Transformation and Collective Trauma
On my twitter feed I recently stumbled across a link mentioning a conversation between two of my favorite transformational leaders, Thomas Hübl and Otto Scharmer. I stopped what I was about to do and for 45 minutes let myself become absorbed by their enquiries, questions, insights and challenges.
It was time truly well spent. I still feel touched and inspired on many levels by their co-exploration. I hope this conversation will be just the beginning of what promises to be a highly generative collaboration
Listening to them and the questions they were both holding allowed me to feel into my own questions, inner tensions and possibilities I sense in my work with Campus Co-Evolve,
a space for community building, skills sharpening, raising our competencies, self-knowledge, and sharing insights and inspirations for loving a more beautiful world into being.
What struck me most was realizing how the different crises we are experiencing in today’s fragmented world are not new at all, when understood on a deeper level. Many of their underlying causes, such as fragmentation, separation and alienation, frequently have not been looked at.
As Thomas and Otto pointed out, ‘the fragmentation and alienation caused by what was considered normal for 1000s of years is still hurting people by creating an experience of disconnect of body and mind, of self and our own senses.’ Alienation is present in the societal structures that reinforce it. Looked at from this perspective, the climate crisis or the economic crises are, actually, disembodiment crisis or relational crisis.
To see this disembodiment and disconnect at scale, we just need to become aware of the dark side of the digital disruption and the shift towards a surveillance capitalism, where the watcher will be on one side and those being watched on the other. Whenever technology has developed faster than human consciousness, it created a disconnect and suffering. Since technology nowadays develops even faster, this disconnect and disembodiment could create a lot more suffering.
If you want to understand how the climate crisis and surveillance capitalism are a collective embodiment crisis on a planetary scale, I warmly recommend listening to the conversation. A special treat will come from discovering the importance of what Otto calls ‘multi-level container building’.
He emphasizes that despite his work with Peter Senge at MIT to develop awareness based social technologies, collective transformation is not so much about using the right methods and tools but about enabling the inner development of facilitators. This, in his experience, is actually what real transformation depends on. According to him, the tools and methods, as the tangible part of capacity building for transformative work, are vastly over-rated; they are responsible for no more than 20-30% of it.
In contrast, the intangible, invisible part that is related to the development of self, our interior development, as well as the holding space and providing the container for social situations, is significantly underrated. For the latter, we need competent and experienced community facilitators.
Campus Co-Evolve, where I’m energizing the role of Community Host, is a training ground for such facilitators, and evolutionaries, who seek to close their knowing-doing gap and unleash their potential for higher-stage development and impact. If you feel that you’re one of them, you may want to look up the preliminary announcement of some of the courses of our Fall 2019 semester and ask for notification when the full, detailed program will be published later this Spring.
However, facing the enormity of task of building capabilities for personal, organisational and societal renewal, even the multiplication of initiatives is not sufficient. That’s why Campus Co-Evolve is seeking to grow strategic alliances with like-minded organisations.
Meg Wheatley wrote, “ Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections.” The connection between Otto Scharmer and Thomas Hübl, and between their respective global communities feels like some of those critical connections that could ignite the hearts, minds and will of many more individuals and collectives.
References:
Otto Scharmer in Conversation with Thomas Hübl – Solvable Transformation & Collective Trauma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hATcs4Zpdqo
Theory U: https://www.presencing.org/aboutus/theory-u
Thomas Hübl: https://thomashuebl.com/
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1781256845/.
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About the Author: Anna Betz
