Organizing retrospective 77

This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. Here is my next retrospective.

What has happened? What needs to be done?
This week, I finished reading Stephen Buhner’s The Secret Teachings of Plants. It’s a book which I thoroughly enjoyed reading, especially the second part. The book is full of quotes by Goethe, Henry David Thoreau, Henri Bortoft, and others. Stephen Buhner mentions, by the way, that the best general work on Goethe is by Henri Bortoft.¹

Stephen Buhner’s key point is that understanding living dynamics forces a substantial change in our orientation. It’s too often forgotten that the relationship with nature is at root a feeling, not a thinking, thing. It’s a change from mental constructs, theoretical analysis, and thought to feeling. We are immersed in a conflict of values and assumptions, specifically the belief that feeling is inferior to thinking.

We have lost the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses. That loss can be seen daily in the environmental devastation of our world. It can also be seen, although it’s somewhat harder to perceive, in the devastation of our internal worlds. Part of this is that we often denigrate our capacity to feel, or apologize for its emergence.

We no longer understand that feeling can be raised to the same level of sophistication as thinking, that the heart is an organ of perception and cognition equal, and perhaps superior, to the brain and its capacities. For its use automatically engenders empathy with, as well of, complex interdependencies. Its use automatically involves caring. This caring itself is crucial and involves the emergence of complex understandings inaccessible to the brain. Some things have to be felt to be seen.

Stephen Buhner writes that businesses embody the perspectives, beliefs, and orientations of their owners. Businesses convey to customers specific meanings through the feelings the customers experience, though they many not normally be able to say what those feelings are. It is possible, after much practice, to identify these feelings, and from them to determine the organizational structure of a business, the impact it has on its customers, its level of psychological and financial health, and many other things.²

Here is a compilation of my tweets from Stephen Buhner’s excellent book.

Finally, here is another reflection from the week. Changing the system doesn’t necessarily change people’s behaviors.

What was good? What can be improved?
I really enjoyed reading Stephen Buhner’s book. It reminds me that I need to re-read Henri Bortoft books on The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science and Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought. Five years ago, I wrote here that we need to take the dynamic way of seeing seriously if we are going to be able to see life both in nature and in our work.

Notes:
¹ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature (Bear & Company, 2004), p.293.
² Ibid., p.277.

Related posts:
Organizing in between and beyond posts