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.
What has happened? What needs to be done?
Books
Three books arrived this week, Autobiography of a Restless Mind Volume 1 & 2 by Dee Hock, and Gentle Action by F. David Peat. Dee Hock’s book is a collection of reflections written over twentyfive years. It’s a thoughtful book full of unusually tweetable quotes.
F. David Peat explores gentle action — how we can exercise more effective, creative, and non-invasive action — in his book. Peat encourages the reader to enter creative suspension from which gentle action can emerge. I think this is related to the Quaker’s discerning of the sense of the meeting, Eugene T. Gendlin’s addending to the felt sense, and David Grove’s way of using clean language to draw attention to experience (expressed verbally or non-verbally). Yet another example of suspension is David Bohm’s approach to dialogue.1 Creative suspension is, in short, that little silence that happens when a person stops talking and begins to listen beyond words to “the promptings of love and truth in the heart.”2
Reflections
I have started to complement my weekly retrospectives with short reflections. Here are the reflections from this week:
- Organizing reflection 1 People are NOT assets
- Organizing reflection 2 Language is inadequate to convey what is in one’s mind
- Organizing reflection 3 Money is NOT value
- Organizing reflection 4 People ARE assets
Reflections 2 & 3 are based on my tweets from Dee Hock’s Autobiography. Reflection 4 is a further development of reflection 1. Whether people are, or are not, assets depends on the perspective. The systemic and extrinsic perspectives are explicate. The intrinsic perspective is implicate.3
What was good? What can be improved?
I tweeted this morning that I need a break from my reading and tweeting, so I will go silent for a while. I will focus on my own thinking and writing when the time is right.
I will continue with my retrospectives and reflections.
Notes:
1 F. David Peat, Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World (Pari Publishing Sas, 2008), pp.97–99.
2 How Quaker Meetings Take Decisions, (London: Quaker Communications, 2006), p. 1 <link> [7 January 2018].
3 Here, I make a connection between David Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders and Robert S.
Hartman’s intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic value dimensions. See David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order, and Creativity (Routledge, 2010, first published 1987), pp. xiii,148, 168–177, 181, 188, 282. See also Robert S. Hartman, The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology, p.114.
Related posts:
Book Review: The Structure of Value by Robert S. Hartman
Organizing reflection 1
Organizing reflection 2
Organizing reflection 3
Organizing reflection 4
Organizing in between and beyond posts
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