The Need for Practice Grounds (or: The Outer Work of Inner Development)

I’ve been in multiple conversations lately with people who have recently discovered the regenerative movement, with its worldview of greater alignment with life. They feel drawn to bring living systems principles into their work with organizations. They’re dreaming of having more meaningful impact in the world. But they sense – and often have been given advice – that they need to do the “inner work” first, integrating the new ways of seeing and being that are at the heart of the movement. “Perhaps the Inner Development Goals are a good starting point” is a frequent suggestion.

There is logic to this advice. And at the same time, there’s missed opportunity – if not actual impossibility – in this approach.

To be clear: there is no denying the vital role of personal introspection and knowledge gathering. And there’s real risk, both to the movement and to those directly involved, when someone claims – without depth of understanding or preparation – to be able to bring wise stewardship in service of system thrivability.

At the same time, it’s not clear that we can sufficiently do the inner work first before engaging with the world. It’s through encounter and engagement that we most powerfully discover what is needed and what more we’re capable of. Perhaps more to the point, there are few of us who can afford to remove ourselves from the action for such an indefinite process.

And here’s the thing: it’s incredibly challenging to develop new ways of seeing and being within old structures and systems. But the converse is also true: as we introduce more life-aligned structures and systems, new ways of seeing and being come more clearly into view.

• Experiencing the emergent, self-organizing collective intelligence of an Open Space session for the first time is world-rocking.
• Agile approaches to project management pull back the curtain on a whole new way of thinking and showing up.
• Developmental Evaluation challenges the bedrock of the outgoing paradigm.

There are many portals into a living systems worldview and the stance of stewardship that goes with it; and often those doorways are innocuously hidden within more life-aligned forms of action.

Indeed, in between personal, inner development and societal, outer impact is the space of practice. This is the understanding behind the Core Practice Areas of Thrivability that my colleagues and I work with and teach (depicted in the diagram below). While exploring new ways of seeing and being, we can also work together to: interact in new ways; attune more fully to system potential; conduct thoughtful experiments in service of that potential; develop new ways of noticing what matters most; and be deliberate about learning as an individual and collective practice. With full awareness, intention, humility and joy, we can (also) learn more life-aligned ways of seeing and being by doing.

In this way, our projects and organizations become fertile practice grounds for a more thrivable world. And we become wise stewards of the systems we’re part of.

I’m not sure there is any other way.