Sensing & serving

Reflection on 14 May 2020 Outfitters Call

John O'Brien

As the weeks between our meetings pass, our experience of adapting to profound change grows and reveals new capabilities and a deeper sense of what is essential. Vital questions open new spaces for discovery. Boundaries shift to to activate more inclusive collaboration. Uncertainties increase around the politics and practicalities of resuming economic activity, increasing social contact, and restoring service system functions. Anxiety and fear remain close by, and so does the consolation and creative action that positive interdependencies generate. New possibilities for answering to our highest purpose emerge.

Looking farther into things worth celebrating

Good things are happening: more ways to connect and act together; practices worth sharing; things that work to build on; discoveries to carry through the uncertainty filled phases of reopening.

It’s important to celebrate and figure out how to sustain these good things. And there is more to learn by gathering and reflecting on current stories of innovation. Attending to who is creating can multiply the numbers of change makers. Identifying and implementing conditions that release creative energy can generate powerful responses in a continually shifting environment.

Who is creating? As we navigate this period of adaptation, who is raising the human spirit? Who is taking responsibility to organize and act in answer to changing possibilities? Who is alert and responsive to matters that need their contribution? Who is raising powerful questions? Whose previously hidden gifts become visible? Who is encouraging? Who is learning and growing? Even if particular innovations get lost in the new normal, innovators gifts are a strong force for a better future.

What are the conditions for co-creation? Within near chaotic disruptions there are mindsets, structures and practices that invoke resilient and creative responses. Naming, remembering, and increasing investment in these conditions increases the odds of rising above the ordinary fears, denials, disconnections, and mindless compliance that inhibit innovation in more usual times. Many of these conditions are alien to pre-disruption organizations: time to build and enjoy relationships, escape from inflexible roles and boundaries, flexibility to self-organize and figure things out to fit particular situations, time for stillness and reflection, the struggle for more meaningful integration of family and work life. It’s worth keeping these conditions alive as system dictated routine reasserts its demands and pulls attention toward downloading the past.

Openings

Molecule by molecule the root tips of plants and trees seek, open, and widen paths of least resistance through the uncountable numbers of microscopic cracks in surfaces that feel unyieldingly solid at human scale. As cracks widen, over time, structural breakdown allows more nutrition-bearing water to flow to the roots and open more space.

We sense these openings for new growth, among others. Good will come of opening wider paths here.

• When our typical patterns of downloading are blocked, we are thrown back on ourselves. Many have accepted responsibility for collaboration, mixing coping with creating new ways of working together. Sometimes this reveals capabilities that surprise others. Some people surprise themselves. As we move into the next stages of reopening it’s important to test current service arrangements and plans against what has showed up in the months of sheltering.

• Adequate responses to disruption can’t wait to proceed through typical organizational silos and hierarchies. More of us are experiencing the benefits of rapid cycle prototyping and the workability of non-uniform solutions to common problems. We have demonstrated ability to move with agility, reach beyond habit, and reshape organizational boundaries.

• Distancing highlights widespread desire for connection. Seeking contact drives trying different ways to reach out through technology and invent rituals and customs that allow people to be distant together. Trying the new together can open moments that reshape typical one-up-one-down relationships between people and their supporters.

• Strong DSP commitment to the person they support makes a significant difference when everyone is caught in difficult and disorienting conditions. There is a lot to learn in reflection on situations where commitment has grown and shone. Some of these commitments seem best (if uncomfortably for some) described as a form of love. It may be time to find new ways to understand, encourage, and safeguard mutual commitments in direct support.

• Many people spot opportunities in disruption and loss. They find ways to contribute to their neighbor’s well being, reach out to family and extended family, show solidarity, grieve losses, practice art, acknowledge health care providers and other essential workers. Employment support workers are taking lay offs as the occasion to review and negotiate beneficial job or career changes when work resumes. Organizations are finding better ways to support families of those they support and the families of employees.

• Societal recognition of essential work and awareness of the terrible dysfunctions of congregate care could offer leverage in the quest for better working conditions, including opportunities for DSPs to escape congregation and make a difference by providing individualized support.

• As governments move to “open up”, citizens have even greater responsibility to judge the balance between defeating the virus and taking up social and economic activity. Those who relay on a federal-state bureaucracy for support and employment could face extra layers of imposition on decision making. If authorities try to impose a pace that doesn’t suit circumstances, discerning the right thing to do and mobilizing the will to do it will be increasingly important.

• Structuring time under separation, as well as the necessity of virtual meeting, has heightened the importance of intentionality in meeting and decision making. Incorporating stillness, reflective practice, sensing, empathic listening, crystallizing intention, and rapid prototyping into individual and group life is necessary if we want to avoid the quicksand of fear and downloading that leads us to continue to produce what no one really wants.

How might this group serve us?

Big questions face us. How do we attend to the openings we see? How do we heal the traumas of the pandemic in the wider context of persistent social exclusion? How do we move our journey forward rather than simply push against unfit structures? How could we add momentum to a movement for more just and inclusive community? How do we build on the relationships, innovations, and lessons that have emerged from disruption?

As a convener of large gatherings and a platform for a variety of self-organized initiatives, this group could play a part in engaging these big questions. None of these possibilities exclude any other.

• It could become a gift exchange, a space founded on generous sharing of our varied gifts and assets. A place of trust to gather around matters of concern or interest, exchange ideas and offer support. A time to share experiences and practice deep listening. An opportunity make alliances and arrange joint action.

• It could become a knowledge-creating network. A place to frame powerful questions, support reflection, challenge and revise assumptions, shape lessons, and draw practical conclusions. A site for dialogue that moves deeper and generates insights to guide our journeys. An open space to inquire into influential ideas, practices, and frameworks for action.

• It could become a place of renewal. A personal commitment to make time to exchange with others who share in the struggle to work in person-centered ways. A brief but regular rest from busyness. A challenge to authenticity in communication with others who hold values in common. A practice field for action that will stretch and develop capability. A place to join others in playing with new forms of art and new ways of knowing.