Month: November 2012

10 practices for uneasy city journey

 

Embracing our cities as part of our personal and collective learning journey requires practice.  It is not easy work, yet it is essential.  Here are some practices we can engage in with self, each other, and our cities to enable ourselves and our cities to be the best they can be:

  1. Notice y(our) response to the unknown. No matter how hard and smart we work, we can not shake the unknown. The more conscious we are of our inner worlds, the better we are able to serve ourselves, others and our cities well.    
  2. Notice if it is time for change. An essential practice is noticing if the conditions are right for change. If not, be patient, if yes, seek out the ways to influence the conditions for change.
  3. Seek out freedom, growth and joy for self/city.  When we align ourselves with our work, great cities that serve us well will emerge because our work is aligned with our true selves.
  4. Organize for emergence – fractally. At every scale, from self to planet, we can choose to organize well by sorting out our destination, embracing our learning journey and allowing the city we need to emerge.
  5. Allow cities to be as good as they can be. When we put our attention on what we want to fix, to where we are, we stay there.  When we put our attention to where we want to go, we move in a new direction.
  6. Perform with purpose. Choose to work with purpose – and with feedback loops that reveal when on/off track. Notice when the wheals are spinning and when there is traction.
  7. Stop and listen – to Self and city. Break the momentum from time to time and check in with Higher Self, seeking alignment with your work.  This serves Self and the city.
  8. Use ‘not knowing’ purposefully. Seek out the unknown from a positive-feeling stance for the purposes of learning. Noticing what we do not know helps see wrong decisions, ensure we have the information we need and see what needs to be known.
  9. Create feedback loops. Our city infrastructure is slow to change, but we have the potential to be wonderfully adaptable with that infrastructure. The customized feedback loops emerging with social media are reshaping our view of cities.
  10. Flexibility rules. Rules have a critical role to play in our world.  They are at their healthiest when they align with the purpose they are meant to serve.  And those purposes are always changing in response to our changing world.

 What practices do you use as you participate in the uneasy journey of our cities?  What would you add?  

 

_____ ______ ______

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

 

 

Cities – platform for never-ending journey

 

Our work to improve our cities is a very personal journey, both as individuals and as collectives. This is not a journey that is meant to end and it is full of uncertainty. Over the last two months I have been sharing pieces of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, the first chapter of the second part of the book I am working on: Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Here are the highlights of the ground I have covered:

  1. Planning as we have is a dinosaur move.  It is essential to notice that our context is always changing. Not noticing is hazardous to our health.
  2. Our cities are perpetually unfinished because we are always learning.
  3. Cities are meant to make us feel uneasy. The human species is on a journey – as an act of travel and as an act of learning. At this point in our journey, cities are our the habitat we have made for ourselves.
  4. Our cities are itching for improvement. We are on a quest for improvement, which means we must scratch the itch. We must explicitly explore what is bothering us.
  5. Tension is an evolutionary driver of cities. The tension we feel between what we have and what we could have – improvement – is hard to live with yet essential to our evolution.
  6. As we welcome and seek deeper knowing, we invite uneasiness. Scratching the itch is what generates new ways of to think, make and do things, the source of the city impulse itself.
  7. Our social habitat is key our journey in cities.  It is time to choose to bring out the best in us, supporting each of us individually and collectively in the discomfort we find when we scratch the itch.
Cities are the habitat we have created for ourselves on a journey that will take us to unknown places and potentials.  Our cities are our platform for future growth.  The better we tend ourselves, the better we tend them.  The better we tend them, the better we tend ourselves.

My next post will recap 10 practices that have been articulated here, that support our uneasy journey in cities.  

 

_____ ______ ______

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

 

 

Flexibility rules

 

I heard this a few times last week: citizens do not want every neighbourhood to be the same; developers do not want every neighbourhood to be the same; city hall employees do not want every neighbourhood to be thesame.  Seems everyone thinks that is what we have, and the finger pointing for the reasons why is dramatic.

Recall the four Integral City voices, each with their distinct perspectives and roles as we organize our cities: civic managers, civic builders and developers, citizens and civil society.  The civic managers run our public institutions: city hall, schools, health services, etc.  The civic builders and developers physically build our cities.  Both of these voices make explicit what we need as citizens: they put our intelligence in action by creating organizations that deliver programs, services and physical structures, all of which is to serve citizens.  Civil society is the cultural voice of the city.

Each voice plays a valid role in how we organize ourselves.  All four are needed.  While each voice has myriad perspectives within it, I hear a smattering of citizens, developers and city hall employees all say the same thing: rules have a place, but the wrong rules stifle our ability to create the neighbourhoods we want.

Remember Spiral Dynamics?  Our value systems, emanating from each of us, our organizations, our neighbourhoods, our cities, nations and planet, are forever in flux in response to our changing life conditions.  It seems there is alignment of values among some portions of the Integral City voices in a call for a recalibration of the ‘rules’ that shape our neighbourhoods, a recalibration of the BLUE vMeme.

Let me be clear – not everyone sees or desires this alignment, but that does not make it less relevant.  There are citizens looking for ways to make existing neighbourhoods more interesting and they find that City Hall’s rules get in the way.  Developers and builders are looking or ways to build new neighbourhoods, or build new homes in existing neighbourhoods, that respond to the desires of citizens.  There are folks working in civil society that wish to better serve the city, and they struggle with this.  There are even City Hall employees that are looking for flexibility.  Do all these folks share the same intention?  We don’t know if they do.

This is the essential work for us in cities if we wish to create cities that serve us well: to clearly see what is we wish to achieve, our destination.  When we know what we wish to achieve, then we will know what rules are necessary.

Rules articulate standards and practices necessary to achieve an outcome.  Rules only make sense with a purpose in mind.  The growing demand for a change in rules indicates a need to declare a new destination.  The contrast appears to be a change from rules for certainty to rules for support.

What we want from rules says a lot about us.  This is the clash I see in my city: the need for rules to prescribe our future vs. the need for rules to support our emerging, unknown future.

At last week’s workshop with The Natural Step Canada, Awesome Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable City, the Integral City voices together articulated neighbourhoods for which there is no recipe.  There are no rules that will give us, with certainty, what we are aiming for.

Rules are needed, however.  They play a critical role in guiding what we create, flexing with the changing conditions.

Flexibility rules.

Are the rules in your world aligned with that they aim to do?

 

_____ ______ ______

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

 

 

Cities – more like Titanic or iPhone?

 

At the Awesome Neighbourhoods for a  Sustainable City workshop I co-hosted last week with The Natural Step Canada, a question surfaced that is still simmering for me: Are cities more like the Titanic the iPhone?

Windmills to power the city – without noise

We started the day building models of awesome neighbourhoods that contribute to the city’s sustainability.  Citizens, developers, civil society and city managers (the four integral voices of the city) worked together to find what makes a neighbourhood look, feel, sound and smell awesome.  The models told the stories of what people are hungry for in our cities.  Andrea and Daniel, two participants from Workshop 1, summarized the stories.  It seems we are looking for neighbourhoods that:

  • Appeal aesthetically – beautiful buildings, visual diversity, artistic expression and public art, and interaction between buildings, transportation and open space
  • Generate sustainability – community based energy generation, increased density, and a shift in modes of transportation away from the automobile
  • Invite – a mix of public and private spaces, places for community activities and gathering, a great place
  • Meet basic needs – safe and secure, housing for all stages of life, places of worship, health services, schools, mixed land uses and affordability
Model under construction

After having built a neighbourhood and taken guided tours of each other’s neighbourhoods, we settled in to look at our collective work.  We noticed that cities are like the Titanic: hard to turn.  We explored this metaphor and found it both negative and positive.  The Titanic sunk and killed many.  We noted that the Titanic was ahead of her time; she represented great progress in that she was something we had never done before.   Unlike the Titanic that was unable to turn in time, we see that our cities are turning.  They are changing and evolving to be what we need.

Cities are changing and evolving because they are created by us and we are changing and evolving.  All of us, as citizens, as the folks that run our public institutions, the people that physically go out to build our city, and our civil society that organizes to live and speak our values and culture, play a role in how much we consciously respond to our surroundings.

We choose to stay in the fun dance hall at the heart of the Titanic, perhaps oblivious to our fate.  We choose to dare look out the window or go out on deck for fresh air and a view, looking out for the obstacles that could sink our ship.  We each choose, in our Titanic cities, to assume everything is okay or to look for feedback that may require our adaptation.  We choose the information we would like to have on our city/ship instrument panel.

Here’s where the iphone fits in: it is a platform for adaptation and customization.  It is a source of open, public feedback for our cities.  At the workshop, Carmen dreamed of knowing where all the saskatoon berry bushes are in Edmonton.  I imagine an iphone app where citizens upload geographic locations, enabling Carmen to harvest her favourite food across the city.  In Edmonton we tweet about where the food trucks mysteriously locate each day.  We have at our disposal unimaginable opportunities to share our cities with each other.  We have, as well, opportunities to share our understanding of whether our cities are serving us well or not.  This is the feedback we need to ensure our cities serve us well.

Tour of an awesome public gathering place

No one person or authority builds our cities.  We depend on ourselves and others to make sure we organize ourselves to build the ship and that she is sturdy enough for the voyage and flexible enough to meet our needs.  We depend on ourselves and others to  have appropriate standards and oversight to ensure what we create meets our needs.  We depend on ourselves and others to ensure that our cities reflect our evolving values and actively support the well-being of all inhabitants of the city and eco-region.

Our learning journey together revealed to me that cities are slow-turning Titanics that increasingly have inhabitants that create feedback loops.  The feedback within our ships/cities, between cities and among our planet of cities is improving.  These inhabitants are, from within the ship, creating new ways to turn and power cities so we no longer have the burden of the Titanic as a slow-moving ship heading to disaster.  Instead, we have ship that serves us well with a future of iPhonic feedback.

What makes your neighbourhood an awesome part of your sustainable city?  What would make it even more awesome?  

 

_____ _____ _____

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

 

I’ll spread the word

 
Stepping back
from the glorification of busy
for good
collaborating on forms
emerging from living, seeing
big
citizenship
globally with questions
I’ve never considered before
I’ll spread the word
with spirit spreading
cooperative
learning, looking at
blind spots
faithfully
bringing out inspiring
diversity together for
common
excitement, motivation
to explore the promise
of opening minds
humanizing connections 
the powers of one are
alive here
inspired here
nourished here
engaged here
renewed here
and out
there

 

_____ _____ _____

Awesome Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable City Workshop II with The Natural Step Canada.  Closing Circle.  November 22, 2012

 

 

 

Use ‘not knowing’ purposefully

 

Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions.  
…
If you think you know where you are, you stop looking. 
 
David Whyte, The Three Marriages (p. 131)

We do not seek out uncertainty, or not knowing – let alone purposefully explore it – because it seems to naturally lead to negative thoughts and feelings.  If we choose to generate positive-feeling thoughts and beliefs about not knowing, what role would we give to uncertainty in our lives?  What would we reveal?

Pondering these questions requires that we stop and listen, to our selves and our city.  Noticing what we do not know is a start.  Whyte notes that this is purposeful; it prevents us from taking false directions.  Noticing what we do not know can be a reality check, keeping us aware of what we do not know when we make decisions, ensuring that we do have the information we need.  Noticing what we do not know may lead to knowing more and making better decisions.

Noticing what we do not know may also compel the realization that we can not know more.  In some instances, it is critical to know as much as possible before proceeding.  In other instances it is not possible to know.  I need to be certain that the brakes work on my vehicle, but I do not need to be certain of the route I will take to get my daughter to the mall for new jeans.  I just need to know where I am going and have a few options.

In the longer term, it is less and less possible to know exactly what will happen.  We live in a complex world where innumerable variables affect the future we create for ourselves.  There are many instances where we may never know what we need to know to make decisions today.  This is particularly acute as we organize our cities.  We do not know what economic drivers will ensure our cities’ success.  We do not know what the demographic trends of our cities will be in 40 years. We do not know where our energy infrastructure will look like in 40 years. We do not know if plague will reduce the human population dramatically.  We do not know if we will be travelling in space in 40 years.  There are innumerable questions as we look at our future that we can answer, but those answers are only placeholders in place of not knowing.

Our curiosity is a pathway into the learning journey we share in our cities.  Our curiosity in what we do not know, whether it can be known or not, allows us to deepen our understanding in both our selves, others and our city habitats.  To make wise decisions, and to live with not knowing when we can not know, we must be able to be well with self and others.

While not knowing makes us uneasy, we can use not knowing purposefully to:

  1. Notice what we do not know
  2. Notice if we need to know more
  3. Notice if we can know more
  4. Notice if we can not know more
  5. Notice the meaning in what we can not know
  6. Notice the learning in what we do not know

 What do you notice?

 

_____ _____ _____

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

Stop and listen – to Self and city

 

There is great momentum in being busy, being distracted from who we really are and the possibilities we offer the world.  The result is that each of us, and the city habitats we create for ourselves, are not reaching our full potential.

Yesterday’s post, performance with purpose, articulated the phenomenon of performance momentum, were we find ourselves caught in a drive to perform.  In this state, we lose track of who we are and the inner passion that drives our work.  We lose track of the purpose of our work and dismiss the feedback loops that ensure our work is responsive to the needs around us.  The result is work that does not move the self, the organization, or the city forward.  There is no improvement; which is itself a fundamentally driver to our work.

In the work we do creates our cities, I concluded with two questions:

  1. To what extent is our work, even new work, blind to our changing habitat?
  2. How would we change how we organize ourselves to consciously choose to create habitats for ourselves that serve our present and evolving needs and desires?
The answers to these questions, or rather the exploration of these questions, are part of the city’s learning journey.  How each of us approaches our work has an impact on our cities.  How we collectively approach our work has an impact on our cities.  The cities we create, in return, have an impact on us.  If we are ‘busy’, missing the clues around us, then our cities will also miss the clues and not serve us well.  If we need healthy cities, and they are made by us, then we need to be well for cities to be well.  The development of our cities is a survival skill.

From time to time, it is essential to stop, to pause and have a look at the deeper inner self, the one that wants to be let out, free in the world.  As we each allow our hidden self to emerge, our cities will change to serve us better.  As our cities improve, they are creating the conditions for us to be better again.

It is hard to stop and listen – and we need to learn how to do this, for self and the city.  David Whyte, in The Three Marriages, has this to say:

… anyone who has spent any time in silence trying to let this deeper hidden self emerge, soon finds it does not seem to respond to the language of coercion or strategy.  It cannot be worried into existence.  Anxiety actually seems to keep an experience of the deeper self at bay.  This hidden self seems reluctant to be listed, categorized, threatened or coerced.  It lives beneath our surface tiredness, waiting, it seems, for us to stop.
 
Stopping can be very difficult.  It can take exhaustion, extreme circumstances on a wet, snowy mountain ridge or an intimate sense of loss for it to happen   Even then we can soon neutralize and isolate the experience, dismissing it as illogical, pretending it didn’t count, then turning back to our surface strengths and chattering away in a false language we have built around our successes. 
 
Success can be the greatest barrier to stopping, to quiet, to opening up the radically different form of conversation that is necessary for understanding this larger sense of the self.  Our very success can be the cause of greater anxiety for further preservation of our success (p, 154-155).
  
It seems the opposite of busy, performance momentum is to pause, to stop.  The lure of momentum, particularly if it is full of what we perceive as success, makes it difficult to slow down enough to give ourselves an opportunity to notice the purpose of our work, the meaning in our work and our innermost qualities of who we are individually and collectively.
How do you pause and stop to listen to your Self and city habitats?  

_____ _____ _____

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

Performance with purpose

 

From 2005 to 2007 I had the best job in the world, full of challenges at a fast pace.  I was running the planning and development department for North America’s fastest growing municipality: the Regional Municpality of Wood Buffalo in the heart of Canada’ oil sands. Political, cultural, social, environmental and economic struggles were the norm, and in the middle our municipal government with a little department with few people to do the work that needed to be done.  I know now that the whole time there was something bothering me, a little itch that came and went.  W. Timothy Gallwey, in The Inner Game of Work, perfectly describes my itch: performance momentum.

Not all movement or action taken in our work actually moves me, or the organization I serve, forward.  Gallwey: “There is a kind of activity that most of us are very familiar with that is not done with conscious intent or awareness of purpose.  I call it performance momentum.”  Most often it is ‘busy’ work, work that makes us look (and feel) like we are doing something of value.  We get energized by the adrenalin and even panic to get things done.  We get galvanized by the drive to get things done.  And we lose sight of purpose and priorities.

I recognize this phenomenon in groups of people and individuals.  We each have moments when we have the foot on the gas regardless of whether we have traction, when we assume that having a foot on the gas is always a good thing.  We must always check to see if what we do is effective.  We need feedback loops and we need to be open to hearing the messages of the feedback loops.

A city, an organization, a person that is intent on doing things – without a clear and conscious purpose – suffers from performance momentum.  It could be connected to a need to be doing, or seen to be doing.  We collectively create this culture for ourselves and for each other.

When I get caught in performance momentum, I get tired and unable to do the work well for long.  Yet stepping out of performance momentum is not a license to not perform.  There is certainly work to be done – and work to be done in a timely manner.  The catch is knowing if the work taking place is the right thing to do at the right time, recognizing the work’s purpose.  It is about working consciously.

I didn’t reach this understanding until I gave myself time and permission to stop and look at what was bothering me – at what and why I was itchy.  I started to scratch this itch five years ago, and as usually what happens with an itch, it has become itchier and itchier.  My choosing to write and explore is a risk I welcome: I may find relief, or I may find that I set off deeper, longer lasting itches.

So what’s the opposite of performance momentum?  Performance with purpose, full of feedback loops that tell us when we are on track.  Noticing when we have traction, rather than wheels spinning, is part of our learning journey. 

 

_____ _____ _____

This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

 

 

The trip

 

We voice louder than I

learning in dialogue

the material

wanting

clean air, water

food, shelter

a once in a century advantage

seriously.

 

Seriously aligning, collaborating

beyond boundaries

global to local

conditions to flourish from

local to global

the trip’s as valuable

as the destination.

 

_____ _____ _____

Harvested at Transform Alberta Summit, November 9, 2012