Compassionate Collaboration 🤝
Thoughts on team-work, governance and prosocial collaboration
Compassionate Collaboration 🤝
Thoughts on team-work, governance and prosocial collaboration
Deep listening and Awareness-based Systems Change
An open mind is the capacity to suspend old habits of judgment—to see with fresh eyes (remove the Voice of Judgment)
An open heart is the capacity to empathize and to look at a situation through the eyes of somebody else (remove the Voice of Cynisism)
An open will is the capacity to “let go” of the old and “let come” the new (remove the Voice of Fear)
Theory U

Creative tension: The gap between vision and reality, generates energy, like a rubber band stretched between two poles.
“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
—Edward O. Wilson
What it takes to grab the biggest slice of the pie is different than what it takes to make the biggest pie. This is, quite literally, the fundamental problem of human social life, and it is just as true for an individual in a team as it is for a nation-state arguing that it should be allowed to release more carbon than other nations.
We need to construct conditions in which altruism can thrive.
What's in it for me → What's in it for us? Eco-system!
The three Cs of human distinctiveness:
Cooperation. First, we easily cooperate with others who are genetically unrelated to us and are by far the most cooperative primate.
Cognition. Second, our cognition is different, especially our capacity for symbolic thought and relational learning.
Culture. And, third, we culturally transmit more learned behavioral information across generations than other species.
Alfred Korzybski famously said, “A map is not the territory . . .” (1994, p. 58). This phrase has been reframed into many other versions (but even more are needed).
The name is not the thing named.*
The menu is not the food.**
The nutrients are not the meal.
The word is not the thing it represents.***
The representation is not what is being represented.
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