, then you learned about how TCoPs, as an evolutionary force, can bridge our individual longing and working for a better world with large-scale systemic transformation, and how you can seed and cultivate such communities.
You can find out more about the role of TCoPs as a bridge between our individual and social evolution here and in this short video:
For you to become a transformative agent (to facilitate the ongoing transformation of self, organizations, and society), you need to engage in practicing generative listening, the art of transformative conversations, embodied awareness of collective energy fields, and aligning collective structures and processes for supporting the evolution of people and organizations.
Of course, we were not born with those capabilities but they can be acquired through practice. That’s why my colleague at Meridian University, Aftab Omer, and I are offering an introductory workshop about them on May 22, in the Teal Organizations track of the 3rd Integral European Conference, at Lake Balaton, in Hungary.
We hope to see you there, share our experience, some helpful practices, and maybe even start building a TCoP with those who are ready.
George Pór is an evolutionary thinker and a strategic learning partner to visionary leaders in business, government, and civil society. He is the originator of Enlivening Edge and teaches a course on “Transformative Communities of Practice” at Meridian University. A select list of his articles and book chapters on the fields of collective intelligence, organizational and social renewal can be found here.
Featured Image of Mycelium by Rob Hille – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17597605 Slightly altered in proportions by EE Magazine.
