#60 Collaboration

with Robert Gilman, Founder of the Context Institute

How can we learn to collaborate to identify solution that are not zero sum but win for all, including the planet?

Listen on Apple, Spotify, or the our Denizen website

In this final episode of a three-part series, Jenny is joined by Robert Gilman, founder and president of The Context Institute. They discuss the importance and challenges of collaboration in achieving systemic change. This episode delves into the concept of moving from a dominator model to win-win solutions, integrating psychodynamics, diverse cognition modes, and effective feedback loops. They explore how to build trust, safety, and relationality within organizations, leveraging tools like sociocracy and AI. They also emphasize the need for a fundamental redefinition of success and leadership, focusing on stewardship and servant leadership for more effective, holistic outcomes.

00:00 Introduction to the Series and Guest

01:23 Exploring Collaboration and Omni-Win Solutions

03:09 The Obsolescence of Dominator Models

05:39 Redefining Success and Systemic Thinking

08:18 The Role of Stewardship and Hierarchies

11:40 AI and Governance

12:09 The Importance of Design Processes

13:36 Addressing Dominator Behaviors and Adversarial Paradigms

19:10 Systems Consciousness and Collaborative Design

25:07 The Importance of Feedback Culture

26:37 Building Trust in Organizations

27:37 From Transactional to Relational Paradigms

28:49 Optimal Zones and Collaborative Outcomes

31:00 Design Thinking and Sociocracy

33:41 Consent vs. Consensus in Decision Making

36:25 Integrating Nature into Decision Processes

38:38 The Role of AI and Information Flows

42:50 Leadership in Collaborative Groups

47:25 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

[INTRO]

Robert Gilman: [00:00:00] We're on a small, highly connected planet. The first step away from what I was describing is that dominator perspective of trying to get relative advantage is to say, well, let's see. If you and I can't figure out a win-win, that's great, but what easily happens is we're gonna win by figuring out how we can push the costs out into externalities.

And so to really do it, we need to have wins for all of the parties who are there at the table, but also wins for the surround, the larger system to. That is not at the table.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's Robert Gilman. He's the founder and president of The Context Institute, and this is a Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefano. This is our final episode of a three part series with Robert, where we explore three capabilities he believes are essential for living in harmony with.

Life on Earth being savvy [00:01:00] about our psychodynamics. That was our first episode. Understanding and integrating various modes of cognition. We covered that last time. And finding win-win solutions, which we're discussing here, which also integrates the skills covered in the first two conversations. Robert is a pioneer in the sustainability space and has been thinking deeply about systemic change for many decades.

He's an elder in our midst who has a lot to teach us here. We're exploring collaboration. We've all heard the term omni win, but really what does it mean to put that into practice? Robert and I discussed the pervasive orientation of domination that hinders our ability to collaborate effectively. The importance of curiosity and emotional safety, the role of feedback loops, and what a better design process looks like.

This conversation is a nice compliment to the one that we did several episodes ago on Redefining Progress. If you've listened to that one, as always, you can find show notes and the transcript for this episode on our website becoming denizen.com. There you can sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest [00:02:00] content to your inbox alongside information about virtual Denizen events.

We're doing a lot more of them this year, including conversations with the community, with our podcast guests. So if you'd like to meet Robert and talk about this series with us, I encourage you to sign up. Again, that's becoming denizen.com. It's a real honor to bring this three part series with Robert to you.

I hope you enjoy this one.

[INTERVIEW]

Jenny Stefanotti: All right, here we go. Part three, collaboration. So you had mentioned the limitations of modern culture that you found most significant. There were three.

Robert Gilman: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jenny Stefanotti: One is being clueless about. Psychological dynamics.

Robert Gilman: Mm-hmm.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's what we talked about in the first conversation.

Mm-hmm. The second was narrow and limited modes of cognition IE perceiving and thinking. Mm-hmm. Which was episode two. Mm-hmm. And then the third is using out. Dated Strategies for success. Yeah. Based on power struggles and dominance hierarchies that [00:03:00] fail to tap the benefits of collaboration. So that's what this third conversation will be focused on.

Collaboration, right?

Robert Gilman: Yeah. And let me say a word about why I, um, say it's obsolete. Mm-hmm. And that is that collaboration has always been, in many ways, the nicer way to go about things. But clearly there's been a period of time when a dominance model has worked pretty well. I. But as the world has become smaller Mm, and more highly interconnected, it means that the feedback loops are a lot stronger.

Mm. And this is one of those gradual system shifts that, you know, never makes the news because it isn't stark enough. Mm-hmm. And yet it's really profound that as we move increasingly into a time when. It's actually much harder to keep secrets and the stuff that you do becomes more visible. Somebody's out there with a smartphone videotaping it, and there are all kinds of different ways in which [00:04:00] on a much starker level, the stuff that we put out into the environment is we are now.

At a scale where we're comparable with what's going on in the environment, we're we come from, you know, all of the human existence where, except in small areas, human activity was relatively small compared to what was happening in the natural world. And so we could get away with a lot more. We can't get away with it now.

So in all these ways, the dominator model is basically to seek relative advantage and to draw resources to you. And you know, that means frequently extracting resources from other people and from the natural world, and you don't care about the consequences that are happening to what you've drawn it from All you care about is that you're accumulating resources and power to yourself.

Mm. Clearly that's worked [00:05:00] in various ways and cultures have developed around that whole strategy, but increasingly it is a strategy that. It does two things. It creates a lot of damage that because we're now much more highly interconnected, that damage comes back to you. And the other big thing that it's always done is it makes atrocious use of the distributed intelligence in the whole system.

So we need to be able to move in those directions if we're going to function well in this world. And so that's why the old strategy is no longer the smart strategy.

Jenny Stefanotti: One of the things that you said is we need a fundamental redefinition of success as mm-hmm. Win, win-win. This is reminding me of a very recent conversation we had called Redefining Progress.

Mm-hmm. That also looked at how we're not accounting for externalities, so, mm-hmm. Why don't you speak a little bit more to that redefinition from your perspective?

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Well, again, it ties back [00:06:00] to this whole thing about we're on a small, highly connected planet. The first step away from what I was describing is that dominator perspective of trying to get relative advantage is to say, well, let's see.

If you and I can't figure out a win-win, that's great, but what easily happens is we're gonna win by figuring out how we can push the costs out into externalities. Mm-hmm. And so to really do it, we need to. Have wins for all of the parties who are there at the table, but also wins for the surround, the larger system that is not at the table, and I don't mean existing business as usual system, I mean the natural environment, humanity, et cetera, et cetera.

That sort of larger context, it takes more. Design thinking, mm-hmm. To get to good solutions. But the solutions and the directions that you get to are more sustainable and that investment [00:07:00] of increased design process will begin to accumulate. And if you do it right, can even begin to accumulate pretty quickly.

Jenny Stefanotti: We're gonna get into that in more detail in the conversation as well. I, I think it's just worth reinforcing that some of the things that are really important to become a win, win-win collaborator

Robert Gilman: mm-hmm.

Jenny Stefanotti: Are being savvy about your own psychodynamics, which was our first conversation, right. And then also being skillful with diverse modes of cognition, which was our second conversation.

Robert Gilman: Right.

Jenny Stefanotti: So those are core personal competences to bring to Right. These types of processes.

Robert Gilman: Right. And I'll acknowledge that. One of the things that really excites me at this point is looking at what are the collaboration skills that are really important to compliment and supplement what we talked about in the first two conversations.

Mm-hmm. If you had a group of people who were [00:08:00] savvy about psychodynamics and skillful with diverse modes of cognition, what would that really release in terms of mm-hmm. The potentials? Mm-hmm. For really effective collaboration.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. I appreciate that you talked about leadership as being in service to the whole.

Uh, this concept of, I think is really important. I talk about this as a paradigm shift that needs to happen, is the shift from a notion of ownership to a notion of stewardship. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Can you speak more to your take on stewardship?

Robert Gilman: Yeah.

Jenny Stefanotti: As a step, you talk about stewarding as a step beyond leadership and followship.

Right. The title I gave myself is the Steward of Denizen for a reason.

Robert Gilman: I think that was a wise choice. Thank you. One of the terms that's sometimes used here is servant leadership, and while I have a lot of sympathy for what that is meant to entail, it still uses the term servant. [00:09:00] Mm-hmm. Which from a languaging point of view, still keeps you in the dominator model. For me, being a steward is a place where you have both authority and responsibility.

I like to focus here on it as a process rather than as a status. So when you're stewarding, I like to think of it as empowered, purposeful agency. So you have the authority to have agency, but it's aligned with the important aspects of your context. So it's done with a system awareness. Let me put stewarding in the context of the discussion around hierarchy.

For me, what is problematic is what I would describe as ator hierarchy. I. But hierarchy itself has a place, again, just like categorical thinking, has a place, but it's problematic when it's the monopoly. So hierarchy also [00:10:00] a hierarchy of functions, just like exists in the body, is often useful in some kind of endeavor.

So I think if we make hierarchy the bad guy. Causing problems for ourselves. It's the dominator hierarchy. It's the dominator part of the hierarchy that winds up being problematic. But in order to get out of the monopoly of hierarchy, it's important to recognize webs as well as trees. A tree diagram is a hierarchy, so you need to be able to blend networks and hierarchies, webs and trees.

All in the frame of understanding that any human group is a complex adaptive system. It's not a machine. Even though we set up organizations with these organization charts and yeah, play this game where people are supposed to role play into being machine parts. In fact, it's gonna be a complex adaptive system.

And it works better when there are all kinds of [00:11:00] different communications channels that are happening throughout the whole organism. Mm-hmm. And within that, you can still have a very useful hierarchy. Not doesn't need to be a strict hierarchy, they're often cross branches, but a hierarchy of functions. So that there is some value to a certain amount of division of labor so that people can really focus on whatever piece it is that they're working on, but always in a way in which they're well connected into their context, and everybody has an ability to feed into that context, and the distributed intelligence in the whole system is able to inform how the whole organism moves forward.

Jenny Stefanotti: It's interesting to think about the use of AI to enable. Some of these systems. Mm-hmm. The thing that I'm most excited about, about AI is how it enables different types of governance that are limited in our own cognitive capacity to scale. Yeah. Yeah. And so I've largely been thinking about it in the context of individual decision making.

Mm-hmm. Assessing all [00:12:00] an issue. Mm. And determining how we would wanna vote on that. But it's also really interesting to enable deliberation.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Yes. It was about seven or eight years. I forget exactly the count, but as a local city council member, and one of the things I came away with out of that experience is that how the decision is made is actually much less important than how the proposals are developed.

Hmm. That if you have good design process for developing the proposals, you're much more likely to get to something that is either consensus or close enough to consensus. Mm-hmm. Whereas in an adversarial perspective, you come with your proposal, I come with my proposal, I do my politicking to line up people to vote for my proposal.

You do your politicking and we collide, but the proposals don't change. Right, which guarantees stupid outcomes.[00:13:00]

Jenny Stefanotti: Understood. This first piece I think is really important, which is the unit of the individual we've talked about. Okay. So we're savvy about psychodynamics. Okay? We understand our psychology, we understand our nervous system. We understand that we have cognitive biases. We have these subconscious drivers of fear from our trauma.

Okay? So we're doing all that work. Mm-hmm. Then, okay, now we've also learned to not over rely on the intellect and integrate all these other modes of cognition, so, mm-hmm. So we're able to come as an upgraded. Unit to the table to collaborate. Mm-hmm. Right. But there's also this really important piece, which we touched on briefly, but I wanna talk a little bit more about this, which is dealing with dominator behaviors within yourself.

Such a key piece of this is not just upgrading our competencies as skills, as you have mentioned and we've covered in these first two episodes, but the unlearning

Robert Gilman: right

Jenny Stefanotti: of the ways of being. Of the dominant [00:14:00] cultural paradigm,

Robert Gilman: right? Yeah. So can you speak?

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. Can you speak a little bit more about what does it look like to deal with, do behaviors beginning with ourselves?

Right.

Robert Gilman: So we swim in a sea, a cultural sea, that we've all learned that we're gonna be in a conflict with people. The sense that it's gonna be adversarial. Everybody learns this. It's not just a few visible people at the top of the hierarchy. We all learn it. Mm. And when you get triggered into a sympathetic state, into a fight flight place, the fight side of that is easy to come out.

And so this is where it's so important to be able to develop the practice of recognizing that that's happening. And yeah, your nervous system and hundreds of millions of years of evolution are right there asking you to go for [00:15:00] it. You're in a fight for your survival, and you've gotta act right now,

Jenny Stefanotti: only it's misplaced.

I appreciate that. I remember reading in one of your posts on Substack about the cultural component of it and how these adversarial orientations have made our way into our judicial systems and our systems of justice. Right. And we actually had a conversation a few months ago on, um, it's called Transforming Relational Conflict.

And our guest, David Cooley, has a background in restorative justice. And so his take on this, this is a very relevant conversation to what we're talking about right now. So I wanna point listeners to it, if you haven't listened to it yet. Talks about how we have unwittingly. Absorbed in his take from the justice system, I think in your take from the broader cultural context, right?

Right. This adversarial paradigm as he calls it, right? Which is somebody's right and somebody's wrong. And so we go into these conversations saying [00:16:00] things that pit us against each other that caused the nervous system response. And now we're out of our optimal zone and we're more likely to see the things in a distorted way.

And so I think that's a really important point, and this is also why. I have conversations about personal relationships, intimate relationships that are relevant, I believe, to this broader conversation. So we're talking about how to do this in organizations. I just wanna point listeners to that conversation if you haven't heard it yet.

'cause it's a very important one, and I shared with the audience handouts from David that say, okay, well what does this actually look like in. How you think and how you speak. Mm-hmm. And how you respond. And then the conversation also really intervenes the nervous system confidence. So there's that piece, right.

Just the fundamental kind of adversarial nature. Anything else about dominating behaviors within ourselves? Yeah. Before we move on.

Robert Gilman: Well, so I wanna point to the way, in the tie in with categorical thinking.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Because you talked about somebody's wrong, this is getting

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: That categorical thinking.

Connects very easily [00:17:00] with judgmental thinking. Yeah. 'cause we tend to associate a category as either good or bad and, and so there's no slider in there. There's no proportionality, there's no mixture. And also categorical thinking tends to look at single causes. So somebody did it. From a system point of view, what you really have is a series of inputs, a series of influences, multiple influences that are all part of why something emerged when it did.

Because categorical thinking is such a low resolution approach to things. It gets us into these boxes. Where the solution is really to dance more gracefully and with more nuance where you're able to bring the multiple factors in, bless them, and acknowledge them.

Jenny Stefanotti: [00:18:00] Hmm. You know, that's a really important point, and one of the things that you mentioned was a problem with categorical thinking is the quick judgment, the like to scapegoat, the likelihood of othering, the lack of nuance.

I think you use color as an example where color is a continuum, and yet we sort of picked points on it to distinguish categories in the same way that we could say the same thing about race. I think that's a really salient place where categorical thinking is really causing a lot of harm.

Robert Gilman: We're not gonna get out of it by coming up with better definitions for the same categories.

Right. To me, to really get out of it is to get to the point where you see each other human being as this unique. Mysterious wonderful territory about which, you know, only a fragment, and one of their layers happens to be the color of their skin, which is on this wide Pantone range, and another layer happens to be their apparent gender.

But those are [00:19:00] just a few of the layers of the amazing mystery that each human being is.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate. I wanna remind the audience and those who haven't listened to the last episode about systems consciousness, 'cause this is a really important thing that we're bringing mm-hmm. As individuals into a collaborative process and moving from the win lose to the win win win.

Robert Gilman: Yeah.

Jenny Stefanotti: So why don't we just reiterate that here.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. So system consciousness is really, in some ways it's getting back to something that indigenous cultures did a lot better with. To be aware of relationships, to be aware of context. It's kind of broadening your view. In modern enlightenment, era based cultures, we tend to be focused on just objects.

I. Just the specific thing that is our immediate focus and lose touch [00:20:00] with the broader context. Other cultures do a better job of staying in touch with context. Mm-hmm. We absolutely need to regain it.

Jenny Stefanotti: All right. Processes?

Robert Gilman: Yes.

Jenny Stefanotti: So what are the processes? You mentioned is just generally seeing differences in perspective as design opportunities versus conflicts,

Robert Gilman: right?

Yeah. So that one. Simple in some ways, and yet I think really pretty profound. Mm-hmm. Again, it ties back to what we were talking about, an adversarial expectation versus an expectation that this other perspective that someone is bringing can contribute. Mm-hmm. Valuable additional, mm-hmm. Understanding.

Mm-hmm. I think modern psychological studies definitely supports as ancient wisdom probably supports as well. Our knowledge of anything is always limited. I like to say that all of our [00:21:00] knowledge is partial. Because we can see only a part of whatever it is that we're trying to understand. It's selective because of all those cognitive biases and because of the choices that we made for what we wanted to focus on.

And hopefully it's provisional, but in a real sense it is provisional. Mm-hmm. And if you look at your own knowledge, as always, partial and selective and provisional. And see someone else's perspective is also partial and selective and provisional. Then there's the hope that when you bring them together, they'll be a little less partial.

Mm. You know? So to the extent that you can approach that with curiosity rather than defensiveness. Mm-hmm. It's an invitation to a richer understanding. That's probably gonna mean you're gonna be able to navigate whatever you have to navigate. More effectively effect because you can see more clearly.

Jenny Stefanotti: This makes me think of so many different things that we've explored. One is, we haven't done this episode yet, but it's coming, uh, unconscious leadership. [00:22:00] So one of the commitments of conscious leadership gets into having a space where people can really speak their point of view, their perspective, their interpretation.

Mm-hmm. Right. To get a more nuanced understanding of reality on the table to make better decisions. Right. So that's one. And I think also just makes me think of, again, so many of our conversations, but one I think is really valuable is around nonviolent communication. Which ties to the work that I did at the design school at Stanford.

Mm-hmm. Where when we were teaching design processes, I would put up a photograph of a girl standing on a chair, reaching in front of a wall of books, and I would say to my students, what does she need? And people would say, well, she needs a ladder. Then I'd say, well, what does she get when she hits the ladder?

She gets a book. Okay, she needs a book. What does she get when she gets the book? She needs knowledge, okay? Mm-hmm. You know? And she needs to understand something. We would keep going from object to object to object, move to a finally get to a [00:23:00] verb. But every step in that process would take us to a larger design space.

Likewise, with nonviolent communication. There's a very important distinction between the need and the solution to the need. I need to control you, for example, right, to meet my need to feel safe. But once you kinda can go back into the need to feel safe again from the solution, right, which is to control analogous to the need for knowledge, the need to understand versus the solution.

Mm-hmm. Which is a ladder. Mm-hmm. That opens up the larger design space to find those win, win, win solutions. From a process perspective. Mm-hmm. I found that extremely valuable.

Robert Gilman: Yeah.

Jenny Stefanotti: So that's a collaborative design competence that I've come to from my work and my learnings.

Robert Gilman: Right. Yeah. Well, I certainly. I think that's really important.

One of the other specifics that I think is [00:24:00] maybe there are some people who've really figured this one out, but I haven't found what feels to me like really good practice on this, and this is, I. To have what's probably gonna be a toolbox of ways to do supportive feedback practices. Hmm. Actually, I think one of the best is what I know of in Sociocracy where they have what they call the role improvement.

Mm-hmm. And it's set up where the person who is getting the feedback mm-hmm. Has actually selected the people who will be there. Feedback team to helps to keep it safe. You may say, well then they're only gonna get nice feedback. Not necessarily true, but systems, system, health system, harmony, depends upon quality feedback, not suppressing feedback.

If you get your harmony out of suppressing feedback, you're getting phony harmony. It's not the real thing.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that.

Robert Gilman: If you need to. Avoid [00:25:00] providing feedback that might be a little triggering for somebody, then your space isn't safe enough. Mm. I mean, that's the broader issue. Another problem relative to feedback is that if when you try to suppress feedback, it suppresses for only so long and by the time it blows out of its lid.

Wind in that. Not very helpful.

It's really important to create a culture in which you surface feedback even sooner than you think you need to. Yeah. In ways that are supportive and it doesn't need to be just feedback that says, Hmm, there's room for a improvement here. It can also be feedback that says, that was great. There's a wide range of of things that are helpful.

Mm-hmm. Another piece in this is when we [00:26:00] talked in the last conversation about the value of sleep on it, right? The value of time. So the ability to put someone in a situation where they are able to get feedback, but then have time before there's any expectation that they do any kind of response. So that they get a chance to integrate it.

They get a chance to do their optimals own resilience. Mm-hmm. To the extent that some of it may have been triggering, if it's all held in a compassionate way that understands that we're all dealing with stuff. Again, safety and trust. And I wanted to say,

Jenny Stefanotti: this is what I, I just, I don't know if you can see it.

I wrote trust and I put a big box around it because that's what I was about to speak to. Oh,

Robert Gilman: great. Yeah. Let me just say that at this point, my favorite description of trust is that it's a combination of competence and goodwill. Mm-hmm. That you will trust someone when you see that they have both [00:27:00] of those characteristics.

There may be various ways in which I would trust you, Jenny, but chances are I wouldn't trust you to do heart surgery for me. Yeah. Not because I don't feel your goodwill, but Sure. You know, I'm not sure about your competence there.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. My husband breaks down trust into motivation. I. So I think that ties to goodwill.

Yeah. Competence. Yeah. And then there's also reliability. So what's the data set that tells me that you will do that thing that you said you would do?

Robert Gilman: Right? Yeah. So it's sort of short term competence and the repeatability competence.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: If you will. I think that those are important characteristics.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I think that this is really important because another paradigm shift that I talk a lot about is moving from transactional to relational. Yes. And centering and Denizen talks about a society that is fundamentally just and caring and regenerative. Mm-hmm. And that care and relationality being centered in organizational culture and organizational [00:28:00] processes is one of the things that I think is very important to establish a sense of safety.

Right. And a sense of trust. I think this is relevant to you. And again, talk about processes. It's not necessarily the just the collaborative process, but what are the default organizational processes? Like every time we have a meeting, let's come into our bodies and let's tell me how you are. Right. How are you doing?

Robert Gilman: Right, exactly.

Jenny Stefanotti: And Donnie McClurkin talks about this in his embodied leadership conversation. Mm-hmm. Like we have to know the humans that are coming to the conversation.

Robert Gilman: Right.

Jenny Stefanotti: To do the work and care for them first and foremost. So I think that's a really critical part of culture and processes that set us up for these win-win, win orientations and collaborative outcomes.

Robert Gilman: Right? And that initial process of that

Jenny Stefanotti: precedes the design

Robert Gilman: process itself. That is important because of the way in which it helps everybody get back towards their optimal zone.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: So design [00:29:00] works much better when you have people in their optimal zones. Yeah. Than when you, when I mean if trying to do design with a bunch of people who are basically in their defensive zones.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. It's

Robert Gilman: not a fun thing.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, to, and this speaks to the conversation we had with Danielle Rubio about trauma in the nervous system. If we're not in the optimal zone in our nervous system, we can't show up. Right. Right. It's a really critical piece of it. Yeah,

Robert Gilman: so for these collaborative, win win, win groups, core to the culture needs to be support, not just for individual work on their optimal zone, but it's gotta be woven throughout the group.

And there needs to be norms that make it possible in a group to be supportive. If you see somebody who's really clearly gotten triggered. Somebody needs to say, maybe we need a break. Yeah, a hundred percent. That kind of process. Watching and process [00:30:00] care, again, it's being human rather than simply role playing a machine part.

Mm.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there's this sort of initial foundation of trust and safety and relationality and care. We talked about this in the optimal zone resilience conversation as well, right? What does it look like for the group to have processes to make it resilient, to stay in the optimal zone? And then you have this layer around.

Design processes and information flows, which is one of the right leverage points for those who have read Anella Meadows and systems thinking. Mm-hmm. Understanding systems and systems dynamic and, and how information flows change the outcomes of a system is really important. Yeah. And so these feedback loops help better decision making.

We mentioned withholding and just a process where there's not withholding of information so that there's an information flow from a cultural perspective that gets us to a better understanding of a nuanced reality by integrating all of these subjective points of view, but also feedback loops that are in place to inform [00:31:00] iterative decision making.

And a core premise of design thinking is experimentation and iteration. Right? Right. Not we have the answer and we do it. And if you look at, I think sociocracy is really valuable here. It's. Because we talk about turning differences into design opportunities versus conflict. So in Sociocracy you have a relatively small circle that makes decisions where you don't make decisions until everyone agrees.

Mm-hmm. And if there's a point of disagreement, you iterate on the idea or the proposal until that's considered an integrated. And in many cases where there's an ostensible stalemate. What the group will do in sociocracy will say, well, let's run an experiment. Let's try it this way for mm-hmm X amount of time, and then get information and iterate on that.

And so where there might be resistance to a potential solution, there's an acknowledgement that there's incomplete information. And let's try something with lower stakes because it's time bound, and then get information to better inform that. Decision making. Yeah. And also in sociocracy policies always [00:32:00] have a expiration date.

Robert Gilman: Mm-hmm.

Jenny Stefanotti: It's not that it should necessarily end, but there's at least a point where information is considered and integrated and, and yeah. And reconsidered. Right. And so that awareness of this complex adaptive systems that comes into processes that acknowledge. Information flows where the dominant cultures tend to block information flows.

And again, there's also this dominant assumption of I know the answer and then I do it, versus it's a complex adaptive system, I just have the best answer. Now how do I put something in place? Right? So I think this is a very, the conversation is like very richly showed what it looks like in terms of organizational culture and, and organizational processes and feedback loops and information flows to have this more complex adaptive organizational structure.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Thank you. And I wanna just put in a piece around sociocracy and its decision making. Mm-hmm. And one of the people that's really influenced me here is Diana Leaf Christian, [00:33:00] who does a lot of trainings for intentional communities around sociocracy. Mm. And before that, she wrote a lot of articles for Communities magazine.

Mm. Back in the seventies and eighties. Wound up having a lot of experience with the way that consensus goes wrong, the focus on in communities where all decisions required everybody's agreement. What you wound up getting was the tyranny of the most traumatized.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, yes.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Go on. I

Jenny Stefanotti: something. Go, yeah.

Robert Gilman: Sociocracy deals with this by, it's a subtle but important difference. They talk about consent rather than consensus. Yep. And consent. You have to have a way of saying that what's being proposed will somehow interfere with [00:34:00] their ability to accomplish what they understand their own task is or the group's ability to, it needs to somehow connect into what is the purpose of the group.

If you have decision making that's coming out of a group that is able to be reliably in their optimal zones. Then I think the distinction between consent and consensus probably disappears.

Jenny Stefanotti: This distinction that at least we're making for the purposes of clarity in the conversation between consent and consensus.

So consensus is we're, we all agree and we're excited about it, which often has. Too many people to reasonably come to an agreement and a lack of clarity around why we're deciding yes or no on something. Yes. And so when you have a large group with our own personal biases and objective functions, it's nearly impossible to decision make.

Whereas in Sociocracy, the idea of consent is you have a small group. Mm-hmm. Six to eight max. Mm-hmm. Who [00:35:00] have a very clear common goal. So their own personal preferences are deferential to the common goal. Right. And relevant for, to the extent that it is brought into the conversation for decision making.

'cause they're representing some group potentially. But really having this clarity around common aim. Yes. And it's a small enough group of people that you can actually get to consent. But what I do find so compelling about sociocracy and consent based decision making in these smaller groups that are all tied together is that.

No one gets to abdicate responsibility for the decision making.

Robert Gilman: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's great. 'cause it doesn't

Jenny Stefanotti: move forward until we all say we're okay with it. And so we keep iterating it. There's not like, oh, I'm not represented here. Oh, I lost the majority vote, or the super majority of vote even. Yeah. And that I found really, really compelling.

Im curious about when you talk about win, win, win. So win for nature and externalities. Mm-hmm. How do you think about that in terms of processes? So there's one of our [00:36:00] systems, consciousness naturally brings that in, right? There are other things that look at governance where that. Prior unrepresented group is actually represented.

Mm-hmm. At the table, there's nature governance, for example, something that we'll cover on the podcast soon, or rights of nature, economic frameworks where there's legal rights or nature that can be represented. I'm curious how you actually think about that third win. Yeah. Being integrated into processes.

Robert Gilman: So, and this is just one piece, it can be helpful to have a, I think of the council of all beings. Approach where you have people who are, who take on the role of the trees or take on the role of the oceans. We can do that to some extent and that's great. And I think it's really important for groups that are using this kind of approach to explicitly [00:37:00] identify what are their important contexts.

So if they're gonna be aligned with their context, what is that? And be able to have some sense about how they determine if they're being aligned with that broader context. So it's, I think there are processes that need to happen internally in terms of that this is a matter of explicitly holding up for awareness.

And as you go through a design or a decision making process, asking the question. How does this affect this part of the context that we say is important? So that's an internal process. It depends upon the quality of the people who are involved. If you also bring in people to represent the currently unrepresented, that I think all of that mm-hmm.

Can be helpful. It's just there's some tricky things in terms of asking someone to come [00:38:00] in as. An exemplar of a category, people can deal with that well, or they can deal with it poorly. So I think that there's some skill to be learned about how to do that really well.

Jenny Stefanotti: I get that. I'm looking forward to a series, uh, on this topic, which will be coming in the new year.

Mm-hmm. We talked a little bit about infrastructure. Mm-hmm. So we talked about communication and information systems, like, you know, the cultural component of it to facilitate information flows. We talked a little bit about meeting and group processes. Is there anything else about infrastructure that you wanna speak to?

Robert Gilman: Yeah. We're now in an era where there are more and more AI tools. Yeah. That may be very helpful because it's easy to get into a place of kind of information overload. Mm-hmm. And difficulty to really find what's the relevant information. There's always a dance in terms of. [00:39:00] How much do you capture? And we're in a time when we capture an enormous amount.

We need to step into that opportunity and figure out how can we really create the kind of transparency that makes it really possible to tap the distributed intelligence and the distributed sensitivities and sensibilities of essentially everyone in a. Danella Meadows in terms of how important the information flows are in the system, and thinking through just where does that happen?

More volume of information doesn't necessarily result in more useful information. I. So there's a lot of stuff to be learned about strategically, what's the information flow that will really help people. And I think your point earlier with sociocracy around the small groups, by the way, those [00:40:00] are also small groups that, if I can use this term, have skin in the game.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: And that's really important. They're not just showing up and having an opinion, but not having any consequence from their opinion. I. They're the ones actually doing the work. They're doing the work and the success of their choice is gonna make a difference in terms of the success of whatever the endeavor is that they are currently dependent on.

All of that is important, but it's a small enough group so that it really can be relational and it is possible for people in that small group to. Develop a high level of understanding. Hmm. It's one of the challenges with a lot of broad scale, direct democracy. This was something again, that I saw as a city council member.

Hmm. Is that a lot of the issues are actually relatively complex and take some learning. Yeah. Understand what's really going on with it, which is part of why we do representative [00:41:00] democracy. Which also has its downsides. If you imagine in the US at this point, doing a lot of direct democracy, given the diversity of perspectives and what many of us would consider to be the lack of knowledge that's pretty broadly out there, and the ease with which it can be manipulated.

Right? It's problematic.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yep. Citizens assemblies, something we covered quite recently are compelling to me. It's quite fascinating that you can get a representative group of citizens who will deliberate over the course of months on policy issues and come to consensus, what we call it consensus or rough consensus, right?

In ways that you don't see across political divides in a representative context, and also don't have the same issues with incentives in terms of time, in terms of reelection process, et cetera.

Robert Gilman: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Citizen juries are a similar. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of good structural [00:42:00] stuff that can be done, and at this point, for better or for worse, I'm actually interested in what are the structures for people who have these skills.

That we've been talking about, what are the structures that will work for them at the moment if we just come up with new structures for people who essentially have age of enlightenment, modernist consciousness. Mm-hmm. How much are we rearranging deck chairs

Jenny Stefanotti: on the Titanic? I appreciate that. Yeah. You know,

Robert Gilman: yeah.

I'm more interested in to believing that we can skate to where the puck will be, and that's the only way that the puck will actually get there, is if, if we're willing to imagine that it can get there.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. All right. Anything else about collaboration that we've missed? Anyways, this is putting it all together.

Yeah. In terms of decision making processes.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Just a further point relative to leadership. Mm-hmm. Leadership, uh, even if I'm. Focusing it through stewarding. There [00:43:00] is aspects of leadership that seem to, in real life, be important in groups, and I think of leadership as anything that helps a group move forward.

And it doesn't need to reside in a person. It can reside in various ways. In everyone in the group. There's so many different aspects to leadership or kinds of leadership. There's visionary leadership. There's. Articulator spokesperson leadership. There's facilitative leadership, there's keep the faith leadership, which can be really important at times.

There's a kind of coaching leadership that draws the best out of people. There's operational leadership that makes sure that that the stuff that really needs to get done is getting done. Relational leadership, that problem solving, leadership, horizon scanning, leadership. Mm-hmm. All of these are different.

Things that when someone is willing to step forward and contribute this into the group and support the [00:44:00] group, because we've had some bad experiences with leadership, if we flip into categorical reversal and say, therefore leadership is bad, we cut ourselves off from what the human experience actually tells us.

What we're doing with leadership and so much of the improvement is being able to take out the dominator parts of it. Mm-hmm. And then allow the agency parts of it. Yeah. So many places where I've been in, involved in the alternative world, enough to see places where people were just allergic to leadership results were not impressive.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. You know, one of the things I've been thinking about, I, I appreciate that you talked about, you know, leadership broadly and not where we have labels around somebody being the leader. Mm-hmm. So one of the things I've just been thinking about with respect to Denizen is around culture and how do I shift the [00:45:00] culture where people step into roles of leadership in various ways versus waiting for me to do something.

I was in an event over the weekend and someone said something really? Important I think where she said, if you notice something that's missing, perhaps it's yours to bring.

Robert Gilman: Mm-hmm. Right.

Jenny Stefanotti: And I think that's an important kind of, yeah, not deferring to others to do things that we are empowered to do ourselves.

And we had a whole conversation with Ted Ra, who we talked to about sociocracy, a follow on conversation about collective power. And just understanding what do you have agency over? Where are you not stepping into your power or competence or responsibility by not taking agency and just deferring to others to do things.

I think that culturally that's an important point.

Robert Gilman: Absolutely. I think it's such an important point for collaborative groups to build a culture that supports people [00:46:00] having a sense of their capacity for agency, their invitation into agency, their pathway, and because out of our current culture, people are often hesitant to step forward.

Or you have some people who aren't hesitant at all, but step forward in a way in which they're pretty clueless about what they're stepping into, and that's not very helpful either. This is a culture problem, not just in the broader culture, but very much in the culture of groups. And I have this issue, you have this issue in the groups where we're providing a certain amount of leadership.

I think it's a great one. The. To really in that design sense that you were talking about with the girl on the chair. Mm-hmm. What's the broader holdback here? What's the safety issues that hold people back from stepping in [00:47:00] where they might, what are the communication, mm-hmm. Issues? How do we structure things so that there's gentle entry points for that kind of activity?

I don't claim to have answers, but I think those are good questions.

Jenny Stefanotti: No, I think they're really good questions and this is a conversation I'm intending to have with, uh, my community, so looking forward to that. Well, thank you so much for this part three. You know, I have people come to me recently and ask.

Can you help me define a regenerative organization for myself? Where's the blueprint? Where's the thing that I can do to actually instantiate that? And these three episodes, I think will be very powerful assets to help leaders think about what does it mean to instantiate that kind of culture and competence and capabilities within their organization.

So thanks so much for coming on and bringing this to the.

Robert Gilman: So if I can offer or ask if someone who is [00:48:00] listening to these podcasts feels that it might be good to have a conversation with me, please get in touch If you have a group that is working on the issue that you just described. I'm looking for test cases.

I am indeed.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I'd love to have a conversation with the community discussing the series

Robert Gilman: Super.

Jenny Stefanotti: All. Thanks so much.

Robert Gilman: Thank you, Jenny.

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