I had thought that permaculture had mostly to do with organic gardening and local food supplies – but what fascinated me as a facilitator was how permaculture is based on natural ecological principles that – lo and behold – actually have quite a bit to do with how people operate.  It’s the application of a “living systems approach” to collaboration, decision making and change.  For example, the approach to “change management” I learned working for a large consulting firm emphasized doing a detailed design, then essentially “managing” the change by designing communications to convince people that the change was “good for them”  The permaculture approach is a more stepwise process, one that values diversity, small steps, and constant creative adaptation.

The first step is what Holmgren calls “Observe and Interact”, which speaks to observing how our actions interact with our place, rather than developing all the details from a grand, abstract theory.  By observing first, we slow ourselves down and see how our thoughts and actions fit into a grander pattern.  This is the essence of systems thinking.

From a facilitation perspective, this means that one of the best ways to sort issues out efficiently is, paradoxically, to SLOW EVERYBODY DOWN first.  Too often we don’t really listen to each other, biding our time until they stop talking so we can jump in and say what WE want to say. Practices like using a talking stone (or stick) are not just some sentimental “kum-ba-ya” throwback, but in fact work because they shift what I like to call the “physics of a conversation”.  Conversations are highly complex interactions that can be understood through many of the ideas of chaos theory, particularly the idea that initial conditions of a system have a huge impact on the subsequent flow of the conversation.  That’s why a mindful facilitator pays attention to factors like the meeting space, the way people are arranged, the agenda, and how the conversation is initiated. Using a talking stone forces each of us into the role of either speaker or listener, without “cross talk”. When one speaks, one speaks completely.  Otherwise, one just listens.  It’s amazing how quickly the real issues in a group surface when we do this, and how it reinforces mutual respect and trust.

For an article on how Transition leaders are using these principles in practice, check out Shaktari Belew’s article in the Sentient Times.  Shaktari is a Transition Trainer and leader of Transition Ashland in Oregon.

In today’s BlogTalkRadio Show with Dr. Don Beck – bio-psycho-social mapmaker and activist – we explored that question.

In Dr. Beck’s view, our greatest need is a remedy for the polarization in our society. We’ve tended to look at conflicting values like left vs right, free-market vs interventionist, as a kind of pendulum that goes back and forth.  There are trade-offs and compromises made between opposing poles. In fact, the better mental model is that of a spiral, in which each movement transcends and includes the previous movement.  The apparent opposites and value conflicts are really moves in a bigger dance, a pattern that reveals itself as it emerges.

Beck’s model, called Spiral Dynamics, imagines personal and cultural emergence as a response to increasing levels of complexity in our environment.  Today, we are at an unprecedented level of complexity, with 6.5 billion humans emerging from a variety of conditions and cultural stories.  Here there are Vikings with nuclear weapons, shamans on the internet, and hedge fund managers doing yoga.  It sounds like a giant halloween party in Times Square attended by all the people who have ever lived.  For a species in which, for most of our existence, most of us have known at most 200 people, this is quite an encounter.

How can we all live together and adapt to this situation? Beck practices what he calls “natural design”.  It’s not based on a “one size fits all” formula.  It’s based on curiosity, inquiry, mutual respect, and an understanding that we all respond intelligently to our particular life situation.

Don Beck has used this model to defuse conflict and create political and economic transformations in a number of troubled societies, including South Africa, Palestine, the Netherlands, and Mexico.

What are the implications for business leadership? Beck thinks that it’s critical to align the business’ cultural DNA with the “habitat”, the larger cultural and economic conditions. There’s no way to fake that – which to me fits in with the new sense that branding has to be authentic.  Authentic branding is not limited to product packaging and advertising, but to the totality of experience of everyone who touches the organization.  Collective karma, if you will.

We talked about race.  Working in South Africa, Dr. Beck developed a color scheme to describe the various sets of values, or vMemes, that he encountered there.  It was no longer an issue of black vs white, but a tapestry of purple, red, blue, orange, and green. As he said today, “It’s not the color of your skin that matters anymore, it’s the color of your mind.”

Can the US create a national political culture that honors everyone?  The blue states, the red states, the cities, the suburbs, the rural areas, even…….Alaska? If we recognize that different parts of the country have different life conditions, can we find a new framework that accommodates each and all of us?

And perhaps President-Elect Obama is just the right person to serve this transformational time.  His unusual background led him to be labelled “un-American” at one point in the campaign.  On the contrary, the fact that he didn’t fit any neat category – African father, raised by white mother and grandparents in multicultural Hawaii – required him to make choices about how to define himself, rather than to “know” who he was.  He had to “ask” who he was, and make a choice.

To my way of thinking, inventing and re-inventing oneself is as American as apple pie.

Here’s the interview: