The Power of Fields

For the first time in quite a while, I am moved to consider a book project, something I do with a fair amount of trepidation.  When an idea is powerful enough to take me over, I find it can be all consuming and I never really know where it will take me.  I find it exciting but also disorienting, never knowing what leads to treasure and what to swamp land. Joining me in this writing venture directly is my colleague, Mary Gelinas, as well as colleagues mentioned at the end of this post who have actively pursued with me the creation of generative fields. Without them, I would surely be lost. What follows is the opening declaration for this project and an initial introduction to social fields.

REVELATION

A REVOLUTIONARY FRAMEWORK FOR AWE, EQUANIMITY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Revelation

1) An act of uncovering something that has been hidden from view. 2) Communicating from a sacred or universal source We believe there exist fields, often expressed through suggestive metaphors, that influence individual, group and organizational effectiveness – from the most harmonious of social dynamics to its mirror opposite, corrupted and violent interactions. We believe becoming conscious of these fields, in all their variety, and learning to navigate them can result in positive social transformation, including greater equity, justice, and sustainable living.  Fields contain different kinds of energy and have unique histories that impose form and organization onto social interactions. Learning to create generative fields and disrupt dysfunctional ones will be the pioneering work of the next decades and current century. We believe it is our evolutionary responsibility, individually and collectively, to shape what happens within these fields. Fields can be altered and by doing so create new possibilities for the future. One of the primary way fields are re-made is through human consciousness. Only in the past forty years have we learned that the individual brain continues to develop through its entire life span, capable of neuroplasticity, the

re-wiring

of neural pathways necessary for learning and new behavior.  By working at the edges of scientific discoveries of the brain and organizational insights about the nature of social change, we can become pioneers of new social forms, highlighting our capacity to adapt and grow without discounting the biological and historical obstacles all forms of social change encounter.

Consciousness of fields and awareness of brain plasticity are mutually re-enforcing.  Fields affect individual consciousness by setting the context for interactions and evoking internal feelings and thoughts. Brain plasticity, the ability to create new neural pathways, affects an individual’s capacity for new learning interactions and increases the ability to be responsive rather than reactive.   Moving beyond the parallelism of individual and collective development,

Revelation

opens the space for genuine transformation in the space between.  Why? Because developing field mastery and equanimity in response to external stimuli goes beyond our current thinking. We are already recognizing the limits of mindfulness as a tool for individual coping because we are fundamentally social creatures. And leadership strategies that seek to alter large systems by primarily developing individual skill sets and competencies inevitably hit a wall of frustration. Neither individual strategies or collective ones, that depend on dominance and hierarchy, can bring forward the outcomes we need.

Revelation

is about creating positive social change that aligns with head, heart, gut, and spirit at the macro (society) and micro (individual) levels.  It is a call for fundamental and adaptive change in a particular direction, not how to succeed to the exclusion of others or how to cope within dysfunctional fields but how to co-create for a future worth striving for.

Revelation

advances tools and strategies better matched for the complex interconnected world we live in by addressing both the evolving human brain and the transformation of social fields.

WHAT IS A FIELD?

The most obvious answer is an area of open land, typically bounded by hedges, trees, or a fence.  The term is also used to connote a particular branch of professional study such as physics or chemistry.  But beyond the obvious uses, field is a term that represents a sphere of activity involving related events.  We are using the term

social field

in this general sense, a bounded area in which a variety of forces, often invisible, act upon the participants.

A MORE SOPHISTICATED ANSWER

In classical physics, field is defined as a region in which each object is affected by a force. The apple falls from the tree because of the earth’s gravitational field. A paper clip is pulled toward a magnet even if we can’t see the physical cause, because of the magnetic field that connects the two  objects. An electric field surrounds an electric charge. In the framework of physics, a field occupies space and contains energy.  Fields have stronger and weaker attractive properties; they have momentum, magnitude, and direction. In earlier writings, I explored the field of collective consciousness with a group sponsored by the Fetzer Institute. We summarized our findings in ways analogous to physical fields by emphasizing the underlying interconnectedness of reality:

We believe a field of collective consciousness exists — often seen and expressed through metaphor — that is real and influential, yet invisible. When we come into alignment with this field, there is a deeper understanding of our connection with others, with life, and with a source of collective wisdom.

The big idea here is that social interaction is fundamentally influenced by fields of psychic energy that create the context for sensing connection or alienation from others. Social fields have qualities of their own, separate from the individuals who occupy the space. These qualities can connect us more deeply or tear us apart. The field for the most part is invisible to the naked eye, but not to those who know of its existence.  And the social field is malleable, capable of being influenced, even transformed. The network of colleagues I am currently working with are not the first to discover that fields create the context for social dynamics, but we do represent a pioneering effort to relate our knowledge of fields to social and organizational change at both macro and micro levels. Stay tuned… and your comments are welcome.

I wish to acknowledge colleagues who have contributed to my thinking for this initial post on social fields.  They include Mary Gelinas, Kathia Laszlo   (co-creator with me of the Unfolding Wisdom retreats), Gisela Wendling, David Sibbet  and Holger Scholz (co-creators with me of Leading as Sacred Practice retreats), Lauren Artress (Wisdom Emerging Retreat), Sheryl Erickson (Collective Wisdom Initiative), Amy Lenzo (Activating Collective Wisdom) and Marilee Adams (The Inquiry Institute)

My work with fields continues to be informed by designs for the Unfolding Wisdom Retreat (open for registration now) and Leading as Sacred Practice Summit (registration opening soon).

For a beautiful description of a generative field in real time, see Wisdom 2.0 founder Soren Gordhamer’s interview with Tarana Burke.