Exploring how deep down the rabbit hole I could tumble in regenerative development and isolating myself in the process, I somewhere lost the ability to communicate the treasures and strategies discovered
This came like a slap in the face when talking to a new community group recently, which is not good for business, though worse, even talking to my team members and partners in our growing business ecosystem, I failed to be able to explain potential roles clearly within the structure, which is not good for anyone
I’m going to spend the next 2 weeks in lead up to the project launch to come back to earth and find a way to share stories instead of tell findings
This one is borrowed from Carol Sanford who has used it many times, though I like this one at 4:50 relating living systems to cars and cats
Im relating it to a specific step in our consortium’s process we are establishing for precinct scale development through both the rPPP and uPPP grant process nationally
As the Willing & Able came together to pool everyone’s genius, we discovered that there are multiple systems of doing what we were all roughly seeing as a Story of Place
I was starting with Regenesis Story of Place, another from a more social and governance reflection, another from a more natural and physical infrastructure focus, and just now over the weekend, a fourth with an economic and policy lens
To triage the value of the work, not wanting to lose any of the genius and value to the system, but also find a way that all these unique ways and people can contribute in a non-competitive way, I had to shake off the rut and grooves that language forces us all into
I had to look at the essence of each system of work and then how that sits in regenerative living system content, and then to program it, how is it set into the delivery of the work and value exchange for it
Im not going to police the definition of ‘regeneration’ here, I can only offer you what it means to me and how that benefits my work through the definition
Regeneration, to me, is a process of capacity evolution based on a Being's essence towards its unique potential that it manifested itself into existence to explore. This Being could be a plant or animal, an ecosystem, a system, a business, or my new favourite thing, a living idea organism
To triage the consortiums work for regeneratively mapping a large area for a precinct or major development, up to the scale of a bioregion (always use this word loosely) I’ll relate it now back to Carol’s cat
In our lineage of regen dev, we start with the whole and view a place/being through living system frameworks, Story of Place (Registered Trademark to Regenesis in the US) is a process for regeneratively mapping place as a living being
Think of the place a project is nested in as the cat; we are mapping the patterns of personality of its living expression, the character of the cats unique behaviour, and its potential to be its fullest cat’ness expression in the future
To work at this level, the actions we take are about framing the evolution of the cats character as it lives through time, and how that influences the greater system the cat lives in and contributes an important function to, and the subsystems within the cat itself.
Example, the different ways the cat will act between putting it in a cage, a bird house, or by the fire on a cold night, and how that shaped behaviour influence the greater space (the world)… this is the capacity for evolution of regeneration, framing the work to influence the whole, its about building fields of influence across place
After understanding this uniqueness as a whole as the Core Team, we can start to look at the living fields nested in the whole as subsystems through Field Teams eg the cats skin as the living layer of ecosystem on top of the geology, the cats brain as the social systems of the people, the cats circulatory system as the financial system of place
Field Teams deep diving on these very important subsystem fields discoverer nodal points of intervention for its rejuvenated health, though best serve the whole by first understanding the context that the work contributes to place, in collaboration with the other subsystem fields
Fixing a cats skin infection wont help the cat evolve to its full capacity, nor will feeding it to help its scarcity mindset, or shifting a blood clot where the flow has been pooled (hoarded), all these things working together rejuvenating its health are essential, but then reframing the cat as a being in its natural environment so it can live and express its true cat’ness is what we want to be working towards in a coordinated way
Its not about reducing things into problems to solve to heal the cat, although this is definitely needed, its about evolving the capacity of the cat to serve its unique contribution to the greater living system it evolved to be a functioning part of
Structuring and coordinating region wider regenerative development projects starting from whole of system essence and potential, allows us to hold the whole, while working on parts of the system as focus groups, that are coordinated by the Core Team
Day 1 of communication development and we’ll chalk this up to an enthusiastic fail but buy June I might start to make more sense hopefully :)
Heres how to really say it throught he Elders