Woot woot… Post 300, I didn’t see that coming
So yesterday, Willow waved her magic wand of genius again after I spent a week doing backflips in my head over a decision, which is starting to get a little annoying if I’m to be honest :)
I’ll try to stack the system with clarity to frame it
The core team for the Bioregional Institute (the entity) is imaging the concept of bioregional places as living wholes and what unique contribution they are asking of nested human settlements to make to this living whole (Chartering from the bioregion). The digital home for all this within the legal structure will be the Open Wisdom Library (OWL)
To start the OWL’s development, we are starting with the core field within this living system approach of bioregional education
This will not be a top-down, reductionist, and specialised colonial model of education to perpetuate the current capitalist system, but a ground-up, living system focused, regenerative model of education that develops consciousness, capacity, and capability of the people through regenerative development focused cohort learning… Phew, that was a mouthful but not important. I’ll explain later. This has been affectionately named the OWLe
To create and procure the regen dev projects for the cohorts of people to learn how to deliver them through our lineages process, we needed to first structure the core practice within the OWLe that frames the work that I need to use with teams out in the field, and need to document for the cohorts to learn later… is anyone still with me?
Tyler's educational genius brought forth a journaling process that works at a few levels while building a field. Its focus is like quick learning by making simple journalling along the way, which captures your live insights before they get abstracted and generalised, and then common thread journalling with the cohort to capture everyone’s insights in a way that builds a thought field around the work… Super cool
Problem is, when we tested the process on ourselves, we got distracted and didn’t follow it
I could journal all day so did too much, Tyler got smashed by all the different levels of work he has both in and out of ours, Willow thinks in images, and we are all neuro-beautiful in one way or another
So the question I’ve been struggling with is, if every place, project, team, and person is different, how do you design a base system that isn’t a replicated generic model that caters to all this beautiful uniqueness but still develops the field?
The answer came when we were designing the Story of Place process for one of the Regen Places Network’s teams
For this place, I suggested a 12-week program where each week we focus on a topic of research eg geology/geomorphology, flora, fauna etc, and we use the journalling process to build the field as a learning cohort, which builds the three C’s for the people
Acknowledging we failed ourselves to keep the momentum, I went on with all the options I’d been thinking about when Willow dropped ‘Just set them out separately on a Miro board and everyone can drop in whatever type of communication they are most comfortable with, writing, music, video, or pictures and everyone can make notes’
Oh Yeah… easy when you say it… and that was that for this next step. Time to test this new hypothesis in the field
This entire process of regenerative design has stretched my mind through the depths of the field to the potential of the work, and it just gets more exciting every day
It's a unique process to design through living system frameworks, in real and not real places, with unique teams, in live projects, but from what I can tell, there isn’t really any other way to do it. It really wakes you up to the layers and layers of complex systems, realities, and narratives that are all woven together through this conscious pulse of the living moment
And we have literally only just begun