We develop the ability to be an evolutionary instrument in an evolving world when we dedicate our will to serve the potential of the larger wholes that seek to express themselves through us. This is what it means to be a living expression of life on the planet. It is an ancient spiritual insight that a person becomes truly themself, and therefore

FUNCTION, BEING, AND WILL The first nine intermezzos are organized around three interwoven dimensions of living systems: function, being, and will. Function is connected to doing, and in the context of this book, it has to do with evolving our ability to understand, discern, and exercise wise judgment—the ability to truly think for ourselves. This

I realized that providing expertise is antithetical to cultivating agency, and I began seeking new ways to engage my client organizations. For example, I stopped offering organizational models and started emphasizing the use of living systems frameworks, which provide the structure for thinking but require participants to supply the content and do

We begin to develop our capacity for systems-actualization by imaging the whole of a system and the way it works when it is healthy and operating in harmony with its nature or essence.

The guiding principle for all of this was the activation, development, and nourishment of personal agency, informed by deep caring about and commitment to the effects this agency would have on the lives of other people.

My insights about the degenerative effects that a dependency on expertise produces in society have been hard won.

Most of the institutions that you or I interact with have deeply internalized the belief that, to be legitimate, knowledge must be gathered empirically and verified by an expert. We have become collectively dependent on third-party, professional expertise, and in the process, our basic human capacities for self-reflection, creative intuition, and

Unfortunately, aliveness gets lost in the machine metaphor, and life suffers the consequences. If we are to thrive and flourish as a species, and if the planet is to thrive and flourish along with us, we will need a life-affirming, life-generating philosophy that works from the infinite and evolving complexity of a vibrant world.

Behaviorism presents a double impediment to this development. It substitutes conditioning for genuine self-management, and it uses an array of rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behavior, most of which have as their subtext the implied threat of nonbelonging. The need to belong to coherent social groups is a core driver of human