The power of open AND generative questions

Posted on August 20, 2006 by George Pór

Robert Bystrom wrote in his comment on the “Connectivity ramp, CI, and Jaron Lanier” blog entry.

“Whenever you entertain an open question, you invite personal intelligence. Whenever a group entertains a shared question, they invite their collective intelligence.”


Robert, the insights you shared with us in your comment are very much appreaciated. Not only they resonate with my own sense of CI and condtions favorable to its emergence but your focus on community empowerment is truly inspiring.
Regarding your key message that I quoted above, I can see that shared questions do invite collective intelligence but wether CI actually will show up, depends on a number of factors in each of Wilber’s Four Quadrants.
The conscious cultivation of those factors may lead to higher level CI capacities. When dealing with complex challenges, nothing less will do. I am curious of what factors you differentiate and respond to in your practice. Would you say more about them?
I think not all open questions generate CI equally fit to call forth the most valued future of the organization or community. I call the ones that do “generative questions.” Their power is in the qualities of the individual or collective attention and consciousness, from which they come.

Posted in C I & All Quadrants All Levels, CI Principles, Presencing, Questions Worth Asking, Shared Attention | 3 Comments

Connectivity ramp, CI, and Jaron Lanier

Posted on August 6, 2006 by George Pór

Radical Evolution.jpg
I’ve just finished reading an amazing book by Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor at of the Washington Post, titled “Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human.”
Garreau presents three scenarios of the future: the “Heaven” of technological optimists, like Ray Kurzweill, the “Hell” of technological pessimists, like Bill Joy; and the “Prevail” scenario of people like Jaron Lanier who doesn’t believe in technological determinism and thinks that:
“Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways.”
The quotes below are from “Radical Evolution”.

Continue reading →

Posted in Connecting Our Conversations, Evolutionary Threshold, Technologies That Support CI | 8 Comments

Chance and choice experiences, presencing as community art

Posted on August 6, 2006 by George Pór

Andrew Campbell wrote somewhere, “The more whole and integrated each person the chances for choices are increased…” I may have found that sentence in the context of his conversation with de Lange on the Learning Organizations list, 5 years ago. The following paragraph from de Langes Choice and Chance are They One? message struck me and helped me clarifying the meaning of an interesting pattern in my own experience of navigating on the high seas of life.

The more we imagine the system’s “coin” as an omnibus of “chance events”, the less the coin leaves us with “free energy” to imagine its future as a “choice event”. On the other hand, the sooner we deal with each “chance event” as an actual opportunity rather than stacking it together with other “chance events” of the past, the more the coin leaves us with “free energy” to imagine MANY “choice events” following from this ONE “chance event”. I myself try to convert every “chance event” as soon as possible into as many as possible “choice events” so as to nurture my “free energy” and the “one-to-many-mapping” of my creativity. (emphasis added)

I found the “one-to-many-mapping”–in the sense pictured by Andrew Campbell’s Lightening Branches below of one’s creativity, both a fascinating metaphor, and a model for contributing to each other’s body of resonance with the emergent futures.

lighteningbranches In my view, the painting also suggests presencing is a community art: the diversity of evolutionary possibilities triggered by one collective choice is a reflection of the diversity of talents and sensibilities present in making that choice. Campbell’s painting and de Lange’s quote above also reminded me of what Otto Scharmer wrote in the 10th Principle of Presencing: Who we become will depend on the choices we make and the actions we take now. That being of the future is our highest or best future possibility. Attracted to realize that possibility, I notice how rapidly I flip events that present themselves by chance into choice events I use for my learning. The same attraction also pulls my attention to the question: What are the practices that communities can use for navigating their future (without blindspot) as they are co-creating it? Continue reading →

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Intersubjectivity, Presencing, Time, attention, bandwidth & CI, Ways of Tuning with Collective Consciousness | 1 Comment

Escaping from the Museum of the 20th Century

Posted on August 6, 2006 by George Pór

As I woke up, I immediately knew: the meaning of this dream will grow with me, keep unfolding; I will see clearer the guidance that Im getting from it, over the years. At the time of that dream, in the early seventies, I was living in Hungary under communist governance, between two markers of my life’s journey:

  •  being freshly released from prison, after serving 20 months for organizing a student movement, in September 1969
  • being forced into exile for continued opposition to the policies of the ruling elite, in July 1975

Back then, there was an artistic avant-garde in Hungary, mostly young people who expressed their dissidence by engagement in artistic happenings, street theater, amateur films, etc. that was considered too “edgy” by the communist censorship. I was part of the scene, and after years of the rather ascetic, movement organizer lifestyle, I really enjoyed the fun, and was inspired by the irreverent, creative manifestations of my peers; some of our best happenings started as a “chance” experience. Like this one:
I am walking on the “grand boulevard’ of Budapest, named “Lenin boulevard,'” in the afternoon rush hour, the sidewalks teeming with people streaming from the offices. In their midst, I feel my movements slowing down, my legs move more and more unhurriedly, hardly lift, and advance at a snail’s pace. It feels like time itself slows, while the rushing continues around me. The boulevard is crowded and a bit dangerous because some people are so little present to their body or the space around it, that have a hard time to avoid bumping into and getting mad at me.
As I turned the spontaneous slowing down of my movement, into an “experience,” a happening, I didn’t intend to provoke the people on the street; I knew it may happen but that was not the point. My way of walking became a full-body, immersion experiment of not being part of the system, stepping out from the drub reality of living in a country without freedom. It was a little bit like a walking meditation, except I didn’t know that time what meditation was. I performed that slow-motion happening at different places of Budapest, a couple of times, weeks before the following “teaching dream” occurred.

Continue reading →

Posted in CI Within, Collective Wisdom, Intersubjectivity, Presencing, Shared Attention, Ways of Tuning with Collective Consciousness | 2 Comments

All presencing is co-presencing

Posted on July 29, 2006 by George Pór

Talking about presence, Andrew Campbell wrote in email, what it means is not what it is — and does. It reminded me of Aurobindo’s saying, Man’s greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible.
What our times demand us to make possible is nothing less than what the unknown author of the following graffiti on the wall of the occupied Sorbonne asked in 1968: Soyez Oalistes, demands impossible! It is to bootstrap ourselves onto higher stages of individual and collective consciousness by simultaneously letting go of the illusion of a separate self-sense, yet embracing our full respons-ability for our choices in every moment.

Continue reading →

Posted in CI Within, Collective Wisdom, Intersubjectivity, Presencing, Shared Attention, Visualizing Our Ecosystem | Leave a comment

Wisdom society and navigating towards it by CI

Posted on July 25, 2006 by George Pór

It was one of those rare teaching dreams. I was the captain of a ship returning to the harbor. There were cheering crowds waiting there, giving us a heroes’ welcome. They must have already known what we came back with.
It was not an ordinary ship sailing on water; we were explorers navigating in a different horizon of time, returning from the future. What guided our exploration was our individual and collective inner navigation. That’s what steered our ship into the unknown era calling us, which we grew to appreciate as the era of “wisdom society.”
Initially, there was no map to it other than the maze-like patterns of branching trees of new possibilities triggered by every turn we took, every choice we made. It was like UK artist Andy Campbell’s “Lightning Branches” that I discovered in Dave Pollard’s blog. See below.
lighteningbranches.jpg
To advance with confidence in the right direction emerging, we needed to turn navigation into a community art.

Continue reading →

Posted in CI Within, Collective Wisdom, Shared Attention, Time, attention, bandwidth & CI | 4 Comments

Redwoods, Messiah, shared-attention, and sustaining CI

Posted on July 1, 2006 by George Pór

“One of the things I love that is so special about the Redwood trees is that they are MASSIVE and yet they only send their roots about ten feet deep… they send them wide and hold onto their community for strength. Good reminder for us all,” says Gentle Thunder, a sister of the “standing people,” her bellowed tree beings. She plays flutes, drum and hammer dulcimer in a way that stirs the souls and seduces us into the deepest reverence for life. The beauty of her music and the systemic wisdom of her words reminded me a new way to look at my quest, a new way to hold my question:
Why can’t we stand together as the redwoods, grounded in our collective intelligence and wisdom in a sustainable way, not only in the precious moments of enlightened communication or the magic in the middle (.pdf), when our heartbeats synch with the rhythm of Life itself?

Continue reading →

Posted in Collective Wisdom, Community of CI Practitioners, Shared Attention, Time, attention, bandwidth & CI | 1 Comment

CI in the transcendence of private property

Posted on June 20, 2006 by George Pór

“Private property of the means of production today, in the era of the hegemony of cooperative and immaterial labour, is only a putrid and tyrannical obsolescence. The tools of production tend to be recomposed in collective subjectivity and in the collective intelligence and affect of the workers; entrepreneurship tends to be organised by the cooperation of subjects in [the] general intellect. The multitude is biopolitical self-organisation.” Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, pages 410-411.

Posted in Co-intelligent Economy | 1 Comment

Forms of Collective Intelligence

Posted on May 1, 2006 by George Pór

There are many forms, manifestation of CI, and correspondingly, many “tribes” of its practitioners. This is an abbreviated overview. A more detailed inventory by Tom Atlee can be found here.
a. Dialogic CI — A diverse group of participants suspend their old mental models and engage in dialogue that values the emergent whole higher than its parts. Variations of this approach include Bohmian dialogue, “generative conversation” (Otto Scharmer) and “enlightened communications” (Andrew Cohen).
b. Co-evolutionary CI — This form of CI builds on the power of such evolutionary mechanisms generating intelligence over time as trial and error, differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration, etc. Its examples include: ecosystems, sciences, and cultures.
c. Flow-based CI — A group of people become so absorbed in a shared activity that they experience being completely at one with it and one another. Ensembles, high-performance sport teams, astronauts, and others in that state of communion, report on both an enhanced state of autonomy, and collective intelligence.
d. Statistical CI – Individuals thinking and acting separately in large crowds can reach successful conclusion about their collective cognitive, coordination or predictive challenges. Examples include the “intelligence” of markets and cases popularized in the “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki.
e. Human-machine CI — This form of CI leverages the synergy of the human mind and its electronic extensions, drawing on the best capacities of both. The “collective” includes symbiotic networks of humans and computers working together and developing compound capabilities. It can also support all other forms of CI.
This post is a seed for collaborative taxonomy development. I will follow and contribute to conversation ensuing it, as time permits.

Posted in CI Basics, Definitions | 3 Comments

Diving into the CI of what is emerging

Posted on April 22, 2006 by George Pór

In the months that gone by since I last wrote in the blog, I’ve been on a fast-pace learning journey into emergent CI, not as a concept but as the living experience of people gathering in circles, in various countries, and diving into such questions as:
• What is our individual and collective learning edge?
• How can we grow competence in attending to and sensing from the whole?
• What is the role of collective intelligence in moving the edge of evolution?
If you want to read what other questions people in the evolutionary movement ask from themselves, here you will find a good sample of them.
Below are some links to places where I’ve been in active conversations with others interested in those and similar questions:

Continue reading →

Posted in Multi-community membership, Visualizing Our Ecosystem | Leave a comment